Live Like the World is Dying—S1E92
Tom Doig on Prepping Subculture
Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Tom talk about talking about preparedness and how subculture can work within those communities.
Guest Info
Tom (he/him) is a nonfiction writer and disaster journalist who writes a lot about climate disaster. He is the author of The Preppers Next Door, The Coal Face, and Moron to Moron: two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure. You can find more of his work at Tomdoig.com.
Host Info
Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.
Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.
Transcript
Margaret 00:15
Hello, and welcome to whatever podcast I'm recording...Live Like the World is Dying. Hello, welcome to Live Like the World is Dying. I'm your host Margaret Killjoy, one of your--well, I'm your only host today. There's other hosts. I found out--I probably said this last time--I found out that one of the other hosts, sometimes people think is me. Maybe people think I'm them, but I'm Margaret and Inmn is Inmn and we're different people. But today, we're going to be talking about talking about preparedness. And we're gonna be talking about someone from New Zealand, who currently lives in Australia, who does a lot of research into the preparedness subculture and also into disasters. And I don't know, I'm really excited for you all to hear this conversation. But first, I'm really excited for you all to hear this jingle for another show on Channel Zero Network, the podcast network for anarchists, podcasts. Their tagline is probably less repetitive than that. Here's the jingle.
Margaret 01:46
And we're back. Okay, so if you could introduce yourself with your name and your pronouns and then the other introduction stuff that you wanted to do.
Tom 02:25
Hi, everyone, my name is Tom. My pronouns are he/him. I would like to acknowledge that I'm recording this podcast on the traditional grounds of the Turrbal and Yuggera people here in Meanjin, Brisbane and acknowledge that their elders and descendants have been thriving on this land for tens of thousands of years and surviving for the last couple of centuries under colonialism. If anyone's still here thriving in a couple of centuries I'll be pleasantly surprised. I'm from Aotearoa on New Zealand. I just like to also quickly say, Kia ora! [continues with a greeting in Māori]. So, yeah, I'm from Wellington. I'm a paikea, settler colonist. And yeah, my name is Tom. And thank you so much, Margaret. I'm a huge fan of your show and your work. And it's really exciting for me to be having this chat with you.
Margaret 03:20
Oh, well, thanks. I'm really excited to talk to you about all this stuff. We were talking a little bit before we press record about some of what we're gonna be talking about and I'm really excited about it. Do you want to introduce the work that you do that kind of leads you into knowing a fair amount about preparedness and stuff?
Tom 03:35
Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm a nonfiction writer. I write books. I wrote my--my first book was actually a comedy travel book, a memoir called "Moron To Moron: Two Men, Two Bicycles, One Mongolian Misadventure," cycling from a small town called Moron to a small town also called Moron. I then, I guess, overcorrected from being a silly travel person and went back to university and did a PhD in climate change and disaster and there was a really terrible mine fire in the Latrobe Valley, which is a couple of hours out of Melbourne in southeastern Australia, and so I wrote a couple of books about that mine fire. The first one was called "The Coal Face". The second one was called "Hazelwood." The name of the mine was was Hazelwood. So I guess now I can call myself a disaster journalist with that written. And then when I was living in Aotearoa, New Zealand over COVID I edited a collection of essays called "Living With the Climate Crisis: Voices From Aotearoa," and that was sort of a collection of personal essays from academics in the climate space but also activists and quite a lot of Māori Pacifica voices as well. And I was quite happy, there was one kid who was still in high school and a young woman who was in first year uni [university] so I was quite excited to have actual teenagers in the book.
Margaret 05:00
Oh, that's cool.
Tom 05:01
So I guess I'm, like writing about the climate crisis and trying to find, I guess, new ways into a subject, which I think obsesses me, obsesses so many of us these days, but can be so overwhelming and complicated and also just sort of a bit dry and boring. So I'm not a scientist. I'm not very interested in politics and policy at that kind of, you know, pointy headed politician level but trying to find excited and fucked up stories and, you know, things that people can really connect with and engage with is what's exciting to me and I guess what brought me to prepper culture and survivalist culture.
Margaret 05:46
Okay, so what's funny to me about this--I agree with you, I think most writing about climate change is like really dry; there's some sort of pun in there about the fires that are coming in here--but it's kind of wild, to me that it's a dry subject when it's like, we're literally discussing--probably not the end of multicellular life on Earth but like, maybe? Probably not. But like, we're talking about something that impacts every person who was alive in very dramatic ways. And drama is literally the essence of story, you know? And so how is it...? Why is climate change boring to talk about? And what are some of the things that you do to come up with ways to discuss it in ways that are not...that are engaging to audiences?
Tom 06:38
Yeah, I mean, I think.... Well, I guess we could say that climate change has got a lot more exciting in the last 10 or 15 years as the disasters have gotten so much exponentially worse. [Laughing] So yeah, it's not...it isn't boring when your kitchen is full of smoke for six months or, you know, when your house is getting washed into the beach, which is sort of happening, more and more. But I guess, I mean, look, I.... I was I was studying at uni, like, if I go back, say 20 years, I was doing English Lit. I was living in a hippie share house full of ratbag girls who were all studying environmental science. And they had the fear back then. And I still was like, "Oh, Kurt Vonnegut, you know, he's cool." And they were like, "We must, you know, never have another plastic bag in the house ever again, you know, like, we are teetering on the brink." And I was like, "Really, this is a bit weird, you know, you guys are pretty uptight." And it took me a while to kind of catch up to them and to understand what they were so worried about. And it wasn't just climate change stuff. It was species extinction and pollution and just overshoot, just the overshoot of industrial capitalism on all its levels. But I think with climate change, right, like, there's just so much to it, right? And there's.... I do think that some of the conversations around co2 concentration levels in the atmosphere, say, and like, you know, I'm old enough to remember when we were trying to stabilize it, you know, 350 parts per million, or what have you, or, you know, like? They were just overshot of there. So, you know, like, the absolutely kind of like.... It can just seem so trifling and weird to be arguing about "Is 1.5 degrees go to keep humanity alive? Or are we already fucked? Or is two degrees gonna be okay?" like just talking about graphs? And you're sort of talking about statistical uncertainty? I mean, I think the Right knew this, right. And there were operatives out of the Republican Party, you know, the tobacco industry. And you know, it's that whole "Death is our product," thing, which is like, if uncertainty is the message, even if all of the outcomes are from bad to terrible to everyone is dead, somehow the message that comes through is, "We don't know." And what people interpret that as is "Maybe nothing will happen then. You know, maybe it will go on like this forever." Or, it's just too complicated, and the experts don't know. And, you know, like I still feel like it gets mired in that space, even though in a lot of ways we have moved on from that and the denial strategies have moved on to that to like, "Well, it's really, really bad, but there's not really anything we can do about it. So let's just kind of hunker down and forment, you know, racism, to shore up a sort of ethnostate," you know, as the sort of is the new frontier of denialism. But, yeah, it's hard to get your teeth stuck into it.
Margaret 09:54
Have you randomly read this book "Termination Shock" by Neil Stevenson? It's a fairly recent Neil Stevenson book.
