Red Pepper with Eric Shonkwiler

Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. And boy, golly, does it feel like the end times as of late. I'm your host today, Inman Harrowen, and I have with me here a very lovely guest, a recurrent guest, and a guest who has a really cool new book. And we're gonna talk about that book. But before we get to all that, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network that might help you feel less doomful about the world that we're all hopefully surviving through. Kite Line is a weekly 30-minute radio Kite Line is a radio program focusing on issues in the prison system. You'll hear news along with stories from prisoners and former prisoners, as well as their loved ones. You'll learn what prison is, how it functions, and how it impacts all of us. Behind the prison walls, a message is called a kite. Whispered words, a note passed hand-to-hand, a request submitted to the guards for medical care. Illicit or not, sending a kite means trusting that other people will bear it farther along until it reaches its destination. Here on Kite Line, we hope to share these words across the prison walls. You can hear us on the Channel Zero network and find out more at kitelineradio.noblogs.org. And we're back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, and for writing this awesome book that looking through it, I'm like, wow, I wish we published this, but I'm glad that Pluto Press published it. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and like, just give us a brief little What is Red Prepper?

Yeah, thank you for having me, Eamon. I'm Eric Schonkweiler, he/him. Yeah, I, you may remember me from previous visits as the author of When/If, a newsletter on preparedness as a leftist. The book Red Prepper is about the same thing. It's about trying to take back this practice, this historical practice of preparedness from the, the stereotypical notion of what prepping is and what a prepper is, rooting it in leftist practices of community mutual aid, helping each other instead of, you know, turning your house into a castle and drowning in freeze-dried mac and cheese in your basement.

But can I still turn my house into a castle for fun?

Yeah, absolutely. Just so long as you invite the community, you know.

Great. Hell yeah. I did go to a fake castle once in South Carolina for this— I forget what it's called— Belegarth, this foam sword fighting game that me, Margaret, and C80 used to go to all the time.

That sounds fun.

And some nerds turned their house into the facade of a castle and hosted big gatherings out there, and it was silly. They turned their house into a castle, but they also invited the community.

I like that. I like that a lot.

Yeah. I guess to start off with, why Red Prepper? Tell me about this title.

So Red Prepper is— Pluto Press is based out of London, and apparently there is a— if I'm remembering this correctly, there's a gardening magazine called Red Pepper. It's a pun and I didn't get to pick it, um, but it, it just, it fit. And, uh, and the folks, uh, the folks at the publishing house, they liked it a lot. Um, so I, I mean, I'm into it. I, uh, they did a great job with the COVID uh, and design and everything, so I'm not, I'm not bothered by it.

Cool.

But it is a pun.

I love that. I wouldn't have I think I just thought like, red prepper nod to socialism, you know, socialism and not capital-C communist socialism, but the socialism that we want, like public libraries and access to resources.

I mean, it definitely is a play on socialism or communism, so there's definitely that. Um, there, uh, I've— we had, we had thought of the possibility that on the shelves people will see Red Prepper here in the US and think that it's right-wing. Um, and I've already had that come up. So that might be—

Oh.

We might be stealthing into conservative households. Um, and they're gonna open this book and, and they're gonna be— I think at the beginning they'll still be into it. They'll be like, oh, he's talking about his grandma, family values. And then all of a sudden they'll be hit with, you know, oh wait, this isn't what I thought it was.

I kind of love that. That's funny because I could see that. And immediately when I saw this in our inbox— because Pluto Press just emailed us, I think doing like a big marketing spree— and we were like, oh, hell yeah, of course we want Eric back on the show. Like, send him right over. But it immediately signaled to me as the opposite of being like, this is prepping for radicals, this is prepping for people who are not kind of alt-right.

Yeah.

So I love that it's sort of doing double duty and signaling that, and also maybe getting into some people's houses that will read it and hopefully feel changed in some of their I hope so.

I definitely wasn't like— it was not written to be, you know, a stealthy— it's not meant to be like radicalizing literature, but I can definitely see somebody accidentally reading it and going, you know, he's got a lot of points.

Totally. It's interesting to hear you say that it like wasn't written to be radicalizing because like, I'll be honest, I've mostly gotten a chance to read the first chapter at this point. But it is told through a narrative lens, and personal narrative to me actually is one of the most radicalizing things for people.

Mm-hmm.

Like, people who are going to read something and read actually what someone is going through, actually what someone's journey through something is, and be able to relate to it. rather than just being like having statistics and like propaganda like rammed down their throat, you know? So like, I think it could be very radicalizing for a lot of people because it does approach it from this, like some, from some more like personal narrative ways.

I'm happy for that to be the case. I think it's been throughout my, throughout my literary career, I've always been surprised by the things that people think of my writing that I never thought of. But it's, you know, that's the good thing about being a writer. People will ascribe intelligence to you that you never actually had. And the idea there is just to never disabuse them of that. Just be like, yeah, totally, I definitely meant that. I definitely meant that.

Yeah.

Yeah. I accident my way into a lot of that.

Hell yeah. I think I wrote a pun into a play once that I didn't even know was there, and one of the actors pointed it out to me, and I was like, yeah, totally, I meant to do that.

Yeah, yeah. You just gotta take credit for it. Otherwise, uh, you know, it goes into the ether.

Yeah.

Maybe subconsciously you did, you did know.

Yeah, I knew, I knew. Part of me knew.

Yeah.

Um, but speaking of narrative, I would love to, I guess, kind of like hear the story of like what, like what got you into thinking about preparedness and like, and like why is this now like a I guess, rather large part of your life and thought.

Yeah. So I actually can't remember if I put this in the book or not. I think it might have been cut for time. I've always been really into the end of the world. And I think this is in the book. I, for a brief moment in my teenage years, was evangelical. And so like, I read all of the Left Behind books that are all about the end of the world. And I totally— it's always stuck in my head.

