The Psychology of Preppers w/Dr. Bradley Garrett

You know, think about this. Imagine this scenario. Imagine that the lethality rate on this virus was like 10%, right? Like what do you have to do to convince those grocery store workers to come to work at that point? No one's coming to work. No one's driving the trucks. No one's gonna deliver anything. And then what Preppers would say is, we're 72 hours to anarchy, or 72 hours to animal, right? It's like once you shut down those kind of supply lines, our entire mentality starts to shift into a different mode. And it doesn't take long before you think, I'm gonna take something from my neighbor at this point. I'm hungry. My family's hungry. Sure. Yeah, I mean, it gets real scary or cooperate with your neighbor, hopefully. Yeah. You know, I hunt, so I have a lot of meat. And so one of the things that happened during the pandemic when it hit, I had a lot of people come over and I gave them meat because I have three commercial freezers here at the studio. If you shoot an elk, elk's 400 pounds of meat. That's a lot of meat, yeah. It's the great thing, as long as the power stays on and I have electricity, I have frozen meat. So I can give a lot of it out. So you got a backup generator? Yeah, I do. I'm not a prepper, you know, but I'm prepared in some ways. And then when all this came down, basically all I did is I stockpiled on a lot of dried stuff like rice, pasta, things that you can cook easily. Well, that's the thing is people get fixated on prepping as this kind of, you know, I built a multimillion dollar bunker or whatever, whatever spectacular stories that people hear, which, you know, I'm happy to verify if you want to get into those. But, you know, like prepping on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just common sense. Yeah. Just having, you know. Having enough food to last a few days. Yeah, and thinking through, you know, what might happen, you know, in a blackout or, you know, the taps not working or whatever. These things do happen. Yeah, they do happen. But I wanted to get into the psychology of prepping because it seems to be conflated with conspiracy theorists in some way, like preppers or it's the tinfoil hat brigade. It's like those type of folks, folks who think 5G is causing COVID. You know what I mean? Like, for whatever reason, prepping, which should be just prudence, you know, common sense. Preparing, you know, having something that can purify your water if everything goes weird. Yeah. You know, I'm going camping every once in a while just to get a sense of what it's like to be outdoors, you know, and pop your tent and pull your water out of a river. And, you know, it's great to have those practical skills. Yeah, camping is fun as long as you know it's not permanent. Isn't that weird? Well, so, I mean, and this is the thing about disaster, right? Is that if it has an end point, it's something that we can cope with, right? Yeah. So take nuclear war, for example, right? Like, let's say we get a text message on our phone. Remember in Hawaii in 2018, everyone got that message? The ballistic missile was incoming, right? So imagine we get that message right now. And you're like, well, Brad, we actually have a bunker underneath this studio, right? So you go into the bunker, but we know after LA's nuked, right, and it's gone, that if we stay in this bunker for 14 days, the radiation levels are gonna be a fraction of what they were when that nuke hit, right? So you have an end point there. We have to make it to day 14. And that's why people are able to psychologically cope with it. Whereas, you know, the situation we're in right now, like, when is the end point? Like, that's why people are cracking because they can't see the end of it. Right. Well, they're cracking for a bunch of reasons. First of all, they're cracking because the economic stability is non-existent. It's gone. 50% of all restaurants are dead. You know, I mean, how many retail shops are dead? It's terrible. Yelp had some statistic the other day that I was reading online about all the different businesses that have been impacted. We don't even know what's happening with comedy clubs. It's just guesswork right now. But I think in Los Angeles, a lot of them are probably gonna wind up going under. Across the country, a lot of them are gonna wind up going under. Restaurants, I had the owners of Felix and the head chef, Evan, and the owner Janet, on the podcast recently. And they were explaining how, Felix is a really great restaurant in Venice, that almost every restaurant operates with a very small amount of profit, you know, their profit margin. What did she say, like 15%, 14%, something like that? Yeah, that sounds right. I think something happened. So imagine all of a sudden, that's cut to zero for several months, and then you're asked to occupy 50% of your restaurant, which is obviously gonna diminish your profits radically as well. It's like it's just a survival game, and there's no end in sight, right? So here we are in July. No one anticipated this in March. We thought, you know, by the time June rolls around, everything's gonna be up and running. No, here we are in July. Everything's locked down again. And there's even talk of another stay-at-home order in Los Angeles, which is even scarier. So let's get back to your conspiracy theories. If someone told you that we would be in this situation a year ago, would you have believed him? Sure. You would have. I would have, yeah. Because the pandemic seemed like a realistic experience. Well, because I've been the center for disease control. I went to Galveston, Texas for the center of disease control for a show that I did with my friend Duncan. And Duncan Trussell and I went down there, and we talked to these doctors that work with these viruses, and they scared the shit out of us. We went down there for a television show that we were doing for sci-fi, and it was basically on the idea of weaponized viruses. The basic premise of the show was, what