Our Vision of the Post-Apocalypse Is Wrong

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Our Vision of the Post-Apocalypse Is Wrong"

Podcast: Are We Doomed?
Host: Ben Bradford (NPR Network)
Date: July 7, 2026
Guest: Dr. Chris Begley, Anthropologist (Transylvania University)

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Episode Overview

This episode interrogates the gap between our popular media narratives of post-apocalyptic survival and what history and anthropology reveal about how communities actually endure catastrophic events. Host Ben Bradford and anthropologist Chris Begley delve into why prepping culture might be solving the wrong problem, what survival skills truly matter, and why human collaboration—not rugged individualism—is the best bet for the future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Myth of Rugged Individualism in Apocalypse Narratives

• Opening Story:
  Chris Begley recounts the legend of Honduras’ "White City," a place not of material riches, but of cultural and spiritual refuge formed after a real apocalypse—the arrival of Europeans. Survivors didn’t go it alone; they congregated, forged new identities, and rebuilt together.

  “If you look at history’s closest approximations, you don’t see solo escapes to bunkers...You see gatherings. You see the White City.”
  – Chris Begley (02:32)

• Common Survival Stories:
  Pop culture imagines lone survivors fighting zombies, monsters, or each other—portraying a worldview of alliances of necessity, enemies around every corner, and the fortress mentality.

  “A ragged, dirt smeared figure darts through a wrecked city...That’s pretty much our post-apocalypse narratives, right?”
  – Ben Bradford (04:47)

The Reality: What History and Anthropology Teach Us

• Civilizational Collapses & Group Survival:
  Civilizations like the Maya and Romans, faced with collapse, did not dissolve into a mass of hostile loners. Instead, people regrouped and formed new or hybrid cultures.

  “Every culture that we are studying, almost without exception, has undergone some kind of collapse.”
  – Ben Bradford (05:41)

• Immediate Survival Priorities:
  Chris outlines a hierarchy for survival:

  1. Oxygen (get out of smoke/fires)
  2. Core body temperature (shelter, clothing)
  3. Water
  4. (much later) Food

  “The first one is going to be oxygen...Next, it’s going to be maintaining your body temperature...After that, it’s thirst...”
  – Ben Bradford & Chris Begley (11:51 – 13:10)

• Food is Over-Emphasized:
  Hunting, gathering, and foraging are barely sustainable for large groups. The historical switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture was not by preference, but necessity—needed to feed bigger populations.

  “If 90% of the people on earth died in some apocalyptic event, we would still have more people than the earth can sustain without agriculture.”
  – Chris Begley (19:07)

Prepping Industry vs. Practical Realities

• Prepping Culture Today:
  The prepping industry is booming, selling everything from knives and guns to luxury bunkers. Yet, its focus centers around isolation, firepower, and short-term survival.

  “But what struck Chris is how it all clusters around guns, bushcraft, fortress thinking–skills to survive the collapses our stories have trained us to imagine...”
  – Ben Bradford (09:32)

• Fortress Mentality: The Math Doesn’t Work
  Relying on violence to defend resources is unsustainable. Even if you win most encounters, statistically you’re doomed to lose after enough rounds.

  “Imagine if you are much better at violence than almost anybody...Statistically, that’s only five or six before you lose.”
  – Ben Bradford (23:28)

  The ultra-wealthy’s luxury bunkers might not shield them, since staff and guards have their own loyalties in a crisis.

  “The pilots of the private planes they’ve commissioned will have families, friends, loved ones. ...Who really ends up in the fancy bunker?”
  – Chris Begley (23:55)

The Survival Skills That Actually Matter

• Skills You Need:
  Immediate skills—building shelter, securing water—are important only for days or weeks. For anything longer, the skills needed are mostly social and organizational.

  “The better in shape you are, the easier it'll be. But you'll get in shape. …after two weeks, after a month, you'll do it.”
  – Chris Begley (31:33)

  "One of the most important is going to be your interpersonal skills...leadership role. Maybe it’s going to be somebody that’s a peacemaker, or a compromiser, or community organizers."
  – Ben Bradford (32:44)

  Critical thinking also tops the list for adaptability, decision making, and learning new tasks.

