Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Preppers

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

The end of the world... but make it cute and consumerist! "Preppers" are the latest iteration of doomsday survivalists, who band together on social media to talk canning, stockpiling, and first aid, but also multi-million-dollar bunkers in rural New Zealand?? Um, yeah, there are also billionaire preppers, and if the apocalypse weren't coming already, these guys are definitely speeding up the process. This week, Isa and Amanda are unpacking the so-called "doom boom" to judge how cultishly bananas (freeze-dried, obvi) modern-day "prepping" has gotten.  To support Sounds Like A Cult on Patreon, keep up with our live show dates, see Isa's live comedy, buy a copy of Amanda's book Cultish, or visit our website, click here! Thank you so much to our sponsor, Cerebral! To receive 50% or more off your first month of therapy, go to cerebral.com/cult. 

We are so jazzed to tell you about today's sponsor, Cerebral, a quality mental health care service that's accessible, affordable, and 100% online. Listeners will receive 50% or more off your first month of therapy. Go to Cerebral.com slash cult. That's Cerebral.com slash cult for 50% or more off your first month of therapy. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable facts.

This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Okay, Issa, if you had to be stuck in a post-apocalyptic bunker way, way underneath the Earth's surface with one of our previous Sounds Like a Cult guests, who would you choose? What? I thought you were going to say snacks and I was ready to say popcorn. Our guests? That's a good question. I feel like Dan Savage would be able to talk me off a ledge.

Oh, that's a good choice. That's a great choice. Daddy. And he's gay, so it's like there would be no bad vibes. Yeah, like I wouldn't want to fuck him. He wouldn't want to fuck me, so we couldn't get mad at each other. Totally. I love that answer.

Or Maddie Matheson could cook me a fucking meal. Oh, that's a great choice as well. What about you? I mean, the sex and relationships columnist and the chef? Hello. Hello. End of the world? Where are you? Yeah, let's get down there now, actually.

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Issa Medina and I'm a comedian touring all over the country. I'm Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism. Every week on our show, we discuss a different culty group from the Zeitgeist, from the Supreme Court to the wedding industry, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? Hi, my name is Grace and I'm from Lawrence, Kansas. And I think that the cultiest thing about Doomsday Preppers is their figure.

Their fixation on assault weapons, specifically in the United States, how they have almost an arsenal. Hey, I'm Maddie. I'm from Laurel, Maryland. And I think the cultiest thing about Doomsday Preppers is like all of the industries, multi-million dollar industries that have cropped up just to cater to this population. Like all of the freeze-dried foods and canned goods and survivalist tools. And also the people who construct shelters that are like millions of dollars worth.

Basically, if you want like an underground golf course, they can make it happen. Oh, I mean, I mean, we are in a Doomsday looking studio. Oh, I walked into the studio and I literally said, I feel like I'm in a post-apocalyptic subterranean bunker. I feel comfortable in here. You said you felt like you were in the devil's asshole. Yeah, well, it feels like something really, really bad is going on outside of these walls. Yeah, it does.

And it is something really, really bad is going on inside of these walls. We're so bad. We're so bad. I wonder what this podcast become about sex. I'm just kidding. It's always been about sex because it's always been about power. I want to ask you because I know my answer, obviously. But do you believe in, well, like metaphorically,

but like do you believe in like the end of the world? Or have you ever been like an apocalyptic girly? An apocalyptic girly? Oh, are you kidding me? Of course, I'm an apocalyptic girly. Yes. I mean, I've said this before, I'm an optimistic nihilist. Yeah, of course.

What is there to believe in? It's not Santa Claus. Like species threatening and species ending events are fairly common. It's not Santa Claus. That should be the tagline. The world ended for the dinosaurs. Who's to say the world will not end for us? I mean, the pandemic gave us a little taste.

This gives me so much anxiety. Like when I was a little kid, I was so aware of my mortality and doom that like I would go to sleep and I would have a panic attack because I was thinking about like death and the end of the world. Yeah, I had that happen as a child as well. Yeah, I think that I recently talked to some friends who didn't have that experience as a child and I think that's like... Don't trust them.

That's the number one sign that you were like born with anxiety, I think. Like some people just weren't born with that anxiety. Curious. I go to sleep and I'm like, will I be alive tomorrow? People be dying in their sleep these days. I think they always have. I know, but it's like crazy. It is unfortunate and yet the best way to go.

