How to Prepare for Coronavirus with Steve Good

In this Episode

• [00:39]Stephan introduces Steve Good, entrepreneur, business executive and author of the bestseller, Be Left Behind.
• [02:09]Steve shares how he got interested in being always prepared for any type of emergency.
• [08:56]What’s the difference between social distancing, self-quarantine, self-isolation, and shelter in place?
• [20:25]Stephan and Steve mentioned the fastest way to be updated on reliable information about COVID-19.
• [29:43]As per Steve, we should not worry about where the virus came from. Instead, try to work together as a global society.
• [36:08]Different kinds of goods you need to have on hand when disaster strikes.
• [41:38]Ways to improve your self-defense and security during a crisis like this.
• [52:42]Why saying “Don’t panic” to someone who’s going through shock or a really hard time isn’t a great idea.
• [1:01:29]Steve gives his best advice on how to remain hopeful to get through this adversity.
• [1:12:07]Steve shares the many benefits of meditation for him and his family.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

 

Steve, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you, Stephan. Nice to be here.

We’re not going to talk about Fintech, we’re not going to be talking about blockchain, cryptocurrency—we might touch on it—we’re going to be talking about the whole craziness that’s out there and how to prepare ourselves so that we can look after ourselves, our families, and our loved ones. And have what we need to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Let’s dive in. But first, I want you to give a little bit of background on how you became such an expert on this area because you didn’t plan it this way, it’s just you realized that this needed to happen so you became an expert just in time.

Yeah, for sure. I’ve never been one that was a doomsday guy or a prepper guy. The term prepper is the term that people everybody uses now. That certainly wasn’t me. You saw things happening in Waco, Texas or people hiding in the woods in Idaho or whatever it was, I always thought that it’s very strange. I don’t understand why people have this mentality to be this way.

Something seems to have changed. I guess I was able to identify or recognize it earlier than others. I thought something felt off, that I just started going through a process of deep-dive learning, researching, asking people questions, following certain Telegram groups. The more I uncovered, the more that I became aware that I needed to be a little bit more prepared, and the thought can’t hurt to have some food and some medicines in the house. If nothing happens, then I have extra food in the house and if something does happen, well at least, I know I’m prepared. It’s been a very odd rabbit hole to go down, that’s for sure.

It starts with food, water, and medicines but there are so many things. I didn’t even know about a pulse oximeter, I don’t even know what that was. It’s a little device that you stick on your fingertip to measure not just your pulse but your blood oxygenation level. The purpose of this is you should be monitoring if you’ve been exposed to the virus, which many of us will be. It’s important to not only measure your temperature on a regular basis because fever is a big indicator of it—not always, you don’t always get a fever but very often you do. You also will likely get shortness of breath, and your blood won’t get fully oxygenated. If you are monitoring this and you go below 90%, that’s, uh-oh time, we got to do something fast.

So, if you’re not able to measure that with a pulse oximeter, how are you going to know?

One of the ways that I learned to check whether or not you’re able to breathe appropriately is to take a deep breath each morning when you wake up and hold your breath for at least 10 seconds. People that are having any form of lung problem will immediately start to cough or find it difficult to breathe and not be able to hold it for 10 seconds. To be honest, it has become a morning ritual.

Every morning I wake up and I’ve been in quarantine for over four weeks, but I still do it every day as sort of a morning thing. I wake up, I take a deep breath, hold it for 10, 15, 20 seconds and say, “Okay. Carry on with my day.” That’s a really weird toy. I’ve got some other weird toys like UV lights and a UV wand that you can wave over things so that you can kill bacteria. 

I’ve got an Ozonator that you can use for basically cleaning an entire room of bacterias and viruses by just soaking your room with ozone air for half an hour. Great for cars and stuff, if you’ve got little kids, to get rid of bacteria. It’s got a lot of uses and it makes the room smell fresh. I used it in the pantry as well for fresh fruits and vegetables. One, the pantry smells incredibly fresh now, like you’re going into the local grocery store in a small village, or town, or something. It also really just makes the fresh fruits and vegetables last a lot longer and freshens them up. There’s a lot of really weird toys—ham radios or radios for listening on shortwave. There are just all sorts of weird stuff you can go and get.

The UV disinfectant, that’s so that anything that’s been exposed, the virus that might be on it gets killed off. I read recently that a lot of hospitals are running out of masks and so what they’re doing to prolong the time that they can still have masks is to UV disinfect the masks and reuse them.

I have seen that. Now, we’re talking about making masks, I’ve actually gone down that rabbit hole learning about that too. When masks are made, there’s a whole process for creating them but then at the end, before they’re put out to people, they are disinfected and the way they do it is with UV light. Doing it at home is exactly the same thing to reinvigorate them. You don’t want to use masks for too long because eventually the material itself will wear down or the filtering process isn’t as effective.

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But certainly for using a mask of little short term usage then the risk you always face is that just by breathing in any viruses that are on the mask could be on the outside of the mask. When you take the mask off from the outside with your hand, you’ve just put it on your hand and you’re like, “Oops, that wasn’t very wise.” Of course, the next thing you should probably do when you’re taking a mask off your hand is to UV wand it.

The other thing is to have 62% and above alcohol-based sterilization, hand sterilization or sterilizer because 60% percent is what doctors have generally recommended. We have some that’s just a big bottle so when you drive in the house, we’ve got it right there right when we walk in so we can immediately sterilize our hands as well. There are lots of weird things like that you can do.

Right. The integrity of the mask also will get compromised if you keep touching the mask itself on the front. You need to take it from the very edges so that you’re not contaminating the mask in the front and also the integrity of the mask is not compromised. So you said 60% alcohol, that’s like rubbing alcohol, ethanol, or what?

I’ll just show you an example. There’s like these typical little hand sterilizer liquids but a lot of these ones that you buy off the shelf like in supermarkets don’t tend to be 60% or above. You’re talking about like a medical-grade one but you can still buy medical-grade hand sanitizers on Amazon, Walmart, or other places in the UK, around Europe, or the US. You just look for the ones that are 60% and above, that’s all. You can get the large bottles and they have a little pump so you can just get a little bit on your hands at a time. You don’t have to open up the bottle and handle the bottle. You literally just pump a little bit out, wipe your hands, you’re all set.

You’ve been in quarantine for a month. We’re going to come back to all the different things to have in the house or in your car, what have you.

Games.

Games are very important. You’ve been in quarantine for four weeks now. Now you’re in Europe so you guys are a bit ahead experiencing what we will be experiencing in, I don’t know, 10, 12, 14 days, something like that over here in the States. What prompted your decision to get into quarantine? First of all, can you differentiate for our listener what is self-quarantine and self-isolation, the differences between those? And then now, there are some other terms being thrown around like shelter-in-place and, of course, there’s social distancing. That’s kind of their own compassing umbrella terms.

Social distancing, we can start there. The shelter-in-place is an American term so you and I could both sort of talk about what that means for the US. Let’s go back for a minute. The problem with a virus like Coronavirus is that there are so many unknowns about it. Is it one strain or multiple strains? How is it transmitted? Is it by touching something like metal? How long does it stay on metal? If you touch a wood, paper, or plastics, how long does it stay there? And what are the risks of being infected?

I think there’s a lot of debate about that which doesn’t help. Of course, you want to protect yourself from that. But then, there’s been this discussion about whether it’s airborne. If it is airborne and it’s transmitted by sneezing, and the microparticles stay in the air long enough that it travels over a certain distance, then social distancing is really about how far away you need to stay away from other people. I can just say hello to you from across the room but I don’t shake your hand or bump your elbow.

The idea around social distancing was to let people not get so close to each other, that they’re not sneezing or coughing on each other by accident. That if they are airborne particles in the air, you’re not accidentally breathing them in. If you’re touching things, that’s a different matter because if you touch something you’re naturally going to touch your mouth, your eyes, or your ears which is how it enters your body in the first place.

We touch our faces many times in an hour. One of the benefits of wearing a mask is that it stops you from doing that.