if someone engineered a virus and released it on the country, like a weaponized virus? And they said, that's not what we have to worry about. What we have to worry about is nature. That's what we have to worry about. Turns out, both. Because this virus most likely had been leaked from a lab. What we're dealing with with COVID-19, according to my friend Brett Weinstein, who is a biologist, and he detailed on a podcast that I did with him all of the different points of evidence that lead to what he believes is a very likely scenario that it was released from, accidentally released from a lab and not actually from a wet market. The wet market's the coverup. It's like the disease is too advanced. It has too many hallmarks and indicators of a virus that had been tampered with for study, for study in the lab, and for the examinations, and all the different tests that they would run. And so you got both those things, right? You have the possibility of something just morphing in nature, like many other pandemics that have happened in the past. And then what we have now, which is this weird virus. It doesn't make any sense. And we were talking about all the different symptoms that people get from it. Neurological problems, blood clotting. I was reading this article where they were saying that the people that have died from COVID, when they've done autopsies on them, they found blood clots in every major organ. And they're like, this is astonishing. Like, this is so weird. Yeah, it does seem very unpredictable. Lungs, liver, kidney, just blood clots everywhere. It's like people are hemorrhaging. It's very strange. It's a strange fucking virus. And the transmissibility, is that a word? The ease of transmission is terrifying. It's so contagious. It's a ridiculously contagious virus. So once we went to that Center for Disease Control, I started getting scared. I saw the 2015 Bill Gates TED Talk on pandemics and about the possibility of a pandemic. And I got scared of it too. So I would have thought it's possible. I never would have thought it's impossible. So here's the thing, regardless of where this virus came from, you have to imagine that there are governments and individuals who are now keyed into how effective this visit, this virus was at crippling capitalist economies. Because the thing is we created COVID's pathways. I mean, it's international flights. It's international trade. It's people moving around. It's the neoliberal global capitalist system that we built over the past 30 years that created the pathways that took the virus everywhere at once. So if this were to be a test run, it's now proven to be extremely effective. And so you have to imagine the governments around the world, probably including the United States are thinking, well, how could we weaponize this potentially? And this is the thing. I don't know if the United States is thinking that, but I would imagine. I don't know either. But the thing is, the existential threats that we face now have been multiplied exponentially. In the past, post World War II, I mean, this is the first sort of global catastrophe, you know, world wars, right? But then once we develop nuclear weapons and we're just past the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test now, once we create that ability to destroy ourselves and potentially the entire world, we have to live with the possibility of that happening. Now, stack on top of that, artificial intelligence, climate change, synthetic biotech, all of these threats that we face are something that we have to kind of hold in our heads all the time. And I think it's cracking us mentally to like think about these possibilities. So yeah, I mean, some of the preppers are conspiracy theorists, right? And they're spinning some really outlandish scenarios. But a lot of them are just trying to work through these things, right? And rather than get caught in this kind of perpetual future tense, you know, thinking about something terrible happening, they're trying to take action now in the present and that gives them some sense of peace, right? Like it gives them a sense of like, it gives them some solid footing in the present. And a lot of the preppers I talked to are not actually very anxious or paranoid at all, right? Because they have a plan. It's those of us who don't have a plan that are anxious. Well, you've talked to them post, post, yeah. Yeah. Do they feel vindicated? No, not really. No? What most of them have told me is that this was a mid-level crisis. Well, they're right about that, right? I mean, if Yellowstone blows, this is gonna look like a cakewalk. Yeah, exactly. If we get hit with an asteroid, I mean, it's a wrap for humanity. Yeah. If there's a solar flare that takes out the power grid, we got real problems. This is minor in comparison. When you look at the actual fatality rate for healthy people, it's very, very low. It's less than 1%, much less than half of 1% for most healthy people. So when you look at what could happen if Yellowstone blows, that's a continent killer. Oh yeah, I mean, we're talking about volcanic ash clouding the sky. Nuclear winter. Yeah, killing crops all over the United States. Yeah. I mean, you gotta have a jet and go to New Zealand, like instantly. I don't even know if that's... New Zealand is in a volcanic zone. I mean, this is one of the great red herrings of our time that all of these wealthy people are gonna flee New Zealand and find safety there. I mean, I also find it totally ironic that a lot of them are sort of libertarian, free market capitalists that are quite happy to make money off this system. But when shit goes wrong, they want a really strong government to clamp down and take care of it. Is that what they want? I think they just want a remote place to escape with a small amount of people and a lot of wildlife resources and real natural beauty. I mean, I think they're gonna be happy. I mean, they're gonna be happy. I mean, they're gonna be happy. I mean, they're gonna be happy.