system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 How does an EMP work, what exactly would it effect, and what could you do to protect your must have electronics?
gpt
An EMP ( Electro-Magnetic Pulse) damages/disables/disrupts electronic devices by inducing current into the circuitry. this causes all sorts of issues with the electronic device( hardware is seeing current/voltage in places it shouldn't and doesn't know how to handle it) and if the induction is strong enough it can cause the circuitry( or really any conductive metal) to heat up and potentially melt. 

In order to protect your must have devices that aren't already designed to handle it you would have to put them into whats know as a Faraday cage. essentially a cage of very conductive metal that will 'absorb' the inducted current. The cage should not be touching the electronic device, or if it is the contact point should be insulated from the cage itself.

>That is the real explanation if i were to try and do a true ELI5 it would probably look like this

think of electricity as a bunch of angry pixies running around in wires, the go from place to place and tell the device what to do.

An EMP is basically an explosion of **really** angry pixies. They get into the electric device and disrupt all of the other pixies and cause the device to break because there are too many pixies telling it to do something different. 

you can protect a device by putting it into a metal cage that will keep all of the pixies out so that cant bother it any more.

-source- i am a medical device technician and had to learn a lot of electrical theory. Also i call 'em angry pixies because they look pretty when they come out of the wires but they tend to bite alot.