Today, Explained - Prepping for doomsday (or Tuesday)

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

How to prepare for the worst while still living your best life. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. A woman at her food supply shelf. Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail]. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 volt and 26 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. What's up y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Ann Mom. 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 a arm just for protection and safety in case the world went absolutely nothing. 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. And 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

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 or 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 do you have or how many guns. 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 Glyn 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's Dr. Chris Ellis. I am a disaster, resilient, civil defense, homeland defense expert. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, etc. 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 practitioner.

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, they did this national household survey between 5,000 and 7,000 Americans for several years and released 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 is 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, etc. 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 without rule of law, scenario, lots of crime. We're prepared. It's as simple as opening up a drawer, and there's your protection. Or government overreach and, you know, and tyranny. I'm not going to depend on the police to defend me. I'm going to spend 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, ma'am, everything's going to be okay. They want to help other individuals very much in their preparedness skills and are very widely based as far as what their threats are. The fourth group are the NOAAs. 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 faith The faithful and the Noah's are a bit different. The noas are concerned about saving their skin.

The faithful are concerned about saving their souls. They're the 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, just 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 interdependence. 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 push. We're a very efficient economy. And it's kind of, you know, this 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, we were very community resilient. So the interdependence 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, 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 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 Hala, 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 bugout bag, your car bag, and then the office. What is a bugout bag? Different for every person. So there's a thousand examples out there. Some people like to have a whole bunch of guns and ammunition because I think they're going to have to go out and shoot deer, bears,

or fend off the looters, etc. I'm not too martial in my bug out bag. I would say that the basic bugout 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, etc. very quickly accessible and in one single fold that you can just open up that fireproof safe grab it stuff in your bug out bag and go also some sort of emergency communication device and 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

base, 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. look different depending on who you are and where you live. Up next, prepping the city. Support for this show comes from Quince. You make difficult choices each and every day. So why does your outfit need to be one of them? Instead, you can try effortless, comfortable, sleek, and well-put-t together clothes with the help of Quince. Quince has all the wardrobe staples for spring. Think 100% European linen shorts and shirts from $34, lightweight, breathable and comfortable, but still look put together, and clean 100% Pima Cotton Tees with a softness that has to be felt. Everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you find at similar brands.

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Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.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. Grenola wants to fix that. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built

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Get three months free at granola.a.coma 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 and 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 Bachelorette. Oh, that's great to Babe Cave. But I admit, you know, I have all these comforts. I love my houseplants. I love all my little day-to-day snacks, but I am zero percent 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 slow down. People realize 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 meats, 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 air. extra space underneath my bed, under my couch. You know, there are all sorts of creative things, you know, 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 live in a babe cave. You know it'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 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've 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 easy place to store water. And in the event of a blackout, our freezer will stay, food will stay cold or longer because we have the frozen bottles of water in there. And 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 bugout 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 the 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 it's 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, 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 11th. 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. Support for the show today comes from the Futurology podcast. With so much changing every minute, it can feel useless to think more than a few days into the future, they say. But exploring what could happen in the week's years, even decades after tomorrow, can completely reshape how we approach today, which is exactly what Futurology is for. This new podcast from the Begruen Institute can help you get ahead of tomorrow. Futurology isn't sci-fi, it's not speculation each week.

They have thoughtful conversations with scientists and artists, technologists, and philosophers who don't just predict. They illuminate the forces shaping our lives. Imagine where they'll take us and how we can respond, whether the future is something we have to endure or something we can design. And if so, what will we build? Subscribe to Futurology, where we get your podcast or watch full episodes on YouTube. I'm Mitch First.

two-time Indiesel champion, championship MVP, and forward for the U.S. Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology. Which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an elite athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's JQ. This is Explained 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 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, right? So even in a hotel, right, I'll try to take the stairs down.

I know that sounds crazy, but sometimes you end up in some weird places. Like you end up in the kitchen, you know, but it's really helpful to have some muscle memory for how to get out of the places that you're in, right? 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 this 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, right? I mean, 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, right?

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. Like 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? Like it's, 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 at a 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. Like, 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 stockpoles. 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, 1-800-6-18-55-45. or email AskVox at Vox.com. Also, consider becoming a Vox member. Vox members get to listen to this podcast ad-free. Head over to vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto.

It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by David Tattashore. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Gulen Hill. Thank you so much for listening. Bye! Thank you.