Why You Should Have a "No Cell Phone" Drill Every Sunday.

What happens to your disaster response the second the screen goes black?

Most people feel safe because they have a weather app, a family group chat, and a digital contact list. But the moment the grid flickers or the tech hits a snag, that digital "preparedness" evaporates. You aren't just disconnected; you’re effectively locked out of your own plan.

In this episode of Dismantling Disaster, we’re ditching the apps and getting back to reality. I’m walking you through a brutal drill I experienced at FEMA’s Advanced Academy—the moment they forced us to shut down our tech mid-task. It was the most effective lesson in resilience I’ve ever had.

We’re killing the "app-stacking" delusion, ditching the convenience trap, and looking at the gear that actually works when the digital signals drop. If your survival strategy relies entirely on a battery-powered device, you don't have a strategy—you have a vulnerability. It’s time to get uncomfortable and get truly ready.

Inside this episode:
00:00 - The "Sacrosanct Sunday": Why I go dark every week
03:54 - FEMA’s masterclass: The moment our tech was shut off
08:06 - Why your "six backups" are all the same failing app
12:19 - How to run a "No-Tech" disaster drill this weekend
14:04 - The truth about real-world communication
18:49 - Why I use a 1930s rotary phone for my landline
20:49 - Building an analog fail-safe for your family
26:09 - The #5pocketmethod: Training for the world as it is

Make sure you’re subscribed. My 30-Day Preparedness Challenge kicks off in September, and we aren't relying on a single "app" to get it done.

Empowerment Architecture means refusing to inherit a boilerplate document as your survival strategy. Prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.

#DismantlingDisaster #DisasterPatrick #EmergencyPreparedness #GridDown #AnalogSurvival #NoTech #SurvivalSkills #Communication #Prepper #5pocketmethod