Better you put glasses on as well because then you won’t touch your eyes.

Right. By the way, let’s just say to our audience here that this is not medical advice, we’re not doctors. Consult your doctor. In all standards, disclaimers apply. This is just our personal pressures and we’re not liable for anything.

We’re liable for ourselves. That’s social distancing. Here’s the other extreme, and then let’s go to the other extreme, and then go back to the middle. What people don’t understand—and this is what I think is probably the most terrifying thing—is what’s called medical martial law. I would suggest people to Google it. You’ll find it written down, it’s explained on the CDC website, it’s explained on other government websites.

Medical martial law, what’s scary about it is it provides medical professionals, military personnel, doctors, and other emergency people to determine that you may be ill with the virus, or you may not be. They are given the right to effectively have you medically arrested. This is not martial law but it’s all a little bit terrifying. If you think that you could just be taken off of the streets and thrown into a car or a van by a medical professional and taken to quarantine. Of course, we all assume that that’s where we’re actually being taken but it’s quite terrifying by the idea that could happen. That is being implemented around the US, around Europe, it’s been done in China, and it’s been done in Italy.

It’s scary because you can see videos all the time of people just being literally taken off the street. Sometimes like in China because you weren’t wearing a mask. In Italy, it’s because people are getting into arguments on the street. The police are taking you away because you’re exposing people. There’s a whole range of other variances of that with putting in various curfew times like you can’t be on the street after eight at night. But still, it’s not martial law, they’re not going to shoot you, they might have fines.

I know that in countries like Spain, Poland, and Italy, there are also fines for being out on the street at certain points in time, if you haven’t been able to prove that you’ve gone to doctors’ offices, hospitals, supermarkets, or pharmacies. If you’re even in quarantine and you break the quarantine then you can be given a massive fine. Of course, if you don’t have the money, you’re thrown in jail.

Wherever the other extreme but it’s already happening. People need to be aware of the fact that these laws are being put in place which can deprive people of their freedom but it’s actually being done to protect us. The best bet is to stay indoors.

Wait a second. There’s a more extreme version which we probably don’t know the full extent of what’s happening in China probably, right? That is people going, disappearing, getting pulled off the streets and then we hear about all these bodies being burned and so forth.

There’s actually a couple of videos that have been cut that are out on a website called BitChute, it’s a Coronavirus series of videos. I’ll have to look it up and I can put the link on YouTube. But effectively, these were done by a whole underground movement of people who put out whatever they could and it shows people being boarded in their homes.

Literally, houses are being welded shut. You see chains being put on doors. You’re seeing people being hauled away. Huge numbers of crematoriums running with bodies being burned 24/7, satellite imagery of huge numbers of bodies. If you get sulfur dioxide in the air, that’s not coming from burning trees, it’s from something else.

There have been some very light documentaries that have been done and they’re haunting to watch. You can’t invent all this stuff. Some of this stuff is shocking to watch. There is the other extreme which is what goes on in China, stays in China.

I think if there’s one thing I want to say here is that it’s important to recognize that we can’t just blindly trust that the Chinese Communist Party or what people call the CPC to be 100% honest with us. I’d like to believe they would be, having seen what we’ve gone through with other viruses and scares like H1N1, bird flu, MERS, SARS, and what have you, but it’s still a communist regime, it’s still isolation in some respects. The government is very much in control of the way they operate, run, and do things. They’ve had a history of doing that. For them to say the numbers that they’ve been saying don’t necessarily add up.

The reason I say that is the number of deaths in Italy has been greater than the number in China and yet the total number of people, if you look at it numerically, doesn’t add up correctly to what happened in China. Calculation-wise is off in terms of those numbers. I completely agree with you, there is also what we’re not being told. We have to be able to use our own brains and work out what’s really going on.

I think what probably alarmed me the most, and this was in the very early stages, was when I saw China shutting down cities starting with Wuhan, then moving to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and on and on. I thought, why would a country need to shut down populations of 10-million, 20-million, 30-million people into regions. Full lockdown, unable to leave nor enter.

I thought, just look at that and tell me if that makes sense at all at any level. I thought it doesn’t make sense. If I just see that is the only fact it’s in front of me, I don’t care what the data is. The fact that you have to shut down an entire city or country to the extreme that they’ve done just doesn’t make sense. I mean, for me, it doesn’t make sense. I hope others would recognize something feels off about that right.

Right. The numbers don’t add up, that’s for sure. To get the inside scoop of what’s happening, there are some camera phone videos that have managed to make their way out of China because of WeChat and all the social networking that’s very tightly controlled by the regime over there. It would have to get snuck out in a different way and then make its way onto like one of these Telegram groups or something.

How I started going down this rabbit hole was you sent me that Telegram group chat link that was frightening and also very educational. But the first time I went in there, one of the first things I saw was a video or an image of a young lady dead in the streets of China. It was very disturbing, I can’t unsee that sort of stuff. I put it down, I could not come back to that Telegram group for days. I ended up doing so because I needed to know what was really going on but it’s really hard to take.

It is. What you saw happened in China, you’ve got almost a replica of it happening now in Italy, and then Spain. The Czech Republic and Poland were very early to do lockdowns which I was very surprised. Some of the Central European countries took that take. All of a sudden, it went from that to the European Union saying, “Hey, we’re locking everything down.” The UK and the US have been taking it all a bit too casually, and I’m thinking, either there’s a reason why Italy is locked down and had such an insane amount of continuous numbers of deaths and more and more people having it, or there’s something else.

Sometimes, you kind of think that something doesn’t make sense, why would countries have to do full shutdowns if this wasn’t more serious than what they’re telling you? Naturally, you and I have both been in business for a long time. In my years being in the banking world and being a guy that was providing services to big banks like J.P. Morgan or Deutsche Bank, when you’re managing an account and you have a few thousand people in there doing work, the first thing you realize is you have to manage things with your client and make sure that you don’t tell them all the bad news right away. Sometimes, you can fix things in the background. 

If you go in and say, “We’ve had a cast of catastrophic failure on one of our servers and something’s gone wrong,” they’re immediately going to go into panic mode and react badly and start giving you a hard time. But in most cases, things can be resolved. You usually go through some sort of risk management process to figure out where we are, what’s going on, what do we need to do to fix it, what can be fixed, what can’t be fixed. And then you’d go to the client and say, “Here’s the problem, here’s the solution.” That’s kind of normal how you manage a business.

I don’t see it really being that different in government. I would think you still have the same risk management and case management scenarios. You identify the problem, you work through it, you have your advisers, you figure out what’s going on. And of course, one of the factors that go into all this is you don’t want to create mass panic by telling people things too quickly. 

But then again, we’re talking about life and death here, not about an IT system. Do we tell people? If we do, are we going to create mass panic and are we going to create a bigger problem, or are we actually going to scare them into staying home? To be honest, none of us know the answer to that because we’re only being told what we’re told by what the media tells us or what the government tells the media. It’s very hard to work out the truth or the facts on a lot of this stuff.

And just using the media as your guide to make decisions, it’s really bad. There’s a lot of disinformation, misinformation, and the messaging is not necessarily so much for your benefit as the population at large, hopefully, but also it’s delayed. The stuff that you get on Telegram, for example, or on Twitter will be much faster than what you’d get on the mainstream media. If that’s okay, Steve. Is that okay?

It’s a public group. Not my group, I just joined it. It’s interesting you say that because when you look at trying to get to the right information, you’re right, the media is a source and I believe a lot of them have the best interest to share what they can. But are they really doing investigative research, analyzing, digging deep, asking all the questions and questioning things, or are they just reporting what they’re given and what they’re told to report? Honestly, I don’t know.

But as I said, we all have good analytical minds as human beings. If we just sit back and we look at the scale of the problem, on our own, we can already ascertain that something’s wrong. If Italy is shut down and the death count keeps climbing, and now we have similar problems in France, we’re having pretty significant problems in Spain, we’re seeing the number of people who are now with Coronavirus in New York is greater than in South Korea. That’s an alarming figure to have come from nothing to that in such a short period of time.

