Making myself some dinner before settling in with DOOMSDAY. PREPPERS.

All right friends! I've eaten dinner and I'm settled in, so here we gooooooo!

We get three preppers this episode. One of them seems to be Dumbledore.

Let's meet our first weirdo! Bruce, aka Dumbledore, is a "retired scientist" and thinks nuclear war is inevitable.

"80% of the population will die in the first 2 years," says Dumbledore.

So he built a 10,000 square foot Vault so he can take in children afterward to save them. He built it out of school busses.

He calls the Vault "Ark 2" and estimates it can house 500 people.

He lives in Southern Ontario, by the way.

His children and grandchildren help maintain the Vault. Today he's explaining the admissions process to his grandchildren. He tells them that when families arrive, they are to be told "we have room for your children but not for you"

After decontamination, everyone is no shit issued a Vault-Tec suit --I mean a jumpsuit.

Parents who give up their children will be sent away into the irradiated wilderness with a dosimeter.

He thinks it will be fine to have the kids hot racking for months but then they can all go back outside. After, yknow, global nuclear war.

Dumbledore has actually thought about ventilation for his massive underground bunker!!

He takes local school kids on tours of it because he wants them to know they have somewhere safe to go when nuclear war breaks out.

Presumably he doesn't tell them about the part where their parents get to die in an irradiated hellscape.

He uses HAM radio to communicate with other prepper weirdos around the world.

His wife can't remember the last time she bought new clothes because they spend almost all of their money on the Vault.

I didn't see any mention of stored food or water? This worries me. The experts do not chime in on the Vault.

Our next weirdo is Jeremy! He's a new father who lives in Salt Lake City and is afraid of the collapse of society due to peak oil!

Is he preparing by reducing his dependence on petroleum so when it's no longer available he'll still have a relatively comfortable life? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

"I'd like to think of myself as a balanced person," says Jeremy, a man who plans to use his hot tub as emergency water storage.

"I can't believe we're making hot chocolate out of hot tub water," says his wife. A chiron reminds us to filter and boil the water before drinking.

He's also hoarding fish tank antibiotics.

...he also has a big ass Army truck that has to be an enormous gas hog. He is going to use it to bug out in case social collapse happens. He assures us that social collapse has led to cannibalism around the world.

It's an 80s era M35 they have turned into a living and storage vehicle.

He claims the engine will actually run on used motor oil?

@ArmyStrang can you comment on the M35 running on used motor oil?

They're doing a bug out drill. They couldn't figure out whether they'd put the rifle in the truck already. It was like a horrible comedy of errors.

He's teaching his wife to drive the huge horrible truck.

The experts want him to have bug out bags and prepack the truck. He agrees those are good ideas.

Our final weirdo for this episode is Bradford, a psychiatrist in San Diego who is afraid of a pandemic. OH BOY.

"Sometimes people refer to me as Dr Doom," says Bradford, who studied infectious diseases at Yale. He's afraid of avian influenza though.

He wants to get his whole family involved in preparing for the flu pandemic.

...he is stockpiling prescription antibiotics at home.

He has spent $15,000 on preparing for a pandemic. His wife disapproves. "I told him nothing is going to happen," she says.

How smug is Bradford right now.

The narrator points out that during a pandemic, just standing within six feet of another person might be deadly. "All right everybody gotta get these masks on!" says Bradford, who is doing a drill with his family.

Point of clarification: he's stockpiling antibiotics because he believes hospitals will be overwhelmed with pandemic victims and hotbeds of infection, and thus wants to make sure his family doesn't have to go near one. He doesn't think abx treat viruses.

Everyone but the dog is now practicing wearing N95 masks.

"The way you get the virus is through human interaction," says Bradford.

"I'm going to pass out, Bradford!" says his wife.

"No honey it just feels like that."

His daughter thinks he's paranoid but harmless.

"Yes I am paranoid, but it's what I call practical paranoia."