I read the, like, the young— or sorry, the YA version, like, once.

Yeah.

Someone, like, gave it to me when I was, like, 8 or something. And all the— I was not evangelical. I grew up Catholic and, like, very, very accustomed to the end of the world in Catholicism. But all the religion stuff really freaked me out, but I loved this story. about teenagers navigating the apocalypse, and that's all my brain saw. I was like, religion? I don't fucking care. Who fucking cares? Apocalypse. Let's—

I mean, that was what I saw. Honestly, for whatever reason, I never fell into traditional fantasy, and this was just fantasy for me. It's a party going through the world when it's raining fire and blood and monsters are coming out of the sea and stuff, you know, like that.

Yeah.

That's, that's a fantasy book, you know? And I just, I never read Lord of the Rings. I read the Bible instead, which sounds boring as hell. Um, and it was. Um, but I, uh, you know, so I, I was steeped in this idea, uh, and, uh, and was always, um, always thinking about it, uh, in the back of my mind in some way or another. Um, And, and eventually, you know, around, around like 2009, 2010, I started to look at climate change and I might've still even been calling it global warming back then. And I started to see it for what it was, which is something that could end the world, or at least end the world as we know it, and started to write about that. And then Around 2016, you know, the thing that happened in 2016 happened. You know, Trump got elected, and that was a very sobering moment for me. I at the time to speak toward being prepping being something like a radicalizing event. I was a liberal. You know, I was I was a progressive liberal, but I was still a liberal. I wasn't really anywhere near where I am now politically. But the the journey for me. seeing someone like Trump come to power and seeing the way that the world was going with climate change, uh, the— these things dovetailed. Um, and I, I just started to see the, the trajectory that the world was headed in and, and realized that not only was, uh, the way that I lived my life insufficient for surviving it, uh, but my politics were insufficient for surviving it as well. And so, like, as I became more of a prepper, I went further and further left. And by the time we got to 2020 and COVID hit, I started to lose what little faith I had left in government and started to prep really in earnest. In no small part because I had settled down. I got engaged and eventually married, and we have a house and a bunch of dogs. that I wanted to care for and, you know, and friends and community members that I wanted to care for. And so I started to think along those lines, along, um, the, not the traditional prepper lines, which is that I've got to turn, like, you know, like we said earlier, I've got to turn my house into a castle.

But you still could if you wanted to for fun.

Right. But there just wouldn't be like gators in the moat. I would, there would be a bridge and it would always be down and people could come and go as they pleased.

Yeah.

But yeah, I didn't want to, I didn't want to create a place where I would just hide and the people that I loved would hide. I wanted to be able to become a resource for folks. And I, to bring it all back around, I wanted to use the best skill that I've got in my arsenal, which is writing to help people. And so, you know, I started When/If, the newsletter, and then when some traction got under it, I started writing Red Prepper and Pluto Press picked it up.

Yeah. Hell yeah. I guess in the moment of realizing, of wanting to get into preparedness or recognizing that there was a need to prepare for something, what was the first thing that you did?

The first thing that I did was wrong.

Cool.

So we'll pull this all the way back to 2016, which like I said was sort of Perhaps the initial radicalizing moment for me, the night that Trump got elected, I was living in Nashville and I came home from the bar. Now I can't remember what the bar was called. Dang. Bobby's Idle Hour. I'm not sure if it's still there or not.

That's a cool name.

That's a cool bar name. If there's anybody living in Nashville in the audience, they'll probably know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Uh, so I, I watched the election at the bar, uh, and, and went home and, uh, I had a, like a, a hiking bag that had a little bit of stuff in it, you know, um, had like a, a big, uh, rusty Bowie knife, um, and like, uh, one MRE. And so like, I, I opened the bag and I was like looking at all the stuff that I've got and like, oh, there's a lighter in here and some matches and a little bit of rope and. and the MRE. So I'm like, I got a thing of water. I put the water bottle in there. I was like, yeah, okay.

You're set.

I started. Yeah. I'm like, I, I, and I, I say this in the book, uh, but I, and I'll say it again because I just, I find it funny. Where, where the hell was I gonna go? Like, where am I? It was a bug-out bag. Where am I bugging out to? Murfreesboro? There's nowhere to go. Where was I gonna walk to?

Yeah.

Um, and so it, it, You know, it was the, it was the knee-jerk reaction of someone who knew just enough about prepping, uh, to be dangerous to themselves. Um, and it wasn't for a little while that I realized that, uh, more often than not, uh, bugging out is usually a bad idea. And more often than not, uh, anchoring yourself in your community and learning skills to help each other is the way to go, not to just put stuff in a bag. And be like, yeah, I've got gear. I'm ready to go.

Got that big rusty Bowie knife and an MRE. I'm ready to tackle the world.

Yes, it's gonna save me from everything.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I wanna dig a little bit more into this idea of like, it's like bugging out is not like— you have a chapter in your book, I think, that's literally called Bugging Out Versus Bugging In. And I guess like, let's talk more about it. What do you see as like, I guess, the differences between these things and like, when is bugging out appropriate?

Yeah. So I think that 90% of the time, a person or persons, you know, if you've got a family or friends or just folks in your apartment or a bunch of cats, you're probably going to be safer staying at home. through most disasters and most things that we think about when we think about bugging out. You know, like when I was freaking out about Trump's election, I was thinking about all of a sudden there being people marching down the street, you know, trying to, you know, questioning everybody and being like, in my case in 2016, are you a liberal? And I'd have to be like, yeah. And then they'd get me. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. But like, and even in those scenarios, like, look at what I had. What was I going to do with a single meal and a little bit of water and a rusty knife? I wasn't gonna get far.

