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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's all things supply chain. We're going to talk about the supply chain crisis, how we got here, where we're going, and what you and I can do to be prepared whether this happens again or even if this current situation gets even worse.

♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host. Today on the show, I am going to welcome back several-time guest of Radical Personal Finance, Stephen Harris.

Stephen is an expert on energy, on preparedness, and on quite a number of issues, including the supply chain crisis and the supply chain issues that we are facing right now because the world is in the middle of a remarkable situation, a situation that many people have been warning for a long time that could and would happen.

Many people have been predicting that these kinds of disruptions are possible and probable, and I think we're seeing a very kind of mixed up, the expression of things that are worse than they've been in a very long time, but yet also seeing a lot of resiliency. So, Stephen, welcome back to Radical Personal Finance.

Hi, Josh. Happy to be back. I got news for you. The supply chain crisis isn't here yet. This is just the clouds on the horizon. The hurricane is not here, even begun to come on land yet. We can always count on you for a good dose of optimism early in the morning, Steve.

It's wonderful. No, no. It's not optimism. It's realism. I do appreciate realism. That is the number one thing. So you think that as difficult as things are with the price of cars through the roof, with some shortages on the shelves, and the fact that this supply chain, these difficulties have been grinding on for months, you don't think that this is as bad as it's going to get?

Oh, no. As my buddy Dave says, as long as the lights are still on, I think you're doing pretty decent. And as long as food is still on the shelf, yeah, there's food missing from the shelf. We just, people were forgetting. We just had a huge protein shortage during the pandemic.

It was impossible to find anything on the shelf. Beef was gone. Chicken was gone. Pork was gone. Fish was gone. And, well, it wasn't gone. I got a video of the big 20-pound case of Impossible Burgers sitting there on the shelf all by itself in an empty meat case.

I did a video. It's like, "Hey, marketing tip. Impossible Burgers. When there is an outage of beef and no one wants to buy your stuff, that's a hint to you." That poor company imploded over the last couple of quarters. No question about that. There's reported bad earnings today, but who cares?

We're not here to talk about them. We are here to talk about the supply chain crisis, supply chain issues, which is a combination of... It's a combination of coronavirus, coronavirus restrictions, government stupidity, labor, people not wanting to work, people not available to work, people not letting be allowed to work, state regulations regarding vehicles and port procedures, and the rest.

Just start adding everything in. It's not one issue with literally 20 things coming together. And it's not even a perfect storm. We get three things coming together, and there's a disruption, and two more things come together, and there's another disruption, and four more things out of those 20 come together, and we have another disruption.

And then there's some more repeating with some numbers. It is a giant kaleidoscope of issues going on. The end result to you, as far as you're concerned, is you can't get it. And people look at me, and I say, "What do you recommend for a grain grinder?" I go, "Oh, I got my favorite, the Wonder Mill, and everything else." And they go, "Well, that thing is like $319." I go, "Yeah, when I got it, it was $225." And they go, "Well, it's expensive." I go, "No, no, no, that's not expensive." I mean, just how expensive do you think something is when it's unavailable?

That's expensive. Yeah, over the last few years, I'll tell you what, we've done so much traveling around the world that over the last few years, I have been away from online shopping, and I have been away from Amazon. First, we were living in an RV and moving around so much that I just couldn't arrange the shipments properly.

And then we've been traveling abroad, and with traveling abroad, we've been in a bunch of places where Amazon wasn't available. It's basically felt like it's taken me back to 1992 in some ways, where my experience, my whole life, I grew up as a digital native. I grew up always ordering everything by online catalog orders, etc.

And so I've always been accustomed to getting whatever I wanted shipped right to my house at a great price, fast. But over the last few years, not doing much online shopping, I've gone back to a previous world where when I walk into the store and the thing that I want is there, I'm just thrilled that it's there, and I buy it.

I go into the store and look, it's here, and they've got something that is probably good enough. I don't shop the brand. I don't wonder if I should have 10 more options. I just walk in and I buy it, and I'm grateful to have it because I could just go to the store and get it.

And it's given me a real appreciation for the abundance that we live in in normal times, having access to exactly what we want at our fingertips. So I've come to appreciate it a lot. My mother was getting her truck repaired, and she goes, "Steven, they said they won't have the truck done until Friday," which was a couple days ago.

I go, "They just got the part in, and they won't have an opening to do the three-hour repair window until Friday and get it back to me." She goes, "I don't want to go that long without a vehicle." I go, "Quit complaining. Go that long without a vehicle. It's only two days.

Get it fixed." She goes, "One, they had the part. Two, they had time to do it." And she just didn't understand, and I had explained it to her. It's like, "Mom, there's a global shortage on vehicle parts." I mean, forget getting oil filters and stuff for semi-trucks. It's even trickling down to a point where it took Amazon six weeks to get me my extra, extra oil filters for my Cummings diesel and my Dodge Ram.

We already had serpentine belts and oil and extra oil filters before the pandemic hit. And so we had a window in the eye of the hurricane, a little window in the storm before we're now going into the fall, and things are becoming more scarce, and there's other issues. So I ordered some extra, extra oil filters.

Yeah, it took them six weeks for me to get them. And it's from a reliable source. So I want to tell you kind of what my impression of this is. For any new listeners, the topics of preparedness, especially physical preparedness, are not new to radical personal finance. I've always seen this topic as a subset, a component of good financial planning.

Most financial planning assumes a workable, stable, organized financial system. But there are times in which that system collapses, either temporarily, as in an earthquake in the local area means the ATMs are down or a power failure means that the whole transportation grid goes down, or longer term, such as you live in a nation that goes into a major economic crisis, an inflationary period or a hyperinflationary period or a military coup, et cetera.

And so I've always seen preparedness as a subset. We've talked a lot about physical preparedness. Back in the first few dozen episodes of Radical Personal Finance, I talked about the classic book by John Pugsley called "The Alpha Strategy," how you prepare for an inflationary time by basically stockpiling all of the things that you need.

We've talked several times with Stephen Harris. In fact, Stephen, I've included, even before we ever knew each other, I asked your permission and shared some of your classic audio files of the emergency preparedness class that you taught back many years ago to a local CERT organization. And so we've talked about this.

But we've had, with the pandemic, an insight into a major, major crisis. And I think we're all thankful it's not as bad as it could have been in terms of the lethality. Hey, hey, hey, wait a minute. What do you mean, not as bad as it could have been?

You got three quarters, I mean, legitimately, okay? And if anything, the numbers are slightly underreported that I'm getting. I went to my experts that I know, and they said, "Steve, yeah, the numbers are real." We're talking three quarters of a million people in the continental United States dead, legitimately from direct or causal relationships, comorbidities, or direct morbidity to COVID.

Three quarters of a million. If you would go back and listen to my stuff, and when you talked to me pre-pandemic, I was saying, "Yeah, we're guessing 300,000 to 3 million." And just because we're at three quarters of a million, and we didn't hit 3 million or 8 million, that doesn't mean it wasn't as – I mean, three quarters of a million people in a direct causal relationship, but bad.

9/11 was 3,000, and we flipped out over that. Pearl Harbor was 3,000, and we're talking three quarters of a million. 750,000 dead. I mean, I just got asked by a company I do science and technology work for. It's like, "Steve, we can't get a hold of one of our buddies in this company.

His cell phone's disconnected. We can't find him." And I went and did background research on the guy. I found him, and he was dead. 39 years old, dead. And I haven't talked to any of his relatives yet, but there were no police records of car accidents or anything else that would kill a 39-year-old pretty quickly.

So it's probably – I'll find out later – probably something COVID-related. But I mean, that was just four hours ago that I did that research, and I had to write them a message and say, "Sorry, he's deceased. He died September 10th." What do you mean it's not as bad as it could be?

I mean, I really got to slap you. I mean, we have a worldwide pandemic that just killed three quarters of a million in the U.S. I think – well, I don't know. God knows how many. You take official numbers and unofficial numbers, and it's single-digit to tens of millions worldwide.

If not more. And this is a 1% lethal bioweapon that got unleashed on us. Right. That's what I was saying. It was like the 1%. And I concede the point. I guess what I was saying is that the fact that it is a 1% number, just imagine if it were 3% or 5%.

Because what has happened is – and here's what I have seen. Early on in the pandemic, basically everybody was taking major precautions because it was unknown the severity of the sickness caused by COVID. But then very quickly, it seemed as though the results seemed to bifurcate into the people who were the oldest and the sickest got sick fast.

And so very quickly, many people went back to work. And I'm convinced that that saved us from a major catastrophe. Two things saved us from a major financial catastrophe, as bad as it's been. Number one is I think that most of us underestimated how the most productive members of society have been able to keep working through telecommuting.

Most of us who work in knowledge-based work have been able to continue working from home very productively. And I think the second thing is how thankfully that many of the most healthy workers have been able to keep on going with in-person jobs because their risk of dying from COVID was less than it seemed in the early days.

So I'm grateful for those factors. You weren't in the continental United States during COVID, and I was. And the emergency alert system on the TV was going off with "eh, eh, eh, eh." And the only other time I heard that legitimately was during the blackout of 2003. And then they had no message.

The following was a message from blah, blah, blah. And in the event of an actual emergency, okay, they didn't have any of that after the blackout of 2003. This time they had it up in two languages saying, you know, stay-at-home order is in effect and everything else. That's when all the schools closed.

See, in the United States, everyone was going on with life as normal, blah, blah, blah, adapting, everything else. But the second all the schools closed, which happened within a couple days throughout all the states, then all of a sudden it was like, what do you mean I can't take my child to school?

And then it became real. Then there was a run on the supermarkets and the grocery stores, and the toilet paper disappeared. But also the other foodstuffs and everything else. That's when it hit in the United States and it became real. And it became real to a lot of people.

I know photographers that are going out in New York and Chicago and LA, and they were taking daytime pictures of empty streets that have never ever been taken before at any time in history. And there's a little meme that goes around that says, "I miss COVID traffic," because during COVID there was no traffic.

Right, right. I mean, people were driving down through Los Angeles on the 405. It's like, I've never been here and it hasn't been a traffic jam. There was no traffic across the Brooklyn--not the Brooklyn Bridge, yeah, there too, but the Golden Gate Bridge, there's pictures of no traffic going across it.

I mean, life--and we have a bias where we tend to forget and block out previous things. 9/11 has been greatly forgotten. It was several years after 9/11 happened. The pandemic is being re-erased in our mind through current memories, new memories, new events, and what's on TV and everything else.

