Meet the preppers

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1:31Hello, I'm James Reynolds. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. In BBC Conversations, we bring people together to share their experiences. This time, meet the preppers. The war in Iran has pushed up the price of fuel with knock-on effects on the cost of food, energy and transport. Some parts of the world are already experiencing shortages. governments are preparing for further disruption. We've all lived through the COVID pandemic and you don't have to doom scroll for long to find other threats ranging from natural disasters and cyber attacks to nuclear conflict or the existential long-term threat of climate change.

2:16But a growing number of people are preparing for almost any kind of emergency. They're ready to protect the people they love. They are known as Preppers. And in our conversation, we are going to hear from four of them. Sarita, known as Dr. Survival, is an academic here in the UK. Killeen lives in the US state of Ohio and runs a website on preparedness. Crystal, known as the Doomsday Queen, is in Utah. And Prepper content creator Derek is in the state of Maine. I've got something that covers all the bases. I've got stored food, stored water, the means to purify and filter water, communications, off-grid heat options, off-grid power options, defensive options.

3:01Everything from knives all the way up to firearms and body armor. I have everything that you would want to have on a daily basis while life is good. So when life gets a little gnarly, I'm still confident. I'm still capable and I'm still comfortable. You know, if the power were to go out, that would mean the grocery store's power is out as well. And I wouldn't need to go to the grocery store. I wouldn't need to go to the gas station. I would be able to defend myself if somebody decided to be rude. I believe there's 10 principles of preparedness. Everything starting from spiritual, physical, medical, food, water, etc.

3:36And I have all 10 bases covered. How long could you survive with just your own supplies? Mentally, I don't know. But physically, I could cover myself for a year. Let's cross to Sarita. Tell us about your emergency stockpile. So very similar. It's essential to have, you know, the supply of food, water, ways of purifying water. Also how to keep in touch with the outside world if things like the Internet go down. But I absolutely would have my own nuclear fallout if that was a possibility. Not so much on the self-defense over here in the UK. it has to be said we've got quite strong laws against that sort of thing so there's probably less scope.

4:17What would you use for self-defence then if you had to? I think I'm the run and hide sort of person if I'm absolutely honest and looking into my soul. I also come from the sort of psychology perspective because I work as a survival psychologist so I think Colleen was very insightful when she mentioned mental survival as well so a lot of looking at how to prepare for adversity from a mental strength point of view. Crystal in Utah, what supplies do you have? So I actually grow and preserve most of my own food. And then on top of that, I have a very large rotational pantry, a long-term pantry. I freeze dry.

4:57Then you go from heating, electricity, solar, self-defense, body armor. We actually train a lot. So from anything and everything you could possibly imagine, our stockpile is a home insurance plan, so you can dabble into it anytime you need. Given that you grow your own food then, how long could you sustain yourself if there was a major emergency and you had to live off your own supplies? Right now, we are actually about a five-year supply in our own house right now. We have about two and a half years, and then we've moved about two and a half years out onto our off-grid location because we have two locations.

5:31Would you ever lend any of your supplies to anyone who needed them? Ooh, that's a really good question. We actually do have a stockpile that is for people that are part of our community, but everybody contributes to that. So there's a pretty large communal stockpile that's not even included in that five years. But to somebody who has not prepared, it just depends on if they offer a skill, something of value, and it depends on what the situation is. Natural disaster, absolutely. That is the easiest one to lend and do those kind of things. But if we're talking something worse or more dismal, most people don't know what we do.

6:12Crystal, you got into this because it's a generational thing in your family going back to your grandparents? My grandpa was born in 1910 and he went through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and him and my grandma helped teach people how to grow and can their own food, prepare for anything, rotational supply. and then I've actually continued to do that since I started canning when I was three. Even directly right after high school at 18 years old, I was hosting canning classes and teaching people how homesteading and prepping go hand in hand. Crystal has brought this up a couple of times.

6:46She keeps saying rotational and that's really important for all of us. It's not just to stock it up and forget it. You have to practice with it. You have to rotate it. You have to have it be a part of your life, not just something in a cold, dark basement. You know, a lot of people talk about preparedness like it's stockpiling fear, but it's actually stockpiling peace and it's a way of life. It's not a destination. What are the emergencies that you have in your mind to prepare for? Any type of inconvenience. I mean, it can be a minor inconvenience like a flat tire in which, you know, I've got first aid and blankets and things of that nature in my vehicle and I know how to repair a tire.

