Prepping for doomsday (or Tuesday)

What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, 7-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic Gold Medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubber, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is AmMom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. I started doing some prep work after the pandemic. I feel very underprepared for disasters that are always seeming to be lurking around the corner. I did go so far as to even purchase it by arm just for protection and safety in case the world went absolutely numb. You guys, it's almost summer. The flowers are in bloom. We're now just a week away from the Eastern Pacific base in hurricane season starting. Time to treat yourself. Plan a vacation. An inflation rose about 3.8% in April according to new numbers. Life is great. Ukraine has become a testing ground for robotic warfare. Okay, I consider myself a glass half full kind of person, but even I'm not that naive. That said, I'm woefully unprepared if things go left. You, on the other hand. If there ever is something like a nuclear strike or war, whatever, we are right down the road from the interstate so we can get outside of Massachusetts to a more rural area. I do have a go bag ready for hurricanes. I got an old school paper map, a satellite communicator, a power bank with every adapter and cord you can imagine. It doesn't matter about guns, how many guns you have or how many MREs you have stored. If you don't have strong communities, you're not going to get very far. Living on high alert can be absolutely exhausting, but if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. I'm John Glenn Hill and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, we're prepping without the panic. To start, I talked to someone who's a prepping expert and that's putting it mildly. My name is Dr. Chris Ellis. I am a disaster resilience civil defense, homeland defense expert. I got my PhD from Cornell University, have four master's degrees and been doing this work for about the last seven years for the military for those skills that I just listed. What made you want to start going down that path in the first place? So a few things. One, as I was growing up, I was told this is back in the 80s that the only time that I would see polar bears would be in zoos because we had global warming at the time, the ice caps were going to melt and climate apocalypse was coming. And then from my father's side, he was an evangelical Christian and he told me that we needed to be ready for the Antichrist and to get ready for kind of the end of days. As I went through my life, I joined the military and I kind of saw man's inhumanity to man. So all of those various things, economic collapse, the Y2K threat, et cetera, I really started looking at preparedness more and more and found that it was exceptionally rational. And I wanted to kind of bust some of the myths that are involved in it. And you can only do that if you kind of get really into the practice of the thing. When most of us think of prepper, we might think of a man probably white with a lot of guns in a bunker somewhere in the woods. I have enough food stock to last 20 people for three months. I'm preparing my family for the imminent collapse of the United States economy. I'm prepping for a terrorist attack on our electrical grid that will send our society into chaos. Are we getting this wrong? What we're finding right now, and this is one of the myths that I wanted to debunk based on hard statistics. So what I found is that back when the data was being released by FEMA, if they did this national household survey of between 5 and 7,000 Americans for several years and release the raw data. So when I looked through that, I actually saw that the number of white men was about 75% of preppers back when they first started releasing the data. And now it's only about 55%. We're actually finding that other ethnicities actually prepare more on average than whites do, for example, those that are isolated. So native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, Alaskan natives, et cetera. And so we're seeing a very large ecumenical portrayal now of preppers both in the reality and then also their coverage as well. So it is no longer the stereotype that is true. What are these people preparing for? What are the most relevant disasters that are likely to come our way? So what I've found is that there are five main heuristics of individuals that kind of do these things. I've been them into five groups and it's not just America, it's actually across the world. So one group I call the homesteaders. These individuals are concerned with just food security. Maybe they're afraid of genetically modified organisms or just want to be able to eat on a regular basis because they've seen famines in the past. Certain foods are pretty high in price. The supply chain still hasn't recovered in many cases. Right now 63% of America is in a drought. There's a fear from the Strait of Hormuz about fertilizer and so they're food prepped. Well, we just finished harvesting all of our storage crops from this season. They keep about 10 pigs year round, so I have about 400 pounds of meat in the freezer at any given time. Another group of the sentinels, these are kind of the more stereotyped group. These are the gun group. They're afraid of either a without rule of law scenario, lots