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

You know, my Sundays are sacrosanct, and everyone knows this about me, that I do something unique on Sundays that not a lot of other people do. I I know a few people who try to do something sort of similar to this, but for me, I don't use technology at all on Sundays. Like I don't use them at all. I don't use my cell phone. My cell phone is put away, it's left there. I have a home phone that if there is an emergency, because you know, I'm in the disaster business, so if there is a disaster, someone can call me on my phone. But otherwise, I don't use technology of any kind. I don't watch television, I don't play you know video games, I don't do you know any of those things. I don't go to movies. What I do is is I sit and I uh most of the time I'm reading. I like to spend my Sundays reading and or spending time you know outdoors or going hiking or doing other things, things that are outside, because the rest of the week I deal with this cacophony of technology that I'm bombarded with. I mean, you're listening to this podcast or you're watching this podcast, and I wouldn't watch podcasts on Sundays, I do it on Mondays or Tuesdays or whatever, because you know, I try to have a day where I just want things quiet. Just where I can go back to being very contemplative. And so today I want to talk to you about something that's a little different. I want to challenge you to do something. I want to challenge you to do something, and I'm gonna give you this particular challenge, and there's gonna be different derivations of the challenge, too. So different ways that you can conduct this challenge. But I really want to challenge you to do it because I think it's gonna make a big difference. And that challenge is the challenge I'm giving to you is take a day and make it a no technology day. It's the summertime, and so we are not all at work. Uh, for those of us who work in the edge in education, or those of us who work uh you know in taxes or whatever, these this is the time where you can take time off. We can take time off away from work. And when we take vacations, when we go away, then it's our way of saying we're trying to put away the technology, we're trying to put away the cacophony of every day. That's what we're trying to do. Something different. Because we just want to get away from our daily grind. And so when you're at home, I want you to take a day and I want you to go entirely without technology, and that includes not only you, includes your you know, significant other, you know, your your children, whatever, people who were living with you, anyone put away the technology for one day. And I'm gonna explain why. I was in a training a number of years ago, and it was I was enrolled in FEMA's advanced academy. So let me give you a little bit of background. FEMA has a series of academies. They have the uh basic academy, they have the advanced academy, and they have an executive academy. And so I decided I wanted to do the advanced academy. I didn't do the basic academy at all because I by the time I found out about the academies, I was already an advanced emergency manager, I've been an emergency professional for I think 15 years at the time I enrolled. And so they put me in the advanced. I tested out, I went to the advanced. So I'm in the advanced, and you complete this program, so you go through, you do a series of weeks. So I do one week, uh that they'll have it blocked into four different weeks you have to attend. So they'll have one week where you're learning a series of things, then you'll go two, three months, and they'll have homework assignments for you to work on, and so you'll do those, then you'll return to class, and again, it's in a whole nother week, eight to five every day, and you're going and you have to travel somewhere. It's not like at your house, you can't do it over Zoom, it's live in person. I did mine in a variety of locations. Uh, some was in Nevada, some what uh two of them were in Las Vegas, and two of them were in Point Magoo, which is near Ventura, California, if you'd never been there. Very nice places to go, actually. And so you do that for four different weeks. So the fourth week is interesting because the fourth week you do it, you you're pretty much you've gone through the material, so now you're just doing your major projects. You're reviewing your major projects, you're presenting your major projects, and so this one guy decided to go up and he decided he was going to talk about EMP attacks. EMP attacks is electromagnetic pulse attacks. And you know me by now that I'm not into the doom and gloom thing, but one of the things that that is unique about EMPs is it knocks out all your technology, right? So this is a very theoretical type of disaster. But if it were to occur, it would knock out all cell phones, all the computers, it would knock out technology entirely. Theoretically speaking, it would put us back in the dark ages for a while. A significant enough one. And so there were talks about, I'm not going to get into its delivery system, but one of the other ways that something equivalent, nature's equivalent, could be are things like solar flares or coronal mass ejections, where these are bursts of radiation from the sun, totally natural, not from a belligerent cause, and they knock out technology for a while. Uh I talked before about how I'm an amateur radio operator. So when I'm an amateur radio operator, one of the things that you have to do sometimes is when there are certain kinds of solar flares, you have to turn off your equipment because it could fry some of the equipment. So there's days where they warn you in advance hey, everybody, there's one coming. Make sure you turn your equipment off, turn your antennas away, things like that. Because you just don't want the equipment damaged. And the sun goes through cycles. So the anyway, so he decides he was going to talk about EMPs. And so the way he did it was this it was really unique. He got four or five other volunteers, people who he'd prepped in advance, and so he was talking to us, and we were