7:28But it could be something more significant. I mean, we've had several attempts to dampen our electrical supply. Several hacks have been thwarted. And the problem is, is if one of those transformers goes down, it's not about, oh, we'll just go into the transformer warehouse and bring out another one. It takes years to replace a transformer. So that's why so many of us think in long-term, like with Crystal, she's thinking five years. Well, that's about right if we're talking a gloom and doom, you know, power outage with a transformer out. Yes, I suppose when people ask about what emergencies might come up in the near future, it is, as we said, the small scale things and doing the micro preps for those to everybody has a kitchen.

8:14You know, how do you prep for an emergency in your kitchen? So a burn skit, fire extinguisher, fire blanket, it they're sort of micro interventions that you can put in place just in case the worst case happens there but then you can go right up to the big scale things like a pandemic I think was a really good example I had a pandemic preparedness kit that had been under my sink for a number of years so when everybody was looking for masks I had masks I had gloves I had disinfectants because that was one of the things that I'd sort of worried about because I was familiar with things like the Spanish flu pandemic going back to 1918.

8:52And it's like thinking, well, yeah, that could happen again. And it did with COVID, but it could happen yet again moving forward. So pandemics are certainly on my radar big time. I think it's brilliant that you brought up on the pandemic and what you already had stored away because we definitely experienced that here in the US. You know, we had more elderly and immunocompromised. They had their own set times to do shopping. And when that fear happened, the civil unrest of people starting to argue in grocery stores, we've all seen the clips. We've all seen it. I saw it firsthand and I was watching a little gal.

9:28She was about 92 years old and she was just trying to pick up basic grocery items. And you had asked earlier if I would share my supplies. During the pandemic, we 100 % did. I asked her to go back to her car because people were arguing, people were getting intense. And because what I do is I grow my own, I knew I had a surplus in certain areas. And so I just asked her kindly what kind of food she needed for her and her husband. And I told her to wait because it was too risky for them to be in a store. And I just filled up an entire box at home, brought it over to their house, just dropped it off there.

10:02And then she actually just cleaned out my jars and then I just retrieved them and then continued to grow. And it was no big issue on our ends. A lot of people don't realize that the smallest things that people can prep for is a job loss. It's your self-insurance plan. No job is set forever. If you go all the way up to EMPs, World War III, all of those, once you start prepping for just the basic inconveniences in life, it continues to help through any circumstance. I agree 100%. And I'll often get questions from newer preppers who are responding to the most recent event, in this case, the war in Iran, asking where to get started.

10:44And oftentimes they don't like the advice because it's not exciting. It's not Hollywood advice. It's prepare for the most likely event that you're going to face. And oftentimes that's either a short-term natural disaster or a job loss. Not the EMP that everyone talks about, not the World War III situation that everybody fears. But if you can cover those more probable events, then you can sort of move up the ladder to less probable but more dire situations. And every step you take on that ladder advances your level of preparedness. Derek, what is the most apocalyptic situation that you would be prepared for?

11:27I mean, I'm prepared at this point for sort of any situation. The most apocalyptic scenarios that I could imagine would either be, you know, a global nuclear war or a serious like pandemic that has a high mortality rate or, you know, multi EMPs hitting the United States would be pretty devastating. Basically, a nuke going up high in the atmosphere that fries the grid. everyone's understanding is that the US is just vastly unprepared for a situation like that. So the grid could go down theoretically for months, if not longer, before it could get back up online. And we're all dependent on just-in-time delivery and getting our groceries from the grocery store and refrigeration.

12:10And once all that goes away, once all banking and infrastructure and communications go down, it's anyone's guess on what would happen. Derek, Crystal, Killeen and Sarita. And in case you're wondering, EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. EMP weapons are a threat that governments are taking seriously. We'll hear more from our guests in just a moment. I'm James Reynolds. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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14:19The prepper, or survivalist, movement was once quite niche. Today, though, it is much more mainstream. Governments, too, want people to be better prepared. Instead, the UK authorities, for example, have launched a campaign encouraging people to be ready for emergencies such as power cuts, floods or outbreaks of disease. And as you'll hear in the next part of our conversation, some religions such as the Mormon Church also encourage people to be ready for disaster. Let's rejoin our guests then. Sarita in the UK, Colleen in Ohio, Derek in Maine and Crystal in Utah. And I wanted to know in particular how Crystal came to be known as the Doomsday Queen.

