A Personal Note From Orion

The war on COVID-19 is just starting, and the solution to end the suffering, fear, and anxiety? It’s us… the citizens of the world. If you’re not living under a rock, I’m sure you’re aware of how the number of those infected all over the globe is getting higher and higher. This is no longer just China’s problem anymore. 

Right in front of our eyes, we see governments having no idea what to do next, businesses closing, thousands of people losing their jobs, medical industries paralyzed – everyone is in the dark. No one is spared, and we are all affected by this. Now the question is, what should we do moving forward? How can we prepare? 

My guest, serial entrepreneur, and author, Steve Good, knows quite a lot on how to prepare for apocalyptic situations. In fact, he was able to predict that there was a major lockdown happening, so he and his family got into quarantine a month ahead of everybody. In this Stellar Life episode, Steve and I talk about how you can better prepare for situations like this, and what you should do to keep your family safe and secure after all of this is over. And now, on with the show!

 

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About Today’s Show

Hello and welcome to Stellar Life podcast. This is your host, Orion, and today, we’re going to have a very important episode with a good friend of mine who is in the know of many things that are happening in this crazy world today. I want to welcome Steve Good into the show.

Steve is the best-selling author of Be Left Behind and he’s an extraordinary human being. Steve, why don’t you share a little bit about yourself so people really understand who you are and a little bit about your background.

Happy to. First of all, thank you for having me on the show, Orion. It’s nice to see you. It’s been a while.

I spend most of my career in the banking world and technology; consulting and working with big banks like J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank. Providing IT and consulting services with big companies like Mphasis and Deloitte.

I had a long history working in that space before I decided that there’s probably a little bit more exciting stuff to look forward to. I jumped into the world of blockchain and went down to kind of a rabbit hole of discovering and learning all sorts of things about blockchain, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency which led to my book, Be Left Behind, which is on Amazon, Apple, Google, and a whole range of other places.

Just over the last couple of months—because of what’s been going on with the Coronavirus and all the discussions around what’s happening—I just took some time to start investigating, learning, and digesting what’s happening. I ended up in quarantine, not because I had to go to quarantine, but because I recognized the problem was expanding faster than people could see coming.

My family, we decided to pull the kids from school, went into quarantine a month ago, almost to the day. Of course, now here we are, a couple of weeks later and just about every country in Europe is in full lockdown. Obviously, I called it correctly but God, I’ve never in my life—you’ve known me a long time—been what you would call a doomsday guy or a prepper, but something was telling me that this was different and I needed to prepare.

Yeah, I get goosebumps as you speak. 

I don’t want to give you goosebumps. 

You know what? It resonates. It feels true. Unfortunately, we live in a new reality and we need to prepare. We need to prepare physically, emotionally, mentally, financially, and spiritually on so many levels. People don’t want to see what’s happening. People want to keep a blind eye because the truth hurts. The more you get into the truth, the more you go down this rabbit hole, the harder it is to digest and people are just like, “Please, don’t tell me. I do not want to know.”

It’s hard to digest a lot of the information if you start really looking at what’s there. Because I worked in the corporate world for a long time, when you’re serving a big bank like J.P. Morgan, as an example, and you’re providing services to a whole group of different divisions that are all doing different things. You start to see patterns or recognize, “Well, this department is doing one thing and this department is doing something else,” and you start to assess information from different places. You could go to a senior guy and say, “Hey. I have a feeling you guys are making a change like this,” and they’d look at you like, “Shh. Don’t tell anybody. How would you know this?”

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Just connecting dots?

Yeah, you’re connecting dots. It became something that one has to do when you’re providing good services to a client. To be able to give them the best advice possible, you have to be able to understand what’s the external market conditions, what’s the internal market conditions, what’s happening in between different departments, what’s working, and what’s not, because how can I provide good services if I didn’t know what was going on?

I’m not a good guy that’s running around being nosy; it’s just people tell you bits and pieces of information. If you just clock all the bits and pieces of information and you take it all in, and you think, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” Then, someone else says something similar and someone else says something a little bit different but related, you could start to piece things together just by chance.

