Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World

Disasters happen. Be prepared. Here’s how.

As a leading security engineer, Michal Zalewski has spent his career methodically anticipating and planning for cyberattacks. In Practical Doomsday, Zalewski applies the same thoughtful, rational approach to preparing for disasters of all kinds. By sharing his research, advice, and a healthy dose of common sense, he’ll help you rest easy knowing you have a plan for the worst—even if the worst never comes.

The book outlines a level-headed model for evaluating risks, one that weighs the probability of scenarios against the cost of preparing for them. You’ll learn to apply that model to the whole spectrum of potential crises, from personal hardships like job loss or a kitchen fire, to large-scale natural disasters and industrial accidents, to recurring pop-culture fears like all-out nuclear war. You’ll then explore how basic lifestyle adjustments, such as maintaining a robust rainy-day fund, protecting yourself online, and fostering good relationships with your neighbors, can boost your readiness for a wide range of situations. You’ll also take a no-nonsense look at the supplies and equipment essential to surviving sudden catastrophes, like prolonged power outages or devastating storms, and examine the merits and legal implications of different self-defense strategies.

You’ll learn:

How to identify and meaningfully assess risks in your life, then develop strategies for managing them

Ways to build up and diversify a robust financial safety net—a key component of nearly all effective preparedness strategies

How to adapt your prep plans to a variety of situations, from shelter-in-place scenarios to evacuations by car or on foot

Sensible approaches to stockpiling food, water, and other essentials, along with recommendations on what supplies are actually worth having

 
Disasters happen, but they don’t have to dominate your life. Practical Doomsday will help you plan ahead, so you can stop worrying about what tomorrow may bring and start enjoying your life today.

Michal Zalewski has been actively involved in disaster preparedness for more than a decade, including the publication of a popular 2015 guide titled Disaster Planning for Regular Folks. By day, he is an accomplished security researcher who has been working in information security since the late 1990s, helping companies map out and manage risk in the digital domain. He is the author of two classic security books, The Tangled Web and Silence on the Wire (both No Starch Press). He spent 11 years at Google building its product security program before joining Snap Inc. as a VP of Security & Privacy Engineering. Zalewski grew up in Poland under communist rule, lived through the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and moved to the US in 2001.