Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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. Today I want to continue talking about some of the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and specifically I want to talk about some things that could happen, potentialities, in the coming days and weeks.

If you will think about some of these things, you may succeed in making good plans to prepare for them if they did happen to protect yourself and your family from anything that could potentially happen. For context, the day is Thursday, February 24, 2022 and in the last 18 hours Russia has invaded Ukraine and the extent of the invasion is quite significant.

Situation on the ground is very serious. You have Russian troops coming in by all methods. You have Ukrainian government has declared a massive national emergency. But more than that, they have gone to a system of martial law. They are on an absolute wartime footing at this point in time.

Even to the point where they are opening up military armories and passing out weapons. Reportedly, they passed out 10,000 weapons in the central city of Kiev, the capital city of Kiev. 10,000 weapons to basically any person who will come and wield those weapons. I've been trying to confirm this.

I think it seems the case. But at this point in time, any men of military age are not allowed to leave Ukraine. The Ukrainian parliament has imposed a national state of emergency and they have announced compulsory military service for all men of fighting age. This is even to the point where I have obtained reports, again I'm not a verified journalist, this is just Joshua's web snooping and looking around, but even reports that the surrounding nations such as Poland, they are not letting fleeing males enter the nation of Poland.

On the Polish border, they have been accepting Ukrainian refugees, people fleeing Ukraine, but now they're not even letting Ukrainian men enter the border out of respect for the government's forced, the Ukrainian government's forced conscription. So it's an incredibly serious time. You have a dictator with tremendous force who has made decisions to take things to a very, very high level.

And of course, as always, it's a real mixture. One of the amazing things about the modern era is you can watch online, if you're a decent OSINT enthusiast or if you're a decent web snooper, you can find lots of on the ground reporting and you can see that there are many areas of intense problems, but on the whole, it's kind of peaceful in terms of many streets.

Not like it looks like everyone is facing trials all at once, it's just in isolated areas as the invaders spread across the country. But certainly the scenes are quite shocking. I think one of the most shocking things and sobering, you see the Ukrainian people taking shelter in their underground stations, stretching out and sleeping in the underground stations for fear of aerial bombardment.

And of course, it harkens back to the images that we know so well from the people sleeping in the London underground during the aerial bombardments in World War II, etc. And so a very serious situation. If you're on the ground in Ukraine, my thoughts are with you and I pray that you'd be protected and no great courage as you confront those who are invading your land.

If you're on the ground in Russia, there's a whole different set of situations that you are facing. There are thousands of Russians protesting the war in public squares and as is always the case in a tyrannical society. Like Russia, you have the police sitting there shuffling them off, arresting hundreds and hundreds of protesters for voicing their opinion in the streets of Russia.

And so it's a serious situation all over. And today President Biden in the United States announced wide-ranging sanctions, freezing the assets of Russian banks held in the United States, freezing the assets of various powerful and notable Russian citizens, widespread sanctions on the nation of Russia. Now the question is, what happens from here?

And of course, we don't know, we're all guessing. There's a major difference today from 48 hours ago. 48 hours ago, the US administration, US intelligence agencies were warning of an almost certain invasion of Russia and there were many who were quite skeptical of that. Well now everything is different.

And so the question is, what happens from here? Where do you go from here? The international outcry against President Putin and his actions has been significant and so we can expect quite significant response. But it would seem foolish to me to think that President Putin has not anticipated the response.

The response that has happened so far is about what you would predict. You know, economic sanctions are the favorite and most commonly used tool of international sanctionary, international, I can't say diplomacy, but international actions. When you have large and powerful countries who don't wish to commit their soldiers and armed forces to actual war and don't want to engage in even necessarily virtual war, whether it's lobbying missiles or doing aerial bombardments or engaging in cyber warfare, you don't want to, then they use sanctions.