I guess that skill has served me very well now because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m looking at information across a variety of sources of information (and by sources of information, I mean non-mainstream media for the most part; and looking at other things other than the mainstream) because the mainstream is going to spoon-feed us what they’re told to tell, unfortunately.

Of course. How long have you been in self-isolation?

A month.

Oh, my God. Wow. How did you prepare for it?

There’s a number of things that I did. There’s a few really good Telegram groups and WhatsApp groups out there. There’s one in particular that I’ve been following quite a lot. I started doing some research on how to prepare in the event that things were to turn bad in any kind of sense. There’s a whole list of things you start to think about in terms of what I should have.

Obviously, food and water is a big one. You’ll see there’s a lot of discussions right now about toilet paper and paper towels. That’s because if you don’t have toilet paper, it’s kind of an essential item, and people oftentimes forget it. That one was easy, just buy that online in advance and we had that months ago, weeks ago. But then, you start thinking about other things like medicines.

In fact, before we even got food, medicine, or toilet paper, the first thing we did was we got clothes for our kids to be forward-thinking. The kids are growing, we have a 5- and a 7-year old, they’re growing quickly. It could be that their shoe size fits and the next week, they grow and they have outgrown their shoes and in three months, they could outgrow their shoes again. So, we literally got shoes that we theoretically think could last a year.

To be honest, it might not be a year. It might last for six months. We don’t know how fast the kids will grow because kids grow at the speed they grow. We bought clothes, one or two sizes bigger for both the kids. My younger one could naturally wear the older ones because they’re both boys.

That was the first thing we got because we thought, what happens if? Yes, you need food and what have you but your kids are going to need to have clothes and shoes to wear. While they don’t need shoes in the house all that often, it’s still nice if you can walk around in the garden or get out of the house a little bit even if you don’t go very far but you’re out in front of the house or someplace, then your kids should have shoes and clothes. My wife and I did that first.

Then, it was buying things in large bulk of dried food items, things like beans, bags of rice, 20-kilo bags of rice will go a long way, dog food. Then, we started looking at medical things that we might need. Then, we started going down this whole rabbit hole and had other things like duct tape, tarps, how do you light a fire in the event you need to light a fire?

Then, you start to realize something really interesting that I learned in the world of crypto from another friend of mine, which is actually quite a common thing that people use in terms of redundancy.  It’s the same concept they used on the space shuttle. The idea is that you say that one is none and two is one. What that means is that if you have one of something and it fails, you have nothing. If you have two of something, you only have one failover. Basically, what it means is you should have always three—one plus two more. That’s how the space shuttle is designed. It always has two redundancies, not just one. If life support were to fail, they have two more life support systems to carry them, and on and on.

Now, I use that same exact philosophy for things like how do you light a fire? So, in the event you need to light a fire, you might need to have something for lighting matches or fire out in the wet, in the wind, in the cold, or something can happen and your matches could catch fire and you lose your matches, then you need another way to light a fire. I started thinking that way about other things and said, “What else do I need?” Batteries, flashlights. I haven’t gone down the path of things like power generators and that kind of thing I know people that have. 

Then, I started thinking about, if we do leave the house and we come back in, how do we decontaminate ourselves? I know it sounds insane. We set up mini decontamination using a room that’s connected between our garage and the house, which is our laundry room. We’re able to basically just remove all of our clothes, put them straight in the washing machine so they can be dried.

We can run an Ozonator which generates ozone into the air so that it basically kills all the bacteria as in most viruses. And then, we just walk from there straight into the shower and just shower, wash our hands and wash our bodies if we actually leave, only for exposed other people. We’re only doing that because we just don’t know the extent of things.

As I said, up until a month ago, I would have never ever dreamed of doing any of this. It’s like total insanity, but I’d rather be safe and then find out that it was all for nothing, it was a great experiment, and I learned a lot, than to regret it and end up ill or something else worse.

 There are lessons in learning things. For me, it was about going down a rabbit hole, learning a lot of things, applying some of the things I learned, and taking the rest away and saying, “I’ve got interesting things I could apply in life later, and hope I don’t need to use them.”

What about fruits and veggies? Do you get deliveries? How do you eat fresh fruits and veggies?