Do you ever think about how you'd like to die? No. I don't want to be asleep. Like you don't know it's coming. I want to just like be like, okay, bye now. When I was in the cult of theater kids as a child and I would think about my ideal death, I was like romanticizing the event.

I was like, you know what? I think it would be really fun to like have just completed my final performance of like the best show of my life. And then pass out. And then pass out on stage. That's crazy. Cult of theater kids, I've changed so much. Yeah.

I would party for like a day or two and then I would like do a brunch situation and then I would go to the movies and then I would end it all in a movie theater surrounded by popcorn, like a pool of popcorn and a bunch of crunch and be like, peace the fuck out. This bitch is so specific.

This is how I'd like to die in this way. This is how I'd like to die in this way. I think it's unreasonable to figure that some version of an apocalypse will not strike. I think it's very natural for humans to trend doomsday because I mean, for most of human history, a lot of extreme events, whether they were like weather events

or personal tragedies would happen and we would not have any type of explanation for why. Yeah. I mean, also you could say that like when a person's life ends, it is their doomsday. You know, like we all have an apocalypse in our lifetime. 100% and think of how like even a small quotidian kerfuffle in your life can feel like an apocalypse.

Like I could fucking like trip on my porch stairs and think like the world is out to get me, the world is ending for me. Yeah, exactly. We're very sort of like self-centered as humans and I think that actually hot take, hot take. But I think actually the way that we talk about the end of the world reflects

a fundamental self-centeredness because we equate our species ending with the world ending. But the world will go on. Well, that's what climate activists are trying to change. They're like, the world will still be here. Like the threat of climate change and global warning, global warning, yeah, it is a warning, is like a threat to us as humans.

And everyone on this planet, except for probably like the turtles and the cockroaches. Or the billionaires. You know what's funny? Which is like go ahead, live for fucking ever. Like do you think I want to live forever? No, I walk outside and I die. No, I do want to like live a full life.

I just want to put that out into the universe because I am a skeptic. But I don't want to like live forever. Forever, I do want to live like 320s. But you do want to live a very, very long time. You're very picky about your life expectancy. Reckoning with collective doom, with personal doom, is a journey.

And that is a type of anxiety that cults have famously exploited. Doomsday ideology is something that goes back to the dawn of religion. The Cold War was also a time period when a lot of people kind of started to prep for Doomsday in relation to the nuclear war. I have like some family who lives in Switzerland and every house in Switzerland during a certain time period

legally had to have a bomb shelter. Now they just like, I don't know, keep their laundry in there. But it's a shelter that could literally like survive nuclear explosion. Well, you know, even the US government was Doomsday prepping during the Cold War. During that era, they built this massive underground bunker

in the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia that was designed to protect all 535 members of Congress and their aides against nuclear war. According to USAToday.com, the bunker held 75,000 gallons of water, a power system, medical and food services, 30 ton blast doors, art from the last days of Pompeii. You gotta have something to look at.

So fucking funny to me and so beyond fucked up that they're like, the world's gonna end. Who should we save? 535 of the oldest bitch also like if they save Congress. In the country. And everyone else is dead. Who are they going to be? Who's gonna be left to rule?

Literally like they're literally like infertile men and women. I know. I know. It's like that's not going to be able to repopulate the earth. Also a mural of Washington scenery was in there that was capable of changing leaves on the trees depending on the season. Huh?

I don't even know how that technology was possible back then. That seems fake. I don't believe the government. Don't trust anything you say. Don't trust anything. Don't trust us. Don't trust us. Don't trust us.

Don't trust us. I think like fearing... Doomsday or fearing an apocalypse is itself not necessarily culty or dangerous. It's when that fear becomes sort of weaponized and institutionalized as a religious tenet by an organized faith. That it can turn very culty. I would say it's also when you start taking actions

on those beliefs. Because you can believe in the end of the world. But it's once you start taking steps every day to prepare for it. And those steps get in the way of your day to day life and living your day to day life that it gets in the way of your life. I mean for a lack of a better word.

Yeah, yeah. And then it's like what's the point? Like you haven't lived your... You've spent your whole life preparing. Yeah, that reminds me of like when Christians like wait to have sex till marriage. Or like soaking, you know? It's like what's the point?