No.

But at home, I had all the food that was in my refrigerator. I had running water, I had shelter, most importantly. And you have to think about the fact whenever you are considering bugging out, I'm leaving all of that behind. And, and you're probably, if, if you're new to prepping, you're not thinking about the everyday resources around you as being articles of preparedness, but they are. The, your, your preparedness is not just the, the cans of beans that you've set aside for doomsday. You're prepared with the, in my case, the vegan mac and cheese and Impossible Nuggets. that you've got upstairs in the regular places where you put your food. And like the, the bandages that you've got, the medicine that you've got, your prescription medicine, I— you're leaving behind, if you're bugging out, all of these things. You're leaving behind a, a, like a status quo of care. If you're someone with a disability or with medicinal needs that like you've got to go to the doctor a couple of times a month or something, You're leaving that behind and that can be very dangerous. Whereas if you are bugging in, again, depending on what the disaster is, there are occasions where bugging out is the only solution. Most of them, if it's just like a really bad storm, you're probably better to stay at home sheltered than you are to like try and run away from it. If you're in fire country, if you're in flood country, that's a different story. And I would encourage anybody in those, quickly expanding areas to get familiar with what the signs of danger look like, and to know precisely how to get out of where you are in those situations.

Yeah, yeah, I, I totally feel you on that, on like all of that. It's like, but like bugging out to me has always felt like this, like, there is an emergency and there is like no other choice, like sort of like thing. Because you are leaving like relative safety or relative stability in a lot of those situations. I thought about it a lot with like, I feel like I had this similar fear in 2016, which became very palpable to a lot of people, especially after Charlottesville. It felt very probable that there would just be roving militias everywhere.

Yeah.

Setting up checkpoints, like, yeah, all of this shit. And like, I don't know, I don't think that's impossible that that will happen in the future.

It's definitely not. I mean, it's, it's not impossible. It has happened. And I can, I can point to the Pacific Northwest, the fires, and I want to say 2021, there were checkpoints set up by right-wing people. They sat out at intersections with guns in their trucks. And they made sure that the people entering their town fleeing from these fires, they were above board in whatever way that meant, which probably means they were white and appeared, uh, you know, straight and cis. I, so this is, this is by no means an impossibility. It has already happened.

Yeah. And like, I think about bugging out a lot of that with like, it's like, I think my prime example of like what I thought bugging out would look like was it has become like, dangerous to stay where I am, and there is enough danger around me that it will be hard to travel to wherever it is I'm going. Like, I don't know, I have these like, apocalypse nightmares about like, they shut down the internet and like, suddenly like, I can't communicate with the people that I care about in other parts of the country.

Mm-hmm.

And that I'm And then they like shut down transit, and that I'm then gonna have to like figure out how to get to the place where all my— the people that I want to like be in the apocalypse with together are.

Yeah.

And that's like my sort of like bugging out reality. Or there's like an emergent disaster that's gonna like destroy my house or something, you know?

Right. And those, those would be the scenarios though. Like, I, I think that bugging out is first reach. For preppers, especially in popular culture and like in popular prepping culture, because it's got— it kind of has an easy fix, which is you buy a bag, you buy things, and then you leave. You are— it's active. So you're buying things, which scratches that capitalist itch for you, and then you have direction. Like, I have to go. I'm going. Somewhere. I, I don't know that people necessarily know where when they think about bugging out. They just know that they have to leave. And if they ever do think about where they're going, I hope that they do. I, you have to, you have to include in your calculus the safety of that place. And so you, you really have to be careful about, about making sure that the, the parameters that you've set for bugging out are are worth it. Like, am I— like, like you said, I, I think that if you are— if you're trying to like meet up with the people that you want to ride out the end of the world with, that's, that's a I've got to get there scenario.

Yeah.

If your house is about to be consumed by a fire, that's an I have, I have got to get out of here scenario. But if it's anything short of that, you have to be very cautious and very cognizant of the, of the very real dangers that would meet you In whatever the scenario is on the road. Because again, you've, you're losing everything that you have in your home, which as, as imperfect as it may be, is more than likely more than you're carrying on your back or in your vehicle. It's just, it's just not likely that you've got everything that you've got at home with you when you're bugging out or potentially where you intend to arrive. My, I caught, I caught my wife watching this video on Instagram. Um, we are, we are both, uh, way, way out there, uh, in our algorithms. Um, and, uh, and Instagram doesn't know what to make of us. It, for whatever reason, it can't figure out either. There's not enough content to like, be like, oh, these guys are, they're, they're anarchists. And so we should find them anarchist content. And so we just get like a lot of, a lot of crazy conspiracy theorist, like right-wing content.

That makes sense. Yeah.

Because it's like, I don't, I can't put them in with like the people voting for Kamala Harris camp. So I'm going to put them in with these people. And so she's watching this video that that was very like the tone was very sensible, and it was animated, and it was these sensible stick figures saying, you know, X, Y, and Z is happening in your neighborhood. It's already too late. Like the idea was, if you have, if your neighbor saw you outside and you lent them a spoon and and some third innocuous thing, you're dead tomorrow. And so you've got to leave tonight and you've got to go. And the video doesn't say where it's like, but you've got to go. And if you haven't already started to go, it's like, you're, you're dead. They, they're, they're already coming for you.

Yeah.

And so it had like, a lot of what it said was like very sensible. And it like, it like, I can, I can imagine folks watching this video and being like, yeah, no, yeah, you're right. Right. I, I can't lend my neighbor a spoon.

Lend your neighbor spoons. It's really easy. It is.