Right now, we’re able to get to fresh fruits and vegetables. There’s a local supermarket that’s delivering, which is fine. They just have to leave it outside the house. We’d go through the same process of taking it inside. We put it into the room that is used for decontamination and we literally turn the Ozonator on.

These Ozonators aren’t very expensive and it just spits out this ozone-related air which just cleans all the air and cleans everything. If there are fruits and vegetables, it’s actually great for them because it’s a great way to clean fruits and vegetables. It is better than washing them in the sink. That’s what we do. Bring everything through into the decontamination and laundry room and then just run the thing for about 20 minutes, then air out the room, bring the fruits and veggies in. That works fine.

Everything’s nice and fresh and that’s working fine for now. I don’t know what will happen if things get worse but for now, we have no problem. We’ve got access to all of that and we’re making our own bread every day. We’ve got tons of flour and milk. The other one that’s hard is eggs because if you don’t have eggs and you don’t have fruits and veg, then you start to wonder, how am I going to make pancakes for the kids or waffles? How are we going to have cereal if we don’t have milk? So, those are the things that you know worry me the most.

We have UHT milk which is milk that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. We have almond milk, oat milk. We have a whole variety of different milk that we’ve stocked up on. For now. the fruit and veg thing is working, but it’s always a worry if it gets worse than you may have to start looking at how you start planting and growing. I am not the green thumb guy.

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Right. What about medical services and dental care? What happens if we need to go to a hospital or we have a dental emergency?

Dental wise, we have our dentists and we have their phone number, so we can call them. I don’t know what they would do for now. They’re all more or less closed so it’s a little bit tricky. I don’t know what they would do if I actually had an emergency. I guess I’d call and find out, let’s hope nothing happens. On the flip side, to protect our teeth better, we got sonic toothbrushes and we got the water picks so that we could really make sure we were doing the best we could, just being smarter about how we take care of our teeth.

I am so regretting delaying my dental work. I have some dental work that I need to do and I was delaying it in the last three months and I’m like, “Oh, Orion, why? Why, oh why?” My dentist’s office is closed. We texted her, she’s not getting patients. Hopefully, everything is going to stay intact.

Now, the other part about doctors, one thing I would say is, go to a doctor’s office if you need to go to a doctor but do not go to the hospitals. Because that’s where the largest amount of infection of Coronavirus is. Unless you’re going there with masks and goggles and you’re really protecting yourself, you’re just exposing yourself by walking into an environment where you don’t know what diseases are flying around in the air.

I’m a very positive person. I share about mindset and I did a previous episode about Coronavirus where it was a little later and that was last week. This week I got new information. With all the being fun, positive, spiritual, connected, and all that, we do need to prepare. I think this episode is very important and essential. It can help many people.

I’m in this mommy group and they’re driving me nuts because they just go and visit each other. They go to 10 different supermarkets every day. I said something and I wasn’t the cool kid on the block. They’re like, “We’re adults and you can’t tell us what to do.” It’s not about telling them what to do, I just feel obligated with the knowledge that I have. You don’t need to have everything that I have, the knowledge that I have, just look at what’s going on in Italy and in Seattle.

Or Iran.

Yeah, so many crazy things.

France or now, Morocco. Pick your country—UK, Germany. It’s expanding exponentially. Despite Italy’s attempts to lock things down, Spain to lock things down, or Germany to lock things down, what good is it done so far? Part of that is it just shows you that people don’t have self-control and they don’t stop themselves from going to each other’s houses, having parties, and visiting their friends. They should have just stayed home in the first place and not expose themselves to others. But it also says, “Did they wait too long?” The death rate of Italy is like 8-something percent right now. There have been more deaths in Italy than there’s been in China now. Yet, the total number of infected people in Italy is far lower.

Then, you can start to go down another rabbit hole, which is to start analyzing data and saying, “Hmm. Is the data that came out of the Chinese Communist Party a good data?” No disrespect to China, but what data has the CCP been giving in the past and is that any reflection that they’re being honest this time?

I think it might be a little bit of propaganda to show to the world, “We are good, do business with us. We’re in control.”