And we're going forward. But, I mean, it was a very--I'm sitting here in my chair and I'm talking with some of my associates, because we're all home and everything, and it's like, we can't believe this is happening. We really can't believe--it's like, I never thought--we've planned for it. We've war-gamed it.

We've done thought experiments and think tanks on it and everything. And we're going, holy cow, we're actually in a global pandemic. And we weren't sure what the lethality rate was and everything else, and everyone was literally scared into inaction. It was--that's a whole other lecture on itself. But-- So here's what-- And we got more coming up.

Right. And that's what we're here talking about today is the shortages, the supply chain interruption, and everything that's going into it. Here's what has surprised me the most from real experience, right? I've always enjoyed-- So anyways, that's what you and I are talking about today is we're talking about supply chain interruptions and what's coming up.

Right. So here's what has surprised me the most and that I wasn't mentally prepared for, and that's simply how slow-moving this crisis has been and how hard that has made it for me to be confident in my decision-making. And I realized this early on back in--more than a year ago.

I've always enjoyed disaster movies or disaster novels. And in disaster movies and disaster novels, for the sake of the pacing of a plot, the collapse usually happens quickly, right? There's an event. There's a triggering event. And then within a case of a few days or a few weeks, everything collapses to a worst-case scenario.

And in that situation, I think that those kinds of materials have made me think that, well, you'll know for sure when the disaster is here, right? You'll see the shelves starting to be emptied, and you'll know that you just have enough time for that last-minute trip to Sam's Club to stock up and to go and spend.

And you get all your credit cards and you go and you stock up as much as you can. But watching this pandemic develop has been a real lesson in practicality because it has not been fast, although there have been times, like you say, when the schools all shut down very quickly.

Rather, it's been slow. And that's made it hard to predict how severe it actually is/was going to be/is going to be, that it's all slow. And that makes it hard to know, am I doing the right thing? Should I really go out and buy a bunch of extra stuff?

In the beginning, I was looking at supply chain shortages, and I was concerned. I went out and I bought a bunch of electronic gear. I bought a brand-new backup laptop. I bought a new cell phone. I bought a new video camera, a bunch of audio gear. I spent in excess of five figures just buying a bunch of backup gear because I looked at it and I said, "The way I make my living is with this gear.

This is the fundamentally most important stuff. If Apple can't get laptops in over the coming months, I'm going to be doomed. If my computer goes down, I need to have backups." But, man, I felt dumb doing that because of the slow movingness. That's been a big lesson for me of how slow a crisis can and does develop.

Yeah, a Mac user having to use Windows is a crisis, absolutely. Steve, a Mac user who makes his living with audio and video having to use Windows, that is a crisis, no question. I just had to dig you a little bit. Of course. The catastrophe of my Macintosh doesn't work.

We do call this a slow motion disaster. We absolutely do call it a slow motion disaster because everything is time compressed in a Hollywood or The Walking Dead or whatever you want to talk about. Everything is going to be a slow motion disaster from here on out with the supply chain.

The thing that you'll find interesting was I wrote a short paper. I was sitting here looking at all the possibilities and everything. You know what a spaghetti model is for hurricanes? Indeed, I do. Florida native right here. It's like, "Well, one's going this way and one's going that way and everything.

One's going straight." But they're all kind of like, "It's going to hit Florida," is the end conclusion of the spaghetti model. I'm sitting here looking at all the different things going on in my notes and our models, and I'm going, "Damn, I don't like this." Because all my spaghetti models were coming together in one thing and one word, and it scared the piss out of me.

That one word was "famine," and I'm going, "No. No, it can't be." Anyways, I ended up writing a small paper on it. I was very careful to husband my words very carefully and give, like, "I think there's this percentage of this happening." In my analysis, based upon this, if these things drop into their slots, there's a greater potential of this.

The end result is there is a possibility, and I was giving it one chance in three, of some type of famine in the United States of America. I sent this to some associates, and they sent it to some associates. They got to a think tank, an intelligence-based think tank, and they ended up spending four hours on it, which is like the eternity for them to spend four hours on it.

They came to the conclusion that, "Yeah, what Steve says is possible, and we'll kind of go along with his percentages and everything. We agree there's a lot of variabilities, and we also agree with what— and we want to reemphasize what he was stating and amplify it even more— that if there is a famine type of event in continental United States, it will not be like any other famine event that has occurred in history.

It will be from other reasons. There might be food, but you might not have the full distribution of it. You might not have the ability to process it, package it, preserve it, distribute it, shelve it. It might be you've got a bunch of food on this side of the river and a bunch of hungry people on this side of the river, and no metaphorical bridge between the two.

So those, I have to emphasize to your audience, those were not even speculative. Those were more than—it was a theoretical hypothesis that I put forward along with conditions. And so this comes along to the root of people saying, "Get to it, get to it. What are you here to—one of the things you're talking about." And I'll give you a specific example of one of those spaghetti models that is like the metaphorical bridge across the river where there's food on one side and hungry people on the other.

There is a natural gas shortage, which is probably artificial and constrained and goes along with a bunch of inter-country and governmental regulation stupidity on natural gas right now. If people haven't noticed, which most of them doesn't, there is an electricity crisis shortage in the UK and in Europe. There's a natural gas shortage in the UK and Europe.

Part of it has to do with Russia not being able to supply enough gas, them not being able to get enough gas for the UK. I really love the sound of policy breaking from stupidity because the wind's not blowing. So the wind farms and the North Sea out there aren't blowing, so the wind turbines aren't spinning, which is about one-third of British—the UK's electricity.

So anyways, there's a natural gas shortage. And if you follow into the weeds of the notes and everything that's going on in the news, you find out there's a lot of places in the United States and in Europe and in Asia who have stopped the production of ammonia. Because ammonia is made by what's called the Haber-Bosch process, and it's made from the steam reformation of methane, which is natural gas, split into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and you add a little bit more carbon dioxide to it.

And then what you do is you run it through a catalytic reformer along with nitrogen, with the hydrogen that you get from the steam reformation of the methane. So the two primary constituents are nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from the methane. You make ammonia. Now, this is called the Haber-Bosch process because Fritz Haber, a German scientist in the early 1900s, invented the way of getting fertilizer, ammonia, directly from air and water, which is the electrolysis of water and the separation of nitrogen from the air.

He won the Nobel Prize for this because it was revolutionary, but he couldn't make it on an industrial scale. Then Bosch came along and made it implementable on an industrial scale because they didn't have the steels that we have now. Back then, they had a lot of iron and crude steels, but he came up with the way of doing it on a large scale.

And thus, literally, they quadrupled crop production because the nitrogen ammonia is used as a nitrogen fixation fertilizer for the crops. And you could now grow four times the amount of corn or wheat per square foot or acre than you could previously. And Europe was heading for a food crisis because they could not get enough Chilean nitro or saltpeter, which was harvested naturally in mine from Chile by boats to Europe.

And they were forecasting massive food and crop issues back then. So he helped advert that. So anyways, ammonia production is down. Also, what's made from ammonia is farmers either put ammonia directly into the ground from tanks. I've seen it myself in Texas for nitrogen fixation of the crops or it gets converted into a solid.

One of those is ammonium nitrate. The other one is urea. And urea is used a lot. Well, urea is also the main ingredient, what's called DEF fluid, diesel exhaust fluid, which is used in modern direct injection, high pressure diesel engines, which held the world record for efficiency in a mass produced device engine in the world.

I mean, it's 44. It's above the about 44 percent brake thermal efficiency, higher efficiency than a proton exchange membrane fuel cell running on hydrogen. Wow. So anyways, this urea is used since we're running higher pressure and we're running leaner, it does higher temperatures in the direct injection diesel engines, which you've been in Europe.

So you see they're all diesel. The reason they're all diesel is because their socialist infrastructure taxes the crap out of the fuel. So the only way they can reasonably afford to drive around is on a diesel engine because it's dramatically more efficient than the gasoline. So same thing goes in South Korea.

And guess where they get a lot of their urea from in South Korea? China. Guess who's having a whole bunch of issues with energy? There's a giant energy crisis in China right now. And there's a mild one going on in Europe and a moderate one going in the UK.

Well, the end result is they're not getting urea so they can't make death fluid. Well, guess what? Their vehicles are not able to run on the road because you've got to have a small tank of death fluid to go with your larger tank of diesel fuel fluid to clean up your nitrogen of oxides emissions and your selective catalytic reduction unit on your vehicle because it's a diesel vehicle.

And so here's an example of a cause and effect, a produced product, it being shorted and a shortage in cause affecting everyone. And they've done some stuff to alleviate some of it, but there is still a urea death fluid issue going on at this moment in South Korea and it's probably going to spread to other areas.

I myself now have an extra 30 gallons of diesel exhaust fluid. My truck uses about 3% death fluid per gallon of gasoline. So if I am burning 33 gallons or one tank of diesel, it'll probably use about a gallon of death fluid when it does it. And the truck has a five gallon death tank on it.

But a modern diesel engine, if you run a death fluid, the engine computer is like, that's it, I'm shutting, it'll literally turn the engine off. Or it'll give you a warning saying it's shutting off the engine at 50 miles. Because without the death fluid, the emission system is going to get all gummed up from the exhaust.

And if you can't, you've got to get air in and get air out for the engine to work. If you can't get air out, I mean, imagine someone putting their hand over your mouth and you can inhale, but you can't exhale. That's the same thing with an engine. So that is an issue that can lead to a disruption in transportation.

But the key thing that scares the piss out of us, as much as when we saw COVID jump to Italy, we said, that's it, it's going around the world. We knew it was out of the box. It was out of Asia. This is a whole new paradigm being written right now.

So we're saying the same thing. American farmers are already saying they're trying to place orders for what they call nitrogen, which is going to be any of the aforementioned nitrogen ammonia products I just mentioned. They are trying to place orders and get their nitrogen locked in for the fertilization of American crops for spring, and they're not able to do it.

Same thing with propane. We've seen a rapid run up in propane. Because if you don't have natural gas in the United States and other places in the world, you're running on propane and to a very much lesser extent, fuel oil, which we've mostly gotten rid of in the United States.