It's very easy. It's very easy. And they're probably not going to come in the night and kill you. I really just don't think that that's the case. But to the point of that video, it had no conclusion. It was just, you leave. And I— where is this? So this was obviously the subject of this video is a traditional white masculine man. He has a pickup truck that he's putting whatever into, I don't know, a 30-pack of beer and then like guns and, and leaving, you know.

Yeah.

I can't let my neighbors get my Coors Light. So this, this white man leaves and goes to a cabin, uh, to, to a— the, the problems are manifold. It, it's like, is there a fallback location where this guy is actually headed? Uh, and if there is one, is it safe? Are there people that are going to see him arrive? And so he's going to be just as paranoid about that. Does he have anything remotely like what he had at home in this second location? Does he actually have the money for a second house? Is he going from house to house? Like, who is this improbable man who has everything except friends?

Yeah.

So I— yeah, a long, long, long walk for that little video. But Usually bugging in is safer, to get way back to that point.

Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing that I've been thinking about this more, especially with like, climate horror, is the possibility of becoming a climate refugee. And that is like, which, it's like, that again isn't necessarily like in a bugging out situation, that is a like, uprooting and changing a fundamental part of your life.

Yeah.

Which could be a slow decision, and it could be like— but also it could be emergent, you know? Yeah. I don't know, like, we could— especially in the wake of Katrina, like, a lot of people became like unexpected climate refugees who never returned to—

Yeah.

Like, to New Orleans, you know?

Mm-hmm. I think that that's— this is a very real issue for a lot of folks in the American Southwest right now, where Water is becoming such a scarce resource and, and there's no telling when, uh, to, to be apocalyptic and very pessimistic, which shock, a guy who wrote a book called Red Preppers pessimistic.

Um, you're on a show called Live Like the World Is Dying, not Live Like the World Is Thriving.

Yeah. Everything is hunky-dory, the podcast. Tomorrow, there, there could be a big valve somewhere on the Colorado River that Trump is just like, by executive order, all of this, what's left, Goes to the new hyper-gajillion data center, and a lot of people simply have none. There's nothing going downstream. And obviously—

Bill Gates' fucking supercity in Maricopa County that he's trying to build.

I haven't heard about this. Why would you build a megacity in Maricopa County?

I don't know why I chose Maricopa County, but it's— well, I mean, it's like Maricopa County, like the Phoenix metropolitan area, is like one of the— I think it's like one of the largest-growing metropolises right now. And it's funny because if you look at lists of the least sustainable cities in the United States, Yes. literally 9 of them are just Phoenix and suburbs of Phoenix. but they're all listed as separate cities.

That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, the, the Venn diagram of, uh, least sustainable cities and cities where you can boil an egg on the sidewalk or something, you know, like those same places. Yeah. Becoming a climate refugee or even like, to your point, it doesn't have to be something that happens overnight. It can be a decision that you make, uh, that, that arrives to you slowly. As your water becomes, as your supply dwindles, and as the quality decreases to the point that whatever is coming out of your tap is just, you know, silt, that would be a scenario where you're not bugging out, but you are leaving emergently because water is absolutely necessary. And at some point, you wake up and you realize that this is not a sustainable way for me to live. And it, you know, the entire city, Phoenix, doesn't have to wake up and realize this, but you may.

Yeah. I guess, like, to sort of switch gears, I love that there is this, like, kind of whole section in the book that talks about threats, none of which I feel like are gonna be new to listeners of this show. So I wanna talk about, like, what if people listening to this who have never thought about preparedness in their life, or this is the conversation that finally gets them to, like, get into it even though it's like the 200th, 300th episode of the show, or people who are deeply immersed in it already. What advice would you give for people who are getting into preparedness for the first time about what to focus on or to refocus on if they've been doing it? Sorry, this is a vague question.

No, I think I know exactly what you're asking for. And I For folks that are new to it and for folks that are maybe like coming back to it, I think that's something to, something to keep in mind as you, as you're beginning is, is one, not to freak out. Like, don't, don't come to this realization. Don't, don't be the frog in the boiling water that's not quite boiling and like, and like realize all of a sudden and, and, you know, and go into a panic. You don't need to drop your entire life savings. on food and water and guns tomorrow to stay safe. You can, you can reasonably and slowly build up regular supplies. You know, I go out when you're grocery shopping, buy a little bit more food than you normally would, things that you already eat. You don't have to buy like just rice and beans, like dry rice and beans. You don't have to do that. You can buy the things that you want to eat. For the apocalypse, and you can eat them in the apocalypse too. Canned food lasts a very long time. If you want to have, you know, food-grade buckets full of rice and beans, you can do that. You absolutely can. I do. But you can also just have Chef Boyardee. It will keep. It will keep for a while. And you don't have to, like, you don't have to do anything so crazy that like that you feel like you've got to like do homework for it. Go to the grocery, buy a few extra things, a few extra cans of something that you already eat. If you have extra storage space for like dry goods and you know that they will keep, buy some extra pasta or what have you. Buy a couple of gallons of water and put them someplace cool and dry. And even that will keep for a while. You don't have to buy some giant container and find a place to put it and worry about adding bleach to it. Start small. You don't have to start big. Take a breath, buy some regular stuff, because it's regular things that keep people alive in the moment. After that, just slowly build up, you know, go from day 1 to day 2 to A week's worth of supplies to a month, and if you've got room, keep going. If you've got room and you've got money to do that, keep going. But if not, don't worry about it. Don't freak out about it. You can only do what you can do. You can only buy the amount of groceries that you've got money for. Unfortunately, never steal from a grocery store, kids.

Don't do it.

Don't do it.

Don't. Yeah.

Do it.

Don't.

Don't.

Yeah.

Do it. But something that you can do after that, like after you think that you've got a little bit of a baseline established, or while you're establishing your baseline, is think about skills that you can learn. Um, and they can— this can be anything. Um, I was, I was talking, uh, to some incarcerated folks, uh, in a prison last week, um, about anarchy and prepping. And we went around the room and just said, It was the coolest thing. It was the coolest thing.