Margaret 10:01
I'm honestly not coming out of the gate recommending it. But there's this part in it where--it's a climate change book--and increasingly, Neil Stevenson's solutions to large problems seems to be, "I hope the billionaires save us." And that's like.... It's like the billionaires and the monarchs literally working together to...whatever. I was pretty unimpressed with some stuff. But one of the things he talks about, he talks about when all of the sudden the right wing starts talking about climate change and taking it seriously, you know,? And it's funny because you're talking about how the right wing thing, right, at least in the United States, the right wing thing is to not acknowledge climate change, you know, to say everything's gonna continue, right? But they're still laying...like the preparedness culture, the right wing preparedness culture, is still kind of laying a foundation. And it makes me think that like--I try not to be conspiracy minded--but it makes me think that like I'm sure some of the people higher up actually do believe in climate change and are just like, "It is not politically useful to us currently to claim that climate change is real." But whenever that switch comes, that's going to be a scary moment.
Tom 10:01
I have not.
Tom 11:11
Yeah, I think you could be right. Yeah, there could be a lot of whiplash, right? In terms of like as Fox and Breitbart and all of those channels, if they do sort of turn on a dime. There will be a lot of confused people. But um, yeah, it also just feels like.... I don't know. It's such...it's so...it's also dank and festy online, right, in terms of the stuff people are reading and people's ability to change their minds, or to change their minds radically while thinking they haven't changed their minds at all. Like, we're very flexible. We're very good humans with withholding contradictory ideas and managing that dissonance. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I guess when I started writing my Hazelwood book, one of the reasons I was really drawn to that as a subject is that it was a way for me to write about climate change and think through climate change stuff with a really clear story and cast of characters and kind of engaging action, you know? There are aspects of the book which are like a disaster movie, I guess, because it was.... I mean, it was.... I'll tell you briefly because it was crazy, You know, like it was...
Margaret 12:21
Yeah, tell me. Tell me what happened.
Tom 12:22
So, the Hazelwood mine is a huge opencast mine. So it's not underground mineshafts. It's like they, you know, they just dig up and expose the areas.
Tom 12:27
Surface Mining! [remembering the word] Yeah. And so the mine is over a kilometer wide and a kilometer long. And it's hundreds of meters of exposed coal wall and it's right next to a town of 15,000 people. And it's directly upwind of this town. And, of course, because neoliberalism is terrible, the mine was owned by the government, the state government, and then they sold it because they thought they needed the money. And when they sold it, they relaxed all the safety regulations, which included that the new miners didn't have to cover over the dugout coal. So, there's just like a flammable wall of coal. And then there's unprecedented heatwave, there's unprecedented drought, and there's a fire that starts directly upwind of the mine. It blows immediately into a pine plantation, which has been planted next to the mine, which is idiotic. So the pine plantation goes off, like, you know, like a box of fireworks, showering embers into the coalface that just lights up instantly. There's no.... They're pulling out the sprinkler system to sell them for scrap because the regulations let them do it. Like, it's just an absolute clusterfuck. And there's literally cracks in the surface of the mine which go 10 meters deep. So, once the fire is in there, it's in there, right? It's sort of like it's a volcano or something. And then it's poisoning all of the townspeople who are directly downwind from the mine. So, not only was it a terrible event and it had poisoned thousands of people who were quite poor and not really in a position to leave town because they didn't have money often and it killed a couple of dozen people, statistically speaking. Although, it's hard to point the finger at who exactly died from poisoning. But that story, I guess, there was so much kind of wrapped up in it as a kind of symbol, or metaphor, or synecdoche, for the terribleness of climate change. And that was really good as a writer to work with, right? Because it was sort of like, well, if you want a story about coal kills, this is a story about how coal kills. And it's killing the people who dig it up and whose husbands work in the mine and the wives live next door. And so, you know, that was a really good thing for me to land with as, I guess, as an author who was sort of hoping to make even a smidgen of positive difference in the world, you know? And coal is one of those kind of inflection points, I guess, where it's like, well, at least if the Australian government closed down some of its coal mines, which are some of the most dirty and polluting in the world, at least, that'd be something you know? And so that was kind of something I dedicated a lot of the 2010s to, probably about five or six years there. And once that project kind of wrapped up and I was a little bit...I was a little bit unsure of what to do next. I'm not.... I mean, it's one of the reasons I admire you, Margaret, is that you have so much on the go and you've got so many ideas and things going on. I feel like I've had three or four good ideas in my life. And I was short a good idea. And actually one of my mates, Sam Hoffman, who's sort of old activist media dude from way back, he started sending me messages and links to prepper Facebook groups in Australia and he was like, "You gotta check this stuff out, man. It's wild. It's like left-winger and right-wingers and weird bogans and anarchists and hippies all saying all this crazy stuff. And some of its, you know, really onto it about storing food and some of its like, really whack-job conspiracy theories." And so he was getting very excited about it. And My instant reaction, my initial reaction was like, "Ugh, ick, gross. Prepping gross. Like, gross, you know, racist white man, yuck. I don't want anything to do with it. Guns, gross. Boo." And so I was quite like that for a while but the links kept coming. I kept clicking on them, I don't know. And then at some point I flipped over. And I was like, "Okay, no, this is amazing. There's something really interesting culturally going on. Sam's right, as he is, from time to time," in terms of it seeming like there was this sort of really interesting subcultural moment where traditional political alliances were sort of getting scrambled and reformed in the prepping space. And I was like, I couldn't tell what was happening. I didn't know how to parse it, right? I didn't know if I would say this is a reactionary thing or this is a beautiful community thing? It seems like it's both at once. And it seems like the people in that space could kind of, could go in either direction quite easily as well. I started looking at New Zealand prepper sites as well. And I can't remember, actually, if--I think this was a New Zealand thing I found--but there was this person and they were like, "I'm just, you know, I'm just a single mama. And I'm just trying to look after my kid and I really want to buy a tent to, you know, bug out, but I can't afford a tent. Does anyone have any ideas?" And someone was like, "Ahh, tents. Tents are terrible and they're so expensive. I reckon just, you know, go to the hardware store, go to Bunnings and buy a good ol'e tarp and a glue gun. You can make your own tent." And I remember just thinking like, that is such a terrible idea. Like, I've been camping a lot. Tarps are not breathable. Like, there's a reason that tents are kind of expensive. It's because they have this really wonderful, breathable fabric. And they're light and...
Margaret 12:27
Yeah, surface mining.
Margaret 18:12
And usually two layers unless it's crazy expensive. Yeah.
Tom 18:15
That's right. And there's membranes going on and stuff. And so I was like, sleeping out in a tarp and/or trying to make your own waterproof tent with a glue gun, I was just like, that's a terrible idea. But the pathos of that and the kind of idea that people who have very limited resources and very legitimate concerns about the fragility of society and how things could go south, and what options they have, how limited their options are, the pathos of that really hit home for me. And I, because, you know, I'm from New Zealand. I have been living in Australia, but you know, I follow New Zealand stuff all the time. And I was back there in 2020-21. The other kind of prepper of stories that started coming across my radar, which I don't know if they are a big deal in the States, but suddenly there was this cluster of stories and it was like, "Silicon Valley Tech billionaires have a bunker in New Zealand," you know?