Just fucking do it. You know, you used the term soaking the other day and I didn't know what you were talking about. Oh, you didn't? No. Well, for those of you who don't know, soaking is when Mormons put the penis in the vagina. Yeah.

And they don't thrust. Yeah. So apparently like they aren't having sex. But like spoiler alert, sex is penis in vagina. And it's a lot of things. Yeah. I mean don't be heteronormative. Yeah, yeah.

Penis an asshole. I'm not a good Catholic. That's why it's so arbitrary. It's like what is sex? What is the end of the world? What is meaning? What is death? Hold on really quickly.

I just want to tell you something insane that I heard. A friend of mine told me that at like Mormon institutions and colleges, two people will be like soaking on the top bunk. And then like on the bottom bunk, the roommate will be like moving the mattress. Oh my God. So that it feels like they're having sex. Yeah. Mormons are really good at hacks.

Yes. And that's why they're in the wellness space now. And the scrapbooking space. Yeah. And the home renovating space. 100%. Mormons like know how to loop. Life hack.

Don't hump like this. Hump like this. I had to go to a conference in Salt Lake City for ex-mormons turned sex educators to learn what soaking was. And now I know. I'd heard about it, but I thought it was a myth like Santa Claus. Yeah. Like God himself. But not like the end of the world, which is real.

There are so many interpretations of doomsday and what a person needs to prep for doomsday. Like the rapture and the second coming. That's evangelical doomsday. And you need to sort of follow the rules of fundamentalist Christianity in order to get into heaven and follow Christ to the promised land. But then Heaven's Gate was a famous millinery in doomsday cult

that was much fringier. They thought that the age's end was going to reach mankind, which was fundamentally evil. And they were going to need to board a spacecraft to follow a comet out to the kingdom of heaven. Yeah. Heaven's Gate is the one where they all committed suicide, right? They did. There were 39 of them, including the leader, Marshall Applewhite.

And they all got dressed up in matching outfits. Okay. It was cute. No, it was not cute. Well, it was cinematic. It was a look. No, it was tragic. It was voluntary.

Well, as voluntary as a cult suicide can be. Yikes. This is why we don't talk about this. I just wanted to know that because my thought process on doomsday and prepping for it, it's like, okay, get together all of your snacks. Like obviously prioritize the important things. But to be the one to take action and take your own life,

it's like, why are you doing the homework if it's going to come anyway? You know what I mean? Why are you going above and beyond for doomsday? Well, because they thought they were going to leave their human meat suits, their vessels, their containers, as they called it, so that their spirit could board this hovercraft.

I'm so fucked up. I literally got a UFO tattooed on my body as a symbol of my love of learning about this ship. But then when I actually reflect upon the tenets and behaviors of Heaven's Gate, it's so dark. But when you think about it, obviously Heaven's Gate took it to an extreme. And the way that they died was fucked up, too.

They took this elixir and then each living member had to ensure that the member in front of them would die by tying a paper plastic bag around their head. And then they would lie down in bunk beds and cover themselves with a purple shroud. And they had a very specific amount of change in their pockets. Change? What were they going to do?

Laundry in Heaven? Toll money. Toll money. To get to the next place? It's getting laundromat. Yeah, it was like five bucks. Yeah. It's like you're doing a big load.

That's not even actually in this economy. Dude, you literally can't even do a wash and dry with that stuff. But anyway, they took it to an extreme, but you can see how it is not that out of control to believe that the end of the world is coming and you need to do something in order to survive amidst all that. That's why it's so fun to talk about these topics, because it's like you can believe in the end of the world,

but how far can you take a belief? How big of an act can you do based on something that you think might happen? And how far can someone with authoritarian power push you? How much can they separate you from the rest of your life and from some idea of consensual reality such that you've lost the plot. You know? Now you're just canning beans and freaking and stockpiling guns

and being like, nobody take my fucking 40-year-old peaches. It's like nobody wants your peaches. That's like when you're reading, but you're thinking about something else. And then you have to reread the page over and over and over again, but you're not focused. So you're thinking about other things while you're doing a thing. That is doomsday preppers, like fucking collecting canned food. And it's hard not to get distracted in a society.