So, you know, we're looking at this. We're looking at twice the price of home heating natural gas in the United States, roughly from last year, and maybe a doubling or more of the price in propane. So when you start looking at these root issues of your heating source, your energy source, your transportation fuel, and what you have to have to go with your transportation fuel, you can see where the spaghetti models are going.

And right now we're just saying we're not comfortable with it. What's the best question that comes to your mind with what I just said, though? I guess the number one thing I think about is, all right, how does it get solved? Because I want to be a realist, but I always think, okay, there's a solution.

Smart people solving it. And so I immediately jump to the solution to say, okay, there's got to be a solution. There's got to be a solution. Okay, I'll tell you the solution, okay? And anyone listening to this, I'm about ready to make your life a lot easier. If you hear news, new TV, newspaper, radio, friend, internet, whatever, and it's like there's nothing you can do about it, stop worrying about it.

There is no solution to this that you can do. You're not going to fix the geopolitical governmental issues regarding natural gas. That is the heating in Europe, and it's also the price of your heating in the United States. You're not going to change that whole geo-- there's nothing you can do about it.

There is no solution. The thing you have to default to, which I think is the solution that you, Joshua, are talking about, is what can I do to prepare myself financially for this? This is a radical personal financial, and what can I do to provide for the safety of my family as well?

And there's an old saying, it's like, before you set off to conquer the world, make sure your house is in order. And that's what you're doing, and we're talking about with different elements of preparedness, is making sure your house is in order so you can go on to that greater financial prosperity.

Because the finance guy in you is going, "Oh, I want to look at propane futures. I want to buy propane futures." If the market hasn't already priced it in, "I want to look at propane futures for January, February." "I want to look at other futures." And those are all smart things to do.

However, you can't do that, and you can't respond to these financial issues when your wife is saying, "Honey, there are a lot of formulas at the grocery store for our son." That's instantly going to grab your attention, right then and there, and the world has just absolutely stopped. So, a good friend of mine, I'm going to give him credit, Shane Connor, said, when the pandemic was starting, he said, "These are the times in which fortunes are made and lost." I think we've all seen the companies and other institutions that have lost fortunes in the pandemic and the companies that have made fortunes in the pandemic.

I had a friend of mine, and I got him going, and he went off and taught himself how to fix freezers. And he was buying broken and/or freezers, because there were no freezers available in the United States. They were out of stock everywhere. And he would buy them for like $50 or get them for free or $100, and he would fix them because the refrigeration system really is not that complex, and this guy is just a little bit of a mechanical genius.

And he was selling them, and he was clearing $750 a weekend through Facebook Marketplace because he'd fix the freezers, test them out for a week, document that they were tested, how cold they got, everything else, relist them on Facebook Marketplace after he cleaned them up physically, made them look pretty.

And people were stopping and buying them for $1,000 and $800 and $600 just because they wanted more freezer space for when they found food during the pandemic, or they could stock up. Someone said, "Hey, we got a cow. You want half the cow?" "Yes." "Well, they need a freezer for that." And so, again, I don't want to get away from the roots of radical personal finance, because I think having your life in a financial situation that is good is so much beneficial to you because you can afford to get the year's worth of food.

I don't mean like the year's worth of freeze-dried and everything else. That should be a portion of your emergency preparedness. But it's the freezer and half the cow or half the pig. We're not facing electricity issues in the United States, plus it's almost winter. So you're not looking at a rapid food spoilage issue.

But during the pandemic, we had food issues, but we didn't have electricity issues. So the food that you got, you could store, but with freezing, which is a very simple way that people understand how to do food preservation. And the reason I was able to do this for my family, for myself and friends and loved ones, is because we were all in a financial status, and we're not rich like you would call rich.

And you've talked about what does rich mean. But we live below our means. We had the cash that we could spend. We did spend emergency money. The money that you said that we're saving up for a rainy day and this is just-in-case money, it was just-in-case and rainy-day money time.

And it is right now. I'm telling you right now is your rainy-day money, just-in-case money, expenditure time at this moment. You need to get what you know that you need to get or you're afraid of running out, just like Josh went and got an extra iPhone. He upgraded his Mac.

He got an extra camera and a better microphone so he could continue to do the communications with you. And you can't ask me for a list because my list is not your list, is not someone else's list. I'm not you. You're not me. You ask me, "What's your list?" I go, "Cat food." Okay, cat food and litter.

That's my list. And it's like, "I don't have a cat." That's right. My list is not your list. So you have to make a conscious decision. You have to look at what you're using in your professional life, in your livelihood, and in your family. And you have to ask yourself, "What of this am I going to be able to not live without?" And the stuff that you're not going to be able to live without, you're going to have to get and have beforehand.

I've used the analogy that people go, like, it was long before the pandemic. It's like, "How much toilet paper do you have?" And yes, that was a thing of conversation. I got over a year's worth. It's like, "Why do you have so much?" It's like, "Well, I got the space.

I'm going to use it anyways. What's the difference?" I'm going to spend the same amount of money on toilet paper, whether I buy it now or buy it month to month or week to week. It is definitely going to get used. It's not money not spent. It's money spent only in advance.

I just got, like, death fluid went up from $2.99 at the pump. Most people are used to buying it in jugs at the store. But if you go to a place that caters to truckers, you can buy it at the pump. And it's like, it went from $2.95 a gallon to $3.05 a gallon.

Well, I filled up 30 gallons of death fluid in different containers, some five, some six, in a 15-gallon container. It's like, "Well, I'm going to use that no matter what." That's not money unwisely spent. It's just like, that's a year's worth of death fluid, depending upon how I'm driving.

And the thing is, death fluid is going to get more and more expensive because the price of natural gas and the price of ammonia, and thus the price of urea, is going to go up. So by me buying now, I'm locking in, basically, at today's price. So I am saving money financially because it's going to be $4 and $5 and more in the future.

The same way you notice that your exchange bottle of propane from the little cage at the store that you go to went from $15 per exchange to $20 per exchange of cylinders because the base value of propane has gone up. So having those funds available, living beneath your means, not being house poor, and managing debt.

Either debt is cancer, but there's a difference between debt and OPM, other people's money. And having that well understood and well managed, and being able to use debt right now because you don't want to use your cash resources, or you want to move your cash resources into more of an inflationary stable resource, being able to do that is what radical personal finance has done for the protection of the family so you can now, at this moment, get the things that you need to get now before you're not going to be able to.

Because this whole train of ants from China to the United States and other parts of the world, where we're getting a lot of supplies and things made, is that trail of ants is going to change. I guarantee you that trail of ants is going to change. Is the trail going to go from India to the USA?

Is it going to take a different route? We solve problems as people. We do that all the time. People will find a way. You have to have faith and confidence in your fellow man, in your neighbor, in your family. Together we get through this. So as soon as there's a disruption in one area, it's people like you and I and your listeners going, "I see an opportunity," and we take advantage of that.

So that trail of ants that we're used to in a 2019 mindset, those ants might be taking a different path or multiple paths or coming from different directions, but at some time or another, that trail of ants is going to be interrupted until they reestablish different paths to us.

And that's going to mean you're not going to be able to get what you can get. And then you get into the "chip shortage," which is really an issue with what's called the foundries that have to do with the silicone. The silicone for those chips, it's grown electrically underneath very pure conditions, atmospherically and electrically.

Hemlock Semiconductor in Michigan used to do that. I had a tour of the place like 30 years ago. It was beyond marvelous. And then those wafers are turned into silicone chips and dies and everything else for CPUs and memory and solar panels. And it was actually the junk, the ones that were rejected, that went to the solar panel manufacturer.

So you hear about "the chip shortage." Don't say that to a guy from the UK. He'll run to the pub, "Oh, they're running out of chips!" A common people separated by a language, as Churchill said. But, you know, so I mean, just look at what I've just dumped on you from unconscious competence about everything from chips to urea to fertilizer to food and everything.

And I'm going to reiterate what I'm telling you right now, November 11th, 2021, Veterans Day in the United States. I am telling you, this is your rainy day fun time. This is your in case of emergency time for those funds that you set aside. Get what you know you need.

I'm not saying want, that can be. But the stuff that you know you need to do what you do, either from baby formula to computer, hard drives. I have a friend of mine, we'll talk about him in a little bit, an IT security expert, a wireless expert. He goes, "Steve, I got spare everything.

I got spare router. I got spare hard drives, spare switches, spare cables. I bought a year's worth of everything I thought I'd have to use in the next year because I know there's just going to be issues getting it. I require those things to do my job." Right. So let me, I totally agree with you.

And I want to, I'm glad that you've said it clearly, because I think that right now there are more... I can't say it. I can't say it anyway, but clearly, Josh. It's one thing that we appreciate about you, Steve. You are not known for parsing your words. You're known for speaking clearly, which is refreshing.

I think that right now there are more people who are open to this message than at least in any point that I've been doing radical personal finance since 2013, because for the first time in that period, we are seeing with our own eyes a significantly inflationary period. And I tried, I worked very hard not to be an alarmist on it, and to watch, you know, I watched the media and CPI.

And wait for time, because short-term changes are not always predictive of catastrophe. But any of us who go food shopping, any of us who fill our cars with fuel, any of us who buy anything, who just notice prices, you can see that across the board, prices are up. I was actually shocked yesterday.

I ate at a Five Guys burger yesterday. And the first time I've eaten at Five Guys burger in a number of years. And I was just shocked to see that at Five Guys burger, a basic hamburger is now 10 bucks where I am right now. And so from time to time, we have these little moments where you buy something that used to be a certain price.

And all of a sudden you're confronted with the fact that, wow, this has increased quite a lot in terms of it is inflated a lot. And so when you're looking at an inflationary environment, it should make it make it afresh to say, hey, this is costing more, but it could cost even more and at least I can get it.

And so most of all. Well, yeah, go ahead. Here's the important thing. I'm going to present you the situation. You tell me from an expert financial person what's going on. We're talking about we're in an inflationary time. You go to Appmax and Texas Precious Metals and some of the other popular metal place.

And you go there and you see junk silver being sold, saying any amount and the price changes over the weekend and during day. Any amount you want, just order. We'll send it to you. Junk silver for going going between 719 and eight dollars and forty nine cents over spot.

Then you go check the ten ounce gold bars out of stock. The one ounce gold pieces out of stock. The half ounce gold out of stock is OK. Kilo silver bars out of stock. What does that tell you as a financial person when you I mean, I just went yesterday and looked at this and I looked at the week before.