Should we be concerned? Yes. Do we believe that Coronavirus is not affected by temperature or is affected by temperature? Well, I don’t know. I mean, Italy’s pretty far South. The temperatures are a lot warmer there than they are in New York, and yet we’re still seeing a massive increase. There are lots of things we need to look at not by what the media says but just look at what’s happening.

Go and look at the weather in Sicily or look at the weather in the Lombardy region in Italy and say, “What’s the weather like there? How bad is the situation?” Sometimes things like that are more valuable than trying to listen to what the media says where they say, “Oh, anything over 70 degrees, it won’t be a problem. Spring and summer will come and the whole thing will die off.” I’d love to believe that but I’d like the data to speak for itself rather than the media to speak for me.

The problem with Coronavirus is there's a lot we don't know about it. Even the world's best doctors and scientists are still discovering more as we go. Click To Tweet

Yeah. This Telegram group, how did you end up finding it? I guess it’s run by an ex-military ops guy or somebody who’s kind of in the know.

Well, I actually found it through a crypto group. A friend of mine called Bruce Porter who’s a fairly well-respected guy. He’s in the political circle world but also in the blockchain world, and he runs a group called Washington Elite. He’s also fairly prominent on Telegram, and he runs his own show, interviewing various people across the US doing things. It’s more crypto, blockchain-based.

Within that group, a few people started popping in there, providing and sharing information that just seemed a little bit hard to take. They were saying, “Hey, this information’s hard to take and we know this. We just want to make people aware.” The thing is it never felt like it was forcing it down your throat. It didn’t feel like it was fake, it felt like genuine concern and the information that was being given. As you said and you’ve seen for yourself, it was quite significant that it made me think, I need to go look at this guy’s group directly.

This individual goes by the name Aries and keeps his own personal name out of it. But the more information that he shares, the more you can actually cross-verify that the stuff that he says, there’s just no way that one could say these things and then they keep coming true weeks later again and again and again since January.

In the know, somehow. 

He has made reference to a joint US-Australian military base that’s run in Australia which he seems to be connected to, is part of or works for. Don’t know exactly but he’s made reference to satellite imagery and the way that they’ve been tracking data and then the way that data was moving.

Then he referred to things about the Chinese Silk Road which travels through places like Iran, and then Italy, and lo and behold. He’s telling you this weeks before saying, “Watch out, if this is anything like what we suspect, it could end up in these countries,” and then what happens? It hits Iran, it hits Italy, and all the disinformation that goes on about how bad it is.

Weeks later, you see on CNN that they have a covered story about how there are mass graves in Iran and he’s been saying that for four weeks already. You’re getting cross information or information in advance of what’s actually happening and you’re thinking, “How can I disavow that information when it’s right there in front of me?”

First of all, for those people who aren’t familiar with the new Silk Road, what is that?

What is the new Silk Road?

Yeah, because not everybody is familiar with it. They don’t know that China is loaning tons of money to these different countries, to port cities all over the world so that they can build all this infrastructure knowing full well that these governments will not have the means to pay China back. They come in and negotiate hard terms like 100-year leases and things like that, so they end up owning these ports in these different foreign countries.

These ports and roads. It’s interesting because they’ve put a lot of money into a number of countries, and are building infrastructure, and roads that go into Africa and port cities. A lot of this is about them investing to create easier trade and commerce, but of course, it’s for personal gain because it’s their own country, of course, they would do that. But these roads reach their way through Africa, through the Middle East, and through Europe. It accelerates trade and movement of goods.

As we’ve all seen and we’ve all come to realize, we all depend on the Chinese manufacturing mega system that we have all collaboratively built by investing our money and asking for more and more products and they’ve been smart enough to recognize that and to build it. Now, they need to make sure that they can export it more efficiently.

Part of this accelerating the transport of goods is the acceleration of the transport of the virus through these very same Silk Road routes.

It is very much, let’s call it, coincidental. It’s been raised as a concern but no one’s ever outright said, “Hey, this is the reason why it’s moved to these particular places.” It’s been more of a, “Why has it ended up in Iran?” First, after China. That’s kind of an unusual one because the trade route between China and Iran is not that big compared to the US, the UK, and other parts of Europe. Why Italy? Okay, fine. They have a lot of tourists there but why Italy? It’s an unknown. I don’t know.

I think it’s rather interesting that it’s ended up in these particular countries first. Of course, we’re all assuming that this is a natural virus. For our discussion now, Stephan, I’m saying we can assume that it’s a natural virus. But then again, there are people out there that say maybe it’s not. 

That it’s a bio-weapon.

That it’s a bio-weapon. I mean I honestly don’t know. I’m not going to make any claims that it’s one way or the other. I’m just saying there’s a lot of things that we just don’t understand.

What I’ve read about this potential of it being from a level four biocontainment, bioweapons lab in Wuhan is that they’re actually two strains—the L-strain and the S-strain. L is for lethal, S is for safe. The L-strain is what leaked out or was released on purpose, who knows, out of that bioweapons lab, made its way into the general population of the citizens of Wuhan. Because it could not be contained, the S-strain, the safe strain, was then mass-manufactured by the Chinese and then released, sprayed on all these citizens so that that would spread like wildfire.

But the problem is this is all conjecture, whatever, so this is not all backed up by the facts and so forth. Take this with a grain of salt. But this is what I’m reading about. That S-strain, the safe strain is what is getting a lot of people just mildly sick or not sick at all, and then gives them some level of immunity from the L-strain because that’s supposedly the strategy to contain this problem of the L-strain being out there and making its way not just through Wuhan but outside of China.

I have done some googling for L- and S-strains and there have been some articles I’ve been able to read that are not just conspiracy theory websites that are publishing some of this information. There does seem to be some backup information out there that there are two strains, that one is quite a bit more deadly than the other. This is very plausible to me. Have you read about this sort of thing or heard anything about this?

One thing I would say is I don’t want to say that it’s come from China because I’ve read enough to suggest that it could be anywhere. It certainly could create an element of us versus them or a blame and shame culture if we actually want to blame where it came from. It’s certainly known that there is a level four lab in Wuhan. But equally, I’ve seen other research suggesting that where you have the most strains is where the virus would have originated from, so that would lead us to potentially the US.

I’ve read other types of reports suggesting that just before the outbreak, there had been some sort of military competitions and games that were taking place with a number of nations including US, Chinese, and others. And that there were several US people that got ill just after this and then the Wuhan outbreak occurred. That’s a running theory. But then, you could also say, what if it was Putin that decided he wanted to create a bio-weapon. Because the US and China were already having trade war battles, what a great way to create more strain between them using a viral strain.

You could go down a million different rabbit holes and try to blame and find the reasons why or how it occurred. At this point, because we’re at the kind of pandemic stage that, I think it’s not even worth doing that because who wants to create a war that comes as a result of any power vacuums that gets formed from government failures. 

We’re already seeing weaknesses in the Iranian regime because a number of people have fallen ill with the virus. We’ve seen the US House of Representatives that are sick with the virus. We’ve seen Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, whose wife has now got the virus and so now he’s quarantined. We’ve seen the Italian Opposition Leader sick with Coronavirus. And we’ve seen MPs, members of parliament, from the UK with the virus.

So to be honest, my bigger worry would be, what happens if we start to see governments collapse in different regions that creates power vacuums? That to me is a bigger worry than worrying about where the virus came from because I’d rather we try to work together as a global society to try to keep each other safe and informed and make sure we have goods available to each other. Easy to go down rabbit holes personally which is my personal point of view. 

I agree with you. The divisiveness is not what we need right now because of the blame, finger-pointing. We need to all come together because this is a global problem. This is all of humanity needing to come together in ways that we haven’t for maybe hundreds of years. 