They may well have controlled it and reduced their numbers very quickly but then again, they may not have, or the virus may be worse than people think or maybe it’s not worse than we think. It’s really hard to understand. The biggest problem with lots of people being sick at the same time is the hospitals aren’t equipped for that number of people no matter what you do. That’s where the biggest failure is.

There was an article, I think it was the New York Times today or yesterday where the headline was, there are lots of people that are in their 40s that are in ICU. Something that, if you could read between the lines, there are more people dying that are older, but there are more people in the hospital that are in their 40s and you start thinking, “Yeah, but what do you do when you’re in a medical triage?” When you have what’s called medical martial law or you’re in an environment where you have doctors that have to triage and decide who lives and who dies.

They do it in Italy.

Well, they do this everywhere in the world. If you look back to the Vietnam War, and the doctors would mark you on the forehead if you weren’t going to make it and they have to make quick decisions. This is what happens in wartime situations. Now, imagine, that doctors right now are faced with a similar circumstance where they’re not allowed to service everybody so they’re going to have to prioritize over those who they can service, who they know will live versus those that probably won’t. We keep hearing that the oldest people are the ones who are struggling and dying.

We also know that those who have various other types of medical conditions are dying and then you say, “So, who’s the hospital and doctor going to choose between?” Just asking the question. “Well, who would a doctor pick between?” Are they going to choose the guy that’s young and 40, who’s healthy and is just sick with Coronavirus but has an extreme case, or are you going to choose the beautiful old lady who’s in her 80s but has some sort of other ailments? Who’s more likely to live? That is what happens when hospitals or doctors are overwhelmed by too many people. They have to choose.

I’m not saying that that’s necessarily what’s happening now, I’m saying it’s a possibility that that’s what’s happening which is why you see more people that are elderly dying simply because you have to choose. I don’t know if that’s the case because I’m not going in visiting hospitals or doctors, but there is something to be said when you say there are more people in the hospital that are younger than older and then you start to say, “Why would that be the case?” Does that make sense?

Yeah. Wow. What about self-protection? Where do you see the economy going right now? I know you’re not at profit.

Well, I mean I spend a lot of years in banking so I suppose I have. I’m not an economist as such. Although I’ve been in the world of banking long enough, and then in blockchain and crypto, so I have some idea of the economic world, but I’m not an expert. What worries me the most is it’s difficult to see how we get out of this situation when large companies can probably survive but small companies, entrepreneurs, and individuals cannot. 

You’re going to see a mass number of people without the ability to support their small businesses unless the banks say, “You know what? Don’t worry about the rent for the next six months. We’re just going to let the building sit there and if no one’s being charged, then those businesses will be able to revive and come back to life straight away.” 

I don’t see that happening.

Are we going to create a larger percentage of people who are at the bottom end of trying to survive and struggle or are the banks and the government’s going to be wise enough to recognize that they need to do something different to help people?

I’d like to think that the goodness of mankind I would like to believe will actually recognize that we don’t want individuals, small entrepreneurs, small- and medium-sized businesses all failing and just leaving it with Amazon, Google, and Facebook because we all know that’s probably not the ideal outcome here. But larger companies should be able to weather this storm easier than the bigger ones because they have more money. Not always the case because the airlines are struggling and Boeing is struggling, so that may or may not be the case here.

I think that we have to be very conscious that we want to create as much harmony during this situation because otherwise, we go straight to it, a depression-level event. I’ve never seen depression, I lived through the recessions of 2008 and 2011. We had a double recession in the UK, so that was pretty tough.

Then, of course, I saw a big market sell-off in 1987. I was young enough to study at a university at the time, so I saw that happen. Those were all pretty significant but to actually see every single country just stop, it’s concerning. But here’s what concerns me more. Let’s combine that now with the failure of the government.

We know that there are people in the Iranian government who are ill. We know there are people in the Italian government who are ill. We know there are people in the US government who are ill. If you start to see that all these government officials are all spending their time together, they’re in the Senate, they’re in the Parliament, they’re in the house, and they’re all exposing each other, then how far does it go before you suddenly have a mass pandemic just within governments? Then, you have an economic problem, an economic shutdown, and a government problem all at the same time?