of crime. It's as simple as opening up a drawer and there's your protection. Or government overreach and, you know, anterity. I'm not going to depend on the police to defend me. I'm going to depend on my 308, my 357, my 45 colt, my AK, my AR. Another group are the interdependent. These are like your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man kind of folks. Don't worry man, everything's going to be okay. They want to help other individuals very much in their preparedness skills in a very widely based as far as what their threats are. The fourth group are the Noah's. These are usually exceptionally well off individuals and what distinguishes them is that they have a bunker. This is the fat boy. This is the largest bunker we make. And then the fifth group is the faithful. The faithful and the Noah's are a bit different. The Noah's are concerned about saving their skin. The faithful are concerned about saving their souls. They're more religiously oriented. Jesus, of course, has repeatedly told us throughout the New Testament to be prepared, to be watchful for his coming. So it really kind of depends about what prepper you're talking about. There's no one size fits all and many people fit into multiple groups. There's not just one, but these are not like hardcore solid bins in which someone is in. Is there a group that sort of gets it, right? I don't know. Like you said, people can go into multiple bins, but I don't know. Maybe I hang out with some interdependents. They sound pretty like a winning team to me. What I will say is this is the more kind of facets that you have, the better you are off. One of the great things about the interdependent is that the American style of prepping has been very individualized since basically the 50s and 60s. And that's been kind of pushed. We're a very efficient economy and it's kind of, you know, this is a Western way of doing things, which is why prepping in America is more expensive. But the interdependent have looked back and said pre-World War II, how were we as societies? And we were as societies were very community resilient. So the interdependents are really reaching out to that community-based preparedness mindset, and that is the next evolution. People are slowly moving back to that. I'm seeing a lot of individuals that are getting into the prepping movement saying, hey, I can't do all of this alone. I need to have a community of individuals that really kind of fits the things that I'm weak at. What are the different ways we can prepare? So the three main areas are really location-wise, the preparedness you have at your home, and that's for staying. So the power gets knocked out because of winter storm or tornado, whatever it is. How can I be resilient within my house without publicly provided water, power, or transportation? And that's usually your largest prep. I encourage folks at home to have at least 31 days if they can after they've really gotten into this and a multiple set of factors. The next place is in your car when you're traveling. That is your really your car accident bag. And if you were to run out of gas, if you were to get T-Bone, whatever you're out of cell phone service, what would you need to be able to walk home or hail a Uber or something along those lines? And then the third place is at work. At work, you may have to shelter in place for 24, maybe even 48 hours. So a change of clothes, a few protein bars, things along those lines, things that don't need any cooking skills or cooking energy, I should say. So the priority is just what I said. Home first, then your bug out bag, your car bag, and then the office. What is a bug out bag? Different for every person. So there's a thousand examples out there. Some people like to have a whole bunch of guns in ammunition because I think they're going to have to go out and shoot deer bears or fend off the looters, et cetera. I'm not too martial in my bug out bag. I would say that the basic bug out bag, you should keep it in your mudroom or right by your garage. So if there is a disaster, you have to go right now, you can grab it. So the things that would be in that would be three days of water and food for everyone in your family, pets included. I would have probably $500 to $1,000 in cash just in case you go to a hotel and the system is down, but they're still allowing bookends. Or again, you just need the cash on hand. I would have where your emergency documents, let's say you're at the threat of a big flood or a mudslide or something along those lines, your emergency documents, your birth certificate, your marriage certificate, the kids birth certificate, et cetera, very quickly accessible. And in one single folder, you can just open up that fireproof safe, grab it, stuff in your bug out bag and go. Also some sort of emergency communication advice. An emergency radio can be found very cheaply. There's a lot of them out there as well. But those kinds of things when you're covering all the bases is what is in the normal bug out bag medical supplies as well. Everyone should prep. But here's what I tell folks. You can't do it fear based. If you do it fear based, that's the that's your limbic system. That's your lizard brain, you know, firing off. And it keeps you in a state of fear rather than a state of agency and hope. And you know, the saying is we're not preparing for doomsday. We're preparing for Tuesday. So doing things that make you feel like you can have more agency over your life, that you can have more actions, that you can, you know, take positive steps to better yourself and better your community is a good thing. If it increases your agency and decreases your fear, that's the way to prep for sure. Prepping can look different depending on who you are and where you live. Up next, prep in the city. Support for this show comes from Quince. You make difficult choices each and every day. 