That hit home for you. Wow. You're like, yeah, I read like 20 books a day. Do I internalize any of them? No. Tear tumbles down my cheek. Anyway, we are indeed talking about the cult of preppers today. So doomsdayers is what they were called when the Y2K preppers

were really, were you old enough to remember that? Yeah. Well, I wasn't. No, I was not old enough. No, no. I know you're a baby. You're just a baby. You're an old phone.

You are a child. We know. But no, I don't pay taxes. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Rest her. No, no, no.

I was famously not old enough to remember. But even at the age of like seven, eight, I was very excited about cults. And so when I caught wind that there was this fringy group of people who believed that all the computers were going to shut down as soon as the clocks hit Y2K and everybody was going to need to like can their shit and stockpile their shit to get ready for that mayhem. I was like, that's interesting. I'm like seven.

I did believe in the 2010 situation, the one with the Mayan calendar. You believe in that? I believed in it, but in a way that like was very quiet. I didn't tell anyone that I believed in it. I was just like mentally preparing for the end of the world and very anxious at the time. And then I was like, if we can survive this, we can survive anything. A cult of one where it's just you is anxiety.

That's what anxiety is. Doomsday Preppers, we have decided are kind of people who, because there's a lot of definitions, but, you know, ours is people who band together either on social media or in person to share survival skills in order to prepare for the apocalypse. The apocalypse, which they sometimes describe with the euphemism, the event. And preppers is really the term that has exploded on like TikTok and social media. There's like a flourishing prepper community.

And not only is it a community of people who gather online and swap tips, whether they're talking about freeze drying or canning or swapping listings for 100 acre compound properties, there's also this massive industry. So there's a site of Amazon where you can buy 80 freeze dried meals for 80 bucks or whatever, which honestly just sounds like an economical thing to do. Yeah, I don't know if you put the new season it right. That's such a cult of capitalism thing for a company to see fear in someone or to see a trend in people and then be like, actually, we have the perfect product for you.

And you can get it in two day shipping. Yeah, oh, exactly. That is America right now. It is this juxtaposition of the world is ending. Everything is going to go to shit. But right now, everything is so fucking convenient and automated and utopian that you can have your doomsday prep and eat it too. Like that's what that is literally put that on some merch.

My name is Catherine. I'm in Arizona and the coldest thing about preppers is the special terminology and codes that they use within their communities to not be understood by outsiders. It's creepy and paranoid. Hey, sounds like a cold podcast. This is Emily from New Jersey. I got to say, I think the coldest thing about the doomsday preppers is how realistic it kind of seems at this point.

I know that at the top of COVID-19, I was really, really anxious as we all were. And I looked at my husband who would always say, like, we should make go bags for the zombie apocalypse because he was ardent that that was going to happen. And then I looked him. I was like, start earning stuff off Amazon. Like, let's make those bags. And I got to say, I still have them in my car because the world is a fucking scary place and sometimes it doesn't seem so far off.

I also think that the pandemic was obviously a time where people really leaned into the doomsday prepping situation because that was a taste of the apocalypse. It was the situation where, like, you literally thought that if you stepped outside, it was airbounds. Disease was going to get you. And that shows statistically in 2019, Business Insider reported that only 20% of Americans engaged in doomsday prepping. And then in 2021, according to Finder Research, about 72% of American adults were stockpiling

goods for the end of the world. And that's over 184 million people. That's a whack-a-doodle jump. 52% of people. Wow, did you just do that math in your head? 72 minus 20, yes. Sorry, oh my god. Okay, actually, you're right, you're right, you're right.

I took out my two in college. I actually think you're much better at math than me. Yeah, I just was, like, surprised. Thank you for noticing my simple subtraction. But yeah, that's absolutely wild that doomsday prepping has gone from a fairly fringy thing just 20 years ago during Y2K prepping. This was something that happened on the early internet in forums that had very geocities, aesthetics.

This is happening totally on the outskirts of the mainstream. Now 72% of people are doomsday prepping to some degree. It is full on the zeitgeist. That has to do as well with the rise in niche collectors. Or, like, I don't know why, but in my mind, it also reminds me of, like, ASMR. Like, it reminds me of the ASMR community. I can just picture someone, like, in a dungeon opening can. Yes, I know what you're saying, because there's, like, an intimacy and a coziness

to, like, having all your little things in a row. Yeah, they're like, You're right. It's profoundly human to stockpile, right? Because, you know, 10,000 years ago, like, you needed to gather your wood and your nuts for winter, right? That was just survival instinct. And now it's like, we're past that phase of humanity.