What worries me more is the fact that we just aren’t taking that aspect of it seriously enough. While some of us have actually looked up and said, “Should we take care of ourselves and do something and we have?” Look at the government officials. They’re still shaking hands and meeting people like there’s nothing wrong.

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They are the leaders. For example, they don’t lead by, “Do what I say, don’t do what I do.”

I know. Could you imagine all the leaders out there with masks and gloves? They could have done that.

They could have done that and that would affect people’s minds a little more.

So, I look at the economic situation in terms of government failure or potential failure. You have to worry because we just don’t know the extent in terms of how many people are actually going to survive and how many don’t because we’re still too early in terms of the virus now being in the US, Canada, China, Europe. In China, I don’t think the data is there to help us understand the truth.

So we need to look at the data over the next four to six, maybe eight weeks, before we have good data that tells us what the actual extent of the damage is and how bad it is or not. If it’s not, then cool. I just got to lock myself in the house for a couple of months. But if it is bad, then I worry about government failures or the weakening of governments. Of course, if you have weakened governments and you have tension between governments, then you have a different problem.

I find it ironic that right after China the next major outbreak was Iran. Personally, I thought that was a bit odd. There are so many people traveling back and forth from San Francisco to China and from the UK to China. But Iran? I thought that’s an odd outbreak. And then Italy, I thought was an odd outbreak.

Needless to say, we don’t know why those were the places that occurred but think of it. If Iran created a power vacuum, then you’ve got all other countries around. You think what happens then. If Italy is in a vacuum, I don’t think Europe is in much of a problem, but Italy is kind of the gateway for Africans and for Middle Eastern people who have been trying to leave from Syria or from other problems in Africa and they’ve been using Italy as one of the gateways to get into Europe.

Think of potential issues that we run into when we’re locking down countries and then we can’t stop immigration or can’t control immigration that needs to be controlled to maintain some sort of sovereignty. Or you see power vacuums occur in places like the Middle East and you say, “Now what?” and is also a country with nukes.

So that kind of stuff is the stuff that I start thinking, okay, I don’t want to think that way but it’s my natural mind to be analytical and say, “These are all use cases or permutations of possibility.” That’s the stuff that if you ask. What about economic? I think economic plus and say, do we need to be worried about this or not? Probably not, but isn’t it better just to think about it and be prepared just in case? Just in case. Without being a doomsday or without being an extreme prepper but just to be thinking about it and aware of it. That’s my only thought process in this.

I believe everybody that listens so far is in a state of panic but relax.

Here’s an interesting point you just made and it’s something I’ve learned from some of the prepper groups, people I’ve met by going down another rabbit hole in life and learning something new about the prepper world because up until a couple of months ago, I’d never met a prepper who really understood it.

The first rule is don’t panic, prepare. Just don’t panic. Get out there, get a list of the things you need. There are lists online. In fact, afterward, we can put a list in your episode of some places where people can find access to these types of things. I know someone that put a list up that’s on Google. It’s a freely-accessible file that’s got everything you need. So we can put things like that up. There are some people who can just read through and understand.

Yeah. I think it’s going to be episode 213 because it was 212 last week. 

Needless to say, we can do something like that just to give people things that they can read and look at and just get access to information so they can understand. They might say, “Oh, I never thought about having that. That’s a good thing to have.”

Some people have the means to prepare such B-level events and some people don’t. How do you think that’s going to play out?

Interestingly enough, when it comes to living, it doesn’t cost a lot. Think of it this way. What do you need to make bread? You need water and if you have premade flour, then that’s all you pretty much need. If you don’t, then you pretty much need a little bit of sugar, a little bit of salt, some bread flour, some water, some oil, and you’re all set, some yeast, dry yeast is fine.

You can make bread every single day with just some basic ingredients like that. Not hard. You just have to have a mixer, you mix it, and then that’s what I’ve been doing every day now, is making bread every day and the kids love it. Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it does. 

I tried to make banana bread a month ago and it was burnt on the outside and liquidy on the inside. I’m a great cook, but when it comes to baking, I am the exact opposite. I’m going to learn how to bake. 

My wife makes great banana bread.