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That's Q U I N C E dot com slash explain it to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash explain it. Support for the show today comes from the boldly named granola. It can be a real struggle to get through back to back meetings. You're nodding along, contributing, trying to stay present. But in the back of your mind, you just want to go home and put on Olivia Rodrigo. Meetings can be a mess. Granola wants to fix that. Granola is an AI powered notepad built for the way people actually meet. You simply take rough notes like you normally would. And in the background granola's securely transcribing the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools. You already use no setup, no awkward bots. Granola says it's just your normal meeting with superpowers that you need to do your job better. So if meetings are eating up your day, granola says there's a no brainer situation here. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash explain. It's granola.ai slash explain to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai slash explained. I'm John Glenn Hill. Back with more explain it to me. Anna Maria Bounds is a sociology professor at Queens College in New York. For me, the most fascinating thing as a sociologist is taking a look at how regular people manage to prep in very small apartments. You know, trying to maximize space, trying to think of creative ways to better protect their families. And I think during the pandemic, we all kind of became preppers, right? We had to figure out how to protect ourselves with limited means and limited resources. How different is prepping in an urban environment from prepping in, say, the suburbs or out in the country? I would argue that the, with all due respect to suburban and rural preppers, urban preppers, particularly in the city of New York, are dealing with reality. So in other words, they've been through terrorist attacks. You know, they've been through natural disasters. They've been through technological failures and they've been through near economic collapse with the great recession. So New Yorkers are used to being very street savvy. You know, they're used to having street smarts. Now they're developing what I call survival smarts. Yeah, you know, I am talking with you from my apartment. I actually refer to it as the Babe Cave, my little bachelor. That's great. It's a Babe Cave. But I admit, you know, I have all these comforts. I love my house plants. I love all my little day-to-day snacks. But I am 0% prepared for a disaster. Where should I start? What do I need to do? One of the things with, you know, the city is we're used to having what we want when we want it. But the idea of prepping though, and with, especially during the pandemic, things slowed down. People realized that they had to rely on themselves. So if you're interested in prepping, one of the first things that you need to do is you need to take a look at how you eat and how you can store it in your apartment. And I'm saying this because unfortunately during a disaster, DoorDash doesn't deliver. And we're all used to that. So for New Yorkers, the idea of just having a completed pantry with canned goods and, you know, rice and flour and salt and, you know, tend to meet all of that, that's very foreign to us. Prepping makes you realize, well, what happens if I don't have any water? What can I do? Well, maybe I should store a little water. You know, maybe I need to take a look at some, make some extra space underneath my bed, under my couch. You know, there are all sorts of creative things, you know, that that preppers do that I've seen. Okay, I understand you've become a bit of a prepper yourself. Can you walk me through your setup? Because from what I can see, you've been able to do this in a way that is very aesthetically pleasing. And I realize that's not the most important thing during a disaster. It is important. Listen, you live in a babe cave. You know what's important. Yeah. Okay, it is important because the whole thing is there's another myth about prepping is that people think that, you know, that means that you have to have a whole room dedicated to stacks of toilet paper and rice and, you know, spaghetti sauce. Absolutely not. You just need to think carefully about how you live in to learn how to manage your space. In the living room in the corner, I had a white freezer, which looked absolutely ridiculous. And I thought, you know what, I can do better than that. So I applied wallpaper to it and, you know, I think it looks really cute. It looks just a little box like a little storage box. And the things that I keep in there are are varied. I keep several different types of meat. I have some uncooked and then I have some that are cooked and sliced and, you know, that I cooked and ready to go. And I've packaged them. We have vegetables. We have pasta and we have soup. We have pot pies and extra bottles of water