• Strength in Community:
  History shows survivors form new, often multicultural communities after social collapse:

  “These small groups banded back together and reformed... Survivors of disaster looked toward each other, not away. They chose option one: rebuilt.”
  – Chris Begley (26:47, 26:59)

The Real Apocalypse Kit: A Thought Experiment

• Instead of focusing on tactical or wilderness skills, the hosts suggest a curriculum heavy on:

  • Soil science
  • Supply chain management
  • Teamwork, diplomacy, organization

  “A way less fun hobby, and a little jarring that the person best equipped to thrive after the apocalypse may not be the one who can outrun the cannibal, but can run a meeting.”
  – Ben Bradford (34:07)

  The implication: prepping for community, not isolation, is the only strategy that history and logic support.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Chris thinks finding food out in the wilderness, for instance, is generally not worth it. It's better to be weak from hunger than to try to forage only to eat a poisonous acorn.”
  – Ben Bradford (15:13)

• On the Pech and apocalypse experience:
  “The biggest killer was disease, which could ravage an entire village at once...A recent estimate found that enough Native Americans died in one century to lower the total number of humans on Earth by 10%, enough to cool the world slightly. That surely is apocalyptic to the survivors of these events.”
  – Chris Begley (26:04 – 26:17)

• On who survives:
  “People are smart. I mean, I know it sometimes doesn’t seem like it, but people are smart. I mean, anybody that shows up can learn to be useful.”
  – Ben Bradford (31:57)

• “If you were designing an apocalypse kit from scratch with no priors what would be worth emphasizing? ...Survival skills, physical conditioning, can be gained pretty quickly. ...The better in shape you are, the easier it'll be. But you'll get in shape. …anybody that shows up can learn to be useful.”
  – Chris Begley & Ben Bradford (29:25 – 31:57)

• “Nobody wants to hear that, but that’s what’s gonna get things done.”
  – Ben Bradford (27:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:16 – 03:12 — The legend of the White City, indigenous survival after conquest
• 05:24 – 06:49 — Chris Begley’s credentials and the roots of prepping
• 09:16 – 11:51 — Prepping industry and survival skills: reality vs. fantasy
• 12:04 – 15:07 — True survival hierarchy: oxygen, shelter, water, food
• 17:31 – 18:53 — Historical transition from foraging to farming
• 19:07 – 21:13 — The impossibility of lone survival for most apocalyptic scenarios
• 23:28 – 25:24 — Why fortress prepping is mathematically doomed
• 26:47 – 27:52 — Historical evidence of communal rebuilding after catastrophe
• 29:25 – 33:47 — What skills really matter: interpersonal, leadership, critical thinking
• 34:07 – 35:43 — Rethinking the ideal apocalypse “toolkit”

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Conclusion

The survival fantasy popularized in media—and monetized by modern prepping industry—frames the solo, armed survivalist as the post-apocalyptic norm. But history, anthropology, and logic suggest otherwise. After true catastrophes, humans almost always survive and rebuild through cooperation, not isolation. The most critical survival skills in a real crisis are organizational, political, and communal—much less dramatic but far more effective for ensuring humanity’s future.

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For more insights, check out Chris Begley’s new book, The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation, and visit doompod.com/support.

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Transcript

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[Ben Bradford]

Learn [e-mail] There's a legend out there of a lost city, an El Dorado type city called the White City or the Ciudad Blanca.

[Chris Begley]

Anthropologist Chris Begley told me this story from when he was living in eastern Honduras. He was with an indigenous group, the Pesh, studying their past when the topic of their lost city came up.

[Ben Bradford]

We were out in the rainforest and one of the Pesh that I was with said, have you heard of the White City? And I said, yeah, of course I have. And he said, well, it's right up this creek, you know, about a day. About a day up there. And you know, I didn't really know what to say. I sort of nodded and finally said, well, can we go see it? And he said, no, no we can't.

[Chris Begley]

It wasn't because Chris might steal some mythical hidden gold. It has none.

[Ben Bradford]

There's no riches.

[Chris Begley]

Chris says it's not even really a city. The better translation is White House.

[Ben Bradford]

There's no scale.

[Chris Begley]

The value is simply cultural, spiritual, it

[Ben Bradford]

all that was lost.

[Chris Begley]

The Pech and other indigenous groups had once formed a sprawling civilization. Multiple languages, cultures, rituals, societies. Until an apocalypse. European arrival, fractured, scattered, killed. From the survivors came the White City.