Margaret 19:14
Yeah, totally. I was gonna ask about this.
19:16
"They've got a private jet on standby, waiting at, you know, the airport, where they pay a pilot round the clock," you know, "Peter Thiel, you know, Jeff Bezos," whoever, you know. Definitely Peter Thiel. I'm not sure about Bezos. I think James Cameron, the film director, owns a massive property at the bottom of the North Island. I think Shania Twain has a massive estate. I don't know if she's a prepper. She's just rich, right? Yeah, but the Peter Thiel thing was big. And the fact that, I think, Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn, but yeah, there was suddenly this this thing and it was like all the CEOs in Silicon Valley, it's a nudge, nudge, wink, wink to say I've got a bunker in New Zealand. And as you know, as a New Zealander, I'm like, the instant reaction, of course, was like "Fuck those guys." And it was just like, why can Americans just buy up half of New Zealand? This is terrible. And I think it's...I think it has been regulated since then. Because I think a lot of people are like, "Fuck? What the fuck is going on? This is terrible." So it's become a little bit more difficult. It's definitely odd, as a you know, as a middle class New Zealander who's grown up being taken by my mother and father into the wilderness to go hiking and camping and so forth and, you know, appreciating the great wilderness, when you start reading American newspaper articles and New Zealand newspaper articles saying that the super rich Silicon Valley tycoons who are destroying the planet are also buying up large swathes of your precious country because they expect their behavior to destroy the world and they want to use New Zealand as their bolthole, it's a pretty...it's, you know, feel a little bit miffed about the whole thing. As well as the terrible hypocrisy and cynicism of it all. And in actual facts, like since those stories have broken, I think there has been a general sense of disgruntlement in New Zealand and the law, the foreign property ownership laws have been tightened. So, it's not like there are, it's not like every second tech billionaire in the States now owns big chunks of New Zealand. That's become much harder. But nevertheless, the fact does remain that Peter Thiel has a big, you know, property on the edge of the beautiful Lake Wānaka. You know, he's trying to get resource consent planning to build, you know, an outlandish Bond-villain style underground bunker that I think he got knocked back because it's ugly and terrible, but, you know, it's is weird to sort of think, oh, wow, that, you know, the people who use the world as their playground, those super rich, they're choosing New Zealand. And, you know, there are lots of sort of, I guess, climate sciency reasons for that, right, because New Zealand has lots of rainfall and will continue to do so, hopefully. It's quite high above sea level. It's very hilly and mountainous. It has a low population. It's far away from other land masses. So, there are all of these ways in which New Zealand functions as a bunker in itself, right? If you get yourself to New Zealand, you sort of, you know, any bunker on top of that is sort of a cherry on top kind of thing. So, I started becoming very interested in this topic in late 2019, right, in the pre-Covid world, and it's so funny because at that stage I would still, if I talked to people, I'd be like, "I've started becoming interested in preppers," and they'll be like, "What's a prepper?" And it was still something that I kind of had to explain, right. Or I remember I was trying to apply for the odd kind of like grant application or whatever. For those of you who don't know, which is everyone, a prepper is someone who thinks the world is going to end and so they're storing cans, or whatever, you know, so you write up your little definition. And I remember writing up those early definitions like in January, 2020 and then that, you know, covid was kind of creeping, creeping, creeping into media stories. I remember having a house party and this guy was over and he was like, "Should we be talking more about Wuhan?" And like, you know, and it's like, "Oh, that's right, Wuhan." And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, it was like, "Oh shit, Italy's in a lot of trouble." And, and then it was like, "Oh God, there's some terrible things going on." But just watching it kind of creep up. And then it was like, "Oh, man, there's this terrible pandemic. We have to all.... And I remember going--so my partner was flying from--we were living in New Zealand at that time--she was flying to Sydney to actually do an audio recording for a novel of her's that was coming out--and I was like, "You need to get N95 face masks. Like, I don't want you on that plane without a face mask." So, I went to the Bunnings hardware store to get face masks.
Margaret 23:58
So the preppers got to you is what you're saying?
Tom 24:01
I was becoming a little bit of a prepper, right? And so I went to the store to get the face masks and the clerk there was like, "I'm sorry, the preppers have come out of the hills and they bought all of the face masks. Like people have been buying face masks by the box, by the 100. And then he found me, you know, in the corner somewhere with the last two, you know, proper spec'd face masks. So I bought them. And I bought my shelving units and I cleared out the garage and I loaded up on cans and I remember as I was--I didn't really go crazy with the toilet paper--but as I was loading up on cans, there were definitely trucks parking in the PAK'nSAVE car park and they were loading up on toilet paper and stuff. So it was like.... And I was listening to podcasts about Y2K and whether or not it was, you know, a red herring or it was a legit thing for people to be prepping for back then, as I was building my own prepper thing. And my friends, my friends who are very normal chill dudes, were going, "Ah, I'm getting my preps," you know? Like so it was sort of like a joke now. And the joke was, we are all preppers now, which I think is actually you wrote an article with that title, right?
Margaret 25:09
Yeah, yeah.
Tom 25:11
But that's like, that's one of the titles, sort of working titles, as I set along for my book around that time as well, which is like so that's, you know, great minds think alike, Margaret.
Margaret 25:21
[Laughing] I won't be hurt if you use it.
Tom 25:24
Yeah, the other title, which is interesting to me, and that I was more stuck on for a while is "Rich Prepper, Poor Prepper." Just like....
Margaret 25:33
Like, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"?
Tom 25:35
Yeah, like that terrible self help book, right?
Margaret 25:38
Yeah, I read like a chapter of it once to understand what people were talking about. It's so bad. It is so bad.
Tom 25:43
Right? And I mean, the beautiful thing is, of course, is that guy went bankrupt and possibly has fraud charges against him and stuff.
Margaret 25:51
Yeah, fuck him.
