Instant Genius - Preparing for disaster, with Michał Zalewski

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Computer security expert Michał Zalewski explains what disasters we should be preparing for, and what simple, straight-forward things we can do to have the biggest impact. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit namea audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine, this is Instant Genius, the bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Sarah Rigby. online staff writer at sciencefocus.com. Preparing for disaster can seem like a niche topic, the realm of people who spend their free time learning survival skills.

However, Nihal Zelowski believes there are things we should all be doing to protect ourselves in the case of unexpected problems, from a kitchen fire to a natural disaster. Nihal is author of Practical Doomsday, a user's Guide to the End of the World. He explains what disasters we should be preparing for and what simple, straightforward things we can do to have the biggest impact. First of all, could you please tell us a bit about yourself?

Well, I'm probably not who you would expect to hear from, given the topic we're going to be discussing today and the subject of the book. I think most people would expect some sort of an ex-military guy or perhaps a radical anti-government type. And I'm not that. I'm a silly-raised computer geek. I work in information security, essentially protecting online services from cyber attacks. And my interest in emergency preparedness is just a natural extension of what I do for a living. You know, in my profession, we are paid to look at complex systems and try to figure out how they can malfunction or be subverted by others. And we have very practical methods of analyzing and quantifying risks that I think are missing

from most of the discussions of prepping today. So, you know, that was a large motivation for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, the book, I think there's also a component of personal experiences that's thrown into the mix. I spent my childhood on the other side of the iron curtain, then had some painful experiences going through recessions. And that did not really convince me that the end is near, but it made me realize that, you know, stuff happens every now and then. It's good to have a plan. When you hear about people preparing for disasters, you usually think about people kind of building bunkers and stockpiling tinned food and that sort of thing. So would your general,

approach to preparedness be that sort of thing? Or should we be doing something, you know, a lot more kind of laid back or casual? What's your general approach? I think you have to start with a risk assessment, right? And I think it's very harmful to just try and catalog every single way in which things can go wrong in life. It's mentally exhausting and there's sort of no limit to how much time, energy and money you can spend if you're just trying to eliminate every single possibility of things going wrong. So on some level, I think, you know, the most likely possibility we have to prepare for is that nothing particularly terrible will ever happen to us. So emergency preparedness needs to be about having a robust plan B just in case versus assuming that, you know, something awful is just

bound to happen down the line. And so I think, yeah, you need to write mental framework for prioritizing concerns to make sure that you don't just, you know, go down that rabbit hole of building bunkers and stockpiling ammunition. And the three dimensions you really want to look at are, first of all, the likelihood that a particular event will even come true, then the impact it's likely to have on your life. And finally, the non-recoverable costs of mitigating that concern. So from that perspective, there's probably no reason to lose sleep over, you know, zombies or black holes. But there's plenty of precedent for recessions, kitchen fires or car accidents. I think it's also important to think about managing risk the right way.

Quite often, instead of buying survival gear, it's better to work on our day-to-day habits. So, for example, you know, you may want to take a defensive driving class instead of putting all your hopes on an extensive trauma kit that you're always going to have in the trunk of your car. So those are the principles that I try to teach and that I talk about in the book. I think in addition to being realistic about the odds, I think it also pays to simplify and generalize as much as possible. Disasters usually don't unfold precisely as plants. So you want to make sure that your plants are flexible and don't depend on too many variables. So for example, and I know that this is going to sound very disappointing, but one of the most versatile preps that you can have is just a robust financial safety net. And, you know, that helps take of all kinds of unexpected expenses.

It's going to get you to a period of unemployment and it can pay for a hotel stay if you're stuck away from home. That kind of financial preparedness is seldom the topic of, you know, prepping books. And one of my long-standing goals is to challenge that. So we're not just talking about like natural disasters and things here, aren't we? We're also talking about stuff like losing your job and, you know, house burning down and things like that, right? Yeah, and I think, you know, generally, I think we tend to spend way too much time on scenarios

that would make for a good plot of an action film or a disaster film. And that's almost always a mistake, right? People tend to worry a lot about terrorism or nuclear war or asteroids, but it's probably more useful to ask ourselves if we have a way to stay warm throughout an extended power outage, for example. You know, the mundane stuff that actually happens on a pretty regular basis around the globe. You know, the other point I would make is that

prepping is generally not about life or death. Even if you don't prepare, you're probably, you're in all likelihood going to survive whatever life throws your way. But in an emergency, comfort and peace of mind are quite valuable too. So it's good to have a plan just to address that risk, right? And in the last couple of years, we've been faced with this pandemic, which is an enormous event that a lot of people weren't expecting. So were you surprised by how prepared or by how unprepared people were for, say, suddenly going into lockdown?

