Preparing for the end of the world is a multibillion-dollar business. People are stockpiling weapons, buying luxury bunkers, and even building flammable moats...but prepping is also an American tradition. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States by Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World by Dorian LynskeyListen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. A member of the post-apocalyptic "Wasteland Warriors" group celebrating to metal music. Photo by Axel Heimken/picture alliance via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is doomsday prepping and why is it popular in America?
There are apocalypses everywhere for those with eyes to see. The Last of Us is back. Netflix made the A-turn out. Paradise got another season. People are building bunkers and buying bunkers. Mark Zuckerberg's blabbing to Theo Vaughn about his tunnel.
There's this whole meme about how people are saying I built this bunker underground. It's more of underground storage. Regulars.
It's for sure a bunker.
Sucky got that bunky.
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?
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Chapter 2: Who is Robert Kirsch and what does he research about prepping?
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?
Chapter 3: What is the story behind Silicon Valley's 'Preppy' bug-out bags?
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?
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Chapter 4: How many Americans engage in some form of prepping or preparedness?
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.
Chapter 5: What stereotypes exist about preppers and what is the reality?
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.
And I'm not even just talking about the extreme preppers. There's an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where they go into an Atlas bunker and try to imagine what it would be like to ride out the end of the world.
Oh my God, I can't be in here. Chloe, if we treat this like a joke, then we won't get the full experience out of this and we won't know if this is what we need.
And so I think that's an interesting starting point. But again, as Emily and I were digging into this, what we eventually concluded was that this behavior can be sort of marginalized and sort of seem to be extreme, but it actually is a kind of behavior that is constitutive of being Americans.
In other words, we argue that prepping is an American institution and that from the founding, Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontiers people who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and sort of bring America into into new spaces.
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Chapter 6: How does prepping relate to American identity and history?
This kind of behavior is actually pretty close to the heart of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are.
And that 40% of us are preparing in some way, this feels like a very high number to me, would seem to suggest you're right. This is part of the identity of many of us. When do we see this put to the test?
There's a couple of ways to tackle that. The first is that I think at the sort of like apocalyptic register, I think things like nuclear war, right? Or the sort of like total social collapse. Americans really haven't had to deal with that. And that's an important part for our analysis too, because we argue that one of the reasons maybe what we call a bunkerization fantasy, right?
is potent because Americans have never actually had to go to ground, never actually had to sort of take cover in the way that, say, many Europeans had to during the Second World War. And so that's one part of the story is that it's easy to sort of think about readiness and what to do in the face of total collapse because it's sort of been deferred. And so it becomes a site of fantasy.
On the other hand, you're also right that the U.S. has ongoing extreme weather events, hurricanes, wildfires, dust bowls, droughts. The list goes on and on. And the way that we tell that story is sort of the way that we diagnose the sort of neoliberal condition of American political life, which is these disasters happen. there is an oftentimes inadequate or incomplete state response.
And so the reaction to that becomes, well, I can't rely on the government to do things or to sort of reorganize things or to play a role in this. So it's up to me to take responsibility for my own preparation. And the way that I do that is through consumption choices.
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Chapter 7: What role do extreme weather events and government response play in prepping?
One beautiful part of the American economy is that there is always somebody who will sell you something if you have enough money. And when we think about preppers, when I think about preppers, I do tend to think about ultra-rich people like Mark Zuckerberg buying a private island, raising their own food, these guys in Silicon Valley buying land in New Zealand.
What is the deal with the ultra-wealthy and their preparation for the end of the world? Is it like, do they know something that we don't? Or do they just have a lot of money and need to spend it?
I think it's the latter. I really think this is a sort of conspicuous consumption. And so these ultra-rich people, we hear a lot about their preparation plans. You mentioned Zuckerberg and Thiel. And those are, I think, the two most sort of high-profile examples of
And what I think is notable about those is that they get profiled in Forbes or Fortune or, you know, these sorts of like monocle like publications, right, for the sort of upwardly mobile people. And they lavish the reader with all sorts of details about the extravagant things that these folks are doing. And then there's always this kind of coy like, but we'll never tell you where it is, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's a way to sort of signal this kind of conspicuous consumption that maybe more middle-class or upwardly mobile Americans can at least sort of try to emulate. But I do want to suggest, too, though, that this takes on kind of strange dimensions. I'm sure, for your instance, you've read a lot about Elon Musk's desire to go to Mars.
So much. Yes. And we're going to take Doge to Mars.
Right. And it's a fantasy. It's in many ways based on this sort of like mentality of like, well, you know, there's nothing we can do here anymore. And so we're going to have to try again on another orb.