But sanctions certainly seem to have quite limited effects and it would seem to me that President Putin has spent the last years working very diligently to build up the economic self-sufficiency of his nation, pay down national debt, improve the situation so that they would not be as affected by sanctions, and also sought to form alliances, I think, perhaps most interestingly or worriedly, most notably, perhaps with the nation of China.

At this point in time, I have a couple of serious concerns of things that could happen, notwithstanding the serious situation that the Ukrainian and Russian people are in. Those of us who are physically more distant, I think we also have our own concerns. First, there's going to be a significant disruption in markets, and I think the most important disruptions will come in the energy markets.

I think you can expect and should expect a significant rise in energy prices. Now, I'm not competent to elucidate exactly the play-by-play moves that are likely to come. One of the interesting pieces of bargaining power that President Putin has is the control over gas supplies to much of Europe.

While there is some maneuvering at the edges, much of Europe is exceedingly dependent upon Russian gas supplies. If you are in Europe, you should be significantly concerned about that and how that may impact your life. To the extent, you should consider, of course, electricity prices, fuel prices, etc. Heating prices may be significantly affected, and that should factor into your thoughts in terms of your personal finances and/or your investment decisions.

The energy situation in the United States is very concerning because over the last couple of years, major domestic supplies of energy have been shuttered and turned off. You had the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline project that would have brought a tremendous amount of energy into the United States from our stable northern neighbor.

But what is concerning to me is not just the standard market disruptions, but the potential for things to escalate to the scale of cyber warfare. I want to be cautious and not overstate things, but I think the most important and compelling story of the last year was the Colonial Pipeline hack in the United States that resulted in widespread fuel shortages, major disruptions in many places in the United States, and again widespread fuel shortages to the point where many gas stations are simply not prepared.

I think the biggest weakness that you have in many of our nations is our dependence on electricity, but more properly, you have our dependence upon modern information technology. It would seem to me that we're pretty well behind the curve in terms of protecting these technologies from external attack. Originally, when the technology was invented, it was invented for utilitarian purposes.

It was not invented and planned that it would somehow be a secure utility protected from modern threats. Let me give a metaphor example and some practical examples. If you think about something like email, people are often concerned about the security of email, rightly so. You have conversations about things like encryption.

How do you encrypt your emails for privacy? How do you hold your emails encrypted? How do you make email secure? There are certain ways to improve the security of email, but at its core, the fundamental flaw in a security analysis of email is that email was never designed to be secure.

By its very nature, the way that the system uses header information to process messages and send them from the sender to the recipient, it was designed to be an open and semi-public form of communication. You can come along and you can encrypt certain things. You can make certain tweaks to improve the security of email, but at its core, email is fundamentally unsecure because it was never designed with security in mind.

This is why if you are concerned about security and you move from email to something like a modern secure messaging app, you automatically have a significant upgrade in security because these new messaging applications were designed with security in mind. They're substantially more secure. They protect the metadata. They have more protection around concealing the identities of the people communicating in addition to actually securing the message itself.

Now let's go to the world that we live in. Something like the electrical grids upon which we are so dependent for our modern lifestyle. The electrical grids were originally an analog system and then they became a digitally operated and intelligently operated grid system. But these grids were not originally designed to be secure.

You didn't have the US military coming in and building a grid to be protected. Rather what you had was computer scientists saying, "Let's make this more efficient." But there were lots and lots of vulnerabilities in the electrical grid. One of the things that's so shocking is when you start to look into attacks upon drug or cell electrical grids, there's abundant evidence of many people who have attacked things like an electrical grid.

Similar with other aspects of data, information security, etc. And again you saw in the colonial pipeline situation, the debacle from this past year, that it's quite possible for smooth, sophisticated people on the other side of the world to manipulate something as basic and mechanical as a pipeline to very disastrous effect.

When you think about other recent stories, this last couple of weeks in the Canadian Freedom Convoy protests, you had, remember what you had with the financial situation. So originally the Canadian truckers had a GoFundMe account set up. Then the Canadian government sued GoFundMe and said, "We're going to block the funds." GoFundMe said, "All right, well, we're going to give some of the money back and then the money doesn't go back.