Let's talk about that for the rest of the episode.

Yes. I did the same thing at a high school. Miserable. Sorry. Sorry, children. I did that at a prison. Rad. Just the coolest people that I've talked to in a long time. It was very heartening and infuriating to think these people who are thinking these thoughts and are that have so much potential are stuck behind bars because of the state. I don't know what these folks did, if they did what they're in for. I didn't ask and I don't especially care. I— the prison is not the answer to what— whatever it is that happened.

Yeah.

But, but I was— we had, I don't know, 20 people in the room or something like that and just went around the room and said, This— I— the person, a friend of mine who organized the event, had the bright idea. This was not my question. He, he said, let's go around the room and tell me something that you can do that you don't think more than 50% of the room can do.

Oh, cool.

And, and people said all kinds of things. You know, they were like, I can hunt, I can fish. One guy had been a farmer. So like, he, you know, he knew the ins and outs of not just like gardening, but farming, like actually growing a lot of food. There were people in there who could do HVAC, who could do carpentry. One person was into crochet. All of these things are skills that matter. They might seem just like frivolous hobbies to folks when you don't sit back and think, I crocheted gloves or a hat. But like, you know what that is, right? Like, you've made a garment.

Yeah.

People need things to wear. So like you have utility. Like if we're thinking transactionally, like you've proved your worth. Like you have a skill that people around you may not have. You know how to do something. You have something that you can give to the community. So think about skills like that. Think about things that you can teach yourself or that you can like find a crochet club, a knitting club. If you have a book club, shift gears in that book club slightly. To talk about, like, say, propose reading a book about gardening, and then suddenly all of you know a little bit about gardening. These are things that you can do for free 99. They don't really cost a whole lot of money, but they, they're very useful skills to have, and they don't go away. So you don't have to, you know, re-up the subscription in your mind to remember how to do these things. They They won't expire like canned goods eventually do, and they won't run out. You know, you're always going to know how to garden or how to crochet, or it'll come back to you the next time you try it. After that, or again, meanwhile, because this is— these are things that are going to happen over the course of weeks or months, get with folks that you know, or branch out and get with folks that you don't know. Talk to your friends about the the very real dangers that we are facing, not just in this country, but in the world, and think about with them what you might do, whether that means like finding a way out of your town or your city or your neighborhood if you think it's untenable, or figuring out how to get together and take care of each other when something especially bad happens. The, the same guy that set up that talk at the prison, he and I have started to work on a an itty-bitty, like just in our friend group, uh, mesh communication network. So we've got these, the little, little mesh guys.

And, uh, we're currently recording on a mesh internet right now.

That's so cool. That is the coolest damn thing. Um, sometimes we can talk to each other on, on our little radio guys. Um, we're a little bit too far away from each other to reliably communicate, but we're working on it, you know, and, and it's gotten better. Like more people are popping up with these mesh nodes. And so Our communications can bounce a little bit further and more reliably every, you know, every day. There are, there are a lot of things that you can do. So to get back to the first thing that I said, don't get overwhelmed by it. You don't have to do everything at once. You don't have to buy a huge amount of anything right off the bat. Start small with things that, you know, you already use and need: food, water, medicine. Talk to your friends, learn, learn some stuff, learn some skills, buy some books, go to the library for some books, and just figure out a few things that you can do in your community. Very important for everybody all the time, even in just day-to-day life, is like first aid skills, stop the bleed training. For now, depending on where you are, your local government might put these kinds of trainings on and you can take them for free. And you can just walking down the street one day, maybe save somebody's life because you happen to take this training and apocalypse or not, you've saved somebody's life because you took the time to figure out how to, how to apply a tourniquet, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Got a couple of things I want to get back to. One is weirdly Chef Boyardee. Yeah, I was just this thing that I was reading or talking. I was reading about it or talking about it to someone and they were reading about it. Information was traveling in some way, but it was about this idea of like food scarcity projections sort of like in the world. And like one projection of like how food scarcity will sort of like play out during like just the regular world and also like that is slowly collapsing is that like food like Chef Boyardee or food like these kind of like fast foods or like—

Mm-hmm.

like, I don't know, junk foods.

Yeah.

Are actually gonna become probably far more prevalent and far more like part of a lot of people's diets, which they already are. They're like huge calorie like stocks for a lot of people in the world. And like one projection of how food scarcity will play out is that it's like as certain foods become like harder to access or more expensive to access, like, foods that we— that are very common to us right now might stop being as common to us or as accessible to us as they currently are. And it's like, I don't know, people— I feel like people scoff a lot at like having rice around, but like rice at many times in the history of civilization has been a fucking luxury.

Yeah.

And I think it probably will be again at some point in the, like, the not too near future. So like, which is not meant to be like, not trying to be doomy about it, but I'm trying to be a little doomy about it. So it's like—

Be a little doomy about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Food's a weird one. But, um, I guess like, so in your book, you talk a lot about also like, um, some, again, something people on the show would be entirely unfamiliar with is this community aspect of preparedness. And I'm curious, what does that sort of mean to you? And I guess, what are some big points that you would suggest for people who want to engage in not just this individual component of preparedness, which I would extend to a family unit or a household, but this larger network of preparedness?

Yeah.

Right before you get into that, um, it's a fun tie-in in regards to like learning skills. Um, one of my friends slash like a, a contributor to the show occasionally, uh, Bex talks a lot about, like, has like a learning cohort setup, which is like people like intentionally learning skills that they want their community to have. And it's beautiful because it's like, you don't have to, you don't have to become an expert on like, every single skill you want your community to have. You can all do it together. And it's really— that's really cool. So what skills would you suggest communities or groups that people like learn together or like infrastructure to sort of like set up?