What does that tell you about inflation? What are people doing, Josh? Yeah, they're they're converting to tangibles. And and that market is tiny. Right. The number of people who buy physical metals is absolutely tiny. But the shortages of physical metals, gold and silver over the last year have been shocking compared to that.

Just it's a classic disconnect. Right. You see, you can see the spot price. But anybody who anybody would look at the stock price spot price would say, oh, so I'm gold, not doing much. But you go and try to get your hands on the physical on the physical asset.

And it's been very difficult to acquire over the last year or two. And so it's getting especially difficult right now because a lot of people are going. They're hearing the word over and over and over inflation, inflation, inflation. And they think, well, I better do a flight to a tangible.

I'd better do a little bit of a flight to safety. Right. And since since they since they can't go to gold and silver as easy as they could or they said, I'm not paying a 29 percent surcharge for junk silver over spot, which is what seven dollars and 19 cents is over 2450 spot price for junk silver.

And it's like, I'm not going to pay that. And they start looking at some other options. And we've seen the run ups in cryptocurrency. And a lot of some some people are doing a flight to that saying, well, I actually have more faith than this in this in the block chain that I do in the U.S.

dollar. What's that say for a statement? It's absolutely. Absolutely. So the point is that we have to in order to combat this, to combat our normalcy bias, you have to understand that this all comes down to a functional financial system. So in the vast majority of times measure, excuse me, most of us are trained by the modern financial system to think of your assets exclusively in financial terms.

If you were to go and meet with me when I was a mainstream financial advisor, we would create a balance sheet and you would say you would say, here are the assets that I have. And there's a little there's a little spot on there for like valuable personal goods.

But usually people think, oh, do I have any rings or do I have any you know, do I have a fancy jewelry, et cetera? It's just not material. It's not important in the modern world. Those physical, tangible assets, we identify everything in financial terms and that's fine because money is the omni tool, right?

Money is the single most useful asset that you can possibly have, because in the vast majority of times, money can be converted into physical assets, physical goods. It can be converted into services. That's why we have the man and use money. Money is the ultimate tool. However, there are times in history and times, periods in markets where all of a sudden money becomes less valuable.

And we're in one of those times and supply chain disruptions as well as financial chaos. These are the types of things in which money is less valuable. So you have to train yourself differently. I did this a number of years ago. I did a show. I talked about how when you review your expenses at the end of the year, there are some expenses that you want to decrease.

There are some expenses that you want to stay the same and there are some expenses that you want to increase. And you can't just look at your total expenditures and be happy that they went down unless you've identified, did the categories that should go down, go down, right? You're a fool if this past year, the amount of money that you invested into yourself, into your own education, into the acquisition of more skills, more knowledge, if that went down this last year, you're doing it wrong.

The classic model is that somebody will go off and at 18 years old, they'll spend $15,000 a year to buy a college degree. And then they turn 22 and then you ask them, how much money did you spend on yourself from 22 to 23? And they don't have an answer.

You know, zero dollars. You're foolish if you do that. Right. Every single year, the amount of money that you invest into yourself should go up. You should hire. You should acquire the best educational materials. You should acquire the best knowledge assets. You should study out the best experts and get access to what they're doing.

You should invest in the best coaches, the best teachers that you can possibly afford because that increases your own personal productivity. So now pivot and look at a supply chain. Look at a supply chain crisis like you're experiencing right now. You have to look at this and realize that if your business like right now, if just to say a Ford Motor Company, a Ford Motor Company had a warehouse that was full of the cutting edge chips and they could actually produce their cars at the volume that the market would love to have right now with all the features working because they had a warehouse full of the chips that they need.

Their sales would be dwarfing every single one of their competitors because. Go ahead. I worked for Chrysler Corporation for 10 years. You know, I was a research and development engineer. I'm sitting literally 10 miles away from a Ford World headquarters right now. And I can tell you something about this.

It is. Here's a perfect example that Josh Sheets would give is radical personal finance show of tripping over the pennies to get to the dollars. And it goes along with being penny smart and pound foolish. Ford told the chip manufacturers, which are making their chips from the silicon from the foundries and everything else that goes into the vehicles for all the smart stuff in the vehicle.

They said, we have a shortage in production due to the pandemic. We're not going to be placing an order for X amount of chips. And so we're talking about, well, we're talking about boards, really, because by time the engine computer gets to Ford, it's already a module that contains a bunch of chips from the tier 1, the tier 2 or the tier 3 supplier.

Right? So let's say the engine computer is about the size of three packs of cigarettes or an old cigar box is roughly. And so let's just say it's that one thing that is they're short on is that size. Well, as soon as they gave up that, they always assumed falsely.

It's stupid being counters. They destroy everything in a corporation. Okay. They falsely decided, okay, we don't want to we don't we're not going to place this order for like 15 million engine computers, HVAC computers and all the other computers that are in the vehicle that do the control of everything.

It's not just one. There's multiple. So they said, we're not going to do this. So that those companies, those suppliers had the chip manufacturers that made the chips for the boards for the tier 2 supplier to supply the single board engine computers to Ford. They ended up saying, well, we got open capacity who wants it.

Other people came in and bought that capacity that they had. Now, Ford comes back and says, yeah, we want to place an order for 15 million engine computers over the next year and a half. Sorry, can't do it. So you understand about the automobile industry, the assembly lines do not stop.

It is a monumental move the pyramids effort. I mean, the pyramids would have just had to move 1 foot to the right for them to stop the production line. And they have. But Ford and all the other people, they will build the vehicles without that one part. I have seen it at the Jefferson North plant in Detroit, building the Grand Cherokee on one particular line doing 1250 vehicles a day.

We had there was a problem with the rear axle on that particular vehicle. They would not stop the production line. They would build those vehicles and they would park them and they parked 8 days of them. So 8 times 1250. And then they had a third. Another tier supplier come in and repair all the axles with the fix that they implemented from the supplier.

And then all those vehicles went out. They will build vehicles with that computer missing. Now, here's a financial question for Josh. Would have been smarter for them to say if they understood the supply chain, if they understood that their allocation of Silicon from the independent components suppliers that were supplying the components for the board level manufacturers that made the boards that went into their assembly level, single board engine computers that went into their truck.

If they were cognizant of that entire supply chain, which they weren't, what would have been financially better for them, Josh, to store an extra two years of engine computers or to store an extra year of assembled vehicles without engine computers? Which one takes up more space? I mean, unquestionably, it's better to have a backroom full of chips.

But I think this is the perfect example of what we see with the dangers, the beauty and the dangers of the just-in-time inventory system, which is the way that that many companies run their businesses and the way that many people run their lives. When everything is going well, that system of production where the chips arrive right as the vehicle is reaching the point in time or the boards arrive right when the boards are ready to go in, it's the most efficient, profitable thing possible.

But if there's any disruption that's unanticipated, then quickly everything can fall apart. And you look in hindsight and you say, why did you not stockpile at least a couple of months of wiggle room? Well, because we're trying to make maximum profits. We're trying to make maximum efficiency out of our production line.

And that works when everything is great. But when it doesn't, you wind up with a bunch of non-working vehicles sitting out being destroyed by the sun while you wait for your computers to show up. You can literally see the vehicles from space. That's how big the parking lots are of the vehicles.

And they are deteriorating out there. There's actually in the automobile industry, there's something called C per 100, which is a bastardization of numerics and terms. But it means the number of returns you have per 100 vehicles sold or the number of times they go back to the dealership. And consequently, the number of C's per 100, so the number of hundreds per 100 is generally like 1.8, 1.9.

And this is part of your quality number. So 190 C, 190 vehicles per 100 vehicles sold go back to the dealership. And Toyota is a world leader in quality, and they had the lowest C per 100 rating. And so the thing is, vehicles that were sitting on the dealer lot for more than three months were not included in the C per 100 rating because they had so many problems with them.

So what do you think is happening to all the vehicles sitting out in the parking lots in Tennessee and the fields in Kentucky and the other places where the vehicles are being stored? We have a massive deterioration of the vehicles going on out there that is just going to be unimaginable.

But it comes down to you got to know your fundamentals. Okay, I understand the fundamentals of batteries and engine systems and electric motors and electric vehicles and combustion engine vehicles and all the different fuels. Even though I've not worked in that industry for X number of years, you can't say I'm out of date because I can adapt and come up to speed on anything that's current.

You want to sit down and have a discussion about the new Ford aluminum pickup truck that is all 100% electric, I can do it because I understand the fundamentals. I understand the fundamentals of what the vehicle resistance is that you measure by a coast down test. I understand the fundamentals of the rolling resistance.

I understand the fundamentals of what's called the world duty cycle and what people do with their vehicles. I understand the engineering standards and the 95th percentile of what vehicles are engineered for. So you got to understand your fundamentals and whatever bean counter or whatever automobile company made those decisions did not understand the fundamentals.

So what Josh and I are saying is you have to understand the fundamentals of you and your fundamentals aren't my fundamentals. You're going to have to make a determination of what your fundamentals are and you have to make sure that you are buying the chips for your board level manufacturers that are making those for the assembly level manufacturers that's going into your production vehicle.

That's an analogy. You're going to have to understand those fundamentals and if you don't understand those fundamentals, you're in trouble. You better learn what the hell those fundamentals are. The first thing you do to learn that is say the beginning of wisdom starts with the words I don't know.

And so even if you're coming to this realization now, it's a lot better than coming to the realization in six months or a year from now. And you were onto a very good thing about education. Both you and I have a culture of daily learning. Wouldn't you say so?

No question. Hopefully. Absolutely. I got to model it for my children. Right. Exactly. Well, people ask me, "Steve, what's the best paying job I can get? What's the best this I can get?" I go, "Look, in life," this is a shorter version of a Harris speech, "in life, you never ever want to pursue money.

If you pursue money, all you'll do is get a job that pays you money. And all you're doing is exchanging minutes of your life that you can't get back for something as worthless as money." And that could be a psychiatrist getting $420 an hour after insurance costs and everything from seeing four people in four 15-minute periods.

Okay. But he's financially limited by the number of hours that he has in a day. So that's not a good business model. I tell people, "Spend a little extra time. Don't pursue money. Don't pursue a job. Pursue knowledge, talent, and ability. And when you do that, you'll start gaining experience and expertise, which is even more valuable than knowledge and ability.