I’ll make it. I’ll tell her to teach me.

Yeah. She makes the banana gone like black on the outside and then really soft. She makes the most amazing banana bread. But basic ingredients like a big bag of rice, a 20-kilo bag of rice isn’t that expensive. Dried beans, pasta, cans of tomatoes, some milk that will last you a while—that’s UHT milk—some of those things are in cans. It’s not that much but if you think about it, each of these little items has some key essential ingredients like tomatoes that are full of vitamins.

Some of the canned fruit, don’t go crazy with the stuff with all the sugar in it. If you still get cans of pineapple, peaches, apricots, or what have you, you’re gonna have your fruit from that. You’ve got the juice, okay fine. It’s got a bit of extra sugar. But you don’t need a lot of sugar, you just need to have the basics of some bread. You’re not going to have a lot of meat because once the stuff that you put in your freezer is gone, then so be it.

Beans are a great source of protein. So just having dried beans, rice, pasta, you could get by a long way with that. As long as you’ve got cans of tomato, and you’ve got some passata, tomato paste or something like that. You can get a bit creative with other things too. Cans of different things and things you like. That’ll go a long way, it’s not that expensive.

Dried foods are obviously a lot cheaper because you can buy big bags of it and then just store it. You just soak beans overnight, then you have them the next day, and you can cook them.

There are ways to be creative. You don’t have to spend tons of money. Eventually, we run out of things like meat, chicken, so we’ve had to go vegetarian and that’s okay. My wife is a vegetarian anyway. I’ve been a vegetarian at home and sort of a meat lover outside but I’m okay with that. I mean, if I don’t have meat, that’s all right.

Also, I think protein powders are great to have.

That’s a good one. I didn’t think of that. That’s a great idea. Here’s another one. Vitamins, because vitamins are so essential that you can get vitamin C powder that you can mix with water so that it’s easily digestible and then your body will actually absorb it and get liquid vitamins. You can just eat them. If you get the tablets, a lot of it doesn’t absorb.

You can also get things like a Vitamin D lamp. So, I’ve got one that’s just sitting right here that I can put on. I just take my shirt off and sit under the sun. So if we don’t have a lot of sun, if it’s cloudy, overcast or whatever then you can always get a Vitamin D lamp. I mean now with spring coming, most people don’t need that.

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These are just different variances of things you can do. If you’re in a darker climate environment, then you can get a vitamin D lamp. There are lots of different ways. Vitamins are essential. Minerals, vitamins, that kind of thing and making sure if you have any medications that you’re on, make sure you have those medicines and make sure you have the basics of headache, sore throat if you get a cold, that kind of stuff. Although if you’re into isolation, you probably won’t really get sick very much because you’re here at home. You’re not exposed so much. If you’re running an Ozonator, which is killing bacteria around the house, you’re probably going to be living super healthy.

Do you exercise? So you guys have been together at home for a month. What does a day look like? Do you have a schedule?

That’s a great question. It took us a little time and even now because it’s also settling in for us, the reality that everyone’s pretty much quarantined around us now. So, we’re starting to change our schedule a little bit to become more rigid because what we realized is how do we operate generally? We get up at [7:00], we go to work in the morning, we come home at [5:00], pick up our kids from school, do their homework, and all that kind of stuff.

With the kids being out of school, fortunately, our kids’ schools are giving the kids a variety of homework assignments. Now, we’re having to do homeschooling. I’ve been thrown into that by my wife. We’re taking turns doing different lessons with the kids and sitting down with them, so that becomes part of our routine. We try to do morning rituals for breakfast every day around [9:00] in the morning so that it feels like we get up, take a shower, we do our breakfast.

I’m starting to do a bit of exercise using YouTube. There’s tons of stuff on YouTube. I guess you could say, anything that you’ve ever wanted to try, what a great opportunity. If it’s Taekwondo, Tai Chi, yoga, or anything. You can learn stuff and you can do it online. Actually, this is kind of fun because I’m exploring that. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have much for work right now because all of my work was really contingent on a lot of things that have all stopped now. So, I’m taking the opportunity to spend it with my kids and do some educating.