Tom 25:52
Pure grift. Right. Fuck that guy. But, and--I'll try not to not make this too much of a tangent--but what I like about "Rich Prepper, Poor Prepper" as a title, as a kind of frame, I guess, is it really starkly shows the difference between Peter Thiel buying property wherever he wants to in the world, and that's his prepping, versus the single mom who needs a tent, right? And so I think the scale of social inequality--and who do we make fun of? We make fun of the woman with a tarp tent, not Peter Theil. Because we, you know, I think Australia is really bad, and I'm sure that the State's is much better, at laughing at poor people, right? We call it "punching down," as a term in Australia. So, yeah, and so I feel.... And actually, oh, I'll tell this anecdote just because I feel like I don't know if the whole toilet paper wars, there was some really lurid footage of people punching each other out in the aisles for toilet paper in Australia that went viral. So, the first reading of that is like, "Oh, poor bogans. Aren't they stupid?" and, you know, it's punching down thing. And then they're literally, of course, academics have written articles on what's going on here. Is it a kind of like, sort of trying to preserve hygiene, blah, blah, blah, blah? Actually, my reading, I think, is that what's going on is something that's hiding in plain sight, which is that if you're freaking out and you've lifted quite late to prep and you don't have much money or much space, toilet paper is the cheapest, lightest, bulkiest thing to buy that you can you know, drop, drop $50 or $80. fill a shopping trolley, then fill your car, then then fill a cupboard, and then you're good, right? If you were to buy freeze dried meals from the camping store, that'd be like $1,000 or $2,000. So that's my big take on the toilet paper wars. But I guess all of this is to say that the prepping thing, as I was starting to become interested in it, it just.... It suddenly was everywhere, right? Suddenly everyone was stuck at home bugged in, you know, like we were all sort of forced to bug in. In New Zealand, where I was living, the New Zealand government lockdowns are pretty intense. So, we had seven weeks, I think it was, where we couldn't go, you know, outside of our five.... You know, you shouldn't really leave the house. You couldn't get takeaways. You couldn't get anything delivered by the post. So, it really was a type of life that was drastically different from frictionless on demand capitalism, you know, driving around, flying around, life. And it was, you know, it was really… I don't know. It was really....
Margaret 28:39
You all managed Covid Zero for a while, right?
Tom 28:43
That's right, it was Covid Zero for quite a long time. And the thing that's kind of disturbing about it is that.... You know, and there was a lot of compliance. Like, the misinformation came later. And, to be honest, I'd moved to Australia and missed some of that. But, I was living in a town called Palmerston North, which is a couple of hours north of Wellington on the North Island. 70,000 people live there. And someone said after the fact that in Palmerston North--and it would serve a region of say another 70,000, so 150,000 people would use the medical facilities--they had five ICU beds there. Right? So if there'd been an outbreak, we could have accommodated five people. And everyone after that is potentially dying in the corridors. So yeah. And I feel like that's the fragility of the health system is something that wasn't.... You know, it's a shameful story, right? It's a shameful story that the left-wing government doesn't want to cop to because they look bad and the right-wing government just doesn't give a fuck about, so it doesn't talk about it, but that's one of the deep reasons behind it. It's not a sort of authoritarian madness, or overreach, as much as a reflection of how fragile things were.
Margaret 29:59
Yeah, Okay, so there's a whole bunch of stuff that I want to ask you about. One, is, so the rich are right that New Zealand--I'm not I'm not telling the audience to go move to New Zealand--but like, because most of the time when people talk about like, "Oh, I'm gonna go get an island," that seems like a bad plan. But it seems like New Zealand is now in a really good position to survive the apocalypse because there's all of these bunkers full of nice stuff that someone can just go get. And all you need is an anti-aircraft missile and then you're good, right?
Tom 30:34
That's right. Yeah, you just block up the ventilation and wait a couple of weeks and then get in there.
Margaret 30:40
Just go in and get the stuff. Because there's that.... Did you read this article that came out a couple years ago about how the ultra-rich were having a conference and that one of the things that they were discussing is, how are we going to pay our security guards in the apocalypse or whatever? And the thing is, there's so many complicated things in this. But one of the things that you talked about the rich prepper, poor prepper thing, and I really liked this framework, is that the rich take this seriously. They tell us not to take it seriously, right? Because they need the bus driver. Well, they don't need bus drivers. They need the takeout food and they need the waiters and they need all this other shit. But they like, you know, it's like Davos, they had all the, you know, there's the press release that came out where it was like, "At Davos, all the world leaders are hanging out in masks with like air filters running all the time and windows open and shit," right? And that's because they don't want to die. And they actually know what's happening. And I don't want to die. And I think I know what's happening. And so I use air filters and I wear masks and this kind of shit. And preparedness is the same way. Like someone who has billions of dollars is gonna have a nice bunker. If I had billions of dollars, I would have a nice bunker.
Tom 31:50
I too would have a nice bunker.
Margaret 31:53
Yeah, I spend most of my time in this show talking shit on the bunker mentality. And it's not a good mentality because someone could just plug up the top, right? But there's some.... That's not where I'm going to wait out the future, right? But it's where I would go and like wait for the nuclear fallout to pass before I come back out and join the community or whatever, you know? But, I don't know. I don't know where I'll go with this. I really like this rich prepper, poor prepper thing. And I kind of want to ask, so your current job, right, your current research project, is about preparedness and about what preppers are doing. Have you seen a bunch of change since then? Like, how have things changed? Yeah, I'll start with that.
Tom 32:35
That's good. I do, on the bunker mentality, though, o yeah, I think it's fascinating, right. And one of the things that I think is really interesting and is slippery, I guess, in how we think about this stuff is like if you're a super rich, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman type chap--and they're mainly men--you can literally buy bunkers without having a bunker mentality, right? Because you're just like, "Ah, I'll just invest some of my obscene profits over here. I've got a bunker," but they're not obsessing over it necessarily. It's just...
Margaret 33:07
Yeah, you're right.
Margaret 33:08
Yeah.
Tom 33:08
Yeah. Because they've just got so much fucking money. And then you invest a bit in cryogenics. And I've been in space. And I've been in whatever other crap. But it's not sort of taking over your life or your identity, right? And so I think, as your disposable income comes down, the percentage that you're investing in your preps goes up, right? Which is why if you're, say, on a blue collar wage, or what have you, and you want a banker, you would have to dedicate your life to it. And you become a bit obsessive and crazy. Right? So I think it's another one of the levels where the way that privilege operates is really important, right? And even down to the masks and backup food thing, right? If you're on the dole, as we call it over here, on welfare, say, the idea of, if you're saving three weeks worth of food, that's maybe food you're not eating in the present. So it affects your quality of life in the here and now. Whereas if you're middle class, like I am, you can just have that extra food and not break a sweat with it, right? And I think, yeah, in terms of bunker mentality and prepping mentality in general, one of the really important questions to wrestle with is how much does preparing for the future impact on the quality of life in the present, right?
Tom 33:20
So that's one of the things I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around. In terms of what have I seen changed, I think that's a really interesting question. And I feel like, in a way, my benchmark, if I'd started back in say, 2017 or 2018, I think I would have been in a better place to see the change. I feel like I started just as we sort of moved, like rocketed into covid world. And so I was there for the mainstreaming of prepping and the kind of proliferation of different types of prepping is the two things I've seen. And, you know, obviously they're all the memes you'll be familiar with, which are like, you know, no one's making fun of preppers now, you know? We were right. And so, like, on the one level, I think there's been a legitimation of all that stuff that, you know, yes, the world is a more dangerous place or, yes, systems can fall apart more easily. And I think on a lot of levels, that has the potential to be good, right, that has the potential for us to think harder about the follies of capitalism and so forth, as well as not, as well as going into a conservative space. But then I think there's this other sort of flip side to it. And, you know, the other memes I was loving, you know, it'd be the picture of the guy with the AR-15 and the body armor and the wraparound sunglasses. And it's like saying, "I could stay in my bunker for six months." And then it's like, covid comes in and it's like, "I don't want to be my bunker. Let me out on the streets!" you know. So there was the irony, of course, that all of these people who ostensibly are ready to hide away from risk, actually, then don't want to do that. But, unpacking that another sort of layer deeper, I guess, I feel like a lot of the, especially of the sort of the slightly more right-wing misanthropic end of things, a lot of the rhetoric is like, "You can't trust your neighbors," you know, "Community is only as strong as three days worth of food," or all that kind of stuff. I feel like in a way, covid disproved that, right, because society didn't necessarily fall apart. Turns out, having a functioning State and welfare state is quite a good thing. You know, countries around the world with more of that stuff than America did a lot better. New Zealand and Australia did really well. The Nordic countries did really well. Strangely enough, strong social democratic countries did well. So in theory, that has taught us that maybe humans aren't as bad or, you know, we're not all just zombies, right? All of that kind of zombie movie rhetoric should have been a little bit discredited. And also, the fact that the State is a useless thing, I think has been a bit discredited, right? Because we've seen that actually, it's quite good to have, you know, a good medical system or it's quite good to have good communication systems and so forth.