If you have knowledge and ability, people will throw money at you to get you to use their knowledge and ability for them. And you will be much happier, much better financially than if you just pursued the best paying job that you could get, for you to pursue that knowledge and ability." Because right now, I think one of the things we're seeing is not just a scarcity of labor out there in the market.

I mean, I'm seeing it already in things like there's a grocery delivery service called "Shipped" that I just order my groceries online, and someone drops them off in two hours or less from the local grocery store. Kind of like Instacart, only better. Well, where's my time better spent? Talking to you here on Radical Personal Finance?

Doing programming or writing or making videos and educational materials? Or is my time better spent standing in line at the deli to get the ham that I want, and then go stand in line, you know, to check out, then to haul everything else? The opportunity cost is much higher for me to go shopping than it is for me to not go shopping, and thus someone else mows my grass, does my shopping, etc.

And you won't understand it until you are in that position of opportunity cost, and then you'll say, "That makes sense." But also, you young people out there, for all of those who are bringing up your children, you want them to pursue knowledge and ability. Because people will throw money at you, begging you to catch it.

It's absolutely true. Get a catcher's mitt. Absolutely true. If you pursue knowledge and ability rather than just a salary. And the biggest thing is, you'll be a lot happier in life. I mean, if you've ever been dating or married to someone who has a miserable job and does nothing but come home and talk for two hours about the stupidity of the people that they work with, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to give one very simple framework, and then I want to ask you a question back on -- basically the question would be, "Where do we go from here?" But one quick framework on stockpiling stuff. Because, in essence, the advice, to repeat it clearly, is simply, "You and I as individuals, and then you and I as business owners or managers, we should stockpile a sufficient quantity of the most important things that we need in order to be prepared to deal with potential disruptions in the supply chain or disruptions in the financial system." And so there are only a couple of reasons, but there are some formulas that you can apply that would give you a balance.

And so what you need to think about as you stockpile things is, number one, you want to be thoughtful when you're stockpiling things about, "Is this something that risks becoming obsolete, or is this something that is running a risk of being destroyed physically?" And so just consider that. Some things become obsolete, and so you would stockpile fewer of those things than things that don't become obsolete.

And then also you want to be cautious about things that are going to be destroyed with time, with age, etc., and then be conscious of that. Finally, you want to consider the cost of stockpiling things versus the cost of alternatives. And then consider in your storage plans. For example, it might be great to store a year's worth of toilet paper, but it'd be silly to store, in my opinion, 10 years of toilet paper, because toilet paper is something that requires a tremendous amount of space to stockpile, and it's something for which there are substitutions.

So you might store a year of toilet paper and install a bidet in your home and/or have a portable bidet or various solutions like that, because the storage space versus the value of the product starts to get out of whack if you're not thoughtful and careful about it. So think about the things that you need, that you use in your life, and then consider which of those things can be stockpiled without fear of destruction or without fear of becoming obsolete, and then make a plan for each of the items.

And especially pay attention to your business, because right now, your business, the things that you have and that you need, you want to make sure that you have those. So for me, I always gave my examples, right? I have two identical – not completely identical because they're of different ages – but I have two computers that all have the same programs installed, the same functionality, etc.

So if one computer goes down, I have the other one. I travel and have two basically identical cell phones. One is a slightly newer model, but they all have the same apps installed. They're running on backup systems. They have backup network systems. So if one goes down or one gets stolen, then I'm good to go.

I have multiple cameras that I can use. I have multiple microphones that I can use. And then in addition, I have kind of tertiary backup systems where if all my cell phones are stolen, I walk into, in my case, an Apple store. I buy a new phone. I put it on service.

I walk out with a functional phone. I know all the passwords and entry codes to get everything back. And in probably about two hours, I can be back online with everything set up with nothing more than turning money into the physical device and my business is back alive. So my business is a very digital business, and those are the tools that I depend on.

If your business is growing food, you have a whole different set of tools. If your business is doing oil changes, you have a whole different set of things. And so you want to look at your business and then say, "How can I put more resiliency and how can I stockpile the things that I need in my business life and, of course, for many of us also in my personal life so that we can do well?" Now, question, Stephen.

You said at the very beginning, you said you think -- well, you said we're early in this crisis. And so I'd like you to cast the two components. Why do you say we're early and how could things get worse from here and why? And then also, how would we know if, in fact, we could expect things to get better?

What are some of the things we would look for to say, "You know what? Things are actually getting better now"? That's one that's actually making me ponder my words before I say them. You know, they say it's always darkest before the dawn, but, you know, no matter how bad the storm is blowing, you always think the storm is going to get better rather than the storm is going to get stronger, like when there's a hurricane approaching you.

Or so you got 12 inches of snow on the ground, you go, "Well, we can't get much more." You end up with three feet, which has happened to me. Just from a world of experience and a lifetime of it, working in different aspects of science and technology and analysis and intelligence, open source intelligence, and looking at what my mentor would call the kaleidoscope that is ever-changing in front of you, you start seeing things with a different set of eyes, and that is the fragility, yet the resilience.

I mean, it's amazing how resilient the human body is, yet how fragile it is at the same time. You can get one wrong infection. A president died from getting his hand cut from a rose thorn, and it got infected, and he died. I forget which one it was. This was before penicillin.

And yet, you know, how resilient the human body can be, yet how fragile it is. And you look at what we have. A modern marvel of the world is the just-in-time infrastructure. It's not a major fragility. It is a major accomplishment equal to that of the assembly line in industrial history, yet it is so resilient, yet it is also fragile, like the human body at the same time.

Right. It's a paradox. And you see the entire system. There's 120 ships off the port of Los Angeles right now waiting to get unloaded. You know it's getting bad when the politicians are coming in and saying, "I'm going to fix this." And, you know, that's one of your indications, like, "Oh, good God, duck down, incoming." So the politicians are getting involved in trying to solve it.

You know, that's another bad indication. But, you know, looking at the greater human factors issue, I mean, it's kind of, I was talking with a friend before this. I said, "Imagine you're a physicist, a really good physicist, and it's 1940. And you get some intelligence coming in. You get a report, and in the report there's just one line that says, "We observed indications that Nazi Germany is experimenting with uranium." Now, in 1940, what does that mean to the average person or someone?

It's like, what the heck, what's uranium? What does it mean? But you, as a physicist, i.e. a nuclear physicist, understands exactly the implications of what that statement means. Right, it's massive. And where it's going and what happened in history. So when I'm sitting here, and my cohorts and my buddies and everything, and we see, okay, you know, a lot of things happened other places before they happened here because of the dynamics that are inherent to the different continents and the different populations and their forms of government and rules and regulations.

And we see things happening other places, you know, gas, natural gas prices, gasoline prices, you know, shortages, what politics have done with this regulation and that regulation and this direction and that direction. But you see the thing that, like, you know, X percentage of ammonia plants are no longer making ammonia, and you're going, "They make several hundred million." You can see if you get your head around these words.

"Several hundred million metric tons of ammonia per year." Wow. And you see that, okay, and I'm going to read a quote here from Wikipedia, which I didn't get for this. I passed it to a cohort we were having a conversation with this morning. Fritz Haberd was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, a method used in industrial synthesis for ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas.

The invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers, also explosives. It is estimated that, get this, because of Fritz Haberd, it is estimated that two-thirds of the annual global food production uses nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch process. This supports nearly half the world's population. Wow. So if your nitrogen production is less than a half—I'm sorry, your nitrogen, your ammonia production is less than half of what it used to be, and that allows four times the amount of food to be grown per acre than with other methods of fertilizer.

And two-thirds of the annual global food production, two-thirds of what 7.7 billion people eat, and it's estimated that that number is half, so 3.6—sorry, 3.8 billion people are eating food to derive from this. You know, what portion of your 330 million, 0.3 billion of the United States do you think is going to be affected?

You know, we're getting into the mathematics of large numbers here. When you understand the mathematics of large numbers and something halving, you go, "That's me!" So, I mean, this is meaning that—it's like I'm the nuclear chemist in 1940 that sees the note that says, "We have indications that Nazi Germany is experimenting with uranium." Holy cow.

In fact, I had a moment like that at Chrysler Corporation that made me the electrical chemical person in the corporation, because I was sitting there bored in a chair in a meeting, and someone comes in, and they show us, and they go— and the heater core is what you blow hot air through that engine coolant flows through that heats up the internal passenger compartment of the vehicle.

It's on the order of 40,000 BTUs per hour, just in case you guys are wondering. It's a lot. It's like enough to heat your house. So, and they go, "We have a problem. The heater cores are becoming—the aluminum heater cores are becoming so paper-thin that the coolant is exiting the core and potentially could be spraying out the duct at 220 degrees onto the passengers." And then they said, "And we measured 30 amps going from the radio frequency interference grounding strap from the heater core to the engine," because it was a source for noise from the spark plugs or elsewhere that went into the radio frequency interference of the vehicle, potentially the radio and other FCC emissions.

And when I heard that there was 30 amps flowing through the heater core, I understand electrolysis. I understand the high reactivity of aluminum in an alkaline environment where you have electrons flowing. It rapidly deteriorates the aluminum because this is what we do for hydrogen production, and one of my expertises is in hydrogen production.

And I just snap up and I go, "You said what? How many amps?" And it's like, that started my three-year electrical chemical career in Daimler Chrysler because I understood the significance of the statement that the person thought was innocuous that was absolutely a relevation to the root cause of the problem.

The electricity flowing through the heater core was causing the deterioration of the aluminum heater core, which was in an alkaline engine coolant. This is when coolant was green. It was in an alkaline engine coolant environment. And the idea of a heater core failing and spraying hot radiator fluid onto the passengers is the most abhorrent thing you could ever think of as a vehicle engineer with the engineering standards in mind.

The first unofficial rule of the engineering standards is, "Do not let a failure of the vehicle kill the driver or the occupant." The second rule of the engineering standards is, "Do not let a failure of the vehicle harm someone who is within the trajectory or the vicinity of the vehicle and the occupants." So, yeah, we got a lot of trouble.

I'm looking at this from a fundamental understanding of that just-in-time infrastructure, of the way transportation, shipping, communications, and everything is linked together. You see that note that ammonia production is less than half, you go, "Oh my God." You combine that with the news article about Midwest farmers having issues locking in prices and delivery dates for spring fertilizer, and this is not even really--we're in November, it's not even quite winter yet.

