Disaster Prepping: Should We All Stock Up? (Mike Chappell, prepper)

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1:05Hello and welcome to Radical. Conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. What would you do if your local supermarket ran out of food? For days and then weeks? Or if your water was cut off, the power went out, and not just for you but for everyone? How long do you think you and your family, your loved ones, could survive? How long before law and order begins to break down? And what would you do then? I'm Gabriel Gatehouse. I've spent half a lifetime reporting from places where that has happened. War zones, disaster zones. But honestly, it's not something I've ever seriously considered we might have to face in this country.

1:49But my guest this week believes that we should be preparing for exactly that kind of scenario. Mike Chappell is a prepper. And I'll admit, for me, that word conjures up images of tinfoil hats and gun-toting loners preparing for a zombie apocalypse. But maybe I'm wrong. Because the British government is now urging us to stockpile food and supplies to guard against extreme weather scenarios. And the National Audit Office is telling us that our supply chains of food are vulnerable to cyber attacks and disease. So maybe Mike is right. Maybe we should all be preppers. If so, how far should we take it?

2:32How practical is prepping for most people living a modern life on a small, densely populated island? And what exactly is the threat that preppers are getting ready for? Can't we just rely on the government to sort things out for us if it all goes wrong? As ever, we'll approach the subject with an open mind and a critical lens.

2:54Mike Chappell, welcome to Radical. Hi, thanks for having me. To start, briefly, you're a prepper. What is a prepper?

3:03Mike Chappell:So a prepper is anybody who's getting ready and supplies in for any scenario that's unexpected. That can be from something minor, like localised flooding, wildfires like we've seen, all the way up to the extremes you see for apocalypse, end of days, that kind of thing. And are you happy with the terminology? Do you like being called a prepper or do you prefer something else? No, I like prepper. My whole premise is trying to get that word normalised a bit more. It's not like the doomsday preppers that people have seen on TV. So it needs to be taken away from that and reclaiming the word, shall we say.

3:43OK, all right. Well, we'll get into it. But first of all, what is your radical idea?

3:49Mike Chappell:Everybody in the country should have at least two weeks' worth of food, water and ways to cook that and stay warm. We should all be preppers. We should all have two weeks' worth of supplies. We should all look at our grandparents and be more like them. Why? Because two weeks will cover most disasters. I mean, if it's my family talking to me, I will tell them to get 90 days' worth of food and water. because in 90 days time with no power no sanitation no clean water 90 of the population won't be here that sounds very scary what are you basing those estimates on it's a ballpark figure but it's kind of based on after x amount of days sewage will start coming up your toilet after x amount of days most people's supply of this would have run out supermarkets would have run out and stuff like that and and after that point whoever's left need to work together right it's as simple as that but two weeks will cover everything that we've seen in our lifetime the storms um power cuts blackouts all of that would be covered with two weeks worth of food that you just replenish on a regular basis how did you get into it where are you from tell us a little bit more about yourself So, I mean, I grew up with a family that always had 30 days worth of food because we lived in a rural part of Wales and it was 60 miles to the nearest supermarket.

5:16Mike Chappell:So doing that every week was a pain. So it was a month's worth of food every time and then you'd top up with local shops. So I've kind of always had that mentality of there's always something in. As I stepped more into the prepping world, I discovered the Carrington event, which was a giant solar flare in the mid-19th century and that hit Earth with a CME. What's CME? Coronal mass ejection. So when there's a solar flare, it has a coronal mass ejection. Very similar effects to what people see in the movies with an EMP. What's an EMP? Electromagnetic pulse. Where all the electrics would go. However, a CME would be anything that's mains wired into the grid.