Let’s go back to this definition of self-isolation, self- quarantine, and shelter-in-place. Those are all concepts that fall under the umbrella of social distancing which we already talked about. Can you differentiate those three terms—self-quarantine, self-isolation, and shelter-in-place? You’re calling what you’re doing as self-quarantine, correct?

I’ve never thought about the difference between self-quarantine and self-isolation because I suppose I’m doing both. I mean, did you have in mind what the difference between them is?

Well, I read on one website that self-quarantine is if you believe that you either have the virus or you’ve been exposed to the virus. While self-isolation is you’re just avoiding potential exposure. That is my understanding.

That’s fair. I never really thought about it, to be honest, because in the early stages, people just said, “We’re asking everybody to quarantine themselves.” As far as Europe goes, they’re talking about lockdowns and asking everybody to quarantine themselves, so I just use the term broadly. You’re right.

We chose as a family to self-isolate several weeks before Europe went through its own form of European lockdown. Every country’s done some different things. We used Italy as our gauge and when we saw things expanding there at the rate it was expanding, we self-determined that we would just go into self-isolation before any schools were shut down in our area because we felt that it would be wiser to do so.

You’re right, self-quarantine would be those people where one person or several people are suspected of having the virus or have been told they have it and they need to self-quarantine until it’s all clear for them. We’re certainly not in that place, we have just chosen to self-isolate.

Just probably to avoid it because you saw the writing on the wall.

Yeah. And before we felt isolated, we already started collecting goods in a range of things; from food to any medicines, to any prescription drugs that we might need. It’s funny because you don’t think about this. You have kids and you’ve got a child, and we’ve got two young kids. The first thing you realize is they need to eat but they also grow, and they grow like little weeds.

The first thing we looked at was we said, we’ve got two boys and they’re just growing exponentially right now. We thought, “What happens if we actually were locked in for three months or six months? What would we do?” The first thing you would find is they wouldn’t have shoes to wear. They’d outgrow their clothes, then what would we put them in? The first thing we did, back in January, was we took a little bit of the money we’ve saved aside from our work over the last few months and we’re just going to buy some extra clothes that are a few sizes bigger. Because I’ve got two sons, it made it a little easier because we always know that my older one’s kid clothes can fit on my younger ones at some point anyway.

While we were at it, we went ahead and did the same thing and got shoes. That was kind of our first stepping stone into the kind of self-isolation world. Once we’d done that, we went out and just bought a bulk of beans, rice, and various things that are dry—pasta and couscous, and whatever we could think of. Then canned vegetables, and canned fruits, and lots of tomatoes—tomato paste, tomato cans, and tomatoes. Flour, cause flour’s great. If you have the right kind of flour you can make your own bread. We make bread every day. Having staple things like flour. You can get UHT milk rather than normal milk. I know I’ve gone off our path a little bit here on the isolation thing. 

No, this is great stuff. We needed to get back to this and go through all the different kinds of goods you need to have on hand. Do you think three to six months is what you need to plan for?

Originally, we planned for about a month. Then, we saw how things were getting worse and worse in Italy, and how people were delaying and delaying doing things. We then went for expanding it to about two months, and now we’ve expanded it to someplace between three and six. I don’t exactly know how long all the food would go but it certainly will go for a while.

We had some pretty big bags of pasta and some pretty big bags of rice. We’ve got two big bags of rice. If you look at a bag of rice, that’s like a 20-kilo bag which is about 45 pounds roughly. If you have 100 pounds or 90 pounds of rice, you can imagine that’ll go for a long while. Dried goods are really important, but then when you think about things like milk and eggs. Well, eggs are only going to last about four weeks roughly if they’re in the fridge. Maybe a bit longer, maybe not.

By the way, a way to tell if your eggs are bad is to see if it floats. Just put it in some water and see if it floats. If it floats, it’s bad.

That’s a good one. We started just collecting things, things we could use for being able to get by. We’ve accepted the fact that meat is not going to be a stable part of our diet. You can replace proteins with things like beans. You can make hummus with chickpeas or garbanzo beans. You can make other forms of things like chili if you have tomato, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, chili, kidney beans, and other white beans.

So many things you can still make as long as you’ve got a big spice rack and lots of things like beans, rice, fruits, and vegetables that are canned or frozen, then you should be in a better place. That was kind of our starting foundation. We had to make sure we had enough in that sense. Then, milk, you can get UHT milk which is basically milk that doesn’t have to be refrigerated so you can get it in boxes.

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We got lots of boxes of oat milk and almonds, that sort of thing.

For people who want to have normal milk or lactose-free milk, you can do that as well. Of course, almond milk, oat milk, coconut milk, and rice milk are all possible. If you just work out how much you’re using per week, then you can pretty much just get like a couple of containers or cartons of it and you’ll have enough that could last you easily for a couple of months because it depends on how much you consume. With kids and cereal, of course, that’s our big killer.

Making bread is easy, you don’t need a bread maker. You just need a way to make sure you have dry yeast and you can mix it with flour, sugar, oil and that’s pretty much the main ingredients, a bit of salt. If you have flour, sugar, salt, and water, then you’ve got all the basics to make bread every day. You can also make your own jams by just making your own preserves if you can’t get access to it, but that, of course, means buying fruit. Fruits and vegetables that are fresh are always going to be the hardest thing.

You go from there to all the other things you need to have which are just medical things that are you think ears, nose, throat. You want to be particular about your eyes. Eyedrops, in case your eyes get dry or something like that. If you get pollen or allergies in the springtime, you want to make sure you have the ability to take care of yourself that way. Cough medicines, if you get a fever or not feeling well, or you have an ache, or if you pull a muscle. Because if you’re working in your house doing things, you still might slip, fall, or injure yourself. You want to have all the basics—band-aids, and hydrogen peroxide so you can disinfect a wound if it happens. You’re cutting vegetables, meat, or anything with a knife, you can still injure yourself.

Just assume that it’s always good to have all the basic stuff for first aid type stuff. Then, you go a little bit further and you think, what happens if the power goes out? What about electricity? What about running water? That kind of stuff. Well, that hasn’t been a problem in China. I kind of assumed if it didn’t happen in China, it’ll probably be okay everywhere else.

But that being said, there are always these ideas about what if I have to light a fire? How many ways can you light a fire? Well, you can use matches, lighters, waterproof ways of lighting matches so that you can get different things, candles. Then, you can start thinking about like how you keep a room clean or disinfected, so you can ozonate a room by getting a little Ozonator which you just close the room, run the machine, it kicks out this ozone air into the room, it disinfects the whole room, and kills off everything in the room. The room smells amazingly fresh afterward. It’s also really good for keeping fresh fruits and vegetables going.

UV lights, UV wands for waving them over fruits and vegetables too or anything else so that you can kill off any sort of bacterias and viruses that you might have been exposed to. Things like hand sanitizers, toilet paper, paper towels, paper rolls, and stuff you’ll typically run out of earlier or sooner. All your washing liquids, having a good supply of that. Flashlights can’t hurt. Worse, I don’t have it, do I? Yeah, I do. I’ll just show you, this is really cool. I got one of these lights here that are good.

That’s cool. It’s like you’re ready to go into the caves. 

Exactly, for spelunking. But I got it because I thought what if I have to walk out of my house in the evening? You don’t know. I mean, I know a lot of people in the states have been seeing things like buying guns and stuff like that which is worrying. 

Yes, it is. They’re selling out everywhere, and huge lines at the gun shop.

In Europe, you don’t have access to guns freely like that so that makes me feel a little better. I have dogs so those are my alarms and they can be pretty mean and ferocious if they think someone’s trying to enter which is great, but they’re still very nice, sweet dogs which I am happy about.

Needless to say, you might want to go and investigate what’s going on. I mean we’ve had hedgehogs coming through our garden and the dogs go crazy because there’s a hedgehog. Having a little headlamp like that means you have your hands free and you can handle whatever situations there are in front of you, and it might just be nothing but at least you can walk around with a really bright light. There’s not much that’s going to escape a light that bright.