We're going to return our people's donations if they claim them. And then the money that's not claimed, we're going to send it on to some not-for-profit entities." And everybody made a ruckus. A few hours later, they said, "We're going to send the information back." But the important point, sorry, send the money back and then they refunded everybody's donations.

The important thing here though is what happened next. Next, the site GiveSendGo, which bills itself as an alternative Christian-oriented collection site for fundraisers said, "Well, we'll step up and we'll protect the truckers." And so they started raising money for the truckers saying, "We're not going to buckle our knees like GoFundMe did in face of government control." Well, some, I don't know who, but some hackers took on GiveSendGo and they succeeded in a couple of things.

Number one, they scraped all of the data from those who contributed to the GiveSendGo campaign and they started publishing that hacked, scraped data online. The second thing they did was they took the website down and they replaced it with their own messages, rather crude messages saying, "Why are you doing this?" And so they showed their power over the GiveSendGo website.

That data that they scraped and then published was then used and is being used as a major point of division and controversy within primarily Canadian communities and then also other communities around the world as well. Journalists started going through that data and they started studying who is involved in that data.

Who is, what are the names that are there? What are the domain names of the email addresses? There are various staffers filed because they made their contribution to GiveSendGo using their corporate email address. Companies are being asked. Journalists are emailing people saying, "Hey, there's somebody with your name and your email address made a $40 donation to the Freedom Convoy campaign in Canada, which is now of course billed as an insurrection in the Canadian system.

And so people trying to throw over the government, what do you have to say for yourself?" And then what has also happened is that information has been used and spread still farther. So there have been reports of people taking those names and addresses of the people making the donations and they're printing them out on basically shame lists, printing them on a paper and putting them on the front doors of their building saying, "You should know your neighbours.

Here are the 15 people in our building that contributed to the occupation of Ottawa 2022. And here are their names, here are their contribution amounts, et cetera. Know your neighbours." And so this information is being used to sow significant levels of distrust and disharmony in what was formerly a country where you had a pretty peaceful, harmonious relationship among its citizens.

Those are a couple of stories of relatively isolated events. Now, when you think about somebody or a military empire with far more resources than those particular events, you're not dealing with something small. Those events are small with regard to the widespread destruction that can be raised through hacking, through cyber warfare.

And the Russian cyber warfare capabilities are extraordinarily extensive. They're being used to some extent right now as the Russian armies invade Ukraine. They'll be used by the dictator of Russia himself as he suppresses dissent, as he works in his own society, he will use his cyber warfare capabilities. The question is, will those cyber warfare capabilities be used beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine?

I don't know, but I consider it a significant threat, very much worth thinking about. What would that look like? I don't know. It could be quite significant in terms of disruption of electricity grids, disruption of pipelines, those things could be seriously costly and seriously disruptive. They could be more of what Russia has been doing significant amounts of, of just simply misinformation campaigns, sowing discord and distrust among societies, including the American society.

That's a very, very significant and powerful thing. You see that right now. You see that, that right now the political administration in the United States enjoys extraordinarily low levels of consensus and support because of the widespread distrust among the American population. The significant levels of acrimony, of infighting, of arguing, etc.

has been enhanced by many misinformation campaigns. It's hard for me to assess the percentage of the blame, how much goes to real legitimate conversations over and disagreements over the issues at hand, how much is to blame for people for the fundamental nature of the downsides of communicating with one another on Twitter, how much is due to the Russian misinformation farms, I don't know.

But I do know it's a significant problem and it makes, it makes it very, very difficult for a nation to give some kind of unified effective response. I think this is a far bigger risk than many people are thinking of or considering. Again I don't see how President Putin would gain by antagonizing a country like the United States.