6:02Mike Chappell:Your phone would be fine, but you'd have no signal because the grid would be down. Now, when that hit in them times, the only thing there was telegraph. Wires set on fire. Operators got shocked off the seats and telegraphs were going without anybody pressing them and stuff like that. At the time, that's perfectly recoverable. This was caused by the CME. A solar flare. Solar flare, which hits the CME, hits the Earth, and it caused the geomagnetic storm. And basically anything that's big enough to be an antenna, so our power cables, stuff like that, picks up these waves and just shorts it out. It is a case of everything would be fried.

6:44Mike Chappell:Now, one of these went out the side of the sun a few years ago. Luckily, it wasn't earth-facing. If that had been, it had been lights out. What do you mean? Everything would have gone off. No power, nothing, no recovery. Literally lights out. Literally lights out. Not a mass extinction event. No, no. Literally lights out. complete blackout um with it's not a case of turn the switch back on it would have caused untold damage so so you found out about this event in in what 1859 yeah um and that led you into prepperdom or were you already kind of nibbling around the edges well i already had like say i would keep a bit in but that took me down the rabbit hole and the rabbit hole wasn't filled with crazy tinfoiled hat preppers but it was filled with nasa reports scientists so that got me prepping now right now that's at the back of my mind there's so much other stuff going on and there's so much other stuff to prep for okay i want to get into what you're prepping for and how you're doing it but just uh tell me a little bit more about yourself you've got kids you where do you live what i've got uh six kids from 20 in the 20s to down to born a week ago a week ago a week ago are you kidding me what are you doing down here commitment um wow congratulations and one of the older ones has made me a granddad as well so i'm granddad now so there we go um i enjoy everything everyone else does i enjoy the football my other youtube channel is about sunland football club for my sins that's what i've i support now i enjoy doing that enjoy family holidays everything like that prepping doesn't take away from my life at all i i do everything everyone else does i am a web developer by trade which is another good reason that i prepped because i got made redundant from that okay um because ai is so much cheaper and easier for people to hire than a 30-year experienced developer ai took your job pretty much really pretty much yeah okay and i mean that is something that is very much on people's minds at the moment definitely definitely and that's one of the forefronts that i'm prepping for as well as the extreme weather that um the vbc themselves have recently reported on so you're prepping for uh not just sort of blackouts and stuff but for the kind of mass jobs layoffs, the jobs apocalypse?

8:58Mike Chappell:Everything. I mean, I've got better interest rates in my pantry than you will get in any bank. What do you mean? Well, I've got cans of chilli I paid 90 pence for that are still good to eat that are now£2 odd in the supermarket. OK, yeah, that is a good investment. I've got corned beef that I bought a year ago for less than£2 and is now£4.19 in the supermarket. What interest rate are you going to get that's going to give you that? Wow, that's good. Yeah, that's better than an ISA. Can I just ask, so you live in Manchester. Yeah. Do you live in a flat? Are you in a house with a garden? Do you have a bunker in the back garden?

9:32Mike Chappell:I wish. The budget does not allow it for it yet. But I have a three-bedroom, semi-detached townhouse. And yeah, so there's not much room with the kids and stuff, obviously. So I've literally converted the understairs cupboard and there's lots of clever storage ideas. That's what my channel was started for. Right. the problem I've got is there's very few UK preppers that are out in the open there's a very secret squirrel society going on so there was a lot of American channels that I was watching and seeing what they do and then just kind of seeing what they get what's our equivalent I don't have a giant homestead like they have so I was going like oh look at this space under your kickboards and look what you can do with your stairs and look where you can store water and kind of adapting it for the English model.

10:19Okay, so you've got this YouTube channel called UK Urban Prepper? UK Urban Prepper, yes. Where you sort of have these tutorials. You said that prepping is a secret squirrel society in the UK. Why do you think that is?

10:36Mike Chappell:I've had emails telling me I shouldn't do the channel. I've had messages saying, you need to stop doing what you're doing, telling everyone about this, blah, blah, blah, with actual threats to my family on there. because these people think that we shouldn't tell everyone. We should be the ones that survive and let them all perish. My theory is the more people that are ready and prepared, the less strain on society and the government and the less people we have to save. Oh, wow. So you're getting emails from other preppers saying, keep it to yourself, don't spread the knowledge. Alleged. Alleged preppers.

