Prepping for doomsday
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I had a dream, which is not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished.
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Costco's got 150 serving emergency food bucket. Americans love this shit, but why? Today on Today Explained, a concise history of our obsession with the end of the world.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue? Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
You're listening to Today Explained.
My name is Robert Kirsch. I'm a professor at Arizona State University. And among all the other university duties that I have, I also research doomsday prepping and the end of the world.
How does one get into, at the university level, researching the end of the world?
Well, it started off as this sort of investigation into these doomsday prepping kits that were coming out of Silicon Valley from this startup called Preppy.
What was the story that the Preppy, P-R-E-P-P-Y?
An I, intentionally misspelled, of course, yeah.
Right, okay, Silicon Valley. What is the story that that bag is telling?
So the way that they sold it, at least at the time that we were looking at their materials, was that this was a bug-out bag that you would be proud to display in your living room.
This is a fancy bag.
This is very upscale. This is canvas that's waterproof coated and all made by hand. So it's kind of like you're getting like a nice bag of Barneys, except we put all this good survival stuff in it too. There's Nats Brothers chocolate, caviar, and a champagne koozie.
That this didn't mark you as some sort of like weirdo who was sort of secretly kind of stashing away goods, but was rather a sort of outward display of good taste. And so, again, these class markers become super important in telling this story, trying to sort of pull this behavior out of the shadows and sort of trying to locate it at the beating heart of mainstream American culture.
Do you have a bug out bag?
I don't. Where I live in the desert, FEMA issues recommendations for geographic regions for what people should have. So my co-author Emily does have a bug out bag because she lives in the Bay Area. I have 15 gallons of potable water ready because I live in the desert.
Good, good, good. Yeah, I have a little I have what I'd call a kit, a just in case kit. I have always wondered how many other people are engaged in prepping or prepping adjacent behavior. Like how many of us are there out there?
So it can be hard to track because on the one hand, there's no like bright line where a certain behavior turns into prepping. Right. But FEMA does give a national household survey, and their 2023 results indicate that about half of Americans indicate that they are engaging in some kind of preparedness for some kind of adverse event.
Huh. If you told me to envision a prepper, I have a picture in my head. Is my picture fair? Is there a type of person who preps?
I think you're right that there's a sort of media spectacle version of a prepper, and that gets informed by a lot of cable reality television.
Tyler Smith and his cousin Chris are building homemade body armor. They hope it will give them the upper hand if society collapses.
I never want to go too far without a good metal pot. This is going to allow me to cook my food and get all the nutrients and also make lots of teas.
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