because the idea is this is a place to store water. And in the event of, you know, a blackout, our freezer will stay food will stay colder and longer because we have the frozen bottles of water in there. If we get an injury and I need to place something cold on our leg or on our back, we could use that. And I certainly do actually rely on that more than, you know, one time. So, yeah, it's a real asset. You know, I'm pretty fit. I try to go to the gym. Are there things I need to be prepared to do in a disaster? If you're someone who says, well, you know what, in the event of an emergency, I'm going to leave. I'm going to put together a bug out bag. Well, you need to be sure that you can actually carry that, that you can, you know, that it isn't too heavy, that you edit what you have in there carefully and that you walk and that you practice with it. That was a really important part of as an ethnographer spending time with preppers is that they would do exercises where they would bug out, you know, and you would spend, you know, the weekend, you know, outdoors, which is unusual because for a lot of city people, you know, they're not interested in camping. Whatever it is that you decide is going to be best for you in an emergency. Okay, don't try it out during the emergency. You need to practice it. Okay, because you need to get over your fear of whatever it is you're doing because that's part of the game. You have to be confident. You have to be calm. Will you be perfect? No. But the idea is that you'll have your bearings and this won't be something new to you. What have you found to be the most important thing to have on hand? My husband. Oh, I love that. Oh, I love love. No, seriously, seriously, you know what? No, honestly, we, you know, we went through the pandemic together and, you know, we've been through September 11. We've been through the blackout. So I think it's not just, you know, having supplies. It's about having a good system of support, you know, having people that you can work with, people you can depend on, that you can learn from during easy times and difficult times. Your rider dies. Coming up, how to prep your mind. This week on Criminal, a man leaves his girlfriend at the top of a mountain. He's charged with her death. And then at the trial, his ex-girlfriend testifies that the same thing had happened to her too. She screamed. She felt dizzy. And, you know, at that moment she realized she was completely alone. Thomas apparently left her. On our other show, This Is Love, a story of another couple on a mountain. There's no ledges. There's... you're trapped. I had confidence that there's no way this many things can go wrong in a row. You can listen to both episodes right now on Criminal and This Is Love, wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole? Finance Edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. We're taking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's on the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. It's shake you. This is explain it to me. When we think of prepping, we often think of items, stuff like canned goods or clean water tablets. But Amanda Ripley says to survive a disaster, that's not all you need. She wrote about it in her book, The Unthinkable, who survives when disaster strikes and why? I learned from covering disasters as a reporter that survivors have these incredible insights into what it actually feels like physically, socially, mentally to go through a disaster. There's usually three phases that most of us go through. And sometimes we circle in and out of all three of them over and over again. But the first one is this very intense period of disbelief or denial. Did that just happen? That did not just happen. Where your brain will work very creatively to convince you that everything is fine. I'm just imagining things. Everything is okay. Everything is fine. That is important to plan for. And the second one is deliberation. So after denial, you tend to get very social. And you look to the people around you. Did y'all just hear that? The people in your circle. I'm not sure, but I think it's over there. Strangers on a train or a bus, wherever you happen to be, coworkers, and you tend to move in groups and you will remain very loyal to that group, even if you didn't know them before. I think you're right. I'm seeing what you're seeing. I've got you. And that is a very normal reaction that we share with chimpanzees and other higher order mammals, that we form groups and we tend to be very pro-social, almost courteous to a fault. After you. No, after you. No, please, after you. And we check with each other before doing anything. So this phase is really important. On average, people check with five sources before they evacuate before a hurricane, for example. So the wisdom of that group really matters. So after denial and deliberation, you have the decisive moment. Okay. I think it's really time to go. And that's where you take action or in many more cases than you might expect you shut down and sort of freeze or stop moving or move very, very slowly, which is sometimes called negative panic. And so that is much more common than what we tend to expect, which is hysteria or antisocial behavior or panic. Our brains are really these amazing machines, how they protect us. But sometimes what they do doesn't always work in our favor. What are some things we should be doing when disaster