We have civilization. We have automation. Everything's good. But we still have that mentality in us. Yes, and I also think that's because the lack of vacation that people take these days and is, like, so exhausted and we don't take longer than one week max, two weeks vacation. A week, a week would be incredible. But, I mean, France is still doing that whole August is kind of off thing.

And I feel like one month is really when you actually get to, like, unwind properly. As Americans, as overworked Americans, you're looking forward to the end of the world because you just, like, want a break. I'm, like, a bunker couple of decades. Sounds relaxing. I think it's those instincts in combination with the consumerism here in America that has led to this doomsday prepping industry skyrocket, which has been labeled the doom boom. Doom boom sounds like what you would call a musical about doomsday.

Well, if you combine the phrase tick tock with the phrase doom boom, you literally get the musical tick tick boom. These are just words that we love to say. It sounds like baby language. I'm just a baby. Exactly. So we talked briefly about the history of apocalyptic vibe people and how they kind of came from organized religion and things like that.

But how are they growing today? Tick tock, Reddit, all the culty hotspots. The prepping community thrives on Reddit. There's this one subreddit just called prepping that has over 25,000 members. It's actually in the top 5% of subreddits by size. And it's considered, like, fairly respected. It's not actually considered super fringe or kooky or conspiratorial. People just use it to exchange advice.

And I truly believe that there are people in this community who are able to engage with it reasonably. So there's this woman who is very popular on tick tock. OK, not very popular. She's $80,000. Relax. But her name is Rowan McKenzie Frazier. And her handle is prepping with Rowan.

She has spent over $45,000 amassing supplies for nuclear disaster according to the New York Coast. Dang. It's just amazing how you can really build up a cult-like following as an influencer, even based on a tenant as ancient as apocalypticism, you know? It's funny because she's citing the war in Ukraine and surging inflation as her latest indications as to why the world is ending. And I'm like, at any point in history, you can look at world events and be like, the world is ending.

It's just classic cult-y starting with a conclusion, working your way backwards to find an argument. When we were doing research for this episode, it reminded me a lot of Flat Earthers. There is definitely a pipeline leading from doomsday prepping or really any sort of like government conspiracy. I don't trust what the overlords are telling me straight to Flat Eartherism or Pizzagate, all that stuff. Because the way that conspiracy theories work, and I would consider some doomsday preppers, conspiracy theorists, is because they fracture your trust in one thing that you've always

taken to be true, and that creates a domino effect where then your trust in everything is broken, and you can only rely on yourself. That's the funny thing to me. Are you that self-important that you think you're going to be able to survive it? I mean, this woman in the New York Post said, I'm prepping as a whole for war, inflation, nuclear disaster, and all-out chaos. And I'm like, and you think your beans are going to save you and your guns? What planet are you living in that you think you're going to be able to survive that?

And also, why would you want to survive it? There is some definite pick-me energy to the average prepper. And to your point, a lot of them gather in these Facebook groups. There are Facebook groups, one of them is called the American Preppers Network, and they have tens of thousands of followers. And I will say that there is a lot of right-wing political energy in a lot of these doomsday preppers groups. The admins in these Facebook groups seem very concerned with issues of free speech and free thought.

And right to bear arms. Okay, so that's the thing. A lot of the time, preppers will defend their extreme actions, extreme preppers, that is, by saying like, I'm doing this to protect my family. But when you get right down to it and you look at the language that they're using and the arguments that they're making, what they really care about is their freedom to have firearms and security. All they want is guns, which is like, the right to bear arms.

I mean, we're not going to get into it right now, but it's like, just do some push-ups, bear those arms, like you don't need a gun. Prepping for a lot of these people seems to me just sort of like this extremely zealous right-wing hobby for conservative Americans to like cosplay zombie apocalypse and Waco. A lot of these super fanatical doomsday preppers will romanticize cult doomsday tragedies like the Waco massacre and the Branch Davidians. That's why these fringe groups are so potentially dangerous, because everything kind of like starts off like a joke, you know?