14:59I do prep for everything from basic job loss all the way up to the grim and the dismal. Currently right now we can see in the news, we can see in the headlines that there is a lot of worry when it comes to a nuke or nuclear power plants being struck. So from, you know, medication that can help assist with that, action plans that can help assist with that. But also Hollywood has struck this fear of one bomb, everything is gone. The nuclear winter that comes across, but everything actually has a distance, a radius. The half-life is very short with a lot of those bombs compared to what Hollywood has said, you know, a thousand years of gray.

15:44But yes, we do prep for everything from there, but we like to bring it back home to rational preparedness. The name Doomsday Queen actually came from the New York Post. They ran an article and they were like, oh, she preps for everything. She's a Doomsday Queen. So a lot of people go straight to the doom and gloom, but we actually try to keep things very optimistic. Most people think preparedness is about expecting the worst. And I believe, and I think there's a kernel of truth that everyone is sharing here, that it's about handling whatever shows up without losing your cool or your groceries.

16:18It starts with a little and it goes to the extreme. People think that preparedness is extreme, like, you know, oh my gosh, did she just say she's preparing for a nuke? Well, that's because she's taken baby steps to get there. People think it's extreme until life gets extremely inconvenient. Sarita, let's go back to 2020 when people were really worried at the beginning of the pandemic in this country. But the government said there is enough food out there. There is enough medicine out there. Nobody needs to panic buy. Nobody needs to hoard. Nobody needs to stockpile. And in the end, there were enough supplies.

16:54Yes, and I think that is one of the things that is quite curious, isn't it? I certainly didn't need to go shopping for three months when the pandemic hit. I never went anywhere near a supermarket. And sometimes prep has got almost the blame for, or you must have been taking the food off the shelves. And it's like, no, no, no, we were the people not taking the food off the shelves because we were already prepared. I actually think that it is a little bit psychological. In the pandemic, people didn't know how to respond. It was very uncertain terms, you know, as to what was going to happen and how do you assert some control by doing something.

17:29So actually, I sort of saw a lot of active coping with people going to supermarkets and going, oh, I wasn't prepared, but now I want to be prepared. And that's when they started buying the 20 bags of pasta, which probably never got eaten. If we can get people to sort of rationally prep before an emergency, we do have the option then to be less worried when things go wrong. Sarita, you described the fact that you don't have a nuclear bunker at the moment, given the resources. But I wonder if Derek, Killeen or Crystal, you do. And if so, what that bunker looks like. Well, I live in an underground solar energy home.

18:04It can withstand just about everything except for flooding. That would be bad. It gets plenty of light. I can grow food within my solar atrium. My father designed this back in the early 70s and it was, you know, very elegant in its day. It would help me if there was a nuclear fallout situation. I wish I had a nuclear bunker, just think it would be fun. But no, I don't have one. But I'm not terribly concerned about nuclear strikes, at least where I live. That said, if one were to happen and fallout was heading our way, we have a basement that we could retreat to. And there's a lot of civil defense era instructional booklets out there on how to basically turn your own basement into a fallout shelter of sorts.

18:49And there's a lot of mass around earth and concrete around a basement that you go in the corner and you could stay there until the risk went away. When any of you go to the houses of friends and maybe you're a bit curious, you look inside their cupboards and they don't really have anything because they're the kind of people who go to the store, the shop that morning. Do you want to have a word with them and say, put more stuff in your house? Absolutely. 100 percent. Well, here in Utah, we're very, very blessed because emergency preparedness is very common here. It's actually preached from the religion that is here to have an emergency food to rely on.

19:27And it's very common. So when I do find that people are like, oh, I only have food for six days in my home, that brings a whole different level of preparedness in where you kind of want to have a conversation with somebody is you're now relying on a store chain because they're going to increase prices, which we're going to see right now with a fuel crisis. Petroleum touches everything. Crude oil touches everything. So even though right now we're feeling that squeeze at the gas pump, people will potentially see the squeeze inside of a store. You know, Crystal brings up a really good point. Preparedness really isn't about being extreme.

20:03It's about being sensible. And when you have people that you care about that aren't being sensible, not only does that make their life vulnerable, but it makes your life vulnerable because they're going to be the first people to knock on your door. And while I prepare to help other people, I also prepare to help other people to learn to do what I do. And I think that's what all of us do if we're in the preparedness business. It's very inconvenient because you've placed a target on your back. You're telling the world, I'm into preparedness. But I think it's because of an inherent love and inherent charity towards other people that we're trying to get the message out and let people know, look, this doesn't have to be about extreme.