[Ben Bradford]

He said it is the place where all of the indigenous gods from the different indigenous groups in Honduras fled when these interlopers arrived and when everything changed,

[Chris Begley]

which Chris companion told him is why he should not visit.

[Ben Bradford]

And if you go, you need to be able to speak each language or you'll anger that particular God that you can't speak with and they won't let you leave. So I asked him if he had been there and seen it. I remember him just looking at me like, did you really not understand the language part? You know, are you crazy? No, I haven't been there. I don't speak all seven of those languages.

[Chris Begley]

It's a good yarn, but why was Chris telling it? We'd been talking about post apocalypse, the abandoned cities and shattered wastelands of fiction. And we'd been talking about the real world culture of prepping people today expecting and training to survive a coming collapse. Chris was saying he sees a flaw in how we think about preparing to survive an apocalypse, a real or fictional one. If you look at history's closest approximations, he says. You don't see solo escapes to bunkers. You don't see rugged individualism. You see gatherings. You see the white City.

[Ben Bradford]

And I think that that really tells us something about the kinds of things we have to repair after something like that happens.

[Chris Begley]

From nuanced tales and part of the npr network, this is are we doomed? I'm ben bradford. Do you ever think about whether you should be doing more to prepare? Like here in California? I have an earthquake kit, a couple plastic jugs of water coated in dust, a few days of food coated in dust, a flashlight coated in dust. That's pretty much it. Occasionally a bolt of stress hits me, especially doing a show about doom. I should take this more seriously, right? The whole survival industry offers robust doomsday supplies, everything from power banks to lock picks to waterproof matches. Should we be investing? But that entire question rests on a bigger what are we actually preparing for? What do people do when civilization breaks down? Not a power outage or a bad week, but a true collapse. What does real survival require? Today? That's what we're investigating. If the world fell apart, what would you need to make it? Is it what you see in Prepping Culture and our post apocalypse stories? Or do they have it wildly wrong? A ragged, dirt smeared figure darts through a wrecked city, chased by a blood curdling roar. A giant radiated scorpion. Zombies. Or maybe worst of all, people, fanatics, cultists, cannibals. The figure parkours over a rubble pile. Allies in the nick of time arrive to drive off the monstrous pursuers. Now the search for food, ammo and a mythical place of safety continue. That's pretty much our post apocalypse narratives, right?

[Ben Bradford]

There's a small group of survivors.

[Chris Begley]

Chris Begley, anthropologist at Transylvania University in Kentucky, is going to be our guide to understanding apocalypses and survival for three reasons. One, he researches what's happened in the real world in the past.

[Ben Bradford]

Every culture that we are studying, almost without exception, has undergone some kind of collapse.

[Chris Begley]

Two, he enjoys a good post apocalypse story.

[Ben Bradford]

They're fun and I love them. And I've seen a million apocalyptic movies and reason.

[Chris Begley]

Three, we're talking to Chris. If you were looking for somebody who could thrive in those doomed, wrecked worlds, he'd be a good bet. Chris's specialty is underwater archaeology, which is what it sounds like diving deep into ruins. During his career doing remote digs in Central America, he spent years with the Pech and other indigenous groups living off the land.

[Ben Bradford]

How can I, you know, find stuff around and do what I need to do to Be safe. How do I build a shelter? How do I build a fire?

[Chris Begley]

Bushcraft in the U.S. chris teaches at his university. But on the side, he also began passing along those skills through wilderness survival

[Ben Bradford]

courses, which I really envisioned as, how do you find your way home? You get lost in the woods? Not how do I survive after an apocalypse.

[Chris Begley]

He would show students how to stay warm, how to find makeshift shelter, how to forage for food, or rather, how not to.

[Ben Bradford]

I would have students go out in the woods and bring back things they think they might eat. And then I would just ask them some questions like, what is that? And they would say, that's an acorn. I'm like, are you sure? And they would be like, yeah, pretty sure. And I'm like, okay, you're pretty sure. Have you ever eaten one? Are you allergic to it? Do you have any sense? If there are some that are edible and some that aren't, do you know what it does to you? Do you know how many calories it has? What kind of nutrition this gives you?