Like, at least for me and I know for a lot of people. Or it starts casual. It starts casual. Then you start believing the things that you're saying and you slowly spiral into this like hole and all of a sudden like you're in Waco, Texas in a closet. Well, I mean, it actually can happen faster in the age of algorithms. I mean, what do algorithms do? I mean, they just push you further, further into that metaphorical bunker.

So much easier to get radicalized. And it happens so much more quickly. Prepper talk would not be effective on me. That's just not my aesthetic. That's not my vibe. But if you are even vaguely interested in freeze drying, canning, learning to like fucking sew your own shit, get a spinning wheel, whatever, like your for you page could very easily take you right away to prepper talk.

Now you're following someone like Rowan McKenzie-Fraser, who the New York Post quoted as saying, I would highly recommend having a few guns and knives in your bunker at all times, along with ample amounts of ammunition. It's kill or be killed and you need the best possible chance of survival. This girl is just like sitting at home like with no problems. From the research that we've done to me, it seems like the majority of Doomsday preppers are white Americans and on the more middle class and like a fluent and conservative. And it's these people who don't have life or death problems.

And so they create these Doomsday problems. And they kind of romanticize being persecuted. Yes. And you can see that in these like white or more privileged communities, because they are romanticizing the past. They want to knit. They want to eat in a bunker. They want to cook over a fire.

They're romanticizing the past because the past was always good for them. Totally. So in that same vein of white people, conservatives, what comes next, very wealthy people. And that is another type of Doomsday prepper. Oh, yes. This is another denomination of this cult. The preppers that we've been talking about so far are mostly middle class. They're, you know, they don't have millions or billions.

These are people who are spending, say, $45,000 would be an extreme. But there is also this whole contingency of Silicon Valley billionaire preppers who take quote unquote prepping to a whole new motherfucking level. Hi, this is Annika from Minneapolis. And I think the cultiest thing about Doomsday preppers is honestly simply why. Like as someone who grew up with Jewish parents who like tried to make me prep about everything, I have so much anxiety. And like if the world ends, like honestly simply why are you trying so hard to survive?

Like just give up? I don't know. Seems like really intense people to me. I'm Alexis from Austin, Texas. And the cultiest thing about the Doomsday prepper community is that they're openly rolling with fear as opposed to other cults kind of keep their fear mongering somewhat of a secret to outsiders. The Doomsday prepper community is quite literally like if you don't do X, Y, Z, you will die tomorrow.

And that's just very spooky. My name is Megan. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. And one of the most interesting things to me about Doomsday preppers is their unique connection to the Mormon community. If you go into almost any Mormon bookstore in Salt Lake City, you're going to see a huge section on Doomsday prepping or end of the world prepping. So far as to have free shred meals, different kinds of coolers and books about how to prepare

for the end of the world. Thank you so much to today's sponsor Cerebral, a mental health service that 82% of patients said reduced their anxiety and 70% of patients said they chose because it was the most convenient option out there. Cerebral is 100% online. You just take a brief questionnaire and get matched with a care team based off of your needs and personal preferences. Cerebral is one of the few services that not only connects you with a licensed therapist,

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it not only provides therapy but it does provide medication management as Amanda already mentioned that is something that's super important because if you feel like you need a little something more than just talk therapy, you have access to that with this service. And our listeners will receive 50% or more off your first month of therapy by going to Cerebral.com slash Colt. That's Cerebral.com slash Colt for 50% or more off your first month of therapy. For quality mental health care that's accessible and affordable, join Cerebral today. Let's talk about doomsday prepping for the super rich. Since the late 2010s, so many media outlets have been writing about how billionaires are

obsessed with doomsday prepping. I mean we've heard you know of like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And if you watch that movie don't look up, did you like that movie? Everyone either loved or hated that movie. I fucking hated it. Oh you hated it. Yeah. I just like hated it for like the hypocrisy. Like everyone in that movie probably takes like a private jet. You know it's like oh what you think like yeah you're the one spreading the word here. Yes yes okay so this is actually a great point because billionaire preppers I find to be some of the most problematic cult leaders and followers in the world because they are themselves a key cause of the disaster that they are preparing for and they're not helping anyone else prepare. I think it's really