And you're going, "Oh my God." Someone asked a general--his name's on the tip of my tongue, his call sign was "Chaos." And they go, "What keeps you up at night?" He goes, "Nothing. I keep other people up at night." So anyways, I mean, if you ask, like, "What keeps you up at night?" Reality is, what makes you stare at the wall with a blank look because you're thinking in your head?

It's stuff like that that makes me stop and think inherently as to what is the validity of the statement? How can I independently verify the validity of the statement? How broad is a single instance of something happening at one plant, or is it industry-wide? The answer is it's industry-wide around the globe.

And you go, "Okay, what is the scale of this?" And then how much is not being produced? How much of that ammonia is going to the critical areas that we were talking about? What percentage of that is--what percentage can be diverted from other areas to the critical? You know, it's like when you start getting cold, the heart starts shutting down the flow of blood to your arms and your legs, which is why they get cold, because it's trying to keep the core warm.

So what parts of that can be diverted to other areas in order to-- It's like, this is how you can accurately forecast what may likely happen and what you're going to say. This is a 90% possibility. This is an eventuality. We know this is going to happen. What's 90%?

What's 80%? What's 50%? What's a wild-ass guess? What do you say I don't know to, or what do you say I don't know but I'm going to find out? And that's what leads me to express severe discontent and concern that I'm trying to communicate to you. And so is Josh, that you have to understand your own fundamentals.

What you need, what you're using, what is going to allow you to not only survive-- I got to say this. I don't want you to be a participant in the disaster, okay? Because if you're a participant, if you get a big rain, huge flood, hurricane, you're swept down the river, you are now a participant in the disaster.

You get swept down the bank of the river naked, freezing cold. Congratulations, you have just survived one event in the disaster to become a survivor of the next disaster, which is hypothermia. Because if you're a participant in the disaster, you are either a victim, dead, or you're a survivor, which means just barely breathing with a heartbeat, not necessarily fully clothed and warm.

I want you to be a spectator in the disaster. I want you to be sitting in the stands watching the football game as a spectator rather than someone on the gridiron. You see some people floating down the river, you go, "I bet that sucks." "Honey, can I have another-- have we got the hamburgers done yet?" That's why I say I want you to be a spectator in the disaster.

So Josh and I are desperately asking you to evaluate your personal circumstances such that those criticalities are not going to affect you, and you can be a spectator in the disaster. In the pandemic, you stayed home for a month or so, and you didn't go outside. And you watched TV.

A friend of mine got-- I said, "Steve, what do I really want to prevent boredom during what's coming up?" And I said, "An Oculus Quest." He said, "That was the best thing we ever got for ourselves and the kids. Oh my God, we had so much fun." And this gave them other worlds to explore when they were stuck within four walls.

So I want you to be-- think, "How can I be a spectator in this?" How can I be such that the crap is hitting the fan, which is going onto the wall, and not even the splatter is hitting me, but yet I can see it occurring? I might get a whiff of the odor, but that's the worst I'm going to get.

So what can you do to be a spectator in this type of event and not get caught up in it? Can you do that fully? I don't know. It's going to be dependent upon you and your situation. I think this is where we put the plug in for individual one-on-one consulting, Josh.

Right, right. Absolutely. And I think that the key-- I consider this a key-- I've been thinking a lot about how to be successful in the information age, and the key to success in the information age is knowing how to process information. One of the most important skills of knowing how to process information is the skill of prioritization, the skill of understanding where different pieces of information go in terms of their impact, how to take advice, filter it, look at your own life, et cetera.

And I want to just talk for a moment-- a couple of thoughts as I'm considering your overview. I think what people often neglect to consider is the knock-on effects of a certain thing happening. So by way of analogy, right, what is the major effect? What has been a major effect of the coronavirus pandemic?

The first-order effects have been the impact on people who were specifically sick with COVID and being treated for that. Then you've had second-order effects and third-order effects and down the range. So second- and third-order effects include effects such as somebody not being able to get treatment for another condition because the hospitals were closed to them.

A follow-on effect has to do with a company imposing a vaccination mandate and then having its workers strike. Thus, that strike results in disruptions in airlines or disruptions in trucking or disruptions in electricity production. Whatever it happens to be, you see the disruption, so the effects follow on. And so when you think about something like ammonia, and if you just imagine, let's say that two-thirds of annual global food production uses nitrogen, and we see that there's half of the nitrogen being produced by-- or half of the ammonia resources being produced.

And so imagine that food production goes down by, say, 25 percent, right? Now, 25 percent, is that survivable? Well, absolutely. In the United States, if food production went down 25 percent, there's enough excess that it would be brought in. And so even that wouldn't necessarily mean that you or I, the average, normal, middle- to upper-class U.S.

American, would be heavily affected by that 25 percent decline. But on a global basis, that 25 percent decline could be absolutely catastrophic because that results in millions or tens of millions of people literally starving. It could get worse, and it could result in outright famine in the United States, but on a global basis, it's catastrophic.

So now imagine what happens during a period of global unrest, right? Imagine what happens when you have people who are starving. They have nothing left to lose. And so look at the United States during the last year, when everyone is at home, and look at how literally dozens of cities are on fire with widespread riots due to the social issues in the United States, and now think about that expanding on a global basis because that exists.

And when you have times of prosperity where people are able to work and there's work available, there's food, then there's stability in society. But when you have times of scarcity, those times of scarcity often lead to violence, to revolution, to unrest, et cetera. Now that violence and unrest and revolution has a knock-on effect that just continues down the road, and it disrupts supply chains even farther because people say, "Our voices are not being heard.

Look, we have factories that are producing silicon chips where we're creating things, but we don't have any food." So they go and they start burning the ships sitting at harbor. They start disrupting things there. And so it just can get -- the cycle can continue to degenerate down the road.

And so that's what makes all of this very, very difficult, if not impossible to predict, is that you look at the front-order effects, then you look at the second- and third-order effects, and those things, there's a wide range of probabilities. You could have a very wide range, just like with pandemic predictions.

You very seriously could make a best-faith estimate to say we could have anywhere from 300,000 people to 30 million people die because of this disease. And that massive estimate is an entirely accurate way to forecast based upon the data that is currently had. Now, as the data improves and as time goes on, you can narrow those estimates.

But when you're looking at highly variable, complex systems, your forecasts necessarily include these very wide ranges of forecasting. Your outcomes on this particular issue could be very, very wide. And so the rational thing to do is you have to say, OK, if this is an important issue with very severe effects for me, my business, et cetera, this forecast could be very wide, right?

We could have a range from 30 to 3 million of whatever the thing is that we're factoring in. So what I need to do is I need to take seriously both of those extreme predictions. I need to take the 30 prediction and the 3 million prediction and then say, what would I do in the case of 30 and what would I do in the case of 3 million?

And then you back up and you say, can I handle the cost of this level of preparation? Can I handle the cost if we wind up with a relative non-event and the prediction of 3 million comes true? Or can I handle the cost if we wind up with a severe event and the prediction of 30 million comes true?

And again, I'm not saying 30 million deaths. I'm simply saying you analyze a subject and you say this is the wide range of possibilities. And then if you can handle the cost of both of those extremes without upsetting in case of a middle of the road scenario, then you go ahead and prepare for those extremes and then you wait for the situation to develop.

You wait for the data to come in and you wait for there to be more and more certainty. But when you're dealing with very complex global systems, there is this paradox of incredible resiliency but incredible fragility. One more story to make the point. If you have not been watching the crisis that is happening at California ports, I think you're missing one of the most obvious and scandalous examples that we can trace right now of what's happening.

So off the coast of California, as Steve said earlier, there are dozens and dozens, 120, hundreds perhaps, of massive container ships simply sitting and waiting. And this has been like this for months now. So a couple of months ago, there was a local entrepreneur, a local CEO named Ryan Peterson, who went out and he rented a boat and he spent a day, just a normal entrepreneur, spent a day going around the port asking local people what's going on.

And he wrote a Twitter thread saying, "Here's what I observe. Here's what's happening. Here are the basic things that are happening." Up until this point, none of the government officials, none of the politicians and none of the regulators in California seem to be, at least from my understanding, making any action to resolve this crisis.

And yet this crisis seems to have these basic things that could be done. For example, the ports had certain regulations on how high they could stack the containers because there were certain local regulations that said you can't stack the empty containers. And this one guy goes out and he identifies and says, "Look, here are the problems and here are some steps that we could take that could start to alleviate the crisis." And I follow the situation closely because I view it as the ultimate example.

On the one hand, it's the ultimate example of total incompetence, showing how utterly incompetent the entire political infrastructure, the entire regulatory infrastructure is there, and how the entire system is in total gridlock because of the incompetence of these regulations and regulators, making the entire port system not function. On the other hand, the fact that at least in those days, this one guy goes out, writes an influential Twitter thread, this Twitter thread is amplified, and then all of a sudden he's receiving calls from the mayor, these are receiving calls from the governor.

They start coming together, they start passing legislation of like, "Hey, let's put in these temporary results," and things start to get better, shows how even total incompetence, when the results get serious enough, improvement can be made. And so my point is it's not possible to forecast this stuff with extreme accuracy.

All you can do is look at the range of possibilities and then try to assess some scale to how severe these possibilities are. You can literally have hundreds of ships with billions of dollars of goods, an entire industry seizing up empty shelves, factory production lines brought to a standstill, because the mayor and the city council of the port of Los Angeles have a regulation that you can't stack empty containers more than two containers high.

And that brings everything to a standstill. But then you can also have a system where when the cost of inaction gets high enough, that people do respond, and there often are ways that things can change quickly. So my point is, I asked Stephen a loaded question, right? What are the probabilities?

How are things going? I've come to the conclusion that it's virtually impossible to assign probabilities to any of this stuff. And so because it's virtually impossible to make any accurate forecasting like that, what I look at is, yes, you should assign some personal level of probability, but as an individual, you look at the range of potential outcomes, and then you try to see, is this potential outcome possible?

Is this other potential outcome possible? And if it's possible, and in fact, if you could see how it gets there, then you owe it to yourself to prepare for it. As long as the cost is appropriate, you owe it to yourself to prepare for it, because some of these possibilities, these ranges of outcomes are simply unacceptable.

It's unacceptable that I, as a wealthy father, could potentially run the risk of my children going hungry a year from now because of the fact that farmers couldn't secure the necessary fertilizers and their crop yields declined by 50%. Farming in the United States and all around the world is entirely dependent on how much fertilizer is sprinkled on the land as part of the growing process.