Just before our show, we had a family night to play games with the kids. That’s something else. Buy or load up on some board games, puzzles, or things like that, stuff that’s not terribly expensive. We had a dance night one night where we put on music and we just danced with the kids and that was great. I was just dying, I’m so tired. I made dinner with the kids and then we had a dance night. We try to do things just so we have positive and happy memories because that’s so important.

I’ve started teaching my 7-year old how to meditate with me which has been really interesting. So just getting him to sit there and to listen to meditation music with me and I’ve sort of guided him through the process and he’s enjoying it. I’m thinking, “Oh my God, this is so much fun.” I mean like, who would’ve thought? Sometimes, routine yes and sometimes, just coming up with interesting and creative things we can do each day with the kids to keep them entertained.

My wife’s still full-time working, I have a little bit of work so we both have things to do that we have responsibilities for others, our clients and our work. But in the meantime, we’ve offset all of that other time with the kids and making sure that they get our love and our attention, and we find fun things to do with them. Some of it’s educational, some of it’s just fun. Of course, we have our dogs. We have plenty of things to do with the dogs like play ball, play rope and all that.

Do you think that now your relationship with your wife is stronger?

Oh my God, yes. We’ve always had a very good strong relationship. But when you’re in times of crisis—maybe it is and maybe it’s not—although, we’re erring on the side of its caution because we said things are going to lock down and they did and here we are, weeks in advance of everybody else, knowing it was coming and feeling it. Going through a preparation exercise together, figuring out where each other’s strengths are, who’s going to do what in the house and really dividing and conquering, it has made us so much closer and so much more connected.

How do you do that? How do you divide who does what?

I like to unload the dishwasher.

My husband, too. 

For example or vice versa, I might like loading it, she likes to unload it or she likes to do the laundry and I like to match socks or find things that you can do. I like to vacuum, she likes to mop, whatever. Guys generally are not particularly interested in doing cleaning stuff and women usually get annoyed with us because we’re bad at it. But I like to clean bathrooms, I don’t mind doing that. I don’t like cleaning kitchens.

We just find different things that we each can relate to, that we recognize are critical and important because we want to keep the house clean and safe. We don’t want to be living in a big mess because that’s not very nice. We’re here every day so we want to make it a comfortable environment. There’s a bit of give and take. Some people have cleaners. We had a cleaner that came once a week, we don’t have a cleaner anymore because we’re not letting people in the house.

Yeah. We let go of our cleaners as well as our nanny. It’s not easy, especially our nanny. She was a part of the family, we see her every day.

With restricted travel, they also can’t travel either. If you have any form of either a medical martial law or full-on martial law, then they wouldn’t be allowed to travel anyway. It depends on which country you’re in but a lot of them are declaring a form of medical martial law which is where anybody could basically take you off the street. No medical, police, or military official and say, “Well, we think you have Coronavirus and we could have you arrested.” That’s a whole another rabbit hole scary stuff you don’t want to talk about.

We decided not to talk about conspiracy theories that we don’t know.

But it’s a reality that if you’re deeply considered potentially unhealthy, then you can be taken away and be put in quarantine.

This worldwide crisis is total insanity, but it's better to be safe and find out it's all for nothing than get sick and fail miserably. Share on X

In Israel, they already took the privacy from the citizens where the government can go and read everyone’s phone and this is how they locate Coronavirus-infected people.

Really?

Yeah. Every day, they read your phone. There is no privacy. That’s where we’re heading in the world.

There’s been a lot of articles recently about whatever we think is secure isn’t. Of course, we probably all know that because the NSA and various other government agencies have huge amounts of technology to crack stuff.

Wow, thank you. Before we say goodbye, thank you so much for sharing this. I know it’s late and I know that this is your time to rest, but you are so kind as to get on the call and do this.

It’s a pleasure. Thank you for that. For you, of course, it’s always a pleasure.

Thank you. Because I think it is going to help a lot of people if they can go beyond fear and into preparation. It is going to really help a lot of people and we should prepare while we can and while we can afford it.