[Chris Begley]

At first, Chris says most of his students enrolled to kick their camping trips up a notch. Over time, he noticed interests changing more and more. Were training for the apocalypse, and it

[Ben Bradford]

was clear that, you know, this was people's idea. I'm going to go out in the woods and I'm going to survive, and

[Chris Begley]

all of that, which puzzled him because he didn't necessarily see the connection. There's a decent amount of evidence that what Chris was noticing was part of a trend. Belief a doom is coming has multiplied. Back in 2012, survey company Ipsos found about one in five Americans at least somewhat agreed with the statement, the world will end in my lifetime. A survey this year asking the same question found now almost a third of Americans expect it. There are a lot of theories about economic anxiety after the Great Recession, polarization and political division, worsening climate change, new wars. Everyone currently sentient on the planet recently survived a global pandemic. No wonder we're shaky. And so interest in preparing for some kind of massive breakdown, whether that's nuclear war or a political collapse, has understandably increased as well. A commonly cited estimate based on FEMA data has it that more than 20 million Americans engage in some form of prepping. But what that means can range from stockpiling a month of food, essentially what my mother does in case a family stops by, to turning a home into a fortress. The whole industry is waiting to help. Companies sell power, banks, solar panels, tents, survival sporks, tourniquets, gold coins, seeds, axes with fold out saw blades, shovels with chainsaw blades. And guns. Lots of guns.

[Ben Bradford]

I went once to a survival expo in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was mainly just a gun show, talking about, you know, what kind of guns do you need? You need your AR15, do you want a shotgun? What's your sort of into the world thing now?

[Chris Begley]

The industry and prepping culture are not a monolith. Different communities have different focuses. Some urge collaboration, others, isolation behind walls. But what struck Chris is how it all clusters around guns, Bushcraft, fortress thinking skills to survive the collapses. Our stories have trained us to imagine and to be clear. It's not that Chris thinks those skills would be useless when we're talking about apocalypse. It goes beyond a disaster hitting fire, flood, earthquake, nuclear missile. The scale of the problem has to break a civilization's ability to cope. Supply chains fray, states dissolve. That's why preppers refer to the relief agency FEMA as foolishly expecting meaningful aid. Historically, we have records of civilizations that have collapsed in the past and why and what happens. We have an episode about this, and what we heard was that whether it's the Maya, the Romans, the pest, whether the collapse is fast or slow, people drift from cities and population centers no longer capable of sustaining them. And so Chris says there is a window when he thinks these classic survival skills might be most useful in the

[Ben Bradford]

immediate aftermath of something you're dealing with not having a house or not having electricity or water.

[Chris Begley]

But the skills you need will depend on what flavor of apocalypse you're dealing with.

[Ben Bradford]

Understanding where the danger lies helps as well. For instance, generally it's a better idea to stay put than leave. But sometimes you have to leave.

[Chris Begley]

Like if the enormous Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica collapses, global sea levels jump, tidal waves put the east coast underwater. This is supposed to happen in 200 years or more. New York, Washington, Miami, all become unlivable. So if you're in one of those damp places, you're probably leaving. On the other hand, if government crashed and dissolved, the state failed, power plants went offline, you might stay, at least for a bit, at your home, where you have walls and a mattress. But generally speaking, Chris has a hierarchy of what you'd want to prioritize first in order of what'll keep you quickest.

[Ben Bradford]

The first one, of course, is going to be oxygen. I mean, you have to be able to breathe. If you're in an area where there's smoke or bad air in a cave or whatever, that's going to be the big one.

[Chris Begley]

If your home is filling with smoke because an Asteroid exploded and set your city on fire. You have to leave because you have to breathe. But that creates the next problem.

[Ben Bradford]

Next, it's going to be maintaining your

[Chris Begley]

body temperature before dealing with food, water, zombies. Sleep, Chris says you gotta avoid exposure.

[Ben Bradford]

That'll get you in a matter of hours.

[Chris Begley]

If you're too hot or too cold, you're in the wrong clothes. You're in a place without shelter. It's really easy to get in trouble. It's a big reason staying in your home might make sense if you can breathe there. Out in the elements, Chris has tips to stay warm. Get out of the wind. Don't lie on cold ground in the absence or in addition to a jacket or fire. Cut and wear a trash bag. Or even better, a Mylar food storage bag because it can reflect a lot of heat. Cover your head. Your mom might have told you you lose something like 80% of our body heat from it. That's a lie. Your mom lied to you. But Chris says the head is the biggest area we tend to leave exposed. So now you're warm enough, you can move down the list.