listening, kinda, and because we've we're emergency managers. We know about EMPs, we've heard about them. But he wanted to make a point. So what he did was the volunteers went around the room, and as soon as he said the EMP attack, he tried to simulate an EMP attack. He said, Okay, we've had an EMP. And an EMP from a belligerent cause would be like a nuclear weapon being discharged in the atmosphere. That's that was the point he was making. And so he was saying, you know, uh a belligerent pariah state, like North Korea or Iran or something, has fired a nuclear missile into the atmosphere and created an artificial EMP attack, and all the technology is knocked out. And nobody was listening to him. Because everyone was just prioritizing their own projects, they were nervous, they weren't really focused on it. We've heard this a zillion times. But he had the volunteers, one volunteer stood at each of the tables. There were like five tables, and each table, they walked around and they slammed the laptops down. Somebody literally took their hand, the volunteers, and they they would touch the top of the laptops and they closed them on you. And I was typing. I was typing on my laptop, and somebody slammed the laptop. Not enough to break it, so don't go there. But they what they did is they pushed it down and it was on my fingers. They pushed it all the way down. And then he had everyone doing that the same, and the ones who saw that that was about to happen, they closed their laptops voluntarily, and all of a sudden, instantly, everybody was focused on him. Everybody was focused on what was happening. I thought it was a brilliant, brilliant way of showing an EMP attack. One of the other things he did too was he told everybody flip your cell phones upside down. Flip them upside down. So, in other words, the screen is not facing you, the screen is facing the table. Because I want you to realize how isolated we now are based on what has just happened. And by doing that, it was amazing to me that how dependent we had become on the technology even in class. And some people were nervous because he was speaking, as I recall, I think he was speaking around 11 in the morning, I think. I think I want to say because as I reflect back, I seem to remember looking outside and remember thinking, gee, it's a really nice morning outside. And it was about 11 o'clock in the morning, and there were people who were going to be presenting at 12, at 1 o'clock, at 1.30, 2.30, 3.30, all that. And they were really nervous because they wanted to keep prepping their presentations all the way up to the moment of speaking. And he didn't do that. He didn't allow anybody to do that. And when that happened, it changed the way the dynamic was, it changed the conversation, it forced us to have a bigger conversation with him. I thought it was wonderful because it really got me to thinking about not only the dependency of technology, because I'm sure we've all heard this lecture a thousand times. We're attached to our phones, we're attached to the laptops, we're attached to the tablets. I get that. We get that, right? We understand that. But the question is how would that positively impact us if we were to sequester ourselves from the technology voluntarily for a day? We don't have to be the Amish to do that. We can go and decide. We can decide that we're simply not going to use technology for a certain period of time. So I would like to challenge us to take a day sometime in the summer. Or if you're listening to this in the fall, that's fine too. As a matter of fact, the harder it is, actually, the the better it is for you. And I want you, I want us to go without technology for one day. Specifically communication technology. Specifically your phone. What I want you to do is I want you to put your phone. Now you can put your phone on, okay? But what you should do is, is that if it's an emergency, only pick up the phone if it's from certain people. If they have texted you in advance, this is an emergency. Pick up. Great. Then you pick up. Because then I say this during my drills all the time, and I've actually had this before. I actually was running a drill one time in South Carolina. We actually had an earthquake. We were actually there. There was an earthquake, and I said to everybody, this is not part of the drill. I'm a good emergency manager, but I can't engineer earthquakes for real. This is a real earthquake. We need to stop the drill. The drill is now over. I'm handing over command to the head of the facility, and we're going to execute your disaster plan for real. And it changed the dynamic of the room. So what I want you to do is I want you to take a day out of your life, turn to your family, and say, no one use your phones. Go through your normal activities, go to the gym, go to your sports games, go and hang out with your friends, whatever, but no communication. And if you say to me, Patrick, there's no way I can get my kids to get off my phone. To get off their phone. I get that. I understand. And I'm not a real big fan of that, even though I recognize that that's the reality for a lot of people. So here's what I want you to do instead. Is they can have their phones, that's fine, but you're not gonna use yours. So if they need to communicate with you, they're not gonna be able to do it that way. And is it gonna be an inconvenience? Oh yes. Oh yes. Is it gonna be difficult? Oh yes. Is it gonna be fun? No. No, it's not. But that's a real disaster. That's what real disasters are like. Are real disasters inconvenient? Yeah. Are they annoying? Yeah. Are you gonna have to go through them anyway? Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna have to do that stuff. So what I want you to do is you need to do it in a simulated atmosphere so you can get used to that. And notice I didn't say you have to do it every Sunday. I do it every Sunday because I'm a disaster professional. And for me, I love doing these kinds of drills. I love doing disaster challenges that make things difficult for me. That is a lot of fun. I have a video that's gonna be coming out, it's gonna come out around Thanksgiving. It's already been filmed, but it's gonna come out in Thanksgiving, and it's gonna be all about how I don't use technology on Sundays at all, and I'm challenging you to do the same. I'm actually doing the same thing for my 30 days in September. For those of you who are listening to this or watching this later, I did this in September of 2025. Go on my YouTube channel, pull up the playlist that talks about the 30-day challenge. Because in September of 2025, I'm doing 30 days of preparedness. Real preparedness. And one of the things I'm gonna tell you to do is don't use technology at all today. Don't use technology at all today. That's one of the things I say. And you're gonna be hearing that on technologies. That's gonna seem oddly ironic. So I'm gonna say, not necessarily today, but in some point. What I say is is don't use technology one day this week. Just don't use it at all. And that'll help to understand how inconvenient that makes your life. But that's the way disasters are. When you have imperfect communication, that gives you a sense of the disruptive effect of disasters. And to prevent and the reason why I'm putting you through it is not because I like torturing you. Well, I sort of do. But I don't really like to torture you. The purpose I want you to go through it is I want you to look at it and say, if I had no phone, how would I communicate? If I didn't have the ability to interact with my family members via cell phone, how would I do it? Some of us have landlines, most don't. I do. I have a landline, in fact, I have one of those old phones. If, and someday I'll maybe I'll put this on social media. I actually have a phone that is from the 1930s that I really like a lot. And that phone is my landline phone. It doesn't have any digital element to it, it's just an old style phone. And it's a rotary phone. It's a rotary phone, just like you see on TV. I just happened to see it in an old movie once, and I liked the it so much that I thought, man, I gotta find it. And weirdly, I was in a hotel. I know this is gonna sound strange. I was in a hotel in Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon, and they actually had a phone just like it. And I actually asked the manager, I said, Where'd you guys buy this from? He gave me the distributor. I called the distributor, and the distributor created an Etsy account just so I could buy one through an Etsy account that they had. They had an Etsy store that they create that they were planning to create anyway, and they created accelerate so I could buy it, and I bought one of the phones. It's one of those old-style phones because I didn't want to rely on the digital element of the technology. So let me explain this to you. When you are looking at the technology, when you're looking at testing something, you can't use the same medium when you're trying to figure out alternatives. I talked about this in a previous podcast where we were talking about warnings and alerts because people will go up to me and say, Patrick, I have all my warnings and alerts. I had a lady who did this to me. I was I was speaking in Las Vegas. I was keynoting there. I keynote in Las Vegas quite a bit. And so when I go down to Vegas, I had this lady come up to me and said, Hey, listen, Patrick, like I know you got after us for not having backups. I do. I said, How many do you have? Oh, I have six backups. Six? One, two, three, four, five, six? Six backups? And she said, yes. So what are the six backups? App A, app B, app C, app D, A. And I said, Well, wait a minute. Those are only backups for app A. App B, C, D, and E and F or whatever are only backups to app A. And I was talking about warnings and alerts, and these things come on apps. That's why I was saying in the previous one, please make sure you use radios and things, and I want you to listen to that podcast if you haven't, because that episode will tell you an awful lot about the new I'm sorry, the new old ways of doing things. Because you really need to have multiple ways of communicating and receiving warnings and alerts. However, when I'm talking about backups with cell phones, do you need to use a landline? Yes, but if it's based on electricity, that is also a fail for your phone. So use the telephone line so that with a phone that doesn't require electricity. I know it's old school. Yeah, of course. That's why I have a nice one. I like I like it. That's why I have one. I like it. From the 1930s. It's a cool phone, and I know you it may not be for you, but it is for me. I'm a big history buff. I really like World War II history. I'm a guy in that way. I really enjoy it, and I'm not just talking about you know knowing how many battles there were and things like that. I I've learned about the you know the biographies of the leaders on both sides, on the Axis and the Allies, about uh, you know, the politics and and the diplomacy and the international milieu, espionage, uh, technology transfers. I've read books on all elements of World War II. And someday I'm gonna do an episode where I talk about the lessons from World War II that we can take for our disaster programs. But what I'm trying to explain to you is you need to have multiple mediums for attaching your backups. You need to have multiple mediums for attaching your backups so that you're not relying on a single type of platform. And that's really what he was trying to show us in that class. That it's electricity, it's it's power generation, and if all of a sudden those are things are all knocked out, and they are not and the and the and the boards on the phones are knocked out because of a sudden electromagnetic pulse. It's the pulse, it's it's the motherboards, it's the chips. The chips are knocked out. It's more than the electricity, it's the chips knocked out. Now we have nothing. So when I want you to look at these backups, do you need to think about being able to write? Yes. When I lived in China, for example, I lived in China when I was younger because I wanted to be an international political scientist and I was studying Mandarin, so I lived in China. And this was way before COVID