20:43It's showing love in advance and trying to get other people to do the same for the people that they care about. And here in the UK, Sarita, as you'll know, there are very few permitted firearms. Farmers are allowed to apply for them, but very few others. And our guests from America, you've all mentioned your self-defense capabilities. Could you describe what those capabilities are and how important that is for you all? It's not that important. It's an element just like anything else, food, water, energy, communications, and it ranks below food and water for sure. That said, I think that a lot of people, probably particularly in the US, and certainly used to be the case, would come to prepping through the firearms community.

21:25And it's been interesting for me to watch the societal change and shift and attitudes towards prepping over the years. I started blogging on this topic in 2007. And back then, you didn't talk about it or people thought you were a crazy hermit, a unabomber type person. Every event that's happened since then, more and more people realize that it's not fringe anymore. When I bought my first AR-15, it was before everyone was buying AR-15s. And it was kind of like, OK, well, now I have some defensive capabilities. But at least in the U.S., I don't know how many households have AR-15s, but a lot. And there are this what they call werewolf preppers.

22:03And it's just how big it is. I have no idea. But the idea is that these people don't have the time or resources or energy to prepare for themselves. So they're preparing only to the point that they have the supplies needed to steal from preppers. So that's a threat that needs to be considered. I think that it's also about being smart. The more you bring in your community around you, the more defensive you are acting. While I train women specifically, firearm self-defense and rape prevention, I think that those are fortunately still the extremes. We're more likely to ward off confrontation with standing your ground, with having made your decision ahead of time.

22:45Will I share what I have? Yes, I will, but it will be on my terms. Like Crystal said, you know, what can you contribute? You're not just getting it for free. I'm not a grocery store. And I think that that's important as well, is to play through these scenarios in your mind ahead of time. Because even if you do have a firearm, what's your skill set? Will you freeze when it comes time to use it? There's backups to backups to backups. I may have firearms, but I also have what's known as an ASP. It's a baton like police officers use. I have pepper spray, and I have a litany of other methods that I could use in a pinch to defend myself.

23:21But just like your other guests, I feel like those are the more extreme scenarios. But those are the ones that I, you know, I truly want to survive as well. Of course, if anyone watches Hollywood films, they'll know that people who prepare are often seen as not always in touch with reality. I can think of any number of film characters have been portrayed that way. So when you all meet new people and say prepping is a big part of your lives, do you get any of those reactions of seeing perhaps that you're not quite of this world? During the pandemic, when I was working at the university and the dean of school came to announce that the university would be closing.

23:57And he just said to me, he said, oh, Sarita, we all thought you were a bit bonkers, but we don't think that now. It took a bit of time to sort of process that. Most people do think, you know, we're a little bonkers until an event happens that impacts their life, whether it's a surgery, whether it was the pandemic. I go in and I teach classes. I teach people how to can, grow their own food, just basic level preparedness. And that even helps people that who are going through income shortages. I don't just like walk up to somebody and go, hey, my name is Crystal and I do a lot of preparedness. I normally just get a gauge for how they feel in the world.

24:36And I go, man, that was kind of crazy what we saw when shelves were empty and people stacking things in carts. And they're like, yeah, that was really intense. I started preparing a little bit, but I still feel lost. And I'm like, oh, have you ever thought of a rotational pantry or a long-term? More people are actually more welcoming to it now than they were six years ago when I started teaching online. More people are like, hey, can you break this down a little bit more? And as we've seen, the cost of electricity has gone up. We've seen natural disasters. There was the Texas freeze and many people had actually passed away because they didn't know how to cook without electricity.

25:12So these are all viable skills because many people need to know what is safe and what's not safe. It's your responsibility as a parent, a spouse, a brother, a sister, to know how to do things so that it's safe, that you don't lose your life to something so simple as, you know, CO2 poisoning. Yeah. And I think that's a really good point around breaking it up and simplifying it. So when I talk to people and say, oh, you're a prepper, they're like, they've got an image in their heads that you know that i'm like a a survivalist out of a film like mad max and i have some like crazy store and in a secret basement and when i go no no no what i do is micro prep i think about what could go wrong and then i put a mitigation in place so all i'm doing really is being a bit proactive around you know thinking about what could go wrong and how i might just stop that being an inconvenience.