[Ben Bradford]

After that, it's thirst. It's water.

[Chris Begley]

You can look for a creek or standing water, or in a pinch. There are ways to drink or distill water from plants. Like you can put them in a plastic bag and let the sun cook the moisture out. The age old way to filter water is to boil it. If you can make a fire to that end, Chris says in Bushcraft, tools can make a world of difference.

[Ben Bradford]

It's remarkable what you cannot do when you don't have a tool. Sometimes.

[Chris Begley]

Chris has a list here too. He likes basic multipurpose items that make that hierarchy easier. Layers of clothes. A metal water bottle that you can drink from but also put in a fire to boil the contents. A water filter so you don't need to boil all your water in a metal bottle. And speaking of boiling, a way to make fire would be just peachy. Also, a good knife.

[Ben Bradford]

Obvious one for like a machete or an axe. Cut wood for fire or to cut through a door or to cut something up to make something else.

[Chris Begley]

He likes a shovel, but it probably doesn't need to double as a chainsaw.

[Ben Bradford]

Something as simple as digging a latrine or somewhere to dispose of, you know, human waste or garbage.

[Chris Begley]

But all of this is contextual. If you're going to be indoors, Chris says, you'll want different tools.

[Ben Bradford]

For instance, there are special tools that turn on and off water at the street. What if you live on the 25th floor in a high rise. You know, in modern buildings, like how do your door locks operate? Are they electric? What happens when the power goes out? Is there a battery backup?

[Chris Begley]

If the digital lock fails, do you have a tool to get your door open?

[Ben Bradford]

That's not a comprehensive list, but it sort of gets to the philosophy behind how you make the list.

[Chris Begley]

So that's all classic survival stuff fits in very well with what you'd find in most prepper guides. But you might have noticed one item missing, a critical human need he did

[Ben Bradford]

not discuss really way down the list. It's going to be food.

[Chris Begley]

Chris thinks finding food out in the wilderness, for instance, is generally not worth it. It's better to be weak from hunger than to try to forage only to eat a poisonous acorn. People can generally survive for weeks without food. And the reason that's worth emphasizing is that's the amount of time he thinks all of these classic survival skills, being alone, living off the land, would actually serve you. Not even long enough that you should worry about food. In the grand spectrum of sort of survival, all of that that you just described, where does that fit the going

[Ben Bradford]

off on your own. That may be what you do for the first days or weeks because Chris

[Chris Begley]

says history shows real survival long term does not happen alone, nor does it focus on bugging out away from society. If you're preparing for that, you're probably getting ready for the wrong movie.

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[Chris Begley]

NPR anthropologist Chris Begley says within our apocalypse stories, there is a math problem.

[Ben Bradford]

About 3,000 years ago, the global population was a couple of hundred million people.

[Chris Begley]

That was the time in history at that population level, 200 million, when Chris says nearly every society had transitioned to farming. Even though farming sucked.

[Ben Bradford]

An average hunter gatherer spends about 12 or 15 hours a week generating their basic needs. Any of us that have any experience with farmers know that you may work that much in a day.

[Chris Begley]

This was wild to me. But hunter gatherers appear to have lived longer than subsistence farmers. They were taller, they were healthier. We have a bonus episode for supporters that gets more into this. One of the reasons the Romans thought the Germanic tribesmen they were always fighting the barbarians were huge is they were just better fed. But farming can simply supply more calories to more people on less land. Chris says that all suggests human societies gave up hunting and gathering. Not for fun. It wasn't fun, but because they had to make sure they could feed enough people. That 200 million, at that threshold, that

[Ben Bradford]

was too many people to keep hunting and gathering.

[Chris Begley]

Even the most catastrophic modern doomsday scenarios, nuclear war, pandemics, they don't take the world population and most projections down anywhere close to the threshold where hunting and gathering would be viable again.

[Ben Bradford]

If 90% of the people on Earth died in some apocalyptic event, we would still have more people than the Earth can sustain without agriculture.