It would seem to me, not knowing all of his evil machinations, it would seem to me that he has his ambitions, he has tested and proven a number of times with the annexation of Crimea, the invasions in Georgia, he has tested and proven that he can take certain levels of military action and get away with it and be left alone by the rest of the world.

And right now it would seem pretty obvious that no one is particularly interested in signing up to go and fight alongside the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians are pretty much on their own. Certainly Western countries are willing to send some levels of materiel support, I'm sure intelligence support, information sharing, etc.

but there's no appetite for outright side-by-side fighting with the Ukrainians from at least any government that I can see. And so it's going to be pretty much down to the Russians and the Ukrainians themselves to fight out their problems, or at least as far as they're going to go.

But that doesn't mean that other countries may not be involved. I think that it's easy to, when you live in a place like the United States or in Canada, it's easy where most of my listeners do live, it's easy to feel protected and secure. I think the United States has proven time and again that she has very little to fear with regard to outright invasion.

Certainly you can go back and you can look at the invasion of 1812 and try to learn from whatever lessons there are from that period. But in terms of actually invading the United States, it is an almost impossible country to invade from a military perspective. What are the reasons for that?

Well number one, of course, the nation is massive and has the world's largest military spending, and that military spending has created a very, very significant level of military infrastructure. It's my opinion that the US military is actually quite weak, both on a relative basis and on an absolute basis.

What I mean is it's much weaker today than it was a decade ago, or a couple decades ago, for reasons of lack of investment, lack of intelligent leadership, and also just distraction from the core of the mission. It would seem to me, not being a military guy, that the military itself is quite weak.

And also just in terms of the results, what's actually happened. To me it seems obvious that the US military hasn't won a war since World War II. And there's been a successful campaign that we all point to of Desert Storm, and then it turned out that that wasn't as successful long term as anybody thought.

And so when you actually look at the results, the results are not good. But I think that where all of the biting would be about US involvement in foreign wars, if somebody ever actually invaded the country, that would instantly unite virtually all Americans. Because at its core, even though the American culture is one that thrives on argument, dissent, debate, fighting, etc.

It's a very violent culture. It's something where there would be an incredible unification. And due to the strong military, due to the strong militia, and I mean that in the informal sense, meaning that all adults are part of the militia in terms of the local people, due to the widespread levels of gun ownership in the United States, right, the Ukrainian government is handing out 10,000 rifles to anybody in Kiev.

I don't know what 10,000 rifles is going to do in a city of millions and millions of people, in a nation of tens of millions of people. But it's a good start. In the United States, every third person has a gun collection that can arm all of their neighbors.

And so in terms of defense, I don't think you would ever have any kind of military defense. Traditionally, that's why the United States has been so concerned about intercontinental ballistic missiles, about nuclear threats, etc. But I think in the modern age, the bigger threat is cyber warfare. I think the bigger threat is disruption due to cyber warfare.

Because the Russian military could unleash a series of cyber attacks on the United States that could be broadly devastating, very, very devastating in terms of actual impact, actual disruption, actual empty gas stations, actual electric plants not working anymore, actual fires blown off due to voltage overloads, etc. Actual widespread destruction in cities and in economies in terms of companies going down and main and computers being affected and software not working anymore.

And actual effects, so whether that is most extreme levels of cyber warfare like that, or the more minor, just increasing levels of misinformation, argument, lack of distrust, more distrust between neighbors. It's very, very serious to consider the impact in the modern age. And so while I don't know that that would lead to the defeat of a nation or the conquering of a nation, I think it could lead to major disruptions in your and my lifestyle, major, major costs.

What would the response then be? I don't know. I'm not a sufficient chess player. I don't understand the dynamics at work well enough to understand where things would go, but it would not be good. Let me turn attention now to what I do think is a serious, serious threat that needs to also be considered.

And I would say it would be the increasing alliance or the increasing impact in the growth of China. And it would seem to me the biggest concern right now is of course Taiwan. The Chinese government has claimed the nation of Taiwan as being its own for a very long time.