Margaret 37:16
I mean, it's funny is like in my mind I'm like, "Yes, it's good to have structures of organization," but in my head, I'm like, "They don't have to necessarily be the State." But that's my own biases coming in, you know? But, this thing that you're talking about, like the guy with the AR being like, "Wait, I want to leave my bunker," right. It's one of things that's so interesting to me about it. When I peek my head out of my like little bubble of leftist preparedness and anarchist preparedness and whatever, you know, people who aren't right-wing, essentially. Whenever I pick my head out, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna go pick up this book on preparedness, or I'm going to check out the following form," or whatever. I'm always blown away by people who are convinced that the unit of survival is like, the home, the homestead, you know, as if you're making your own canning jars, as if anyone is homesteading to like, literally, be self sufficient. Everyone is involved in a larger web. But I think one of the things that happens is that they create a community, right? It is a community of people who get together and talk about all this stuff. But it's weird because it's a community that's built on the premise that "As soon as shit happens, I'm gonna turn around and fucking shoot you if you come too close to my house," and I'm like, that's gotta hurt your soul. It's got to be bad for your soul to be like, "Oh, well, we're friends now. But as soon as the apoca-rev,"--no wait, that's what we call it. "As soon SHTF happens, then it's all over." And I'm just like, "Yeah, of course you want to come out of your bunker." Like people like hanging out with people. Like I'm a fucking hardcore introvert. I live...I picked to live kind of where no one's around. I still miss people. I still like hanging out with people sometimes. Like...
Tom 39:10
Yeah, totally. So like, I think...I mean, there's so much in there, isn't it? I mean, I think the first thing to say is that all of that--because I have, I have lurked in and stalked those right-wing forums and listened to like the Canadian Prepper Podcast and that kind of thing and...
Margaret 39:29
Is that the same guy who does the YouTube channel called Canadian Prepper?
Tom 39:32
Yeah.
Margaret 39:34
He like, actually, is probably kind of center. But he clearly is like.... I think he's like.... Yeah, but he's in the center-right space. That's my read. I don't know. He's interesting.
Tom 39:46
Yeah. No, I think.... But yeah, so there's this.... One of the things that's going on, is this this very supportive social movement of very antisocial people. Um, and there's probably a lot of those if you actually dig into it, right. And the internet, of course, famously, that's what the internet facilitates is that people who are sort of antisocial can be social with each other. But what I what I think about more and more--and this is like, I've literally...I've traveled a fair bit, mainly in Southeast Asia and Asia, China, India, and stuff like that, I've never set foot in the States. I've been to Canada. I've never been to the States. And now I'm quite scared of the place. Like, obviously, I'd like to come visit. But, it's not top of my list and I'm scared, you know, like? I'm just gonna get shot randomly. Or, you know, when I think about the prepping thing, I sort of think that, you know, sometimes the rhetoric is like, "If only we all have enough food for our families and then locks on our doors and lots of ammunition and everyone's like us, it's gonna be fine." And it's like, no, you're not. An who's gonna be the biggest threat is gonna be the other preppers who are doing exactly what you're doing. Because you're gonna be trained with your guns, you gonna have heaps of bullets, you'll have been sloughing off all your empathy so that you can like, you know, basically have this death squad experience. And it sort of feels like yeah, the move, you know, this sort of moving towards a kind of civil war or more like a first person shooter type nihilistic Fortnight video game thing, in my head, that's what the States is becoming. But that's only when I'm looking into the prepper lens. I'm like, man, I really need to visit before... like while I can. I mean, New York's great and I'm sure LA are wonderful places.
Margaret 39:57
I'm like I live in West Virginia. But no, I mean, like.... Okay, what's funny, you're not entirely wrong, right? The United States is in trouble, right? We are. We are incredibly culturally polarized. Both sides are armed. I am, like, you know, I don't have like a.... It is not as important to me as food but I've got an AR-15 and some ammunition. You know? And I, I learned about it because not--I've said this story a million times, probably in this podcast--but like, I got my concealed carry permit and took classes about how to shoot because Nazis told me where I lived and sent me pictures of my family, right? Yeah. And you're like, "Okay...." So, it's a threat modeling problem, right? One of my threats is Nazis. And the thing that I have learned from history--because for my other podcast, I research history all day--is that small arms make a difference at stopping fascism. They also make a difference in enabling fascism, right? You know, like small arms actually have a wildly disproportionate impact for what they are, which is basically just a hunting rifle that shoots a little faster. You know? But.... No, it's so interesting to me, because then I'm like, oh, you come to the States, I'll teach you how to shoot. [Laughing]
Tom 41:36
Well, I would love that. And I will do my damnedest to get there. And I would love, if anyone's gonna teach me to shoot, I want it to be you, Margaret.
Margaret 43:11
But like, but no, it is a.... I mean, one of the reasons I want to ask about prepper culture, you know, where you're at is because I assume it's different. Like, because America is.... I mean, America is not a right-wing country. America is a polarized country. It doesn't have as strong of a history of a left as compared to most other European descended countries, right? You know, our left is actually center or center-right by most standards, the Democrat party, right, it's not a left-wing party to any appreciable degree. They are like progressives within it, but why am I talking about that? Well, I guess I'm kind of curious about how preparedness differs because you go and look at these preparedness cultures, like because in the US.... Okay, wait, one more part of this rant. I'm thinking about what you're talking about like.... I actually think it's really important to distinguish, or it's useful, not really important, but useful for me to distinguish between the center-right and the far-right. Overall, I would say that most of the center-right people I meet are people where I disagree about some ways of dealing with certain things, as compared to the far-right who will be like the bigots or the like the people who are actively looking.... Like there's a difference between the center-right preparedness people, who I think that I have a foolish idea. The Homestead idea is foolish. And then there's the Nazis, right? You know? And those are the enemy. And so when I pick on the like, homestead center-right preparedness people, I'm hoping to kind of help them come on over to realizing that community is actually the thing that gets people through problems. But, I hold on to the far-right as a threatened model. That is the thing that I have to prepare for, is the people who are armed want to murder me, you know, who largely.... Like, I live in a center-right area, and everyone seems to be more or less accepting of me, you know, and we'll see how that plays out, right? But like, yeah, I don't know. And so like, my kind of question around this is, you're actually looking at preparedness--obviously not as a total outsider, you have a garage full of food--but from a sort of journalist point of view, you know, an interested analytical point of view. What is the overall politics you're running into? Or, how polarized is it? Do you see any progress in a positive direction? Like, what's your...what are the things that you're picking up on in preparedness culture?