[Chris Begley]

Today, a massive, highly specialized industry produces the vast majority of food. An intricate machine so much more complex and feeding so many more people than at any other point in history. But if that falters, as you'd expect in a doomsday scenario, amid displacement and state failure and who knows what else, how do we eat? In the apocalypse movies, our ragged dirt smeared figures peel open cans of food from the before times or grill up right on a stick or depending on their affiliation and even less savory meat. Either way, that's hunting and gathering. And Chris says the math simply doesn't check out.

[Ben Bradford]

The problem that we're going to face is food. And a big part of that's going to be agriculture.

[Chris Begley]

If we need agriculture, that leaves two options to get it. Option one, try to rebuild that system.

[Ben Bradford]

And the more you think about it, the more you realize what an involved thing that is. Who has that knowledge now, it's not

[Chris Begley]

just how to plant, how to irrigate,

[Ben Bradford]

how to harvest the inputs, the fertilizers, the pesticides.

[Chris Begley]

It would be a giant daunting group project.

[Ben Bradford]

It's going to be recreating these systems that allow us to stay alive.

[Chris Begley]

You wouldn't just need food, you would need drinking water. You would need people coming together, meaning construction. Ultimately we'd want electricity since we know it exists. That'll help us make fertile, which means more people, which means kids.

[Ben Bradford]

You're still going to have to have education systems, you're still going to have to have communication systems, more people who

[Chris Begley]

will need dentists, who will need equipment.

[Ben Bradford]

You're going to have to have some sort of diplomacy.

[Chris Begley]

And pretty quickly you're just rebuilding a society.

[Ben Bradford]

You have to reconstruct those systems and doesn't mean you have to remake them in their same image.

[Chris Begley]

So that is one option, a very hard one. Option two, you could try and peace out. Much of the prepper industry sells walling yourself off guns, solar panels, tooth pulling kits, seeds for your own farm that you will protect with your own guns. If you didn't want to worry about agriculture and all those other people, you can invest in pouches and powders and bars and cans and energy drinks with a 30 year shelf life. One of the cheaper options for a family of four for five years, roughly $100,000. In addition to the dietary gamble on what that'll do to your gut, you can spend a lot more. A fantastic New Yorker article from 2017 detailed the rich technologists buying their own ultra high end bunkers. A former missile silo offers luxury apartments for the end of the world. It has a gun room and grow lamps for vegetables, armored trucks, armed guards and a chore list and timeout room for the multimillionaires inside. Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is carving out his own fortress in Hawaii. These bunkers would probably be lovely for weathering nuclear fallout for a couple of weeks. See our episode about what it would be like for most of us a really terrible toilet. But long term, Chris sees problems with the bunker fortress concept. You have a really interesting take on, I think why on basic, I think emotional reason that the well and the fence and the shotgun shells don't make sense in real life. And it has to do with violence, the nature of living with violence. Can you tell me about that?

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm not naive enough and few people are, I think to imagine that you don't ever need to think about some things like that. But it's not a sustainable strategy.

[Chris Begley]

The premise of fortress prepping from simple homes to ultra luxury bunkers is simple. You have resources and you're going to defend them from others who didn't think ahead like you did. But pretty quickly, Chris says, you encounter another math problem.

[Ben Bradford]

Imagine if you are much better at violence than almost anybody, and so you're gonna win some kind of encounter 90% of the time. You know, statistically, that's only five or six before you lose.

[Chris Begley]

But what if you're, like, really good at violence? You're gonna win 99% of your shotgun battles.

[Ben Bradford]

Okay, that's 50 or 60.

[Chris Begley]

That's also just a lot of battles.

[Ben Bradford]

You can't live like that.

[Chris Begley]

The luxury bunkers for the ultra wealthy might have even more holes in their logic. The people they hire to guard their bunkers with guns will have families, friends, loved ones. The pilots of the private planes they've commissioned will have families, friends, loved ones. Is it likely these people, in a worldwide disaster where perhaps money and property titles are not worth much, will prioritize their client over family, friends who really ends up in the fancy bunker? And then when you start playing that game, when you think about the family and friends you would check on in a crisis or bring with you if you all had to leave and who they would bring with them. Suddenly reforming into a community, however hard, rather than figuring out how to be separate, seems a lot more plausible to Chris. Lone survival or fortress mentality doesn't add up due to math and logic, but also for a bigger reason. He says we can look to history. For more than 1,000 years, the Pech had spread across what's now Honduras. They lived in the rainforests and on islands off the coast. We don't know how many there were, but in the 1500s, the Spanish arrived with guns and horses and a thirst for gold, Guts buzzing with previously unintroduced diseases. And the Pech didn't stand a chance. Whole islands were killed or enslaved. They were driven away from much of their land.