So to get to the first part of the question, when you want to branch out of the individual aspects of preparedness, The, the first thing that I would suggest, if you're, say that you're completely new to the arena and you, you're like me and you're a little bit of a shut-in. And so I, you know, I talk this big game and I write a lot about community preparedness, but I, I, I don't do a ton. You know, I, I go out to the really free market sometimes and I talk to my neighbors when I can and I talk to my friends all the time about this stuff, but that's, I'm not always walking the walk.

That is walking the walk though. Like, that counts. Like, talking to your friends and neighbors about this stuff counts.

So let me qualify that by saying, as the author of Red Prepper, I'm not all the time doing this stuff. A lot of my energy is spent in front of a screen writing a book like Red Prepper or writing When If. But the and again, like in the same way that you don't have to buy out the grocery store in order to start prepping, you don't have to be out all the time doing this community work. Something that I do that again, like I'm like I said a bit of a shut-in. I'm definitely an introvert. I'll say I'll say that definitively. And so like, even just like going, going up to my fence and like looking at the neighbor over the fence and be like, hey, hey, do you, do you think that you'd like to, like, can I get your phone number so that I can text you in case like there's something going on? And so I live in central Ohio and there is an active and very good ice watch. 614 ICE Watch. And it's just a bunch of folks that drive around keeping an eye out. That is something very useful that you could do in your community to try and help people that are at great risk due to the obvious overt racism of this administration and the United States in general. That is a pretty low bar of entry. Go out into your community, find people who do this kind of thing. You might be able to just like Google Ice Watch, whatever my town is, and find people who are doing this work. You can go to, you know, like a city council meeting and be like, hey, fuck, fucking sucks. Maybe don't do it.

Yeah.

Or, you know, in the night, put on a Spider-Man outfit and maybe do something else.

Um, have you seen these videos of people who are like— there's like a flock of them on the— on YouTube right now of like people being like, man, flock cameras fucking suck. Anyways, here's a completely unrelated tutorial about how to cut through 2-inch aluminum pipe.

Yeah, I love those. I—

it's like people that I'm like, you're not— I don't think you're like super radical, but you fucking hate flock cameras, and that's awesome.

I, it is, it's a real flashpoint and a real unification point across, uh, the political spectrum. And I, I, this is, this is very beside the point, but, um, but the, the reaction that I've seen against, uh, state surveillance, um, is very heartening to me as far as like, yeah, would a, would a mass movement in this country be tenable? Um, and before I saw the response to Flock, uh, and how it cuts across Every, everybody across the states. My answer might have been a little bit different previous to that than it is now. And now I'm like, I, you know, I don't know, we might, there might be enough goodwill and common ground across people that you wouldn't have wanted to break bread with previous to this that you might have been like, hey, we both hate a lot of the same stuff. That's enough for now. Let's, let's get rid of the things that we hate and you and I can talk when we're done.

Yeah, I think we can all think James Cameron for this, for making us as a culture fucking hate Skynet. Everyone hates Skynet. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, what's the, uh, the, uh, the redhead kid? I keep seeing a t-shirt that says, uh, Save the World, Light a Cop. And it's the redhead kid, you know, uh, saying, I don't know. I don't know John Connor. Uh, to the, to the, uh, the T-1000.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

In Terminator 2, I also want to plug that, um, uh, John Connor was a total bug-out kid who rode a dirt bike, hacked ATMs, and like, his mom had a fucking bunker full of guns.

Like— Yeah. Sarah Connor. Do they make them like that anymore? I hope so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyways, skills that communities should have, infrastructure, etc.

Yeah. So it's, again, it's not, it's not crazy stuff. It's some things that you probably already know. It might even be your vocation. Your community is going to desperately need people that know how to, know how to build shelters, that know how to repair houses, that can do electrical work, that can Do plumbing work, HVAC work. All of these things are skills that, that I think particularly in modern times have become so siloed off that we— I like, I think maybe a generation or two ago, and I'm not trying to espouse, you know, anything about some golden age in America. I think this is more out of necessity than anything. Like my, my dad knew how to do a little bit of everything. And I don't, I don't. You know, if something goes wrong in my house, more than likely I have to call somebody. There's some things that I can fix, but generally, you know, I'm calling somebody.

That's okay. There's people who know this stuff.

But that's the point, is that you probably have someone in your community that knows how, and you don't need to be the Swiss Army knife that knows how to do everything. You can know how to do a few things okay, and one or two things really well, and be a completely valid and valuable member of your community. So I think that before you go around trying to get you and your 3 or 4 friends certified in HVAC repair, make a friend who knows how to do it, knows how to do it, you know? Yeah. And because you probably don't have to go too terribly far down the street to find somebody who has some training or that, like, is their job.

Yeah.

And the The greatest asset that you could possibly have, and the greatest— and to wax poetical about all this, the greatest asset that humanity ever had is other people. You know, another person is a whole other brain with a whole lived life full of experiences that you didn't have. They know a lot of stuff that you don't know, and you know a lot of stuff that that person doesn't know. And when you loop another person in, that's a whole other life of experience. that you get to include in your community. So suddenly you've got this brain trust of people that know how to do a lot of things. And if they don't know how to do everything, they know how to do a lot of the stuff that keeps people alive. So before you think that, you know, your tight-knit circle has to, has to learn everything, maybe just think about talking to your neighbor and, and gauging how they feel about things. And, and if they you know, would want to be involved if, you know, if you saw something go sideways and you want, you want to form like a team of people that come and help if there's a storm and you just cut, you know, cut up trees that have fallen in roadways or what have you. There are a lot of things that you can do, and it doesn't have to be the apocalypse. It can be when a storm hits tomorrow, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And My very silly addendum, which I don't think you're suggesting, but it's just a funny thought I had, but build real relationships with these people. Don't go around collecting tradespeople like Pokémon, you know?