Tom 45:50
So yeah, so I guess I, when I started this research in earnest, I was stuck in a small city in New Zealand during the lockdown. And, you know, a lot of the media articles that were coming through my Google alerts were from the States, but there were also, you know, random articles popping up from like, preppers in Malaysia, preppers in Russia, preppers in Costa Rica. And so it was, it was exciting to sort of see that there was a sort of, there were regional variations of this globalizing phenomenon. But then I was doing my interviews mainly in New Zealand, right, Aotearoa. And, to tell the truth, I was most interested in trying to find preppers who were doing it differently from the American style. And I knew that would be the case, mainly just because there's not gun culture in the same way, right? Like, you can get a gun in New Zealand, but you can't just buy it over the counter. You have to go through really lengthy background checks. And like, my friend, actually, is getting into hunting and he's--look, he's becoming a prepper, I'll be honest--but when he was trying to get his rifle to go, you know, deer hunting or whatever, they literally sent a police around to his house to interview his partner to see if she was okay and if they need to do a domestic violence intervention, right? Like, which my understanding is that's not how it works in the States. But so....
Margaret 47:12
That is correct.
Tom 47:13
So, the preppers, and you know, the first prepper I spoke to in New Zealand, it was.... I was with my mate Tama, we were about to go on an outdoor adventure, and his mate Andy was over. And, Andy was just like, "I haven't seen you in a while. What are you up to?" And I was like, "I'm doing a book about preppers. Do you know any preppers?" And he was like, "Well, my brother's a prepper. He was just on Radio New Zealand the other day," and I was like, "Well, that's amazing. Can I please talk to him?" And so that was how I met this chap, Richard Hovey, and it was just lovely. And so Richard lives in suburban middle class Wellington, a small medium city. His background's kind of industrial design, very lefty greeny, you know, was a member of the Greens party until he decided they weren't getting action on climate change fast enough. And he became jaded. A single dad as well. And he's just become a full on prepper with a focus on sort of bugging into the house, storing food, you know, grinding his own flour to make bread, all of that kind of good stuff. But he...and he's got very little interest in guns, but he's very interested in self defense. So martial arts is a thing for him and then knives, throwing stars, weapons, and training his children how to fight with weapons. And that was something where, you know, when I was talking to him, like on one level as I was like, "That's a bit much." and he was, I think he was very aware of it, he was very cognizant, and he was like, "I worry if my children are becoming a bit too violent, and they want to, you know, I watch them fighting over Legos but now they're doing it with with wooden swords," you know?
Margaret 48:53
Oh, that's funny.
Tom 48:54
It's good, right? Like, it's good stuff. And then, you know, and so I think he's a little bit torn about wanting to protect his kids, and have them sort of ready for some sort of riots or, you know, civil unrest, and then going, "Is it going to make their life worse in the here and now." And, but like, I just sort of stop and pause--because I don't have kids. My wife and I are childless. And I don't know martial arts, but I was like, "Well, God, if I had kids and I knew martial arts, I'd be training my children," you know? So, I don't actually think that the craziest thing that this guy was doing is that crazy at all. Like, I think if I was in that position, I would probably end up making the same decisions or coming to the same conclusions, right? But when it came to the gun thing, there's just not that much ammunition. There's not that many bullets in New Zealand, Margaret. The idea seems to be--and I've talked to a number of kiwi preppers who have said similar things--it's like, there's just not enough bullets. So you'd have to spend a lot of money and to have enough that otherwise your gun just becomes a crappy club after a couple of days, right? Because you had 100 bullets and you've shot them all. It's like you'd be better off with a bow and arrow, you'd be better off with a sword. Like if you're thinking about it in a kind of self-defense paramilitary type situation, you know, you're better off with a long stick or or what have you. So that's sort of one of the ways that it's shaken out over there. But I think in a way, the lack of guns is one thing, but I think the lack of that kind of super far-right antistate, you know, "the government is our enemy, the government's coming for us," like, because that isn't present at all to the same extent--it's not entirely absent--but it's not in any way such a strong thing.
Margaret 50:50
It's frings as compared to...
Tom 50:52
Yeah, it's very fringe. Right. And so what you have instead--and I did seek out while I was there--are the people who were doing the kind of more lefty community eco prepping just cause, to be honest, I just was like, these are my people. I love these people. They're really nice.
Margaret 51:07
Yeah. That's also a better idea, right?
Tom 51:10
It's a better idea, right. And I was like, this is a much more interesting story. And it's not... It's not... It's not just a joke story. And it also connects, I guess, with my politics and what I want to be doing with the book, which is using prepping as a way to make people take climate change seriously, right? Because it's like, if you're talking to--there's this fabulous woman, Lucy Atkins-Read, who's like, you know, was living in a yurt, like a Mongolian tent, you know, in the country. She's one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa, British originally. And she was just like, "We're gonna grow as much food as possible. But we've got no walls and no gates and we're just going to try and feed as many people as possible." And I was like, well this is utopian. And also like having a really good time in the here and now, right, like, eating beautiful, healthy food, connecting with the neighbors, like having that really beautiful permaculture experience. And I was like, there's something in that which is really win-win and it doesn't matter if the world doesn't end, it doesn't matter if things...if global capitalism keeps teetering along the path for decades, it's still win-win because you're living a beautiful life. You're not harming anyone and you're enjoying the present moment. So, those kinds of stories I found quite utopian and beautiful. But it was weird. Like in New Zealand, I sort of feel like prepping culture isn't--and paramilitary culture or all those other American things are not are not there--but I still found the little anecdotes of prepping would pop up like mushrooms everywhere, right? Like I'd been drinking with some old friends in Wellington and I remember one of my mates was like, "I went on a Tinder date a couple of years ago and this girl was like, 'Ah, my dad's a prepper. He's got an underground bunker under his porch,'" as you know. Literally, on the first Tinder date, which I don't think there was another one, you know, and so all like, or, I was catching up with it with a friend who was getting married and it was like his bachelor party, and there was like an old friend who was someone I went to highschool with I hadn't seen in like 25 years--I'm old--so 25 years. And this person was like a lawyer, you know, living in a small town and we're having a really great chat. We're drinking and walking in the bush, which is like such a New Zealand thing to be doing, drinking beer on a bushwalk. And then he was like, "I'm a lawyer, but ,you know, me and the partners were really worried about AI. You know, it's gonna come in and and completely disrupt Law." And this was back in like 2021. So it was, you know, he was just ahead of the AI panic that we're all in now. And I was like, "Oh, you're, freaked out about AI. This is sounding a bit prepperry." And like, sure enough, a couple of hours, a couple of beers later, he was like, "Yeah, me and my wife, you know, we're preppers. We got food stashed. We got the guns, you know, we've got all this stuff." And at the wedding, my friend Steve's wedding was a week or two later, and it was a beautiful wedding in a garden and they had the PA system and stuff. And afterwards, I was helping move some of the speakers back into the car of this guy and his wife and the wife was like, "Oh, yeah, before we get the speakers in we've got to move our bugout bags." So you know, just pulling the bugout bags out of this soccer mom's station wagon. Yeah, and so it was like.... But it was really, you know, in a way, it was quite beautiful. It's like there's just sort of prepper culture, kind of, little pockets of it here and there, you know, and this other, you know, old old friend who had been living by the coast and then they got really freaked out about sea level rise and so they moved to this small inland town that was, you know, 100 meters above sea level or whatever, and they were like, "Not gonna get smashed by tsunami," and it was like, "Well, you are living in Dannevirke, though." And like, Dannevirke is a pretty small and crumby town like, you know. I was like, "You should have stayed where you were. You had a really nice beach situation ago." So in a way, that's one of those things where it's like, what are you sacrificing in the present versus for future future gains, right?