11:09Mike Chappell:So I very much believe it's probably somebody sat in a basement and a keyboarder who's never seen the light of day, probably. So, Mike, you started with cans of food about eight years ago. Where are you at with it now? Like, what is your stash? What's my survival rate? Yeah. How long could you survive? So, I didn't have any idea. So, I actually made an app to calculate this, which I'm going to put out there for everyone to have soon. And it works out that just in my prepping pantry, in canned foods alone, I've got 109 days for the entire family, based on calories per person per day. Okay. For all, you've got six kids and you and your partner, so eight of you.

11:51Mike Chappell:Well, no, because the two oldest ones are left home. They've been taught as much as they can. That's up to them. But for me and the younger ones, yes. And same amount with water. And that's just in the canned foods. What does that translate into the number of cans of baked beans you've got? Not just baked beans, obviously, but just give me a sense of your store cupboard. It's an understairs cupboard. Anyone in a terrace house knows roughly how big that is. It's both walls filled with cans on shelves. What are we talking, like 100 cans, 200 cans? At least 200. And what kind of stuff have you got in there?

12:30Mike Chappell:Everything I eat. What do you eat? Sausage and beans, macaroni and cheese. I'm a sucker for a Heinz can. Spam is the classic prepper one, but although that's getting expensive. And I have lots and lots of canned potatoes and canned corned beef, because I figured a really good way of making corned beef hash using cans that actually tastes as good as fresh in my eyes, then you can step. So I've got tiers of preps, right? So we've got first tier is canned foods and pastas and things like that. And it needs to be what you already eat. There's no point buying a load, putting it in a cup and thinking, I'm okay.

13:04Mike Chappell:You need to have what you eat because you then cycle it like a shop. Newest ones in the back, oldest ones you use. Right, so you're constantly replacing it. Yeah, so the pantry is not just a prepping pantry, it's a pantry. It's like our parents and our grandparents always had. It's just something we forgot because everything's so convenient now. Then the next tier is kind of the MREs, which are meals ready to eat, which are what the military use, military rations. And it's them because they're easy, high density calories, and if I had to get out, move, anything like that, they're much more transportable.

13:40Mike Chappell:and then the third tier is freeze dried and this is the stuff that you see on where in the background the big buckets in the american programs when they're doing prepping this last 50 years stick it in the cupboard and forget about it survive a nuclear blur yeah what they don't tell you is the nutritional value is absolute pants right so i mean i i worked it out i had to fill a mess tin this big with macaroni and cheese it was a chore to eat and i got 200 calories out of it right because of how it's made and stuff like that so in other words when you're prepping make sure you you buy something that's tasty yeah it's well it's it's you want to do that right the last thing you want in a disaster scenario is to eat something you've never eaten before you need morale i went camping in utah last year for a documentary i was doing and i bought some supplies some of these kind of ready to eat meals like i'm baking mac and cheese it was so disgusting really horrible you've got to test the water so i've got some with me now um what you got um shall i shall i grab them out here yeah go on try not to rustle and bang too no no rustle and bang away that's your water bottle that is the ultimate water filter okay um so i've got so the commercial ones that people will know is things like this wayfarer you kind of get them and go outdoors right that's a chili and rice i want this is a kind of like a foil bag rip it open yeah Put water in it.

15:08Mike Chappell:Well, no, you boil the water and you sit the bag in the water. Oh, OK. And let it heat up in the bag. Then you eat it straight from the bag. Right. Is this camping supplies? Yeah, and you can eat it cold as well. But what I prefer is good old British military ones. Ooh. Hunter's chicken. There you go. That's a sort of beige pouch with lots of red writing on it and nothing else. And beef burrito style filling. There we go. How do you get hold of military rations? Surplus stores. I've got a friend who probably is the only good prepping store in the UK, in South Wales. It's called The Bugout Shop, and he has everything from ours to American rations, which is great.