Yeah.

Which is the silly thought that I had. But it's like, this kind of relationship building is like what is going to Like, set people up for, like, success, set communities up for success, and is the foundation of building these, like, resilient communities that can respond is, like, having real relationships with people, not Pokémon relationships.

Yeah.

Although I guess arguably the characters in Pokémon, or at least, you know, the main characters really had big, deep relationships with those Pokémon. I'm not going to tear this metaphor apart, Don't treat your apocalypse survival group as Pokémon. That's what I'm saying.

Here, we can make this perfect. Don't treat them like Pokémon cards.

Yeah, don't treat them like Pokémon cards.

Because then obviously you don't have a relationship with the card. So there.

Yeah. As we kind of like near the end of our time on the episode today, this is a weird question because we've talked a lot about kind of like preparedness and like things that feel more hopeful. What brings you the most dread when you think about the future or collapse? What is something that kind of tears at your existential dread? Sorry, this is a horrible question to ask someone.

It's really bad to end on. Yeah.

Well, there's a question after this.

Okay, good. It's like, what's my favorite flavor of ice cream? I'm excited to answer that one.

Yeah.

Um, so I, I have, I've spent a lot of time, um, staring into the abyss. It's not just like our current political milieu, uh, as depressing as that is. Behind, behind the, uh, the emergencies that we are aware of, um, there is a, there's the quiet emergency of collapse, um, which is the, not like Not a specific collapse, not like governmental collapse or collapse due to climate change, but the inevitable mathematical collapse of virtually everything that underpins the world as we know it right now, which is that so long as we are beholden to capitalist interests, the world runs on capitalist motives. And At some point, the people that have all the money are going to say, it doesn't make any sense for us to keep doing things the way that we're doing it. And they will, they'll pack up all of their stuff and say, we're not going to, we're not going to drill for oil anymore. We're not going to work in the tar sands anymore. It's not making me enough money. And we're seeing things that are approaching this now. Like, I think, you know, about every other day you hear about billionaire bunker. Um, and I'm not, I'm not trying to conflate these 2 issues that the billionaires are just going to pack up their toys and leave and we're going to be stranded. I don't think that's the case. I—

If only they would.

Right. Yeah, I, I wish they would and let us, we'll figure it out. Yeah, I promise we'll do our best to figure it out.

Get into that fucking bunker. Get in there.

We're definitely not going to seal the vents with poop. Uh, definitely not. But the, we, there, there is a, there's a, a cliff of, of viability that we'll reach with fossil fuels. And if, if your knee-jerk reaction is fossil fuels got us in this mess, the answer is yeah. Yeah, they did. But they also feed us. I was going to qualify that, but let me, let me put a full stop there. They feed us. We, are able to support the lives of most of the people on this planet because of fossil fuels. And without that energy input, we're not able to. And that is just a— the day that we absolutely run out of fossil fuels is far away. But the day that we, that people decide that it doesn't make sense to go for them anymore could happen soon. And when that happens, a lot of things change and things get pretty grim. Pretty quickly. The way that we fertilize most of the crops in the world these days is by, in part, by a process called the Haber-Bosch process, which uses fossil fuels and atmospheric nitrogen to create anhydrous ammonia that we spray on fields. And it's how we put nitrogen in our crappy monocropped topsoil. And without that, Our yields get cut in half, roughly. So just imagine how we're feeding all the people on the planet with the food that we've got now. Now imagine we've only got half of it. And you make up some of that gap by being responsible and by cutting waste, but you don't close the gap entirely. And there's just no way to make up for it. So once, once that process stops, once we stop having this easy energy, we're in trouble. And there's, I don't think that, I don't think any reasonable person who's informed on the subject can say anything other than a lie on this and say that we're just, we're in a lot of trouble. We can, we can work to get to sustainable energy inputs, but the way to get there is with fossil fuels. And so you're in the same boat. We have to, things have to change the way that that we work right now has to change. And that's everybody on the planet, mostly people in the Global North. The folks in the Global South, they don't have to change. Ideally, you need more than what you're getting. But the way that folks operate has to change. The way that we consume has to change. And it has to be now. And every day that it's not now makes The— makes the utopia that we could potentially have if everything goes right after today, makes that utopia a little worse. And by a little worse, I mean people go hungry. And that's just, just the math of it. We have— we are attempting in this world to go for infinite growth on a finite planet. And that doesn't work.

Yeah. I'm wondering if this sort of is— if this Not try to sum up in shorthand what you said, but it's like, are you sort of hinting at the idea that's like the thing that we've become, the thing that we've become reliant on is also killing us, like sort of vibe with fossil fuels or?

Well, it definitely is killing us. Um, the thing that we know is killing us, I, I would flip that on its head. The thing that we know is killing us is keeping us alive.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and it is, it is a very necessary poison. Um, we are, The metaphor, the indelicate metaphor that comes to mind immediately, and again, I'm going to forecast this, I know it is indelicate, it's akin to alcoholism. Your body becomes used to it, needs it in fact, and withdrawing from it is physically harmful and can be deadly.

Yeah.

It's like that. If we were to suddenly quit this habit, It would be deadly.

Yeah. It's like some of the backlash to use like the sort of like air quotes junk food-like thing. It's like, if we— yeah, junk food is like causing a lot of like irreparable harm to like a lot of people's like bodies and stuff like that and health. And if we got rid of it, people would die of hunger.

Yes.

Like, it's like the solutions are not as simple as like, getting rid of something.

Yeah.

And that's so complicated.