[Ben Bradford]

A relatively large civilization that had all kinds of artwork and widespread influence. We really see that change to a number of really small villages. At their nadir, I would say there was probably 2,000 pech.

[Chris Begley]

They were fractured, scattered, population decimated. Maybe it seems off to use the word apocalypse, but Chris says the experience of the Pech and other native peoples in the Americas approached the kind of destruction described in today's wild fiction that

[Ben Bradford]

approximates sort of our visions of something dramatic.

[Chris Begley]

The biggest killer was disease, which could ravage an entire village at once.

[Ben Bradford]

And then one winner. You might have 65, 70, 75% of the population die.

[Chris Begley]

I think it's worth restating the level of devastation. A recent estimate found that enough Native Americans died in one century to lower the total number of humans on Earth by 10%, enough to cool the world slightly. That surely is apocalyptic to the survivors of these events. What happened? What did they do? Did they go off on their own or something else? The answer? You can probably guess something else.

[Ben Bradford]

These small groups banded back together and reformed. These sort of multi ethnic societies, probably multilingual societies, famous cultures.

[Chris Begley]

The Catawba people in North Carolina formed from more than 30 different native nations. The Seminole in Florida grew from refugees who traveled from all over. And the Pesh. The idea of the White city stands as a testament to what they did, a monument to multiple cultures, different gods, different languages, commingling over and over again across two continents. Survivors of disaster looked toward each other, not away. They chose option one rebuilt. Chris thinks that's human nature borne out by history. And the reason that matters is if in the post apocalypse, other people aren't the top enemy. If it's the opposite, if collaboration would be key, then how you would prepare and the skill set you would need are totally different.

[Ben Bradford]

Nobody wants to hear that, but that's what's gonna get things done.

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[Joanna Strober]

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[Chris Begley]

If you were designing an apocalypse kit from scratch with no priors what would be worth emphasizing? What skills would you teach? A lot of our fiction shows harsh lands where only the classically strong survive. The armed, the handy, the wilderness. Ready? There is a type of useful person,

[Ben Bradford]

a trope that you'll see in a lot of these. You know, somebody that has the big bunker, you know, and you can get in if you have a special skill, right, Medical, or you're a mechanic, or you're a soldier or something.

[Chris Begley]

Chris Begley thinks this trope of the useful person is a power fantasy and that it falls apart when you consider what actually comes easy to people and what's hard. Chris remembers years ago, the first time he put on his archaeologist cap and traded in city living in Chicago to live with the Pech in the rainforest. The lifestyle took adjustment.

[Ben Bradford]

To bathe, to get drinking water, you had to walk down to the creek, you know, of course there just was no electricity.

[Chris Begley]

Exhaustion stalked him. Everything required manual labor. Walking, carrying, chopping wood. He missed the food.

[Ben Bradford]

Back home, I mean, we ate beans and rice three times a day, but we sat around a lot and played cards and told stories.

[Chris Begley]

He remembers trying to adapt to all of it and not knowing if he could.

[Ben Bradford]

It was hard. It was really hard.

[Chris Begley]

He says his experience wasn't unique. He later saw it in other visitors like him.

[Ben Bradford]

Once a guy from Spain came, and after the first day, he was like, okay, I'm leaving. And I said, okay, tough it out a week, all right?

[Chris Begley]

Because Chris says the things that were hard, that seemed intolerable at first, quickly got better.

[Ben Bradford]

And after the week, he was fine. And it was same with me until

[Chris Begley]

soon, the lifestyle just was.

[Ben Bradford]

By the time I left there a year later, I had no desire to leave. To tell you the truth, I liked that life.

[Chris Begley]

The lesson to Chris is that survival skills, physical conditioning, can be gained pretty quickly. A Chicago academic can adjust to life in a rainforest.

[Ben Bradford]

The better in shape you are, the easier it'll be. But you'll get in shape. I mean, after two weeks, after a month, you'll do it.