What if you don’t have a dog and you don’t have a gun? Are there weapons that you should have on hand?

That’s an interesting question because it’s not something that I like to talk about a lot because I don’t like to think about it.

We’re having to think about things that we really don’t want to think about here, right?

I know.

Like a taser?

Tasers, handcuffs, baseball bats, BB guns, I mean there’s all sorts of things you can do. Here’s a good one and this is something that I learned some years ago. 

Mace?

But here’s a better one. Take some coins and just stick them in a sock, because the weight of those coins inside of a sock, you just hit someone with that. It’s going to hurt a lot. That’s probably more damaging than a baseball bat in some respects because it’s metal and it’s in a sock.

No one’s going to take you seriously if you’re walking around with a sock in your hand and then you just clock them with a sock and then it’s like bang, they’re down. Sometimes, look for the things that you’ve got. Don’t go out and buy something. If you can defend yourself by just dumping a bunch of coins in a sock, isn’t that a better way to defend yourself than trying to do it with them with guns and weapons?

Especially, if you’ve never shot a gun before. 

If you’re going to be pointing a gun at someone who knows how to use a gun, your chances of success are not going to be very good. I honestly hope we don’t degrade to the point where things like civil unrest start occurring. Bars on windows, if you can put bars on your windows. That’s not unheard of, as long as you have a way to unlatch them for fire-related problems. But if you have a way to prevent people from entering your property, I would always err on the side of making your house more safe and more protected. Make sure the locks are solid and secure and make sure you lock your house every day. That’s going to be worth more than trying to have weapons in your house because you’re going to mistake something.

People with fear and panic will always make mistakes. That’s just normal. When we’re under stressful situations, it’s easier to make mistakes by being in a panic situation. I would rather try to just find things that can be used in my own house that’ll be useful. If you don’t have dogs, then other things that are noisy that will help you are always useful.

With the taser, you can’t use that multiple times. If you shoot and hit somebody and then there are three attackers that are entering your home.

That’s not going to do much for you.

You would need three tasers. But one thing that is interesting about a taser is that it can call the police upon firing because it’s Bluetooth connected. If your phone is nearby and you have the Noonlight app installed, that Noonlight app will call the police as soon as the device has been fired. You can also use that app just as a way to call the police just by hitting the button. If you’re in an unsafe area, you can have your finger on the button, on this app. And then, if you let go, then it immediately calls the police. Something like that.

My only comment about that is if we really ended up in a situation where you’re having a civil unrest style problem…

The police are going to be busy.

Yeah, you’re not going to get the police coming around. Let’s hope that we are smart enough, that we can help each other as neighbors, and protect each other rather than run and hide if something does go wrong. If you’re able to secure your home properly, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

Hopefully.

Hopefully. I don’t think I’ve reached the point of that level of concern yet but I certainly see the number of guns being purchased in the States and that does worry me.

My wife, Orion, spotted a guy casing our place and he was checking out our windows. He didn’t know that she spotted him out the window because it’s hard to see in because of the type of windows we have.

That is scary.

The guy looked super sketchy. He made a call while he was casing our place and he was looking at other houses in the neighborhood.

Well, that’s not good.

This is coming. When people start running out of food, supplies, and so forth because the whole supply chain is going to fall apart. It can’t continue for months without the workers all coming into the factories, without the people in the retail shops. I’m sure there’s going to be some critical infrastructure that will still stay running because they have to, like the healthcare system. A lot of things that are currently considered essential businesses, that we’re accustomed to and spoiled by, may stop working, or they just kind of will dry up. It’s already taking longer than we’re used to to get Amazon deliveries. A guarantee of two-day prime shipping, that’s kind of out the window already.

Wow, yeah. The other thing too is to go online and look at the Port of LA because it’s online and they have cameras showing it. What you’ll see is how few containers are sitting there right now.  Normally, the Port of L.A. has container upon container that takes two to six or eight storeys or higher buildings. They’re just massively tall. It’s a mini skyscraper village of containers all over the place. Right now, you just see these huge empty patches where there’s just nothing. That is a supply chain problem that’s already occurred.

Let’s hope that a lot of that is not all China, but the fact is that with now Europe also being in a bit of a lockdown that doesn’t help. The Port of L.A. would be coming from Asia. You look at that and you say well, how much stuff is not coming from Asia and when is it coming? How much of that is related to food and supplies that are necessary right now for people that are in their homes? If it’s not, great. If it’s televisions, I think we can live without extra television sets right now. 

But if you’re trying to find some of your favorite Italian pasta, good luck, right?

You’re probably not going to see much.

That’s going to start drying up if it hasn’t already.

Exactly. That’s certainly it. I don’t know how much of that’s manufactured in each of the respective countries, but certainly, most countries have their own companies that produce some goods and some things are imported and exported. You might find that your favorite of whatever it is may not necessarily come for a while, but hopefully, each country has the ability to supply what it needs to, at least short term. But global trade is definitely halted to a large degree, and that is scary because if you start looking at the ports online and you realize how much movement of goods is actually not occurring now, that probably worries me more because I don’t know how long it’ll be until supermarkets really can’t supply stuff.

I saw a video that was on LIVELY. This lady was taking like a surreptitious camera phone video. She was a truck driver or something, and she was showing how the port was practically empty. Very few containers. There are stacks on stacks on stacks of these containers. There’s nothing, almost nothing there. She’s like, “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is very worrying,” That was weeks ago that she took that video. Things are going to start coming to a screeching halt because the entire world is essentially closed for business for weeks, maybe months, probably months.

There’s a site called covidactnow.org that’s trying to convince all the legislature, the different governors, the heads of executive branches to take fast action. Every day that there’s a delay in locking everything down, forcing us to stay in our homes, many more people are going to die. It shows these different curves of the spread of the virus depending on when they act and bring in, as you said, medical martial law. It’s pretty frightening.

The difficulty that I find with a lot of this is that there is misinformation about the death being more for people who are with previous medical conditions and the elderly, because time and again, we’ve seen cases where that’s not true and younger people have died. The other thing that I think is the biggest problem is that because it’s a respiratory illness that affects our breathing and the amount of equipment physically available in the hospitals is limited.

I think the biggest problem with the virus isn’t so much the fact that it would necessarily kill everybody normally, it’s the fact that our hospitals globally are just not equipped for the volume of people that need respiratory care. That’s where everything just falls apart and breaks. What makes it scarier is the fact that you can’t get the medical care you need when you need it. Plus doctors and hospitals are just not equipped with the number of masks and equipment that’s needed to take care of themselves. That’s why you’ve seen so many doctors falling ill as well. They don’t have the masks. It’s like I’ve seen something in the UK, “Test the person if they turn out to be positive for Coronavirus, then we’ll give you a mask to take care of that person afterward.

By then, spread it all over the place.

I just exposed myself. Telling people not to wear masks is also one of the funniest things I’ve seen. It’s pretty logical. The reason that people have been saying that is simply because there isn’t enough of it to go around. If you tell everybody to go buy a mask, you create a run on the masks.

There’s already been a run on the mask but there will be mask-panic. “I don’t have masks, we’re all going to die. Oh my God, let’s riot, loot, and create all this havoc.”

That’s the thing we don’t want to have. We don’t want panic, we want to prepare. That’s why I ended up going to the proper mentality, so I wouldn’t feel myself in panic mode. Because I don’t want to be a panic-er, I would rather be a prepper.

Something I learned that’s really important when you’re telling somebody who’s going through shock, or going through a really hard time, do not say, “Don’t panic” because it’s their reptilian brain that you’re speaking to, their amygdala which is in fight or flight, and they’re not hearing the little nuances like the word don’t.

All they heard was the word panic, and of course, they are going to get into more of a panic because you just told them to don’t panic. Instead tell them, “Remain calm,” so the presupposition meaning, you already all are calm–even if they’re losing it–and then calm is that primary keyword that they’re focusing on instead of the word panic and don’t panic.