or anything, so don't say how'd you get out of China? Because I've had people say that to me before. You know, how could you be in China during COVID? I wasn't there during COVID. It was many, many years before. And I was there, and my host family was talking to me, and I was trying to learn the Chinese words for emergency alert. I never did figure it out until I got back to the States, and then I was able to Google and figure it out. And I had an instructor who gave me the exact wording because I couldn't even communicate what I was trying to say to them. But what I learned and discovered is that when I'm attempting to get alerts in China, since I don't have a way of communicating that effectively, I wrote out note cards and I actually had Chinese characters. I wrote the Chinese characters out for I'm an American, I need help. I mean, I knew how to say those things in English. I'm sorry, I knew how to say those things in Mandarin. But I wanted to have cards in case for some reason I couldn't communicate that to somebody. Did I have something on my phone? Of course. I had a Chinese phone. I had a Chinese phone. So I had a Chinese phone that allowed me to translate words. This was but back before we had, you know, perfect smartphones. They that just didn't exist back then. But they still had a translation. It wasn't a great translation. Today the translations are way better. But the translations then were sort of more literal, and so you would say things and it'll say, you know, give you the exact words for it without trying to figure out what's its underlying contextual meaning. And what I want you to what I did was is I learned how to say certain things in case for some reason I couldn't communicate it, because I had no other way of communicating with anybody. If I was unable to speak for some reason or something were to happen to me. Where I lived in China, there could be earthquakes. No doubt about it. No doubt. Something could happen. So if it were, I wanted to make sure I had a way to be able to communicate with friends and family and other people around me if I have to get somewhere. Because for all intents and purposes, they were my family. So when you're thinking about the drill, so some of you will say, well, wait a minute, now, if there if I have people spread out everywhere, how am I going to communicate with them? That's beyond the scope of this podcast. I am going to be creating a video on this, and so I'm going to create a video on how you conduct a drill like this. And I'm doing it, I'm putting it in my 30 days of preparedness video. So if you want to know exactly how to do it, that video will tell you how to do it. But what I am trying to advocate for is that you should try to do it at all because that's 99% of the battle with most folks. We don't want to do it because it's inconvenient. I totally understand. We don't want to do it because it is difficult, it makes things hard for us to conduct our daily activities. I get it. But what I challenge you on is then when there is a disruptive event that results in the power getting knocked out, then what are you going to do then? How are you going to handle it then? So when you are thinking through what's going to be the drill, what am I supposed to be doing? What are the expectations? The answer is really more free-flowing. I just say, give yourself a set of tasks and figure out how to do them. So when people say, What do I do with this drill? My answer is it doesn't matter. But you'll see in the video a series of ideas that I can give you. But the point I'm making is I want you to get used to having a regularized day, maybe once a year, where you just don't use technology. And don't do it on the easy days. Don't do it on like Christmas Day when we're all at home. No, no, no, no, no. Do it one time on the weekend and then do it one time during a work week. At some point during the year, and don't send me emails saying, you can't expect me to do this twice a week. Of course I'm not gonna do ask you to do that. I do it. My friends understand that I'm not reachable by cell phone on that Sunday. There's no way for me I don't pick up the phone in any way. And everyone knows how to reach me. There's an emergency phone and there's a way to reach me. There's other ways as well. But I want you to get used to the uncomfortableness of running a drill like this. I want you to be ready to deal with a situation where the things that are comfortable are absent. I want it to be inconvenient for you. And if you're listening to this podcast when you are in the gym, then you know what I'm talking about. I'm a gym rat too. We don't go to the gym to just be comfortable. I don't go to the gym to be comfortable. I go to the gym to be very uncomfortable. I go to the gym because I want to be challenged. And every time I go to the gym, I make sure I'm challenged. And that's beyond the scope of this episode today. But there are things I do actually have written down. My trainer gives me a series of things. I have a private trainer, someone who's been work I've been working with for many, many, many, many years. And he sends me my workouts. And every time he pushes me and challenges me, and we have a talk and we talk once a week, and he goes through saying, here's how you're gonna be uncomfortable this week. So when you are doing that, that's what I want you to think about is how you're gonna how you're gonna execute a non-technology drill, because what it's really testing is making yourself uncomfortable. And I'll talk about this in more depth in a future episode. But what the main element of having a no-technology day, a no technology drill, is you will find out how are we going to alternately communicate when all of a sudden we are surrounded by a table and somebody pushes the laptop down onto our fingers and we no longer can use the technology to which we are so familiar. That is where the real growth comes from, and that is how we will truly become in a place where no disaster truly takes us off our guard. This is Disaster Patrick, and don't forget if you prepare for a disaster, you'll never experience one.