Yeah. Yeah. Bring it back to Chef Boyardee. You're, you're definitely going to see shocks that are more like you don't see fresh corn or fresh fruits and vegetables of varying kinds on the grocery stores than just like Chef Boyardee. It's made of so much processed stuff that you'll probably be able to find that more readily than you would like an ear of corn that you would normally buy at your local grocery store, those things are going to blip in and out and become scarce. Where a massive company that makes junk food like Chef Boyardee, which I love—

Yeah, sorry, junk food is maybe— it's like a colloquial term and it doesn't imply my actual sentiment about it.

Yeah. those sources of food and caloric value and to some extent nutrition will be easier to find. So yeah, definitely by no means denigrating that. I know that you're not either.

Yeah. And I guess to close up with, what's something that's bringing you hope these days?

So we already talked about the response to Flock. That brings me hope. The the tide of public sentiment appears to be turning on Palestine. So you've got the fallout between Macklemore and Ed Sheeran.

Totally.

And the fact that when Ed Sheeran fell on the side of, I got a pad in my pockets, everybody was like, actually, you fucking suck and we're not going to play with you. And, you know, and everyone supported McLemore on the very important bellwether of Palestine. You know, I should have opened up this talk by saying, yeah, there are active genocides going on across the globe and our tax dollars support them. And that is fucked up. Free Palestine always, from the river to the sea. And that the way sentiment is turning on that gives me a lot of hope. It is, it is coming far too late. But I think the American public is always a little bit slow to move. I think that we have a kind of cultural inertia about us. But seeing that tide turn, and I hope that this is the tide turning, is a hopeful event. And I'm hoping to see even more pushback and, you know, some actual results soon. Yeah.

Hell yeah. And now to shamelessly shill your book. Where can people find it? Where can people find you in the places where you would like to be found? And how can people support you in your writing besides getting your awesome new book?

Yeah, so you can find me at ericschonkweiler.com. That's E-R-I-C-S-H-O-N-K-W-I-L-E-R.com. I didn't pick my last name, I'm sorry. And you can buy Red Prepper at plutobooks.com. And I think depending on when this is released, there may still be a pretty great sale on their website and you can get a lot of their books for like 40% off.

Hell yeah. Is the When If newsletter still happening?

It is. Because I'm working on stuff with the book and I'm also trying to write a new book, or at least I'm on the precipice of that. Those newsletters come out a little more infrequently than I would like, but you can go to when-if.com and you can subscribe for free. It's never paywalled. No portion of the newsletter is ever paywalled, but you can also throw in a few bucks here and there through that subscription.

Hell yeah. Well, thanks so much again for coming on the show today, and thanks for writing such a cool book.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then see what you can do in your community to build the sense of preparedness and community around preparedness. Also, if you enjoyed the show, you can support it, and you can support it by supporting our publisher, which, you know, we're crying that we didn't get to publish Red Prepper, but like, you know, whatever, other people can publish stuff about preparedness. That's cool too. But if you If you want to support Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, then you can find us at tangledwilderness.org where we put out books and zines and other podcasts like the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast or The Spectacle. You can also find us at patreon.com/strangersintangledwilderness where for a variety of tiers of support you can get a lot of really cool things. Um, arguably, which I would say the Coolest thing is that this podcast can continue to happen because all of our shows are entirely listener-supported. Because, well, I don't know that like iHeartRadio would even pick us up, but, you know, we're not taking your ad money and shilling for Simply Safe or whatever the fuck it is, you know? So thank you so much for supporting us and our work. One of our favorite tiers of support is the Acknowledgments tier, and now the Friends of Strangers tier. The Acknowledgments tier is we will thank or acknowledge a thing of your choosing, whether it's a person, an animal, whether it's you, whether— my favorite— a nebulous concept, or whatever. I don't know, get creative. And then there's also the Friends of Strangers tier, which is sort of like Friends of AK Press, where we'll send you everything that we publish every couple months. And we'll also thank or acknowledge a thing of your choosing. And we would like to thank these things. Thank you, Glenn. Please fight anti-fatness. Arizona sunsets. I saw the most incredible Arizona sunset last night, and I really have to plug that. Bunny Bionics. Patrick Harnett Marshall, rest in power. All wiener dogs everywhere. The first 2 chapters of The Eden Project by James Hollis. The Kiwanis Socialists. The Athens People's Assembly. Assembly of Athens, Georgia. Your Canadian friend Mark.

Tiny Nonsense.

A Future for Abby. The Canadian Socialist Rifle Association.

Max.

Lancaster Chooses Love. Astoria Food Pantry. The Enchanted Rats of Turtle Island. Feral in West Virginia.

Blink Cat.

The Massachusetts chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association.

Shulva.

Jenny and Phoebe the Cats. Jason, Aidan, and Yuki the dog. Sunshine, which I think is a name and not like the concept of sunshine, but I'm not sure. Opticuna, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace. Julia, Appalachian Liberation Library. Lord Harkin, Baby Acab and her 3 great pups. Ephemeral, Princess Miranda, Jason, Janice, and Odell. Boldfield, Allie, Paparuna, Milica, Theo, SJ Page, to the Pocono Pink Pistols. Nicole and Tikva the dog. David, Towser's love of bumblebees. Carson, Dana, Chelsea, Amber, Marjorie, the truth that we will outlive them. Kirk, Micaiah, Chris, the incredible Rennerai, Micah, and Haas the dog. Is there anything you want to shout out today, Eric?

Oh, you put me on the spot. I thought that I was all done. Hmm. Uh, I will shout out my wife Ruth, who is an incredible poet, and our 4 Pomeranians, 2 of which are in the room with me and were blessedly quiet.

Hell yeah. Pomeranians aren't wiener dogs, but they are just as great.

True.

Thank you, Pomeranians. Uh, thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next week.