Exactly. Prepare, not panic. Just get things that you need and know that farmers are still growing food or preparing food for you anyway. Farmers aren’t shutting down and there’s still going to be governments moving food from the farmers or from various places where production is taking place to the shops so there will always be some supply within each country even when borders are shut. 

Rather than panic, just prepare and have things a couple of weeks in advance rather than a couple of days in advance. Don’t shop for two to three days. Just have enough stuff that you don’t have to run out every couple days and then just rest knowing that you’ve got stuff there, that if things get worse you’re okay. If you have to ration food, well it’s been done in the past, we can do it again. Just be careful how much you’re eating, monitor what you’re doing, and then you’ll be fine.

And before we say goodbye, what are your three top tips to living a stellar life in isolation? 

One is to forget what’s going on outside of the house and embrace the love and the joy that you have with the people you’re with. Do fun things with them, enjoy their company. Like I said play, dance, do crazy things. That’s one thing. You have that love there, embrace it. It’s the most amazing thing. First of all, endorphins give you positive, happy energy, makes you feel happier and healthier. That’s one.

A second one is if you haven’t meditated before, try. There are tons and tons of online stuff on YouTube, Spotify, Apple iTunes, and Google Play. To be honest, some of the meditation stuff just to get inside yourself, just get away from everything else, just shut down, and just try to get into focusing your energies toward positivity—bringing energy in, sending energy out—is really nice and it’s good. It gives you a feeling of harmony.

The third is to do something for yourself. That is exercise, learn to do magic, play a game, do a computer game, read a book, read my book, whatever it is. Do something that gives you personal pleasure. Some of it’s with people so that you’re getting the love and the affection. Some of it is something for yourself, so you feel like you’re getting self-gratification in any form. Learn something online. For me, the third one is meditation. It doesn’t have to be meditation. You can find other ways to create that kind of positive, happy bubble of energy that you need to kind of keep going.

Right, so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. I felt your heart. Where can people find your book or contact you if they want to work with you?

We have our own website, it’s beleftbehind.com. On the website, you’re able to get access from there. We have other links to Amazon, Google Play, Kindle. Of course with books probably not being delivered, if you want to buy it in electronic, digital form, then it’s available in quite a few places. Barnes and Noble as well.

To get in touch with me, they can send an email to authors@nullbeleftbehind.com, which my co-author and I are both accessing that email, so they can email me there. Of course, I’m very happy to help people. I’ve spent most of my career in entrepreneurial work, so if people want help or want to figure out how to do better prepping, then of course just drop me a note. Happy to chat.

Thank you so much, Steve.

My pleasure.

And thank you for everyone who is listening or watching. Remember, take care of yourself, meditate, be together with your loved ones, be in the moment, stay safe out there, and have a stellar life. This is Orion, until next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓} Stay aware of what’s going on but only read or watch from reliable sources. False and misleading information is rampant during times like this to invoke mass fear and anxiety.
{✓} It is better to be safe than sorry. Do some research on how to prepare if things get worse and implement what you’ve learned. 
{✓} Stock up on necessities that can last up to 2-3 months, such as food, water, and hygiene products, but don’t hoard so other people can acquire what they need as well. 
{✓} Always have three each of something important. Remember the saying, “one is none, and two is one.” It’s good always to have a spare in case the first one doesn’t work right.  
{✓} Decontaminate yourself before entering the house. Make sure to leave your shoes outside, put your clothes in the washer right away, leave your purse in a secluded area in your home, and take a shower before settling in.
{✓} Go to a clinic if you need to see a doctor and not in a hospital. Doctors in hospitals are more overwhelmed, and you’ll likely increase your chances of getting the virus.
{✓} Get back to basics and remove any excess in your life right now. Make your lifestyle as simple as possible so you can save your stocked food for a longer time.  
{✓} Find ways to keep yourself busy. Plan activities within the day for you, your spouse, and your kids. Create themed days to keep yourself entertained during the quarantine. 
{✓} Stay home as much as you can. Don’t go out of the house unless it’s necessary. You’re not only putting your health at risk but also your loved ones and the people you pass by along the way.
{✓} Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and avoid touching your face. It’s been repeatedly said, but it’s the most crucial tip to help prevent contact with the virus.

Links and Resources

About Steve Good

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

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