AP 0494: What Happens If the Internet Goes Away?

Askpat 494 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 494 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from Prabhu over in India.

All right, now here's today's question from Prabhu.

Prabhu: Hey Pat. Good morning. This is Prabhu from India. I run a blog called BloggersBooks.com. [Editor's note: This site is no longer active.] I have a question for you. How do you manage the content curation? I mean, say Facebook goes down tomorrow. Facebook or Twitter, or Pinterest, they can go down tomorrow, then what's the plan? As far as we're talking about email lists, what if email goes out of scene tomorrow? What if internet goes out of scene tomorrow? What's the next move? Thanks. If you are listening to my question, if you could answer the question, thanks very much. Cheers. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Man, this is a great question, Prabhu. Thank you so much for asking. What if the internet were to disappear tomorrow. I think the world would just be in mass hysteria honestly, because there are so many people who rely on it and it runs the world essentially. There's a lot of people out there who would be very lost. Now of course, not taking into consideration if the internet went down, then the stock market would crash and all this other stuff would happen, everybody would lose their money and that sort of thing, if just the internet were to go down but everything else essentially stayed the same, what would I do? What would be my next move?

I'm putting things into place in case that were to happen. I don't think the internet's going to go down. What I mean is having a plan B and a C and a plan D. This is essentially being able to take the money that I've earned and investing it in other places and diversifying my portfolio. Not just my passive income online business portfolio, but other things like real estate, that's something I'm getting into now, other forms of investments too.

That's really important because the internet, of course, that's the kind of business I teach, but that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't be able to survive without the internet. I think I could do a good job of creating something and providing solutions for people in a brick and mortar space, for example, and that sort of thing. I do have some emergency funds set aside in case something were to happen—and that would obviously be an emergency. I could see myself setting up shop and creating a business in some other way, shape, or form. I don't know what that is and what that looks like. It depends on what the whole situation is.

That's a very interesting question. Yeah, I mean, let's all … Everybody who's listening to this, if you use the hashtag #AskPat494, answer this question for me. What would you do if the internet were to disappear tomorrow? What would be your plan or what would you see yourself doing? Maybe I'd buy a farm or something and start creating my own crops and just being self-sufficient that way. I think that would be very interesting and fun and necessary actually for a lot of people to do. Anyway, let's go to some of your other parts of your question.

What if email went down? Well, email is obviously very important and that's kind of a safety net for a lot of people in case the social media sites went down because that is a way for you to contact your audience directly. I've had problems with my website before where my email list was the saving grace because I was able to talk to my audience still even though my website was down. If my website had gotten completely hacked to a point where I wouldn't be able to get access to it anymore, and I'm talking about SmartPassiveIncome.com, when it was hacked in 2013 and I couldn't get into it for a week and a half. I lost about $15,000 in the process, kind of estimated. The email list was everything I needed to set up shop somewhere else if I needed to, online of course. I, every once in a while, export my entire email list into a spreadsheet so I keep that on my hard drive in case that particular provider were to leave or go away. That's another safety net. I keep that in my backup in my external hard drive.

Yeah, so again, just having these plan Bs. These are obviously worst case scenarios, but it's obviously something that can happen. We all thought MySpace was going to be around for a while, and even though it's coming back, it's coming back in a different way. It's not what we all thought it was. A lot of businesses were created on the back of MySpace and then kind of just disappeared as soon as MySpace kind of disappeared too, so I think it's really important to think about these questions and that's why I appreciate this, Prabhu. Yeah, I don't necessarily have a plan, but I do have things in place in case things were to happen and I do feel like I have the skills necessary. I think that's really what the most important thing that you need to realize is, that you're—as an entrepreneur—gaining these skills that would allow you to survive no matter what platform, what situation is happening in terms of the world or what technology exists. Even if it were to disappear, you'd have the skills necessary to become a successful entrepreneur even if we went back to the olden days when all electricity disappeared and you were back in the 1800s. You'd have the skills to be able to figure out how to make things work. That's what really entrepreneurship is all about, adapting to the situation that you're in to make it work and succeed.

Curious to hear what everybody else thinks about this question, just a really, really fun question to ask and I appreciate that Prabhu. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Again, use the hashtag #AskPat494 to let me know what would you do if the internet went down tomorrow. Love to hear your thoughts.

Obviously if you have a question to ask, head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. I appreciate all your questions coming in. I thank you so much for that.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the week by Steve Farnsworth. He said, “Trustworthy content has a balanced point of view. It asks and answers the right questions. It doesn't love itself. It tries to inform and educate.” I appreciate you. Take care and if you have a second, head on over to iTunes and leave a quick review for AskPat. I appreciate that and I'll see you guys next week. Thank you for listening in and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Bye.