telling that they are getting ready to leave the earth because it's not like they want to fix the earth because they don't want to sacrifice anything. They want to continue to destroy the earth. Yeah they feel entitled to use their money however they please and so their current goal is to like enjoy life to the extremes that they want to without a care in the world and so what's their out what's their next step strategy is to leave the earth. To leave the earth to colonize Venus and Mars and whatever the fuck. It's like trashing a hotel room and then not worrying about who's gonna clean it up because like you're like peace out I'm checking out at 10 a.m. 100% yes it is deeply careless it is like late-stage capitalist hedonism it's the worst and this sort of like

new generation of well I guess we've never really had billionaires before now but like at least as many as we do yeah so this wave of billionaire preppers whose habits are bananas and we'll describe them really started coming up over the past 10 years according to a New Yorker piece from 2017 and recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City oh where we are right now should we find some among technology executives hedge fund managers and others in their economic cohort so there is this guy named Douglas Rushkoff who is a journalist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives and he was recently invited to speak at a gathering of these rich preppers out at a

remote location in the desert and he wrote about this experience for the Guardian so he talked about how when this reporter arrived at the event five and I quote super wealthy guys from the upper echelon of the tech industry and the hedge fund world peppered him with questions about the end of the world as we know it and how they should prepare so these questions were like whether or not New Zealand or Alaska would be less affected by the climate crisis or whether or not global warming or biological warfare would be a greater threat and how to maintain authority over their security force in their underground bunker after the event this just shows how some people are truly just born so selfish you think they're born selfish or you

think money makes them that way I am not a billionaire I'm not a billionaire so I don't know but I think they were born this way because they got to be a billionaire because nothing was ever enough and so they kept accumulating maybe they were born with the genotype for evil billionaire and then or just like the selfish genotype because my thing is if you have all this money and you do love business and you love creating new products why don't you pivot your attention to fixing the problem you can make money off of fixing the problem and instead they are making the problem worse and making money off of it it's like when the United States continues to push for like oil funded energy and literally goes to war for oil where it's like don't spend

money on war to spend money on oil create green energy and then sell green energy I know I really I do wonder like the story that they tell themselves that ends justify the mean story that is told in all cults and including and especially the cult of billionaire preppers another disturbing fun fact one managing director of a venture capital firm called Mayfield fund told the New York Times there's a bunch of us in the valley we meet up and we have these financial hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing it runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on bitcoin and cryptocurrency to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens other countries if the world going

down it's going down together what are you talking about I know it's like the end of the world does yeah it's in the name yeah just get me a movie theater and we're good well the sort of normie not rich preppers are like stockpiling in their houses and building their own bunkers or choosing to spend their life savings to prep the super wealthy obviously have endless resources and time and access to knowledge to hire people to do the work for them you were talking about how how uh exploitative and manipulative it is for companies to take advantage of people's anxieties this way there's a company in texas called rising s company that builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for the wealthy that range in price from 40 000 to over eight million dollars

something that we touched on earlier is climate change as an apocalyptic possibility and of course if people are going to have these like million dollar mansions they're going to want to protect them and so companies are going to provide solutions for these millionaires and it's like and destroy the climate as they're doing that yeah fly to their private bunker in their private jet I know it's like your carbon emissions that you're spending as you prepare for the apocalypse are causing the apocalypse there's another company called vivos they call themselves the backup plan for humanity that sells luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities missile silos and other fortified locations around the world their tagline is the

backup plan for humanity secure your space in a vivos underground shelter to survive virtually any catastrophe I'm looking at it right now and it literally the bunker space looks kind of like a jail cell but almost like you know do you ever watch stranger things yeah you know the how they get to the underground you know in like the machine thing that's kind of what it looks like um I don't want to spend for it I don't want to spend forever there if I go to the movies and and literally choke on popcorn until I die the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that he estimated that over half of his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some kind of doomsday hideaway spot somewhere in the world and they're like this is this is like the secret like they're

all prepping without us yeah people aren't getting schisky chalets anymore they're getting doomsday yeah yeah that's like the last bastion of a vacation home is like a glamorous bunker that's so fucked up that's that's like the cultiest thing in the world these rich dudes are even getting expensive surgeries to better their chances at survival for example the CEO of Reddit told the New Yorker that he got laser eye surgery in 2015 to improve his odds of surviving a disaster it reminds me of the show upload on Amazon because in the show the billionaires create a way to survive after they die in the afterlife right and then they can re upload their soul back into like a regenerated body because but they haven't found the technology to do so so in the meantime