And the incredible productivity of the land is driven by that very technical process. Well, the farmer can't get enough fertilizer to apply at the appropriate time, and yields decline by 50%. That's potentially catastrophic on a global basis. Now, what does it cost me as a father to prepare for that?

You know, hundreds of dollars, which I can easily part from, especially knowing that I'll eventually eat the food. And so that's where, when you do that analysis, as far as I come up, you come up with an insurance model that says, "The risk of my losing this fundamentally important asset or this fundamentally important thing is unacceptable.

Thus, I insure, and as an individual and as an individual company, it's easy to make those decisions." It should be a no-brainer. Hey, don't forget, John Deere tractors also run on diesel fuel and death fluid. Yep, 100%. If I snap my fingers and all the death fluid in the United States disappeared like I was a genie, I mean, all transportation would come to a halt, all farming would come to a halt.

I've got to go double-check. I know railroad locomotives don't use death fluid, but I think-- I'm saying this expressly--I'd have to go check. I'm pretty sure John Deere tractors also now use death fluid and emissions. And sometime you and I got to do a whole show on priority versus potential, which was taught to me by one of my mentors.

He said, "It might be a priority in your life to mow your grass every week or to get up mowed, but it's got zero potential to you and your family about what it contributes other than a pretty lawn. It doesn't contribute anything to your base income, your potential, what you want to achieve in life." And actually I went out, and I went on a little sabbatical in the spring to unscrew my head from being screwed up from COVID, the politics, and BS, and everything.

And I had a list of 110 different things I could do. And I was in the middle of North Carolina with my cat and my bug-out trailer, completely isolated on my own, my own power, my own communications and everything. I sat there, and I put it into a spreadsheet, and I started putting in all of the potentials, not just like what's the potential of this between zero and nine.

I came up with 26 potential factors I used to analyze everything I'm doing. And I am doing my stuff right now. I'm talking to you, and what we're going to talk about, and one of the things you were testing for me earlier is directly off of that spreadsheet that I have been implementing successfully for the last six months in my life, and things have been going very, very fantastic.

- Absolutely. - I think there's a whole lesson for us to give your audience about what's the potential of something versus what's its priority. Also, if there was a 25% reduction in food coming in and being produced in the United States, don't think it wouldn't affect you. It would be to the tune of 10, 20 million dead in the United States or more in a year's time with a 25% reduction in food.

If you think what we're talking about is not going to affect you, think again. If you're in the United States thinking, "I'm isolated, I'm safe," no. It's not only coming to your city, it's coming to your neighborhood, it's going to be knocking on your door. That's the eventuality you have to prepare for about what is coming up.

And I would have given you the same speech when COVID hopped from Asia over to Italy. On SoundCloud, my original podcast and my predictions of what's going to happen and 95% of it was spot on. But speaking of security and stuff, I don't know, you and I have been talking a little bit about providing some more security-related items from my background and your background related to the concerns of actually many of your audience regarding actual personal physical security wherever they are in the world.

Yeah, we've got an outline, right? We're working on testing over the last year because over the years, I've had a course called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis. And that course has always included two different components. The first component is in the direction of preparedness to be where you are in case there's disruptions.

And then the second component has always been preparedness to go from where you are to be away from where the crisis is. And I think that this is probably the most ignored concept that really has tremendous value to help people survive through things. But when I was watching--I've watched--last year, the entire United States was in flames, right?

Obviously, it was in pockets, but I'm watching the country that I know and love, and every day I'm watching cities in flames. And that was so shocking to me. And watching that happen, you realize how security is such a major concern. And then also, as we've been traveling--I've been traveling in some-- what's the right word to use--some unique places where many people have security concerns of going.

And so we've done a bunch of testing over the last--Steve and I are friends, and we've done a bunch of testing over the months. I think I've got a safe story that we can use as an example, Josh. I think we've got a safe story. You were in one of these questionable countries.

You could say that the gun laws and the knife laws and the personal defense laws were a little bit restrictive, weren't they? No question. Okay, so anyways, you went through what we'd kind of call a grocery store, but there it's kind of like a combination of grocery store and hardware store all in one.

It's a get everything. And you sent me a video of you walking through the store. You were showing me everything on the shelves, and you were saying, "Steve, what do you see with your eyes that I don't see with my eyes that I need to get?" And one of the things you were concerned about, because you were going fairly remote, you were going off the beaten path, was what could you use for the safety and protection of your family and your children.

And do you remember what one of the things I saw, and I said, "Josh, get that. Get that. Do you remember what one of those items was?" I could probably list several of them. Okay, well, anyways, I'll tell the audience. One of which was you were in the camping section, and they had a hatchet.

Yep. A small hatchet. That was going to be my number one. And I said, "Josh, get that little --" they got the little metal pan barbecue with the little wire thing over the top with charcoal so you can put the burgers on. I go, "Josh, get that, get that, and get the hatchet." And you go, "Well, we're not going to cook that." I go, "No, no, no.

The little camping setup is camouflaged for the hatchet because you need the hatchet to make for the wood for the cooking thing so you can fry your hamburgers and feed the kids." But the thing is, a hatchet or an axe is one of the most fearsome weapons you can brandish at someone else.

If you got into a situation where you're being threatened, just imagine you're threatening someone else. "Mister, I want your wallet." Now, imagine you're the aggressor and that other guy reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a Swiss Army knife. You're going to go, "Yeah, right." Imagine they reach into the vehicle and they pull out a baseball bat.

It's like, "Fine. You might get a little bit of a blow in, but I'm going to catch that baseball bat and take it away from you." Now imagine them pulling out a hatchet. You're going to go, "Ugh, I don't want anything to do with that." People will say, "I don't want anything to do with you," more so when you're brandishing the hatchet.

This is when you're in a disarmed population. They will be more fearsome of you brandishing the hatchet because they know what a hatchet does. It's devastation to wood and wood is harder than their body. They will be in more fear of that than if you pulled out a knife.

You and I, plus I've been doing this with sailboaters for years and other people traveling the world, we've done a lot of stuff with weaponry in foreign countries, weaponry you can get off of the shelf for your own personal protection, stuff that hides in plain sight. It doesn't look like it's a defensive or an offensive item until it is used like that.

You've had opportunity to T&E, test and evaluate, many of the things that we're going to be talking about potentially with your customers in the future, whether it's videos or training or something. What's been your impression of it over the last year? The thing that I value the most is funny, Steve.

I was a longtime consumer of your stuff before I ever started talking to you personally. Over the years, I've said on previous episodes where you've been on the show, I bought everything that you sold ever since I first heard you many years ago on Jack Spirico's show. One of the things that's been the most interesting, and here's a story you haven't heard, what I value the most that I have learned from you is the way that you think about how to solve the needs rather than the specific thing to solve the needs.

I've taught preparedness classes, which you teach and many people teach. One of the things that's different about my teaching of preparedness classes is I've done it while simultaneously being a digital nomad with a family of four children. I flew outside the United States with nothing more than I think about nine or 10 suitcases, maybe eight to 12 depending on different sizes of suitcases, which means I didn't take any preparedness items with me.

Well, I did. I took kids' books, kids' toys, I took kids' clothes, and I had my electronics bag and basically that's it, but I didn't take preparedness items with me. Now going on in two to three different countries in all different scenarios, I've flown in with nothing except personal luggage, flown in, noticed, with many restrictions on things you can fly with, and I have had to evaluate and prioritize and say, "Okay, what do I get?

What do I buy? What do I acquire? What do I set up in order to make sure that my family is protected in case we're here in this weird place and all of a sudden things happen?" Then how do I put in place a plan of how does this scale?

When you were doing those broadcasts with your audience, I was part of your – I can't remember what group you're doing, but I was in Kentucky listening to you give last year right before they closed the borders. I was in Kentucky in the United States listening to you give your dire concerns about the situation, and I had already done some preparing back home, but I was in the United States for a couple of weeks.

I go back, and it's not a matter of, "Oh, I can get this certain item," or, "I can get this certain thing," but rather I had Stephen Harris' voice in my head saying, "I can get this certain – this is the functionality I need, and here's different ways that I can solve it." I'm going into stores that I'd never gone into before, and I'm walking through the stores looking at them with a lot of your training in my head.

What's funny is – literally, hang on one second. Son, come here. Come here. I'm going to give an example. Sit down. Sit down here. I'm recording the podcast here, and my son is doing his homework here, so I've pulled him over here next to me. We're going to do a quick test.

Son, sit up. Sit up. Sit up. Speaking of the microphone, I taught you recently how to evaluate a flashlight for purchase. What did I teach you about evaluating a flashlight? Usually, you'd want to get either AA or D-cell batteries because they hold almost double of the smaller ones. You want to get a D-cell rather than a C-cell because it holds almost double, and the same with the AAAs and AAs, right?

That's exactly right. There's an example for you, Steve, of my 8-year-old. Go back and do your schoolwork now. Go finish. Finish your language book. There's my 8-year-old who's doing his homeschool work nearby. I've been able to take much of the knowledge that you taught me, and I taught him how to analyze the purchase of flashlights.

He wanted to buy a flashlight, and I taught him how to go in and say, "Okay, you want a flashlight. What are you looking for?" Just a simple fact that over the years you learn that a D-cell has almost double the amount of power reserve of a C-cell, and a AA has almost double the power reserve of a AAA, that when he wants to spend his few dollars on a flashlight for himself at the local grocery store, he has the knowledge to be able to repeat it, et cetera.

It's just been great, and we've been doing that, right? As I've traveled the world, I travel with a satellite communication device that we have hooked up so that if the whole world goes black and I can't phone home or something, first thing I'm doing is going and flipping on my satellite communication device so I can reach out to Steve and to others who I have a satellite connection with.

I've been a ham radio operator for years, but I don't travel with a ham radio. I travel with a satellite device that allows me to get help. And who taught you about that little satellite device? Right. That's what I'm affirming. If any of you guys haven't taken Steve's trainings on stuff, it's just been amazing, and we're working on some stuff.

Hopefully we can make it happen. Well, actually, how seamless was your communication with me via text message on that satellite communication device as opposed to a cell phone? How seamless was it? It's phenomenal. And it also just feels good having those backups, right? I travel with two phones, two different networks, two global SIM cards.

But to have that ultimate backup gives me the confidence to take all those that I'm responsible for into some weird places without feeling like I'm doing something foolish. Josh, they're screaming at the radio. Well, they're screaming at the computer and their phone right now, so I better tell them.