The nation of Taiwan bristles at that and says, "No, we're an independent nation." And you have a very uncomfortable argument going on on a world basis whether Taiwan is a country or not. China has so far held back from militarily forcing itself on Taiwan and invading Taiwan. But you have a very powerful nation, the nation of China, which has for years systematically been working on taking over and expanding its scope and expanding its influence.

And many analysts have for quite a while expected China to sometime soon take action and go ahead and seek by force to invade Taiwan. I don't understand myself how these countries think that their military invasion is going to do any good. I don't understand how the Russian nation or how President Putin could think that his invasion of Ukraine is going to do any good if the Ukrainian people are not with him.

But maybe I don't understand it. Similarly, if the nation of Taiwan wants to be a separate and independent nation, I don't understand how it would do the Chinese government any good to think that they could bring them in by force. But then again, throughout history it's happened, right? It happened in the United States when you had many states seek to secede from the federal government.

The federal government went after them with force, forced them to not be able to secede, and it worked. It kept the nation together. So maybe I'm naive. But I think there's a very good reason right now, if you are in Taiwan, there's a very good reason right now to take a foreign vacation, to get out for a time.

Now perhaps you are committed to fighting for the independence of Taiwan and you're going to take up arms against China, that's your prerogative to do so. But if you're not going to fight and take up arms against China, this would seem like a pretty good time to consider taking, to at least be watching sources of information very, very carefully, and even to consider taking some significant time off for a foreign vacation or send your children and your family for some time abroad while you stay involved in your business affairs, your job, etc.

But keep a close eye on your sources of information to be able to get out. Remember, in any kind of dangerous event like this, you have to get out before everyone else decides they have to get out. You could get out of Ukraine pretty easily three weeks ago, a month ago.

You could not get out easily two days ago, three days ago, even before the invasion. And you can't get out now. If you're a military-aged man, they have conscripted you into the national defense. And all respect to those who serve, but I don't intend to be myself conscripted into an army.

That doesn't line up with my idea of freedom, nor do I think it's a particularly useful way to die in terms of impactful, as a soldier sent off to war by a president to be cannon fodder. Here's a gun, go shoot. That's not useful service. That's cannon fodder stuff.

If you're going to be involved in a resistance movement, be involved in a resistance movement. Don't be stuck into some military unit, at least not a conventional unit. Be a long-range sniper or a sophisticated placer of improvised explosive devices. Do something that's going to be impactful, not just conscripted with everyone else, at least in my opinion.

If China starts to use this event as cover for its own actions, things could get even more significant. And that could happen very, very quickly. Whether it is an invasion of Taiwan, whether it's something else, the point is that could happen very, very quickly. So what do you do?

I've laid out some of my concerns. What do you do? As I see it, all of the standard advice that I have been giving for many years applies. And you have a couple of lines that you go down. Number one is you engage in basic preparedness. You make sure, in the old days it was called civil defense.

Civil defense, the concept of civil defense is can you defend your nation against, can you empower civilians, non-military personnel in your nation to defend themselves effectively against foreign invasion? That was the classic concept of civil defense. A few years ago I heard an interview with a historian, a British historian, who was analyzing the effectiveness of the British civil defense programs.

And I wish I could lay my hands on it for the facts and figures, but it was resoundingly effective. And so what was the basic concept of civil defense? Part of it was equipping people to be independent. Of course, part of it was actual protection, building fallout shelters, having community shelters, having community air raid drills, and then providing for the storage of supplies and defenses of the local community.

So today we don't usually talk about this in the terms of civil defense. These are not words that we use much. We talk about it in terms of prepping or preparedness. But all of the basics still exist. The basics of making sure you have supplies of food, supplies of water, supplies of fuel, supplies of medical supplies.

And if you think about it, there's what I always refer to as the commonality of disasters, that it's the basic preparedness that you'd make for an event of a pandemic, some kind of significant pandemic, all the way to cyber warfare. If you imagine the electricity going off to your house for a couple of weeks, what would you need to survive that?