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Chapter 8: How do the ultra-wealthy approach doomsday prepping differently?
There's a risk here of upping the ante. So what starts with the rich often trickles down to the less rich, which is why I have a life straw and an LLB knife. And I wonder, like, if we talk about people who are not the Elon Musks of the world or the Peter Thiel's of the world, is prepping big business among the kind of middle class as well?
Yeah. And I think like many other industries in the U.S., it ebbs and flows or booms and busts. And we trace that back to the Cold War where there were home fallout shelter kits that you could buy. And those kind of went under in the 60s. And now they're kind of coming back. You can look at different kinds of preparedness markets that pop up, a lot of shelf stable things.
Food is becoming an increasingly common thing to see. I know at my local Costco's, there are often aisle end caps that have like pyramids of these food buckets that you can store in your house. And so we might just be in a period of upswing right now. I mean, there are still companies that will come bury a fallout shelter in your backyard and promise not to tell anybody where they put it.
You're in Arizona. What's the scenario that most worries you, for real, for real?
Grid failure.
Uh-huh.
And that's just because, as you can imagine, in the Sonoran Desert, it's hard to imagine making it through 115 degree days without some kind of chemically induced air conditioning.
My biggest ones are electromagnetic pulse, hurricane, tornado, and civil war. Electromagnetic pulse is akin to grid failure, right? It means the electricity goes out and you're trying to figure out what to do. We just saw this happen in Spain and Portugal. It was really a nightmare. It makes me wonder, should we really want to survive a doomsday scenario?
It sounds like a bleak question, but I think in some ways that is the politically animating question. Yeah. What can we confront alone and what can we confront together, right? And if we limit ourselves to confronting things alone, I think that threshold is pretty low.
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Chapter 9: Is prepping big business and how has it evolved over time?
Robert Kirsch studies the end of the world at Arizona State. He's co-author with Emily Ray of Be Prepared, Doomsday Prepping in the United States.
The regular season is in the rear view, and now it's time for the games that matter the most. This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here. On Small Ball, we're diving deep into every series, every crunch time finish, every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run. Who's building for a 16-win marathon? Which superstar will submit their legacy?
And which role player is about to become a household name? with so many fascinating first-round matchups. Will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate? Will the East be as predictable as we think? Can the Celtics defend their title? Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
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Today Explained, we're back for now. The original stories about the end of the world, the ones that we know about anyway, started with organized religions. Now, some religions see time as a circle that goes around and around. But some religions developed the idea that time was like an arrow. Eventually, it hits a terminus, an end of a world.
Then in the 19th century, a whole host of things conspired to take the apocalypse out of religion and move it into secular works. Dorian Linsky wrote Everything Must Go, the stories we tell about the end of the world.
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Chapter 10: What are the real concerns for preppers living in places like Arizona?
So the first secular narratives about the end of the world, which as far as I could tell, were Lord Byron's poem, Darkness, and Mary Shelley's novel, The Last Man. Both appear in the first quarter of the 19th century. And there's lots of different things happening at the same time. There's the discovery that the world is much older than people had imagined.
For example, skeletons identified for the first time as dinosaurs. There was the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century and a general fascination with ruins. Like British tourists would go through Europe visiting the ruins and reflecting on hubris and nemesis and so on. So all of these different currents are converging.
And so it makes perfect sense that this is the era where Byron would come up with the possibility of of an end of the world story which doesn't feature God. And as soon as you exclude God, you exclude what happens at the very end of the book of Revelation, which is that the righteous are chosen and that they ascend to paradise.
So in darkness, which really sort of shocked and confused critics at the time, it is just the end. It is nothingness. And that was a very startling proposition.
How influential was that poem?
Well, if you judge it by how many similar works emerged in the coming decades, you would have to say not many. And Mary Shelley, who was actually living in the same part of Switzerland as Byron when he was writing Darkness, and in fact, she was coming up with Frankenstein at the same time, when she writes The Last Man about a decade later...
It's absolutely destroyed by the critics that they think that it is a loathsome idea from the start. This is a novel about a pandemic that wipes out everybody in the world except one person. And it was seen at the time that this was just not something that you should do. Perhaps it's certainly not in the form of a novel.
that there were religious poems about this idea of the last man, there were satirical poems about it. But this very long, and it has to be said, not particularly great novel, it was seen as the product, as one critic said, of a diseased mind. And essentially, there are no successes to these works for decades, not until the late 19th century do you really get a whole wave of these.
But I think the reason it becomes so influential... in literary terms, is because of HG Wells, who is the first person that comes to this and pulls together all these things, fear of foreign invasion, fear of social collapse, fear of runaway technology, and just does it better than anybody else.
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