Margaret 55:08
But then, like, I think that that's.... I only advocate that people prepare in ways--mostly--I only advocate in ways that enrich our lives, right? Like, after we get off this call, I'm gonna go make bread, right? And like, my life is better now that I make--I'm not particularly good at this--but I'm like, well, whatever, I want to make bread. And it's a skill that I wanted to learn. And now I get to do it. And now I get to put pesto on it from my garden. This is all very new to me. I've never been a very garden growing person. And, yeah, it enriches our lives and sometimes changes our lives, right? Cause there is no like, okay, if you have this beautiful beach side property, do you want to hang out, even though it might shorten your life dramatically? And that is actually a hard question that I think a lot of people are asking right now because huge chunks of the world are less and less livable. And then you also get into the preparedness differences, right, between who can afford to leave. Like to take the United States as an example, it's like marginalized people in Florida are fucked right now. I kind of assume that everyone around the world knows US news, and that we don't know any around the world news. That's usually the way it usually works. But Florida is run by a right-wing maniac. And it's basically illegal to be trans by a lot of different contexts where you can't get access to the medical needs that you need and stuff like that, right? And so a lot of people are leaving, especially parents of trans children. But a lot of people can't leave, right? You know, and so like, being able to leave.... You know, there's entire countries that are just fucked by climate change, right? And most of the people in those countries can't leave. And so that does get into that they actually need preparedness more than the random person in New Zealand or the random person in the United States in a safer part of the United States or whatever, you know?
Tom 57:04
Yes, yes, totally. Yeah, if you're in Bangladesh, say, like one of those coastal places. But I feel like.... And this is something that--and I'm probably only going to get to scratch the surface with this on this book I'm working on--in a dream world, I would love to go and spend chunks of time in places like Bangladesh, to get my head around what's going on there and how it relates to prepper culture, right? That's one of my big questions is that prepper culture is primarily an Anglo sphere thing, right? It's American. And then it's a bit British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand. It's popping up in Germany and France in quite a big way. And it is sort of globalizing, but then I was in Indonesia last year and I was lucky enough to be at a writers festival in Bali, which is tropical paradise, in this town called Ubud, which is a like a hippie yoga--it's sort of been colonized by yoga people--but so Bali is a Hindi kingdom within a Muslim--Indonesia is Muslim, but Valley is Hindi. It's a beautiful, beautiful island. It's sort of formed by a volcanic cone. So some of the most fertile soil on Earth. It has three rice harvests a year, which I think is unusual. Usually it's only two. So before tourism came, they had like the best yields of anywhere on the planet. Thousand year old agriculture, like sort of, what do you call it? Like paddy field? Water agricultural....? What do you call that stuff? Cool farming tech, where the water runs out. And irrigation, sorry, irrigation is the word I'm looking for. So, you know, it's a really beautiful place that's been very, very damaged by tourism. And so now Bali has to import rice from either from Java or from China, which is just fucking ridiculous, but that's where we live in. But I was over there, kind of,--and because I'm so deep in this prepping thing--I was going, man, maybe Bali would be a good place to live? And it's weird because Australia is, you know, the politics.... One of the sort of racist right-wing things is being scared of Indonesia invading Australia, right? Stop the refugees. Stop the boats. There are a lot of people in Java for sure. But I was sort of like, man, maybe moving to Bali from Australia is not such a stupid idea because Australia is a giant desert. You know, like, very vulnerable to drought and stuff.
Margaret 57:19
And then also catches on fire a lot, right?
Tom 59:11
Catches on fire terribly. Like the fires in 2019--2020 were just appalling. I had just left when they happened. But I was in New Zealand and the sky was turning yellow in New Zealand, you know, like across the Tasman Sea, thousands of kilometers away. And those fires killed hundreds with the smoke. But so living in Bali...or people living in Bali, one of the things that really struck me is that there's all that kind of community integration and coherence, right? And you don't have to say, you don't have to tell people, "Guys, it's not just about being an individual, it's about being part of a society." People like, "No, no, we get it, we're part of a society." So it's like, people are just part of that more integrated, more collectivist, more communal way of life. And they're also used to getting by with a lot less. So on one level, I was like, God, maybe they're actually going to be far more resilient than rich spoiled people in the first world who will just potentially freak out if their standards of living are getting met. And I was talking to some of the taxi drivers who worked there, who of course, when covid lock down went through, they lost all their employment. So they went from, you know, earning a subsistence wage to having no money whatsoever coming in because there are no Australians catching taxis around. So the income dropped to zero. And this, I was talking to this guy and I was like, "What did you do?" And he's like, "Well, I went back to the rice paddies. And I got a, you know, I got a little patch of rice paddy and I worked and I had a duck and a chicken and I had their eggs." And then he was like, "And then I'd go into the jungle and I'd forage for papaya and for jungle salad and I'd feed my family jungle salad." And on one level, it was, you know, a really sort of tragic story of hardship. But on another story, it was like, he had rice, and chickens, and ducks, and jungle salad, and papaya, you know. Like, it was all there. Like, if there was a, you know, if the economy crashed in Australia, there's no, there's no jungle salad to be had, you know. And the same in New Zealand. And so, there was this part of me which is sort of going, maybe a lot of this sort of Anglo cultures have got some things wrong, just in terms of I think we're just so sort of fixated on like, "Our country is the only country. This is the only way to be," whereas I actually wonder if the resilience of the global south is actually going to be far greater. And I mean, I'm sure there is going to be insane migration flows, and it's going to be very messy, and it will trigger all manner of wars and civil wars and draconian crackdowns. I do think it will happen. But I also think that there will be the ability of society and culture to continue is actually probably going to be far greater than then we realize from these white countries looking into it. I'm wondering about that a lot anyway.