I think, you know, I think it illustrates that we as a species are pretty resilient and able to adopt, right? And I think, you know, the life mostly goes on, even though we are facing, you know, an adversary that's sort of, you know, unprecedented in recent history. But it also illustrates the difficulty of making sound decisions in the fog of war. I think, you know, when you're bombarded with conflicting information, when even the health authorities don't really know what's going on and what the right measures we should be taking may be, when you're facing this prolonged emergency that, again, it's nothing like the, you know, action films that we watch. It's mostly mundane.

It's about sort of, you know, taking care of yourself. and your family and it drags on for years, I think that is really a very interesting reality check for a lot of people who are into emergency preparedness. I do find some silver lining in COVID-19, however crazy that may sound, in that, you know, I think there's a long history of truly deadly pandemics, haunting humanity throughout the ages, right? It's not just the black death or smallpox. Even today, malaria is killing people by the millions. And that's a disease that used to be present in Europe and in the US well into the 50s. I think, you know, COVID is a terrible disease that caused a lot of pain and suffering,

but it's also less deadly than a lot of the problems we've dealt with the past. So I think it is this reminder of our vulnerability to events like that. And from that perspective, I think it's a relatively gentle wake-up call. But I think it also demonstrates that we've made a lot of progress in understanding disease and our ability to develop novel vaccines on our short notice. So I'm actually very optimistic about the future of humanity. But at the same time, I think small reminders like that, are the best we can hope for so that we don't get too arrogant and too comfortable with what we have.

So now let's talk a bit about how we should be preparing. So as you said earlier, probably one of the most useful things is a rainy day fund of money that we can use in an emergency. So ideally, how much should we have saved up for an emergency? So that's a difficult question to answer. I think in general, rainy day savings are wonderful because in almost every scenario, or they can be exchanged for what you actually need at the time, right? So in contrast to the proverbial stockpile of canned cheese, which can't really be traded for a new rule. Yeah, money helps.

And I think, you know, we get this idea that even a lifetime of belt tightening is not going to make us wealthy, so we don't even bother trying. But the emergency funds don't really work that way, right? The size of your emergency funds needs to be proportional to the cost of living, and that tends to be proportional to your income. And as long as you do have disposable income, the goal of building that safety margin to get you maybe three to six months of financial hardship, I think is quite easy to accomplish across a wide range of income brackets. You just need to set aside a relatively small fraction of your paycheck, maybe 10%. And keep doing that for about three to four years and you're going to get there.

It is a drug, but I think once you hit that mark, your life changes for the better. For one, you know, it makes work less stressful because you know that you have a way to pay the bill to see their way. So if your boss is a terrible human being or if your company is not doing well, it just doesn't hurt as much. So, yeah, I would advise people to aim for that three to six month mark as a useful benchmark. But it really depends on your personal circumstances. And as opposed to most other preps, it's difficult to go overboard, right? even if you have a year or two years worth of your income saved, you are probably not going to be hurt by that.

Whereas, you know, buying survival gear, I think, has the problem of rapidly diminishing returns. When we are saving this money, where do you think is the best place to store it? I mean, the traditional idea is, you know, you put it under your mattress or you put it in a safe or you buy lots of gold or something, but should we have it in a bank, a particular type of bank account? I think that, again, depends. I don't want to be in the position of giving people sort of, you know, rigid prescriptions

on how they should be investing their wealth. But I think, you know, hiding cash under the mattress is generally ill-advised. I think having a small amount of cash to be able to get through temporary problems, such as, you know, bank closures, power outages, you know, the situation you had in Greece not long ago. is beneficial, but you only should be keeping as much as you're not afraid to lose in case of burglary or fire or whatever. In the longer term, yeah, I think banks provide a reasonably safe alternative, and the

most significant adversary you're facing when you're keeping cash savings is inflation, which is ticking up right now. To deal with inflation, you generally want to be able to have a claim on assets that represents something real, whether that's, you know, a stake in a company, in a public company, whether that's collectibles, precious metals or whatever, I think, you know, that's up to you and to your individual risk tolerance and beliefs and faith you have in the financial system. But generally, that's sort of, you know, that's one of the simplest way to, of the simplest ways to escape inflation.

The other option is to invest your money in a way that pays of dividends, right, whether that's, you know, making a loan to others or making any other investment, that's sort of an option you can pursue. And now probably one of the next most important things is food. So how much, should we be stockpiling food? Should we be collecting lots of tins or jars of things? To an extent, I think that's wise, because there are situations where you may not be able to go to the grocery store for a while. And so, you know, it's good to have some emergency water, food and hygiene supplies. That said, as I mentioned, I think there are diminishing returns. an outage or a supply chain disruptions that last several days is reasonably likely.

It happened countless times to people all over the place. A similar event that drags on for months is probably less so. So again, you need to start by doing an honest assessment of risks and probabilities before you start stockpiling stuff. And I think that's where many emergency plans really fall apart. People end up spending thousands on increasingly exotic and unnecessary supply. because they didn't draw that line. And there's always another doomsday prediction in the news.