That is like an NLP, neuro-linguistic programming technique. But the thing about masks I want to mention is there’s a lot of confusion around surgical masks. Are those sufficient or do you need N95 masks? What’s the difference between that? K and 95 and so forth. What do you tell people about the masks?

Get an FFP1, not an FFP2 or 3. Basically, N95 or FFP2s, those are not actually deemed to be sufficient for blocking Coronavirus. It is funny that a lot of people think N95 is the right mask to get but what you actually need is what’s referred to as N99 or N100 which has a much finer material and the respirator is for catching even smaller particles. The research that was done early on that identified that the virus is a very, very small micro particle suggested that the N95s may not be sufficient.

I have been surprised that for a very long time, everyone’s been talking about, “Get yourself an N95,” and I always thought, I don’t quite understand that because it’s not really sufficient. Different terminology different people use, but at the end of the day, N99 or N100 is basically what people need to be getting in actuality. N95s are still going to protect you from quite a lot, and it’s probably going to be sufficient in many cases.

It’s better than not having one.

It’s better than not having one, and that’s generally what people are getting access to. But I just did an early research and identified that that wasn’t sufficient. So what I have is a very small stockpile of masks but only because if I need to go out for even a couple of hours and take care of something like try to get some fruits and vegetables or something like that, then I might go leave the house go for a couple of hours and come back and I don’t want to take any risks. That’s where I would use a mask like that. As we talked about earlier, reuse the mask, sterilize the mask, and reseal it so I can use it a couple of times if at all possible.

If I only had N95, yes I’d still go out. And yes, I would still take a risk because having fruits and vegetables is probably more important than over worrying or panicking because a lot of these masks are already there to protect you. If you can protect your eyes as well, protect your eyes.

And that’s with what? With goggles or glasses?

Goggles, glasses, sunglasses. You can also put through your ears, you can put little earmuffs on your ears, you can put the cap on your head and block your ears that way. You could wear the little things you stick in your ears like earbuds when you want to sleep or you want to have no sound. Anything that just blocks stuff going into your ears is also recommended by some doctors because the three entry points are your eyes, your ears, your nose, and your mouth, four actually. Who can count? Five, we got two eyes. 

Most people aren’t protecting their ears, and to be honest, the bigger problem with ears is more about if you’re scratching your ear, you touch something with your hands and then you stick your hand in your ear. That’s where you’d have a bigger problem for ears. But sneezing and then someone sneezing the particles are in the air, they can go into your eyes and you wouldn’t feel it but of course they’re microparticles. That could be how you get infected. 

For example, I could wear my reading glasses but I wouldn’t go walking around wearing my reading glasses because I wouldn’t be able to see anything when I’m walking around. That would probably be more than sufficient in most cases. People are taking things to all sorts of crazy extremes, partially for fun and partially because they’re just being extreme. To be honest, my wife and I, we’re just being cautious and we’re being careful. Social distance first and then making sure we have a mask and wearing glasses so that we’re protecting ourselves the best we can. A pair of sunglasses and a mask and you look like Darth Vader. That’s kind of cool, you know.

Hopefully, you’re indoors and away from people so you’re not getting exposed but this is if you have to go out.

If we had to leave the house, I’m using it as an example but that’s what we would do.

Right. One of the really valuable documents that I got from being in that Telegram group is the Coronavirus Hygiene Google Doc, I don’t know who created that, but that was really helpful to understand. All the different things that you should be doing. To think I’ll just wash my hands after I go get gas is a brutal mistake. You need to be wearing gloves and you really shouldn’t be reusing the same gloves over and over again if at all possible. There is another document I got from the group which is a Coronavirus Supply Survival Guide. That’s where you think, “Oh gosh. I didn’t think of that and I didn’t think of that, that, that, and that.”

There’s this survival guide, the one where all the things that they could buy that was in that group.

I want to restate one thing too. FFP3 is the N99 or the N100 masks that you need to look for. I might have misspoken earlier so I want to make sure I restated that. That it is that FFP3 that’s really the highest N of the masks. But if you have an FFP2, those are fine, I mean they’re generally good enough for most people anyway.

Ideally, you want to get FFP3. Got it. For those of us who are in California, Governor Newsom has stated we have to stay in our homes. I forget the terminology—there are all these terminologies like shelter-in-place, stay-at-home, etc. We have to stay at home with the exception of going out for essentials, going to the grocery store, going to get medical care, that sort of thing. What is currently allowed, but I’m guessing it’s going to be tightened, is you are allowed to go outside to exercise. You could go to a state park or local park and just keep your distance, minimum six feet social distancing from anybody else, and that you can still get that exercise, still go hiking or running, or what have you for now.

That’s very interesting. 

Yeah, in California that’s on the covid19.ca.gov website that they are allowing that, but I can’t imagine that’s going to continue for very long.

Wow. Let’s get out and go for a run while we can. Six feet apart.

You’re not in California.

No, too far.

That doesn’t give you carte blanche to go and hang out with people, and organize play dates with your mommy groups and that sort of thing in the local park. Definitely stay away from people.

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Oh my god, I read something today. There was a woman that posted that she wanted to have a playdate with her friends to give all the kids exposure to Covid-19 because she figured it was like chickenpox.

Oh my God. So then we won’t have to deal with it in the future. Crazy. You know that just because you have it once doesn’t mean that you are immune. I saw articles like there is this Japanese guy who was on the Diamond Princess, I think, and then he got better after getting very ill, and then he got it again and had to get rehospitalized.

Was it a relapse or he actually got it again?

He got it again.

Really? So I know there’s been a lot of cases of relapse but I hadn’t heard of one where you’re actually having it twice.

Yeah. It was on NHK, the NHK World Japan news. A Japanese man tested positive the second time.  

The thing that worries me most about this disease is the fact that it does damage to your lungs and reduces lung capacity.

And your heart. Just getting it and getting through it doesn’t mean that you aren’t permanently disabled to some degree.

It’s horrible.

What can we tell people that will end this episode on a positive note so that they can remain hopeful that we will get this, that this too shall pass.

Well look, there’s been a virus of some pandemic about every hundred years, and we’ve always come out the other side of it. I think human beings are very resilient when it comes to adversity. We lived, we’ve been through World Wars, and during those World Wars, you and I didn’t experience them firsthand, but our grandparents and older generations have. We’ve come out the other side of those things. 

There was a Spanish flu during World War I, and we’ve come out the other side of both of those things. I grew up during the era of nuclear war fear all the time of the U.S. versus Russia, and what’s going to happen, and all that, and we don’t talk about that anymore either.

I think these things are always going to happen in the world that we live in, and they’re going to come and they’re going to go. I think the downside, of course, is the risks and dangers of our health, and also there’s a lot of issues with the economy and jobs. I think  in some respects if you can risk being home instead of being out then you can also do a lot of other things that are great for yourself to pursue other things of interest. You can go online and you can learn things on YouTube that you’ve never had time to learn.

You can read books. You can read my book, or your book. We’ve both written books so there’s a lot that you can do. I’ve had the opportunity to spend so much time with my children that I never had before. Yes, I have to do the homeschooling now because the schools are closed so I have to take responsibility for that. That’s a challenge but it’s also interesting to actually be able to connect with my kids and spend more time with them. I get to spend more time with my wife doing things that we’ve been wanting to do and not have time to do because we’re home all the time. 

We’ve created some different rules or boundaries, so I’d say for people who are married that are wondering how do you not drive each other crazy. Define some boundaries around, “Hey, you know I’m a guy I want some guy time. I’m going to play my Xbox or if I have a garden or a place like the front of my house. If I can play basketball and shoot hoops, I’ll shoot hoops.” Whatever it is, let a guy do what a guy wants to do and let a woman do whatever she wants to do. Give each other space to do your own thing. Have some time where you get together as a family and do fun things together.