Margaret 1:02:29
No, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think that.... I think there's a lot of stuff in radical and progressive and anarchistic culture that when it comes from like a Eurocentric point of view is basically just trying to find what has been stripped away by what comes before from a Eurocentric culture, right? More and more--again, I read history books all day--and like, the more I read about the enclosure, the comments, I'm just like, "Oh, this is like the mortal wound that we're basically just all trying to recover from, is that people used to, even when they were broke, have access to "Well, I can go hunt, I can go graze, I can go chop wood, I can use the commons," you know, and obviously capitalism comes out of this and all this shit. And so it's just like, this is when we became super atomized. This is when we became super individualist and then also homesteadist, you know? Like, not just about the individual but the individual family, you know, the nuclear family or whatever the fuck. No, that makes sense to me. But then it is still awful because like the actual straight up crises are primarily affecting the extracted from world rather than the world that did the extraction. That's a depressing.... We're coming up near the end of our time and that's a terrible note to end on. There's gotta be something else.
Tom 1:03:59
Well, I mean, that is true. But it's like, the other thing about the extracted upon world or chunks of it, they still have some really beautiful spiritual systems in place that enable them to live happy and beautiful lives even with material poverty and with suffering, right, and so I feel like that's a circle,I can't square in terms of how do I make sense of that as a white heathen, secular, atheist person who grew up and does yoga every now and then and, likes the idea of Buddhism but it has not committed to anything. You know, I feel like I live in spiritual pain all the time, and that my friends live in spiritual pain, and my culture is a culture of spiritual pain. And so these places that are suffering terribly also are enlightened in a lot of ways that don't take away the terrible things that have been done to them and that they do to themselves, but that does mean that people live with equanimity and grace as well.
Margaret 1:05:01
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that, you know, whiteness is the eradication of culture, right? Like, and at this, incredible, you know, privilege.... It is sold for an incredible amount of privilege, right. But I think that that is a thing that a lot of people are trying to find their ways around. And of course, obviously, a lot of, you know--I know more about the, you know, indigenous cultures here on Turtle Island--but like, you know, what has been asked of a lot of people who are settlers is to actually look into where we're from and what was stolen from us within the colonization of Europe, right? You know, and not with this, like.... And then it's like sketchy because we're all like... you know, I'm not from a culture that uses runes, right? But let's say you are from a Germanic culture, like, well, I don't want to go get into runes cause the people who are into that shit are Nazis, you know? [Laughing] And then like, you know, Irish Americans are insufferable. So I don't know.
Tom 1:06:07
Yeah, what are you gonna choose, right?
Margaret 1:06:10
And I think it's just a personal thing. And I think it's a thing that behooves people to do and then just, but it's hard to--we just like, can't center ourselves in any of the conversations around it either and it's a.... I don't know, it's complicated.
Tom 1:06:25
Yeah. Well, maybe I should come back in a year when I've done more research around the rest of the world and I'll give you an update.
Margaret 1:06:33
I look forward to that. Are there any final thoughts you have? Or questions you wish I'd asked or things you were looking forward to? Or things that give you hope about preparedness? Or favorite caliber of ammunition? I'm joking. That's a joke. [Both laughing]
Tom 1:06:54
Yeah, gas masks. In a way, what gives me hope about preparedness, I was thinking about this, I feel like the reason that people get into preparedness is because they come to.... They're worried...their threat model has freaked them out about some sort of threat. And they've reached the conclusion, no matter what the threat is, the threats can be very different, right, from 5G microchip, you know, conspiracy bullshit to the very legitimate threats of social inequality and climate crisis. But, I feel like there's this interesting convergent point where you go, "Ah, the system might all fall apart, or life as we know it might be a done deal and we are gonna have to think about it." And then from there, I feel like that moment, as much as it's a crisis, and as much as it's very painful and scary and sad, and all the rest of it, I feel like in that moment, that inflection point, there is the potential for people to reevaluate the world quite dramatically. And I think there's the potential for political change and social progress to come from that moment, right? And even if it's a small but maybe profound as get to know your neighbors better, or, you know, think about food differently, I do think that there is a radical chance for a sort of revitalization of left politics and progressive politics comes out of that moment as much as it can go the other way to, you know, lock your doors and lock up your wife. I do think that that moment can be kind of prized open a bit and that, you know, that's also how we can maybe take the climate crisis a bit more seriously. I don't think we can stop it. I'm not even sure we can slow it down that much. But even a little bit of slowing it down is nice. And I think about reappraising things as a way of letting go of capitalism, which is, you know, what we all need to be doing as well.
Margaret 1:06:57
No, that all makes sense. And, you know, it ties really well back to Australia because the most famous series of utopian post-collapse films come from Australia, of course, the Mad Max films about the beautiful societies that grow up from the scraps. [Both laughing]
Tom 1:09:19
Yeah, just good times, right. Just driving around kind of like with a metal mask on your face, like as a human hood ornament.
Margaret 1:09:26
Yeah, exactly. Like you can have a guy on the front of your car. That is the kind of thing that is now available to us in the future. It's a dream.
Tom 1:09:35
Just dream large.
Margaret 1:09:36
You could be the gimp on the car if that's what you're into. Yeah. Alright. Well, is there anything that you want to plug here at the end?
Tom 1:09:46
Um, no. Look, I would just say if you want to know more about preppers in New Zealand, or four of them. I did write an article for New Zealand geographic called "The Preppers Next Door,." So I'm pretty sure if you just Google "The Preppers Next Door, New Zealand Geographic," that should come up. So that'll give you a little taste of how prepping in Aotearoa differs from the American style prepping.
Margaret 1:10:11
Awesome. Well, thanks so much. And I look forward to talking to you in a year when you have new information for us.
Tom 1:10:19
Thanks so much, Margaret. Keep doing the excellent work that you do.
Margaret 1:10:22
Thanks. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, you should tell people about it. It's the main way people find out about podcasts. People don't Google, "What's a good podcast?" they hear from their friends. Maybe people Google, "What's a good podcast?" In which case, you should type in "What's a good podcast? Live Like the World is Dying," a bunch of times from a bunch of different computers so that way the autocomplete of Google, as soon as someone says, "Actually, you know what, like, what's good?" you should just be like, anytime like, "What's a good..." and then just type in Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is the name of the publisher. If you want to support this podcast without doing weird Google hacks that don't make any sense and don't work, you can support us on Patreon. We are patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And we send out ziens to anyone who backs us at $10, anywhere in the world, and they're all different. They're not on sort of on any given topic. That makes it sound really vague. I swear we curate them well. And we use that money to pay...to make a lot of stuff happen, including this podcast. It doesn't pay the hosts, but it does pay the transcriptionist and the audio editor who do the thankless work. Because I'm not going to thank them. You shouldn't thank them. That's the whole point. It's thankless. But we should give them money by going there. My dog just yelled at me. I don't know if that's going to come across, but my dog doesn't like me claiming that I shouldn't thank the audio editor and the transcriptionist. In particular, I would like to thank Marm, and Carson, Lord Harken, Trixster, Princess Miranda, Benben, Anonymous, Funder, Jans, Oxalis, Janice & O'dell, Paige, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, Shawn, S.J., Paige, Mikki, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro Jenipher, Eleanor, Kirk, Sam, Chris, Michaiah, and, of course, Hoss the Dog. Alright, I hope everyone's doing as well as you can.