There's always another reason to be anxious or worried about the future. And so it's very, very difficult to stop. And does it matter what type of food? Because if I was going to stockpile food, I'd probably end up with lots of tins of the same thing, like lots of jars of pasta sauce or something. So I wouldn't end up with very much variety. Yeah, I think, you know, it's useful.

You can come up with sort of, you know, a theoretical approach to what you should be stuck bailing, but I think it's best to just try it out, you know, make a resolution to or settle on a specific menu and then sort of, you know, try to actually eat that for a couple of days and see if it's conductive to survival, right? And being comfortable. So, yeah, I think, you know, Kant foods are actually a pretty reasonable choice as long as you have a reasonable variety, you have a source of protein, and all that.

You do want to make sure that you have an adequate intake of calories. I think a lot of canned foods, especially fruit and so on, are just very, very local. So you may run into the problem that, you know, it seems like a lot, but you're actually going to be hungry by the end of the day. But yeah, you know, I don't think there's a specific prescribed way of doing this. Many people stockpile very basic supplies like flour and sugar and so on. the difficulty there is that you still need a way to actually turn that into an edible meal. So you need a way to cook, for example.

So, you know, all of a sudden your plans get a bit more complicated. And as well as preparing for things like supply chain shortages, as you explained in your book, we could also minimize the chance of suddenly being out of a job. So what sort of things can we do to try and keep ourselves in employment as much as possible? So I don't think you really can prevent that, right? I think, you know, we are in a period of rapid technological disruption, and fewer and fewer professions offer stable employment for life. Just give you an example, just 20 years ago, you know, traditional print journalism was a thriving

industry and you couldn't go wrong, opening a DVD rental place, right? So I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of disruption in the coming decades, too. And so I think the strategy here is less about protecting what we have at all costs and more about being able to respond to market shifts. This may mean staying on top of the latest in your field of expertise, even if it's not necessarily relevant to the day-to-day job you have right now, or it may mean pursuing potentially markable hobbies on the side. Financial preparedness helps with this too,

because it buys you time to maybe train for a different job or look around for a while. Do you think we should all be teaching ourselves something like computer programming or something. It's kind of people talk a lot about how in 20 years or so, that's all we're going to need to do. Do you think we should be doing that? Possibly, but I think, you know,

it's difficult to predict that precisely. And I actually wouldn't be surprised. You know, we had a lot of professions that people believed would never get automated or outsourced or made obsolete, obsolete. And I think, you know, computer programming is not entirely invulnerable to this. There are technologies using machine learning,

that are making it possible to create rudimentary software with minimal user input, where you basically just describe what you need and then, you know, a computer algorithm produces the actual code. Even software engineers probably shouldn't be too comfortable with the cozy jobs that they have today. And again, I think, you know, having a variety of skills and being able to respond to market shift is more important than setting your sites on a very, very, very, specific occupation. The more choices you have, the better, right? So I think that's pretty universally true.

And as for natural disasters, that's probably something that would have the biggest impact on us in terms of preparing for disaster. But we can't predict when they will happen. So should we be preparing for natural disasters? I think we should. But again, it's a matter of how we approach it, right? Because it's very easy to get lost in the sort of, you know, apocalyptic fiction and all the, and all that. I think we tend to forget that climate and the environment can't be unpredictable. Every generation gets their storm of the century, flood of the century, heat wave of the century or whatnot. And the cadence of such events means that we're always caught off guard when they actually happen

because, you know, we grew up never experiencing you anything like that before. Of course, if you're about to be engulfed by lava or if your home is about to be carried away by a tornado, there's not much you can do. But outside the epicenter of such events, there's a much larger zone of disruption where most of the infrastructure is still fine, but the roads may be impossible or there may be no power for a week. And, you know, rational approach to such disaster focuses less on the plots of disaster films and more on the demands. mundane reality of perhaps not being able to get groceries or flush the toilet for a while. And the supplies you need for that eventuality aren't particularly far-fetched or costly to procure, right? And finally, what three things do you think we should all know about preparing for disasters? The one takeaway for me is that it's probably not all lunacy. I think, you know, there's, in the online world,

we don't think it's crazy to suggest that people should back up their important data, right? Like, that's just common sense. But if you ask people about, you know, having a fire extinguisher in their home, let alone, if you ask them if they have some extra water or canned food, you're going to start getting funny looks. And I think there is a spectrum of sensible positions you can take between the two extremes. And sure, on one end of the spectrum, you have people stockpiling guns and building bunkers. But, you know, the other end of that spectrum that is ignoring emergency preparedness altogether and assuming that nothing could possibly ever happen to us or that when it does, you know,

the government is necessarily going to bail us out on time. I think that may be equally wrong. And so I would urge people to not dismiss prepping under the mistaken assumption that, oh, you know, it's all those, you know, crazies and the, you know, people living in the woods, right? Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Mikhail Zaluski. If you want to know more about preparing for disaster, check out his book, Practical Doomsday. Or, to hear him tell me about how to survive the apocalypse, head over to Instant Genius Extra,

available only on Apple Podcasts. The February issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

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