15:49Mike Chappell:You can get a slice of pizza in a ration pack. Are you ex-military yourself? I trained. I didn't serve. I was medically discharged, and that was all that. that has no effect on prepping whatsoever. Because if you're in the military, you have a giant logistics chain behind you and you've got three days' worth of food. If the logistic chain disappears, that's it. Your three days' worth of food are out. Unless your special forces are trained in that way, they rely on that. So there's a common misconception that some guy who's in the infantry for 10 years will make a better prepper than someone who's a survival expert who's done bushcraft all their life.

16:28Mike Chappell:It's not the case. and that bag you just brought out is that is that kind of looks like one of those kind of waterproof pouches yeah that's so this is a this is just for separation so everything's waterproof within the bag so if the bag gets saturated then you know it's a lot easier and did you bring that here to show me or did you bring that here because you never know what might happen on your way back to manchester later so if i'm going on a journey as long as this i might get stuck the trains might break down i don't not saying it's going to be the end of the world well i'm well sat here in the studio touch wood hopefully not but if something happened for any reason if we had power cut through cyber attacks anything like that this will get me three days worth of travel that's not going to get me home because of the distance but that will get me to somebody within my network who can then resupply me and i can move on a beautifully designed squarespace website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online.

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18:26I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Mike Chappell. Don't forget, you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you always know about future episodes and make sure you've got push notifications turned on. That way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Now, back to Mike Chappell.

18:47The apocalypse is much on the news these days because of AI. and the idea that artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. What are you prepping for? What scenarios do you envisage? Is that it?

19:04Mike Chappell:It is interesting that it's not just conspiracy notes that are saying this. It's ex-employees, CEOs. It's people like that that are warning us. I think the biggest effect from that is going to be economic. I've lost my job from it. And my entire CV is web development. and coding and that's the market that is now saturated with 5 000 applications for one job because ai is so much easier so yes i'm prepping for that the biggest effect right now that i'm prepping for right now is the effects of super el nino that's the biggest thing we've just had that heat wave i'm sure you felt it yeah um it was probably warmer down here than it was where i am That's affected farmers, crop yields, crop quality.

19:49Mike Chappell:We've got the fuel crisis going on because of the Strait of Hormuz and now the other strait being closed. There's so much geopolitics involved that basically, I don't think we're going to have completely empty supermarkets, but the selection, what's available, is going to be massively reduced as we go into the end of this year and next year. And just a few years ago, I would have put you on the sort of quite radical spectrum for prepping for that. But now we've got the British government, which is warning us to buy in supplies in case of extreme weather. We've got the National Audit Office saying that our supply chains are vulnerable to hacking and disease, presumably pandemics or something.

20:30So you must feel vindicated.

20:33Mike Chappell:A bit, but I do feel like we are behind the curb on this. So lots of European countries have already issued leaflets to people's doors. When the government launched the prepare.gov site, or relaunched it as it were, it got like 10 minutes on morning TV and that was it. And then it's forgot about. And most people you speak to in the workplace don't even know because it's not been publicised enough. I think they're too scared to cause a panic. But even if you turned around and said to everybody, right, get two weeks worth of water and food. if you look at that on a grand scale of things it's a single cupboard in your kitchen it's not loads it's not like rooms full of stuff yes when they first say it tesco my emptier sainsbury's my empty other supermarkets are available um but they very good very good the bbc podcast they they might empty right they might have a rush on and stuff like that but that would just be in the initial people stocking up we we'd restock and everything like that and two weeks would cover 99 % of situations.