If you imagined that there was unrest in the streets, the stores were empty for some periods of weeks, what would you need to survive that? That's the basics of home preparedness. And so you would almost certainly survive the effects of a few weeks of the stores being empty, disruptions in fuel supplies.

You would survive that. It's just a matter of in what comfort, in what peace does your family survive that? And again, just to connect the dots, how could that happen? Well, if there was some kind of cyber attack that disrupted on a broad scale, the supplies of fuel like happened with the Colonial Pipeline hack this last year.

And if there were shortages of fuel like happened this past year, such to the point that the 18-wheelers couldn't run, things would be disrupted. If that were exacerbated by some kind of wide scale attack on telecommunications infrastructure, and there were sophisticated cyber attacks on large companies, large trucking companies, large distribution companies.

I mean, consider, if the Israeli government can get a worm into the Iranian nuclear centrifuges that cause the whole thing to blow up, then I would imagine that the Russian government could pretty easily get a worm into the Walmart distribution center that wrecks their ordering system. Well, imagine what happens if ordering breaks down.

I'll tell you what had happened, actually. A few days ago, I was in a local hardware store. I went into the hardware store and the computer system was down. And so all the point of sale, point of service terminals were not working. And so this particular hardware store, they had a backup plan, but everything was a mess.

And they had lines of all the workers were gathered up front trying to do the work. And what they're doing is they were scanning, they were manually taking the SKU number from the barcode of the things that I was trying to buy, going on the company website to find the price, and then manually filling out sales tickets of that particular price so that they could, and creating these manual order receipts for people purchasing things.

But it took what is, of course, usually a quick and effective process, and it made it take five times as long, six, eight times as long as it would usually take due to the simple fact that their system wasn't working for them to take, scan the code and have the computer do all the totals for you on your pricing system.

Now I want you to imagine that on a more widespread basis with a company that is totally automated, such as Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, Kroger, Publix, any widespread store. If I were in charge of the cyber warfare department in the Russian military, and I knew that one of our longstanding enemies was the United States, I would have a list myself of the top 300 companies in every industry.

And I'd have some kind of virus or worm ready to go to get into these company systems and blow them up, not literally, but just to drive chaos into their system. American stores and global stores, right? Doesn't matter whether it's Carrefour in France or Walmart in the United States or Intermarché elsewhere, it's all the same.

Stores, everything is run on the just-in-time inventory system. That's what I've, remember for years, I've talked to you about this. And the just-in-time inventory system is an amazing, amazing invention of the modern age. It is extraordinarily efficient, keeps prices low, and it keeps more selection on the shelves than anything ever imagined in human history.

The basic idea of the just-in-time inventory system is as a product goes out the scanner at the front door, then it should be coming back onto the loading dock in the back door. And the companies that use this have incredibly sophisticated systems that run it. And what has happened in the modern age is it's actually gotten better than before, where companies have gotten very, very good at dealing with supply line disruptions.

There have been a few empty shelves that you've seen in your local area over the past couple of years, but for the most part, they haven't been significant. And if you look at the performance of companies like HEB in the Southwest, in light of a hurricane, their systems are amazing.

Or Costco has done a great job with it. If there's a hurricane or an event coming, they can quickly send supplies. But all of that is built upon interconnected computer data transfer, artificial intelligent analysis of that data, et cetera. So imagine some kind of cyber warfare attack. Imagine that the Russian military inserts a worm into the Walmart ordering system.

And imagine that it has the ability just simply to disrupt that inventory system. Everything could go haywire. And how quickly can you bring that stuff back online? It's not a dark ages kind of thing. It's not like we automatically go back to horses and buggies and single bottom plows and we're spending the next hundred years.

No, but it's disruptive, potentially extremely disruptive. Again, I don't know the extent of this, but I guarantee, if you know that the intelligent services of the world, again, the example I like to use is when they got a worm into the Iranian centrifuges and made them melt down. You know that these countries are very, very sophisticated and very good and they have backup plans.