strikes? How can we take control of our brains in that moment so we can do what we need to to survive? I think there's three things that I have learned and still take with me in my everyday life. And the first one is to have a little more situational awareness of the places where I spend time. So even in a hotel, I'll try to take the stairs down and it sounds crazy, but sometimes you end up in some weird places like you end up in the kitchen. But it's really helpful to have some muscle memory for how to get out of the places that you're in. And so that includes if you work in a tall building or if you live in a tall building, just going down the stairs, having that muscle memory because it'll be really, really hard to find the stairwell for the first time under extreme stress. So having a situational awareness, but then also really trying to build connection and rapport and relationship with the people that you see every day. I know that sounds very basic, but those are the people who are always going to be there in a disaster. It's not first responders. They just cannot get to you quickly enough. Usually in big disasters, it's days or weeks if you ever come into contact with a first responder. So it is really important to know who on your block is elderly and might need someone to check on them in an extreme heat event or who on your block is a nurse, right? In case you need help or someone else does. Just knowing that kind of thing and building those connections, I love that advice because it serves you even if nothing terrible ever happens, right? It just makes life better to have connections in the place where you live and build those connections. And then the third one in the immediate moment, so once you've maybe you're trying to push through denial, deliberation, the decisive moment. The most effective way under stress to access your nervous system on purpose and calm yourself down a little bit, which is what we need. We need to kind of calm ourselves down, not all the way, but a little is through conscious, intentional breathing. So that is really the only way to do that in the moment. One thing that I do is just as a normal everyday practice when I start getting stressed out, you know, when I'm trying to pay my taxes or dealing with traffic or whatever, I do box breathing, which is something that is taught to, you know, everyone from soldiers to people doing yoga, right? So it's in for four counts. One, two, three, four. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. And it's a very effective way to get in the habit of lowering that nervous system response so that you can access your higher order thinking skills so you don't get tunnel vision, right? So you don't lose eye hand coordination, all the kind of things that start to degrade under extreme stress. You've given us a lot of good information and a lot of good tips here about what to do during a disaster, but what about preparing for one? How do you live day to day in this uncertainty? Well, the technical term for this kind of anxiety about disasters is dread, which I think is a great term. Yeah. And there's an equation for dread. There are certain variables that dial up or down your dread level. And one of them is unfamiliarity with the threat. The less exotic and strange a threat is to you, sometimes the less dreadful it is. So one thing you can do is understand the threats that you're most likely to face and understand that while it is true that disasters are very frequent now, at the same time, and this is really important, anything often gets missed, the number of deaths has dropped by about two thirds over the past 50 years. So disasters have gotten less disastrous even as they've gotten more frequent. And so why is that? Well, it's because humans have gotten better at working together to predict disasters and get out of harm's way just in the nick of time. So, you know, as an example, in 1990, the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only 24 hours in advance. Now you get 72 hours. So that's a very big deal. But all of this progress and all the future progress we can make, which is huge, depends upon trust. We need to work on trusting each other as Americans and building institutions that we can trust. So in the longer term, if you're thinking about preparing, for me, I don't do a lot of stockpiling of resources and that kind of thing. And for me, I try very hard to find opportunities to try to build human trust and connection. The stronger your neighborhood or family or school is before a disaster strikes, the better you will recover. And so that health of a community, how fair it is, how trustworthy it is, connected it is, that matters way more, it turns out, than the threat itself. That's it for us this week. We have a show coming up about infidelity, what counts as cheating and why it makes us so angry, even when we're not the one that got cheated on. But we want to know, have you ever been unfaithful? Why do you do it? And what do you make of that choice now? Tell us. 1-800-618-8545 or email askvox.com. Also, consider becoming a Vox member. Vox members get to listen to this podcast ad-free. Head over to vox.com. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. It was edited by Ginny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by David Taddeshaw. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Cullen Hill. Thank you so much for listening. Bye!