I’ll give a few examples of fun things we’ve done. We had an upside-down day. Upside down day was basically that we weren’t going to do anything in the normal order. The kids got up and the first thing they did was they got to have snacks and watch cartoons for breakfast, then I had some turkey in the freezer so I made us a Thanksgiving dinner for basically a brunch. Mashed potatoes, turkey, whatever. And then we had breakfast around dinnertime, so the whole day was completely upside-down, but the kids were like, “So are we going to do an upside-down day every Saturday then? Because it was kind of fun.” That’s one thing.

Also, self-care, so having time to do a bubble bath if you’ve got a tub, that’s not my thing. Painting your nails, also not my thing, but Orion, my wife, took some time to paint her nails.

Or she could just paint your nails because maybe she finds that therapeutic, and then you could have some time together where you’re talking and she’s painting.

That’s funny. She was very happy to have her nails painted. She normally goes to go get a manicure and pedicure, but that’s out of the question now. So being able to take the time and do that, it’s really helpful. Take time for self-care. 

That’s it, and make a routine.

That’s great.

Get into a routine. Your normal routine is get up in the morning, go to work, come home, get the kids out of the house, whatever. Create different routines that you can get into patterns for.

Let the weekends be weekends with sleep-ins and all the rest, but let the week be structured a little bit more where you actually force yourself out of bed. If you’re working and you can work from home, then certainly stay in that work focus and mentality of get up, work from nine in the morning till five in the afternoon, have your lunch break. 

If your kids are home with you now, of course, have lunch with your kids.  Of course, there’s more things going on, but routine helps because it gives you a sense of purpose. And then throw in fun things that you’ve been wanting to do. Learn magic, or Magic: The Gathering, or whatever. Taekwondo on YouTube, or go get a Series 7 license, or something so you can become a financial advisor. There’s no stopping the number of things you can come up with and do to self-educate, and learn, and grow in these times.

Every night could be game night.

Every night could be a game night. We can have poker online, I mean why not? We’ve got to find an app that’ll do that for us, but we can have some fun and we could transfer bitcoin to each other for whoever the winner is.

I don’t know poker well enough so I’m going to pass on that one. 

Blackjack is just fine, but you get my point. There’s lots of things you can do and the other thing is you can have social parties with your friends using Zoom, or Skype, or whatever too. This is a great opportunity to connect with people that you’ve not been able to connect with for a while. You got too busy, pick up the phone and call someone you haven’t had a chance to talk to in a while and just reconnect.

Yeah, Every day find somebody new that you have not spoken to for a long time. All this idea of like, “Oh it’s been so long. This family member I’ve fallen out of touch with them. It’s kind of awkward to give them a call now.” All that’s fallen by the waist side because we’re all in crisis mode so just check in on them and say, “Oh I haven’t spoken to this relative for five years, how embarrassing.” No, it’s not anymore because we’re all one big family right now. 

Some other things that bring us hope like I’ve read some things about Chloroquine which is an anti-malaria medicine that seems to have some positive effect on people who have the virus and are suffering from Covid-19. There’s another thing I want to mention. You mentioned, Steve, we’re resilient as a species. I would take that even a step further. 

There’s a book that’s called Antifragile. It’s by the same author of The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb. He describes antifragile as a step beyond resilience where if you’re resilient, you just can bounce back against, or you can weather the storm. But if you’re antifragile, you actually need those pressures and stressors to thrive and evolve. 

Our immune system is antifragile, it’s not just resilient. We’d all be dead if we just merely had a resilient immune system. Mother nature is antifragile. Economic systems like the ones that we’ve been living through are antifragile. If you think of yourself as antifragile and not just resilient, that will give you almost like a mental superpower.

That’s so cool, yeah.

Take this to another level and apply that concept of antifragile not just to your immune system, but to your psychology as well. 

I will add one thing to that as well is that a healthy mind gives you a healthy body, because it’s very easy to start, and I’ll tell you from experience. Being locked at home and not being able to leave the confines of the house suddenly feels, there are days where I woke up at the beginning feeling stressed or feeling, I wouldn’t say depressed but felt uneasy like trapped, and that’s no different than being in a crappy job, and feeling trapped in my job, and waking up in the morning in a sweat going, “Oh, I gotta get out of this job.”

It’s that same feeling so you have to shift the mindset. How do you shift the mindset? You start to find ways to make a positive experience for yourself because if you can create a positive environment, you won’t get ill. Generally, it creates a stronger immune system. It creates a stronger mindset for yourself, and that’s also like a superhuman power of just being in a positive mindset. If you’re feeling down, call a friend, mastermind with some people. Talk through it together, create support groups if you’re feeling down.

But don’t use those groups to create negative environments. Create positive environments with positive outcomes, actionable things that you can do that you can monitor. Don’t ever feel like because you’re stuck at home for two or three weeks, which could be two or three months, or could be longer, that we have to sink into any forms of depression. Find things that you can do to uplift your spirit because the more positive energy and feeling you have, the more that it makes getting through the day easier especially if you’re not able to leave the house and the furthest you might be able to go might be a balcony or might not even be a balcony. You might just have a house or an apartment.

This really calls out to everybody that just find ways to create, use different rooms for different things so that you can go to a safe room, like you said, take a bath, or go into your bedroom and that’s a place where you only sleep, and then when you’re in the living room it’s a place where you do other fun things. Try to find ways to create environments that create positivity. If you’re feeling down in one room, get up and move to another room because it changes the mindset when you move.

You gotta feed the lightness within you and not the darkness. The darkness that’s out there is undeniable, but we don’t have to focus on it. If we focus on it, we just create more of it, whereas if we focus on the light and focus on revealing light in every interaction. Now, before I get on a podcast episode to do the recording, or if I am going to get on a client Zoom call or something, I’m always thinking about how I am going to reveal light in this interaction. There’s this old Cherokee wisdom, The Tale of the Two Wolves. Are you familiar with this?

No. 

Here I’ll read this to you. One evening, an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is evil; it is anger, envy, jealousy, doubt, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good; it’s joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, forgiveness, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Yeah, interesting.

All right, so focus on the light.

Try meditating as well. A lot of people don’t meditate or don’t understand the benefits of it, but there are tons of great meditation stuff you can find on YouTube that will help you to find your inner peace and your inner self. Here’s another really interesting, cool thing that I discovered over the last few weeks. You can listen to music that’s in 432 frequency, and 432, in particular, has a certain vibration or reverberation which is probably the most natural frequency that there is.

There’s been tons and tons of research done about this frequency, versus 440 which is what most music is made in, and 432 actually creates really beautiful patterns. If you put a vibration of 432 with sand, the sand will form a beautiful pattern, where if it’s 440 it’s a little bit of a muddled pattern. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been recently experimenting by using 432 to put my kids to sleep, by using 432 frequency, and oh my god. They go to sleep so quickly now, and I can only just say that I was using other music and to put them to sleep, just to relax them, that sort of meditation music just because they liked the sounds of the tones. When I switched from 440 to 432, it was a miracle music.

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That’s awesome, 432 Hz.

Yeah, that’s it.

Okay, and you’re also meditating too, right?

I started meditating last summer. It’s interesting, it helps you to really just get out of your own head and just to take in the energies around you. I just go into a mode of serenity where you don’t have to think about the positives, or the negatives, or anything. Try to just create a blank slate. 

There’s lots of online meditation stuff where they’ll do guided meditation and help you. I’ve gone to the point where I can literally go into a point of like I’m not thinking about my wife, or my kids, or work, or anything. I just let my mind float as if you were floating in the ocean just floating there, just freely floating. It’s very therapeutic because it just gives you some time to escape everything and let your mind take you where it takes you.

We have a couple of great episodes. I’ve got multiple episodes on meditation. There’s Ariel Garten who’s the co-founder of Interaxon, creates the muse meditation device, the wearable device. That’s a great episode. I’ve had Sanjay Sabnani on. 

That would be a very interesting episode too to listen to, I’ve not. I’ll check those episodes of yours out. 