And this cyber warfare is a powerful, powerful form of warfare that we've really not seen. We've never seen used. And yet we know that it is part of military planning. Now again, imagine something similar happening if we brought the nation of China into it. Imagine if you had a conflict where China goes ahead and invades Taiwan and now the United States is responding, supporting its ally, Taiwan, in an actual kinetic way and it unleashes something like cyber warfare.

It's a very serious threat. I don't think it's actually even most important to talk about things like the nuclear threat. I think the cyber warfare threat is significant enough. But I want you to remember, because our memories are short, I want you to remember how quickly things can go from zero to panic.

Do you remember a couple of years ago, President Trump was President of the United States and there was the banter back and forth with North Korea. And then one day there was an alert that went out by mistake on the Hawaii emergency warning system saying take cover, missiles inbound, something like that.

I want you to remember, at no time in my life have I ever feared nuclear war. But a couple of years ago, when everyone was, the big conflict between North Korea and the United States, President Trump going back and forth with President Kim Jong-un, I think it's un, right?

That was a serious event and it happened quickly. And you can see just how quickly things can emerge. So I was giving you solutions. Quick preparedness comes into place, making sure that you have the ability to do without external systems of support for some weeks, a month would be ideal.

Of course, you can set higher targets, six months, a year is great, but it's a significantly higher level of commitment to go to that. But if today you started to prepare for, what would you do? Imagine this, right, if I flip off the breaker to your house and the water supply to your house, what would you do to live for a month without going to the store?

And that's prepping, that's what you basically need. So how do you provide against that? Talked quite a lot about it, maybe do more, used to sell a course on it, maybe I will in the future, if you're interested let me know. But that's preparedness, there's plenty of information out there.

And so you should engage in that. You should also be prepared to go someplace safe. If ideally you should have the ability, some kind of backup plans to go from where you are to another place that you think would be safer. There's some, this can be as simple as another town.

Right now there are certain cities in Ukraine that are being targeted. If you can get out of those cities and go to other cities that are not currently being targeted you can improve your safety. Again I don't expect hot warfare in the United States, but local events can make certain places undesirable.

Big cities can be especially flammable. So do you have a safe place to go? If money is no option I would just keep a vacation house, a country vacation house. It's a wonderful place to go, it's a backup place, it's out of the main city, that's a place that your family enjoys going.

Why? Well again, one place can be threatened by certain events. This is where you do get to the area of what if there were actually a nuclear threat? Do you have the ability to go to a place that's less of a target? Although of course you could choose your housing decisions by picking a book like Joel Skousen's Strategic Relocation which puts nuclear target maps and you analyze your state and you analyze your city based upon likely nuclear targets and likely wind flows, etc.

Most of us don't choose our housing like that. But if you have the ability to go from a big city you'll sleep better, to a country house, a country vacation house, you'll sleep better at night. If you have the ability to leave a country that was involved in a conflict and go to a country that's not involved in a conflict you'll sleep better at night.

So this is where we get into kind of this dual fold scenario. One is preparing to be secure in your home, the other is preparing to leave a place that is bad and go to a place that is better. That leaving can be local, moving from a neighborhood that's threatened by floodwaters to a neighborhood that's not threatened by floodwaters, going inland 20 miles to get away from the significant risk of storm surge in a storm or wind damage.

It can be regional, seeking to go from a region that's heavily affected by an event, region that's affected by an event to a region that's less affected, or it can be international, seeking to go from a country that is involved in some kind of international conflict to a neutral country, something like that.

So more on that in the days to come. Just want to encourage you, be prepared. Be prepared as best you can with whatever that means to you. Because things have gotten significantly more perilous. I hope and pray that the perilous reality in which we live at the moment calms down and becomes less perilous.