Josh was traveling with something that's called a Garmin InReach Mini. I-N-R-E-A-C-H. It's on Amazon. It costs about $300, or it did a couple months ago. It's maybe $330 now. It's on the Iridium network, which is global. In fact, it's on the Iridium telemetry network, not the voice network. So you only get to send and receive text messages.

No pictures, no data. It's basically you're limited to 160 characters. But it's amazing what you can do in 160 characters, especially when you have the unlimited plan. You can send unlimited messages. So Josh was traveling, and he could send text messages through the satellite device to a person's cell phone, to a person's email.

He could receive them from him, and he could also send from a Iridium device to a Iridium device, which was me. The whole world could be black. And he could send a text message from his Iridium device to mine sitting in the window next to where my cat sits.

And it would go, "Tweetle!" And I would know that he had sent me a message. And if you think, "Well, Steve, if the world's dark, is the Iridium system going to be working?" It's like, I'll give you one clue. World headquarters of Iridium is in Langley, Virginia. So the U.S.

government depends heavily upon the Iridium system. So basic plan is $12 a month, month to month, no obligation. You can go up and down in plans. You went up to the $50 or the $55 a month plan, which gave you unlimited messages between you and I and unlimited tracking.

And then when you got back to the United States, you changed your plan back down to the $12 one, right? Yeah, absolutely. So he can flip, he can change that back and forth. And you can send unlimited messages with the $12 a month. You just get charged per message.

But if you're worrying about the 25 cents per message, and it's like you got your priorities completely wrong, if you're on the lower, that message is well worth more than 25 cents. But anyways, we've been talking for a year about how to take like what's in Stephen Harris's wazoo belt.

And I'm just going to let you go Google what a wazoo belt is. You know, should I show you what's in my wazoo belt? What's the value of that to this audience? What is the value of something called Overwatch? And I experimented with Josh. What is the value of that satellite communicator?

Like I said, it's only $330 and $12 a month. It's very affordable. And, you know, there's other things. Because really the thing you were traveling with that was the most valuable was your cell phones. You had duplicates of them. You had some of my batteries that I have approved and are used around the world by U.S.

government, military, and other entities. And, you know, basically you can charge this battery in one hour off of a car battery. And then that one battery will power your modern iPhone for a week. And I don't mean in airplane mode. I mean with the cell radio, the Wi-Fi, the Bluetooth on for a week.

This battery will charge in an hour and power it for a week. If you put it in airplane mode, it will be like three weeks. So we've been testing and evaluating what we call T and E, these different aspects, because I wanted to bounce them off of someone that was totally naive to these principles, yet was very much, you know, the financial customer and audience that you are your own audience.

And your audience is a reflection of you. And we're trying to come up with a balance. Well, anyways, we're trying to come up with a balance of different things. It's like do we want to offer security training the same way you would financial training and preparedness training? Is preparedness and not worrying about food and water is a necessary thing for you to feel secure enough to do the financial stuff that you want to do to grow yourself, your business, your portfolio.

But the question is how much does a sense of security that's not related to food, water, medicine, how much of a sense of real physical security, and not just in the United States, but in a foreign environment where you're traveling with only a backpack, how much of that is a factor in what this audience may or may not be interested in?

And I think we've narrowed, I think we're off the wall, we're down to the dartboard, wouldn't you say? And we're trying to figure out where in the dartboard we are. Any feedback, you know, you can email me or contact us and let us know. I don't know, but sometimes we're in the forest, we're in the trees and someone's outside the forest and going, "Dad, over there, over there!" And we're going, "Well, all we see is trees." Yeah, feel free to let us know.

Steve and I have been working on this. I've got kind of a starter outline, but that's Joshua's biggest challenge, as longtime listeners know, is I can go a mile deep. And knowing where you go a mile deep and where you go a mile wide is often the challenge and we depend upon listener feedback.

But I guess the closing, as we close today's show, and by the way, Steve, I'm sitting here on my table using one of the batteries, not that one that you're referring to, but I've literally recorded this entire interview sitting at a park bench. I am sitting here by a lake.

My son is at one picnic table doing his schoolwork and I'm sitting here recording this with you. You know the other amazing thing that I've got to emphasize? Your son could have told us everything he told us about D-cell and double As, which also you've got to know, D-cells are over seven times the size of double As.

You've got to know that, Link. So, anyways, your son could have not only told us everything he told us that you taught him, he could have told it to us in Spanish. That is true. No question about that. That's been a fun adventure as well. So, anyways, you're running on Harris power right now.

Right, right. Yeah, doing this. And that's what's amazing. Again, we're teasing and we've got to wrap this up, but I'm sitting here with a backpack that's sitting on the table here that has, I think, $10,000 to $15,000 worth of electronic gear just sitting here on the table. Knowing how to protect that, you gave me some ideas while I was traveling on how to protect that, that I immediately went out and I had no idea, and I immediately went out and put some stuff in that bag that makes it.

Because that bag is my -- it's not my life, but it is my business. If I lost that bag, it would be a very frustrating day to lose this -- I mean, I haven't done that $15,000 worth of gear sitting here on a picnic table. And so that's not something I take lightly.

But, on the other hand, like it's not something I'm going to walk away from. Right? So knowing some security techniques and knowing how to use this stuff means that I can sit here on a picnic table at a beautiful park and work in the sunshine on an incredible Thursday rather than sitting in an office like most people are, which I don't want.

So the techniques of -- this is the whole point, right? Why do you do preparedness? And we end up talking about preparedness. I think people are more open to this anymore. But I do preparedness so I don't have to worry about stuff so that I can do more stuff.

I don't do preparedness -- I have no interest in being a hermit sitting in some cabin somewhere waiting for the world to end. I desire to be out on the front line, out in the thick of it, working hard so the world doesn't end. But my ability to sit in a cabin and be a hermit waiting for the world to end is what gives me the confidence to go forward and find things.

And so whether it's security, whether it's knowing how to be secure with my family, I do that so that I don't have to sit and just take some vanilla vacation to Disney World. I do that so that I can take my children and go and do interesting things without sacrificing it.

So the point of preparedness is always not so that you can -- for me, it's never so I can just sit back and be scared of the world. That's what drives me nuts about a lot of preparedness. I have no interest in that. It's so that I can be shored up and solid enough to press forward and advance the improvements that I want to make in the world.

There's a beautiful story, and I heard it from a Mormon guy. A farmer is interviewing a ranch hand, and he goes, "What's your best attribute?" And he says, "I can sleep when the wind blows." And it's a longer story that I won't go into here, but basically the ranch hand and the entire family can sleep when it's storming outside because he's taking care of everything.

He's at such peace and everything is taken care of that he can sleep through a storm rather than run out and shut the barn doors and get the horses and bring the cows. He can sleep when the wind blows, which brings me to another saying we have in the security business is that security is like oxygen.

You take it for granted that it's always there, and you don't know that you even need it until the moment you don't have it, and then you will pay anything instantly to get it back. So it's like I put my hand over your mouth and your nose, you instantaneously realize how precious your oxygen is.

Your security is the same way. And we've got one of your listeners I've got to give a shout out to, Eric. Eric's listening. He is one of the world-class experts in communications and information security we might be bringing in to work with us and you guys on, and he is a top-tier, world-class expert in communications security as well as data security.

And so, I mean, Josh and I have been having very, very secure communications, even more secure than Signal. But we have nice ways of communicating securely, even in skywriting. I can send Josh a message, have a plane right in the sky above his head, and he knows what the message is and no one else does.

So I think there are a lot of titillating things that are just like rabbit holes. So to be careful, you might get sucked into the rabbit hole and really enjoy the trip. Absolutely. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been phenomenal. I know that most of your work is profiled at Stephen1234.

That's your primary platform you're sending people to right now? All my free stuff is on Stephen1234.com. You can reach me through there. And my main site is Harris. My last name is Harris. Harris, H-A-R. H-A-R-R-I-S, H-A-R-R-I-S, 1234.com, Harris1234.com. Yeah, and I can absolutely vouch for every one of your products, every one of your courses.

You have hours and hours of free stuff, and whenever I have you on, I'm always trying to not duplicate any of the other stuff that you have available on your websites, the courses, the classes, the audios. I'm trying to add to that, and I think we've done that here today.

Thank you so much for coming back on. Oh, pleasure to be here. Just look for some more, really. You'll either get silence or you'll get a whole bunch of stuff on the subject. So it'll be one or the two. We haven't decided whether we're engaging or not. We'll see.

All right, my friends. Thank you for listening to today's episode. My thanks again to Stephen for coming on. Just simply want to close with a simple call to action. One of the key skills of success that you see people put into practice again and again and again is simply this.

Those who win are those who take action when they hear an idea. Think back in your life about how many times when you first heard about something, whether it was the first time you heard about Bitcoin or that was the first time you heard about the pandemic or the first time you heard about a new lucrative job industry or the first time someone made a suggestion to you.

If you discipline yourself to become someone who takes action every single time, it is a major, major skill of those who win. Notice I use that word "skill." It's something that can be developed, honed, and perfected over time. So as you have considered today's podcast, as you considered the discussion we had on supply chain issues, etc., any actions that came to your mind, notice them.

Write them down so that you can look at them and analyze them with your logical brain. Notice the potential actions that came to your mind. Reflect on them and give yourself a deadline for either choosing to act or not act. So notice first, clarify, write them down, and then give yourself a short deadline.

You're the one who decides, "Maybe I need to think about this for 24 hours. Maybe I think about this for one week for some big thing." But set a deadline for when you're going to take action, and then simply sit down and take the relevant action. And if you discipline yourself to be an action taker, you will find that your entire life will flow more smoothly.

Warnings are often missed by those who don't pay attention and don't bother to take action. And so we're doing our very best to warn you about potential things. Hopefully this is wrong. This is one of those things where I think I would be thrilled, and I guarantee you Stephen would be as well, to look back a year from now and say, "You know what?

That day, November 11, 2021, that was the zenith. That was as bad as things got," which wasn't bad, right? We would be thrilled with that. But there is a very decent chance that if we reflect back a year from today, we would see that things were actually much more difficult than they were on November 11, 2021.

And that can make a big difference in your life and in your business. Dig into the issues, educate yourself, and may God bless you and your family as we all seek to work together to build a stronger and more resilient future. Be back with you very soon.