21:37Mike Chappell:When we had Storm Arwen, there was rural Wales, there was places without power for 10 days. That was, what, about five years ago? Yeah, something like that. 2021. They were out power 10 days. It happens in the Scotland Highlands quite often. They're without power. So two weeks would cover more scenarios. That's what they should be telling people. You can't turn your TV over to any news channel without seeing something about a threat from Russia, without something about supply chain issues, without fuel prices going up, without food problems. And I think the conversation of me to anyone about prepping has become so much easier in the last 12 to 18 months.

22:17Mike Chappell:Really? Because the same people that would have gone, yeah, you're nuts, and if anything happens, I'll just come to your house, are now asking me for genuine advice. Okay, well, we'll get some advice from you in a minute. But having said, we don't want to panic people. can you just tell me about food security in the UK you're quite worried about it why I'm quite worried about it because we import a mass percentage of our food what's on your plate is at least half you know imported as the geopolitical climate changes and war fronts push further in potentially if Russia attacks a NATO country then imports become less and less reliable and if that all stops where's 50 of the food going to come from official government figures say the uk imports roughly 40 to 48 of our total food but in fact um when you look at land use it's higher than that so uh research has found that 64 of the land needed to produce the uk's food and feed including you know animal feed is located abroad and and that and that's before we take into account that that land that is arable 80 of that needs chemical fertilizers to grow things which is reliant on coming through the strait of humus and things like that yeah or coming out of ukraine yeah and the fertilizer costs have doubled we've got farmers within our network that have suffered this firsthand and they to order their fertilizer last time round they had to agree an amount of fertilizer based on no price otherwise they wouldn't get it and They just had to face the price whenever it came.

23:58And so when we're talking about food supply chains, things have changed quite a lot, haven't they, from, let's say, the immediate post-war period?

24:08Mike Chappell:Yeah. I mean, I'm no expert in it, but we're just in time for everything, right? We've got this just-in-time system for absolutely everything. Any supermarket holds less than three days' food for the people it serves. And we saw that firsthand through COVID and through lockdowns and stuff like that, how quickly shelves emptied. It's a super fragile system. I mean, during COVID, there were shortages, but, you know, pretty much they ironed themselves out pretty quickly. It seemed to me that the food supply was pretty resilient. I mean, it's a great model for business. It's a great, just in time is a great model for business.

24:48Mike Chappell:You don't have loads of overages. You don't have stock going bad. Just to be clear on what it is, it basically means that these huge supermarkets don't have vast stock warehouses. They buy it just in time for you to buy it and replenishing the empty shelves as and when they occur. I mean, even if you take that out of it, food's vulnerable anyway, right? It's vulnerable to weather. It's vulnerable to anything like that, pests, anything. You have car insurance in case you crash. you have home insurance in case something happens at your home. What insurance do you have in place for your food and water?

25:24Mike Chappell:It's more vital to you being alive than your car insurance is and your home insurance. So you're saying this isn't a radical idea at all. It's as boring as buying car insurance. It is. It can be. It can be. The preppers who talk and get involved in the communities, it's become a hobby for them because they enjoy it. And they enjoy the camping side of it, the practicing side of it. But yeah, it's as boring as just keeping a cupboard full of stuff and, you know, just in case, because I never want to look into my child's eyes thinking, where's the next meal coming from? I spent a bit of time on your YouTube channel.

25:58I hope you subscribed. You were live streaming. And I want to just get into a bit of vocab because there was a whole kind of new vocabulary that I'm not familiar with. Bug in versus bug out. What is it?

26:16Mike Chappell:So bugging in is what most people in the UK would want to do in any sort of crisis situation. And that is basically closing the doors, closing the curtains. You've got all the stuff there you need. Let the outside world deal with itself. Pull up the drawbridge. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's what bugging in is. That's the most comfortable, the safest and what most people choose to do. However, your house is suddenly on fire. Bugging in is no longer an option. You have to get out. And that's where we see governments around the world advising a grab bag, an emergency evacuation bag. The European Commission said 11 items that you should have and stuff like that.