But I wanted to point out to you a couple of scenarios that are reasonable, realistic ways that things could get much more difficult in coming weeks and months. It's worth considering those scenarios. As I stated this morning, it's worth believing that they can happen, and then it's worth protecting yourself against them.

I feel like my list of preparations is incomplete. For example, in your company, I think as best you're capable of, you should think about what would happen if your company suffered a cyber attack. What would happen if your information were leaked out? I had planned to do a show on information privacy.

Maybe I'll do that soon. But in light of the Give, Send, Go hack, it's important to always think about information privacy. If you were being targeted by a hacker who's upset with your political contributions, or if you were being targeted by a cyber warfare unit in a foreign military, what could be made to leak out from the information?

That's even without going to the level of paranoia of your smart devices or your connected house. Just what information would you not want to become public? Is that information protected as a matter of course? None of us are perfectly protected, but it's worth thinking about. It's worth considering. It's worth making sure that you have PDF backups of your bank records stored in an offline file.

This is the classic conundrum. The things that you do to prepare for one thing often turn out to be not so great in another. An example would be having paper backups. Generally, I would advise you against receiving paper statements, paper investment statements, paper credit card statements, paper bank statements.

I advise you against receiving those things because they pose, in today's world, a significant risk of identity theft. A mailbox pirate comes along and gains access to the information. The paper itself is often not well secured. Somebody can break into your home safe or your desk drawer and often have access to your private information.

I generally believe that it is better for you to have your financial records stored on the encrypted website with a secure login for you, and then you can go and get them when you need them. The problem is that most of us are lazy about going and getting those records.

If Vanguard or Fidelity suffered a hack, I just want you to imagine, right? Imagine the chaos that could be strewn across the world and across American society if Vanguard were targeted by the Russian military with a sophisticated hack, a sophisticated worm or some kind of malicious code that is installed in it.

Vanguard, I'm sure, worked very hard to be protected from that, but they're not ready for an attack from a foreign nation state actor. I spend enough time listening to talks by hackers, red team planners. I spend enough time listening to them to know that a determined adversary can get into any organization, any computer system, etc.

I just have a hard time believing that if I were in charge of a cybersecurity department at a large foreign nation state and I had plans of how I'd disrupt the United States, again, I don't believe that I could be successful attacking the United States with an invasion force.

I don't think that I would even probably be successful attacking the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, conventional or nuclear. That would just not be good and there would be a disproportionate response. But I do think I could be very successful at completely disrupting the United States with a cyber attack.

And so if I were in charge of a cybersecurity or cyber warfare environment, I would have a list of the top 10 banks. Bank of America, Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, just go down the list of the top 10 banks and imagine a sophisticated attack against those top 10 banks.

I would include the top 10 investment companies, Vanguard, Fidelity, even the little ones, like how to mess up e-trade, Robinhood, just go down the list. I would have targets and plans and software prepared for attacking those entities. And so again, imagine that the files in the computer systems are completely disabled of these banking and investment companies.

Think about the havoc that that would wreak on the US society, on the US stock market, on the US financial system. It would be very, very serious. So I don't know necessarily that having offline copies of your financial data is necessarily going to help you in an event like that, but it probably can't hurt.

So things like that. And again, I just go back to the solutions that are realistic. All day I've been tweeting pictures of lines at ATMs in Ukraine, people trying to get their money out of the bank. Make sure you have cash. Make sure that you have a plan to...

I'm going to stop there. I go over the solutions nonstop. So just wanted to bring you some sobering commentary on what could happen from here. And we hope that it will not happen, but things have changed dramatically in the last 18 to 24 hours. Depending on what happens in the coming days, things could change more dramatically indeed.

And wasn't it... I think there was Lenin had some kind of quote that was something like, "Sometimes you can go decades with only days happening and sometimes you can live decades in a couple of days." And so it's very possible that in the days to come that would be the case.

Be thoughtful and may God be with you and your family as we pray for and support the people being victimized in Ukraine and elsewhere right now. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level.

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