[Chris Begley]

Even technical skills can be picked up, can be taught. And in an apocalypse that's not premised on solo survival, but is a group project requiring coming together, working together, it changes who would be useful.

[Ben Bradford]

People are smart. I mean, I know it sometimes doesn't seem like it, but people are smart. I mean, anybody that shows up can learn to be useful.

[Chris Begley]

If you picture an apocalypse level disaster with people displaced, tormented by losing loved ones, shell shocked ragged after abandoning cities and towns, real horror show. And they start to work together to Recover as people do. Then Chris thinks other rarer qualities would actually be most useful. They're just less cinematic ones. What do you think the most important skills might be really in some kind of apocalypse civilization collapse scenario?

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, well, I think one of the most important is going to be your interpersonal skills. Now, maybe this is going to be political, some sort of leadership role. Maybe it's going to be somebody that's a peacemaker or a compromiser or community organizers.

[Chris Begley]

I love the idea that you're like, okay, so what do we really need? Politics.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, I know that sounds bad, but you do need groups of people to work together. Nobody wants to hear that. But that's what's gonna get things done.

[Chris Begley]

A few years ago, Chris was writing a book called the Next Apocalypse, essentially on this topic. He asked a wide range of thinkers with different angles and experience related to this topic what they thought would matter most. Over and over, he got a common answer. It wasn't shooting or fishing or even farming. It was critical thinking. Because with that, almost everything else can be taught.

[Ben Bradford]

If in some of these unrealistic situations, you know, I showed up at a place and there was some usefulness quotient, you know, it's like, sorry, I'm. I'm going to pass on that place. That is not the people I want to be with. I'll go find the useless people and we will become useful in all the right ways.

[Chris Begley]

I don't want to dismiss prepping. We do this show because horrible things could happen. If it makes sense to be ready for earthquakes or hurricanes, why not even the worst disasters? I think Chris's point is compelling though, that the kit we see in our movies sold by the survival industry diverges from what math, logic and history suggest would actually help. It's solving the wrong problem. So if you were building a curriculum for the apocalypse, a toolset from scratch, what would it contain? Instead of wilderness survival, Soil science. Remove target practice for supply chain management. And put that way, it's so much more mundane, a way less fun hobby, and a little jarring that the person best equipped to thrive after the apocalypse may not be the one who can outrun the cannibal, but but can run a meeting. Chris Begley has just co authored a new book, the Emergency Playbook, a bunker free guide to disaster Preparation, where he shares more tips than what you heard here. If you're enjoying this show, you think there's value, you can find out how to support us and help us ensure we keep making it. @doompod.com support next time on are We Doomed? Asteroids? Are we really good at these?

[Joanna Strober]

We are getting there day by day to retire the rest of the risk.

[Chris Begley]

Check out our YouTube for fully animated versions of previous episodes. We're YouTube.com@are we Doomed? Pod Are We Doomed? Is a production of Nuanced Tales. I'm Ben Bradford. Our producer is Lindsey Kilbride. Our sound designer and engineer is Jay Sebold. Our editor is Tracy Samuelson. Theme music is by Dylan dagenet. Animation on YouTube by Alboris Kamalazad. The show is distributed by the NPR Network. Huge thanks as always to Dan McCoy, Khalil Ali and the rest of the team at NPR. And thank you. See you next week.

[Joanna Strober]

This message comes from Midi Health Co founders Joanna Strober and Dr. Kathleen Jordan discuss why they started a virtual care platform to empower and educate women in perimenopause and menopause. Historically, perimenopause and menopause have been very stigmatizing. So people haven't wanted to admit that they are in perimenopause and menopause as though it was like embarrassing, which is insane. It's just something happening to your body. So one of the things that we're trying to do is destigmatize these topics. Perimenopause and menopause are just women's health. So we try to educate women all the time. Maybe it's your hormones and we would like to help people.

[Ben Bradford]

You yeah, and I find women actually

[Joanna Strober]

want to talk about it.

[Ben Bradford]

It's one of the things they always

[Joanna Strober]

comment at MIDI is that they finally feel heard. One of the ways that women find MIDI is actually from other women and I think it's meaningful. Midi Health committed to helping women in midlife with perimenopause and menopause care accessible via telehealth [e-mail].