they upload their story conscience into this afterlife and that's what it reminds me of that's an interesting philosophical question that's sometimes posed it's like if you if you knew your consciousness was going to be uploaded to the cloud and you were gonna get a replacement body later would that feel like death to you and would you be scared i think i would because with human created technology there's always room for error so like you could just die yeah like the cloud could yeah and like in the in like in the show they if like someone hacks the cloud like all those people go bye bye and that is one version of the event that some of these people talk about it's not just a climate event or biological warfare or just like social upheaval an evil like AI

computer hack or man-made computer hack could cause the end of the world too so this journalist rush cough that went and spoke to all of these billionaires he wrote that these billionaires are not interested in making the world a better place or stopping what they see as the impending end of society but rather insulating themselves from the very real present danger that they caused that's what i said rush that's what we said rush cough same page oh my god come on the podcast just kidding we don't need another white guy on here we do respect your work though we do i don't know if any billionaires are listening to our podcast but if you are just like maybe do less like help us help you help the world

oh my god oh my god prepping is so culty my location is reno nevada um likely the grounds for the first efforts of survival in the zombie apocalypse based on what i've seen um prepping is culty because it creates this ideology that we're going to run out of everything and if you don't have enough or the ability to fight to protect your shit that everyone is going to take it from you and this is what really really rich people do on their mountains and their mansions and they build like crazy fences and cages around them to just live in fear of everyone else with all of their dumb shit he sounds like a cult my name is christin and i'm currently in georgia i think one of the cultiest things about doomsday peppers is the polished eco-friendly facade they

can put on my former boyfriend and i went to look at an above garage apartment on a beautiful completely self-sustaining farm we almost lived there despite the bunker in the hill until we got the lease which said we would be subject to audio and visual recording along with thermal imaging and electromagnetic detection went on their grounds their farm is still very successful and they sell maple syrup locally which they also stockpile apparently maple syrup lasts a long time and is good for quick energy during the apocalypse so isa out of these three cult categories live your life watch your back and get the fuck out what do we think about the cult of preppers i think that if you have over a certain net worth it's a get the fuck out totally but in

general it's a watch your back hard to agree oh yeah love that consensus because like if you have over a certain amount of wealth like you have the ability to turn all of your anxieties into actions yes that affect everyone that affect everyone but like if you're just like thinking about it and ideating and like having a panic attack it's like yeah welcome to life i know i think like the worst case scenarios for the average prepper are culty for sure there is this us versus them mentality and exit costs i remember learning about how on the y2k forums if anyone questioned like hey maybe the world isn't going to end when the like clock strikes midnight on y2k like other people would ostracize them or criticize them that type of doubt and then the response being

like how dare you question this that's certainly culty you know it doesn't seem healthy to me to have all of your brain space occupied by thinking about the end of the world and if all you're thinking about is the end of the world and you're not living your life and you're losing so much time and money and emotional bandwidth that that's certainly culty but at the same time like i can see that there is a way to engage with the prepping community in you know such that you're you're building friendships and relationships and like it's a fun hobby i think the reason like really rich people start to prep for the end of the world is because they don't have to prep for retirement that's like most people's doomsday you know oh my god yes like like when like my parents

are still figuring out like how they're gonna like retire and that's most people like we're not worried about the afterlife totally we're worried about when we're too old to physically go to work yeah no we literally can't can't think that far ahead this just makes me think of like army hammer allegedly eating humans being interested in eating humans it's because like rich people have already eaten all the foie gras in the world it's like what's next yeah yeah these billionaire preppers that's where it truly gets to be a get the fuck out well that's our show thanks so much for listening we'll be back with a new cult next week and in the meantime stay culty but not too culty sounds like a cult is created hosted and produced by isa medina and amanda montel our research and

social media assistant is noemi griffin our theme music is by kasey colb this episode was mixed by adam har visa here you can follow me on instagram at isa medina isa a medina to check out tickets to all my live shows and tell me where i can perform and amanda here i'm on instagram at amanda underscore montel and feel free to check out my books cultish the language of fanaticism and words let a feminist guide to taking back the english language we also have a patreon and we would really appreciate your support there at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult and if you like our show feel free to leave us a rating on spotify or apple podcasts and if you don't like our show rate other podcasts the way you'd rate us