I’ve also had a Oneness monk Douglas Bentley on the podcast, so those are just a few great episodes on meditation to check out. I have multiple other ones. Just reconnecting with your inner being and staying connected with your inner being is so important. If you don’t quiet your mind chatter, how are you going to do that? It’s going to be so much harder. Definitely meditate, and work to elevate your consciousness, and just operate at a higher vibration. 

You’ll affect the people around you. If you’re in self-isolation with your family, that will affect them positively. It will affect the field around you even if you’re by yourself. The field will be better because you are elevating your consciousness, and if you want to get a little woo woo, I recommend Akashic Record readings. This is really spooky, kind of weird, but my wife Orion had an Akashic Records reading. It is amazing. I’ve had multiple readings from her as well. It’s bodyenergyconnection.com.

Anne Marie is the person who does the readings. She was channeling the records holders, records people who are entities or whatever, and the records keepers were answering one of Orion’s questions through Anne Marie. I know it sounds pretty woo, but it was about our nanny. The question was about her nanny, I don’t remember what she said exactly, what’s the question she asked about our nanny, but the records keepers said that something’s gonna shift in March and that nanny will no longer be your nanny. 

Woo.

Oh my goodness, yeah. 

And here we are.

And here we are.

You don’t have your nanny any more because of the situation.

Right. We sent her home about a week early before all the stay safe at home orders and all that. So we thought, “Oh well, we just need to take proactive action here. It’s probably just going to be a short term situation.”

It really hadn’t sunk in yet, but we said, “We really shouldn’t be bringing you back in for this next week so can you just not come?” Which was heartbreaking to say and then in reflection, Orion’s like oh my God, this was the record keepers telling us that something’s going to shift. 

That’s so crazy. 

Well, you’ve had some kind of crazy stuff.

Yeah, I started meditating more seriously last June 2019. I started having these—I think probably around September, October—these dark versus light. I could almost imagine floating in space, and I would see just a vast darkness consuming an area of space, and then see this kind of line with a light on the other side of it. I was always being confronted with the fact that they were both there but the expansion of darkness was coming and was getting bigger and it was scary.

I was getting these sensations that there was something dark and terrible coming. I don’t know how to explain that to anybody that they’ll think I’m not like a nutcase for saying it. I kept being shown these paths to light, and I didn’t understand what it meant, and I just kept making sure that I was walking toward or staying on the side of the light and the positive energy.

I just felt like I was amongst the presence of energies of positive and negative, but it wasn’t just that. I felt like there was something dangerous and something very bad coming. It led up to the point where in around January, I started seeing this blackness over China, and I couldn’t understand why it was so black, and so dark, and why China was so heavily misted in some sort. 

I didn’t understand that at the time. This was when the outbreak was just starting, and this was  just after the New Year. That was the last one I had, and after that it stopped. But it was this continuous build-up of bad, bad, bad, bad, bad and you can be safe if you just follow the light. I don’t know if I connected that inner meditative state that I’ve had and the images that have come from that with my decision to turn into a prepper. 

A mindful prepper. 

Yeah, a mindful prepper. A positively, mindfully stated prepper, or something like that. 

We could create a Telegram group ‘Hopeful Prepping’.

I don’t think I want to be hopeful.  I want to be more like the preppy prepper or something. 

The prepper zone will make fun of you for being hopeful, but yeah you want to be pragmatic but you also want to connect to the light.

Yeah, but there’s something to be said. Meditation is something that we always want to explain everything with science. I understand a lot of people will just say that to us saying this kind of stuff, we’re just you know full of it, and we’re crazy, and you can’t prove it with science.  

But guess what? We can’t prove it with science, but we still know things. We see things, we have premonitions. There’s people who do all sorts of weird, wacky things like remote viewing and making predictions of the future, and some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, and a lot of it we’ve seen a lot of this weird stuff on television that you think come on this is just ridiculous. 

But there is something to be said that the earth and the sun are gravitational forces that are being affected by other gravitational and energy forces around us. We have a north and south pole. We’ve seen evidence that the North and South Poles have shifted over time. We see energies that scientists can’t explain about how energy moves around the planet. You know what? We have no idea how these gravitational forces, these energies, and these vibrations affect us individually or as human race. We have no idea. Our own planet, and universe, and solar system in an expanding universe are also moving through the universe and being affected by other energies and vibrations and such as well.

And there’s probably more than just one universe, right? The multiverse theory.

Oh yeah, there’s definitely more than one version of the truth because if you look at just the concept of space, time, and anything in quantum mechanics, then certainly there’s going to be multi-dimensions that are already there. There’s also the Mandela effect, there are all sorts of weird stuff.

I love it. I’ll tell you, I practice or believe in the willing suspension of disbelief because if you go around as skeptic, you are not just even that far off from being a cynic. Who wants to run around being a cynic everywhere? Especially at a time of crisis like this when you need to be a light for others around you and for the world. 

That’s it.

There’s a term that I just recently learned from one of my Kabbalah teachers David Ghiyam who was also a past guest on this show. Great episode, I highly recommend it.  

He talks about certainty beyond logic. It’s easy to dismiss the outbreak and so forth if it’s not directly affecting you massively, right? That’s certainty within logic, that’s not hard. But if you connect with certainty beyond logic, like there is a higher power that is protecting me, that I’m guided, angels are looking over me; however, you want to frame it but that you’re connecting to certainty beyond logic. That’s where you reveal tons of light and that’s where you plug right into the fabric of creation. I’ll include a link to that.

That is really really interesting. As I say, I kind of feel like there’s so much we don’t understand or don’t know that sometimes we just have to go on what we see, what we experience, what we feel, and what we sense. If a number of us all see, sense, and experience the same thing in different places, in different periods of time, but we can all compare those stories and they all align, then there’s a truth that doesn’t have to be proven through science that can just be proven through a story, through communication, through telling it to each other.

As they say, for me, I realize there’s a big cosmic universe and we don’t understand most of science when it comes to the cosmic universe at all. For us to say we haven’t proven it in science just says, “Not yet. Well, we might.”

Well, there’s so much that we will never know. I was so fixated on learning everything. I still am a bit of a seminar junkie, but I try to connect more to the tree of life than to the tree of knowledge, the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. There’s a lot of darkness, there’s quite a rabbit hole with the Tree of Knowledge, good and evil.

If you just connect to the tree of life and just trust that life is happening for you, not to you, that there’s a bigger picture, that you’re being looked after, then this helps you to ground yourself, and be a light for others, and reveal lots of light in the world. That’s what I do, I just try and remember to stay connected in that way.

That’s awesome. I love it.

We’re way past our normal episode length, but I think our listeners will appreciate it because this is a really important topic. We want to stay positive and yet stay prepared,  or if we’re not prepared yet, get prepared.

Absolutely. As I say, it can’t hurt to have some basic preparation of foods, medicine, and we didn’t mention but it will just throw it into there, liquid vitamins, because they absorb in the body better. But just having basics is gonna be something you will use no matter what. So yeah, absolutely. Let’s be prepared and be here to support each other.

Vitamin C is a must-have, especially if you end up getting sick, you want a mega-dose on vitamin C. From my understanding, again not medical advice, but what I’m hearing is that taking enough vitamin C, you got to go to the bathroom really bad is what can help if you’ve got the virus. Stay safe, stay positive, help others, be a light in the world, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thank you so much, Steve, for being here and for sharing your wisdom and all the great research and preparations that you’ve done with all of us.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Stephan. Thanks, everybody for taking the time to listen. I know it’s been a long episode, but it’s been really fun.

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About Steve Good

Steve Good is the host of The Coin Chat and is a digital strategist who travels the globe raising awareness and adoption in cryptocurrency. He spent more than 20 years in Financial Services and Technology as a Management Consultant and Client Account Manager at Deloitte and Infosys before dedicating his time to cryptocurrency. He is an accomplished entrepreneur with board-level experience, a public figure, keynote speaker, and has been featured in numerous articles including BuzzFeed. He currently resides in London, UK with his family.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments, or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Stephan Spencer, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.