His wife is from Cambodia and survived the Khmer Rouge. She lost her entire family and is willing to hunt rabbits and other small wildlife to eat. She is incredibly irritated with her husband for spending all this money hoarding food and supply.

Meanwhile Bradford has spent the money to replace all their windows with half inch ballistic glass.

He is now taking his wife and daughter to see the bug out location he has bought. His wife looks like she's wondering what she can get in the divorce.

He's bought a decommissioned gem mine. His wife is explaining that being in a cave is giving her trauma flashbacks to escaping from the Khmer Rouge.

She's obviously miserable and traumatized. He said maybe she told him about hiding in a cave, he doesn't remember.

The experts point out that caves are cold and damp and maybe he could find a better bug out location.

Overall, despite studying infectious disease at Yale, this dude was WAY less prepared for a pandemic than Donna in Utah.

And now I need to feed the dogs and bring in firewood, so it's time for intermission! We'll reconvene here in a bit.

Right! Everyone back? That took a little extra time because elderly dog Xita told me she had to pee and what the old dog wants, the old dog gets. But it turns out she actually wanted to wander around in the cold and dark sniffing things.

But I'm back, lights are out, I'm all settled in and it's time for our next episode! We get three preppers again. Let's meet the first one!

John moved to Idaho from Utah to get more freedom and space...

He just had his kid ready a cricket they found under a log.

Anyway John is afraid of a series of dirty bomb attacks around the US.

"I feel there are several entities around the world that would attack sovereign US soil," he says.

He thinks it will be a large number of coordinated attacks that will result in the entire food supply being irradiated and poisoned, so he's storing thousands of dead bugs in his freezer where the radiation can't get them.

"Crickets boast an average of 13g of protein each, making them a superfood," says the narrator.

"I do cook my insects because I have some standards," says John.

John will sell you a seed bank with an acre's worth of seeds, or enough to feed a family for 4 years. He tells us seeds can be stored for hundreds or even thousands of years. Except I think that doesn't involve being in paper seed packets.

He has seed banks buried in caches around his property in case roving marauders seize his home.

Also he has 30 guns and 1500 rounds of ammunition.

He says he's totally ready to murder "rioting marauders".

Look dude are they rioting or Marauding.

They are now going to do some kind of drill for the show. I can't wait.

They're now sealing off their dirty bomb shelter room. A chiron reminds us they should have a carbon monoxide detector. This is especially important since their home is heated by a wood stove.

He plans to sprout seeds, which among other things will help prevent scurvy.

...that's me editorializing. They didn't mention scurvy.

He has a filtration suit so he can go outside and dig up the cached seed banks so they can get into the retired ambulance that is their bug out vehicle. They will then drive either north or south.

I kind of tuned out the experts except they want him to have a HAM radio

His update is that he bought particulate masks and an AK-47. Oh.

Our next weirdo is Janet, from Helena, Montana. She's afraid of nuclear war.

"Preparing for disaster is the only safe and sane thing to do," says Janet. She thinks it's "tragic" that we no longer teach duck and cover in schools.

"90% of the people in Great Falls will die, but that still leaves 6000 people to come here to Helena. So I concentrate on helping as many people as possible for as long as possible."

She has to hide her preparations from her husband, who does not think she's being sane. She literally has a metric ton of food under their bed.

Now she's disassembling a door to hide soup packets inside it.

She's got a written journal of where everything is, thank God, or this would be a nightmare after she dies.

Her medical supplies are all packed up into a dropped ceiling. She says it is her most secret housing place that only she knows about.

"I've seen over the years how much she's been collecting, putting things in strange places. I'm not thrilled, but it's part of us" her husband says.

0459 02 Feb 1989 is when Janet decided she needed to start prepping. A train exploded in the middle of Helena. Skew was obviously deeply, deeply traumatized by it and nearly breaks down talking about it.

So yknow we're back to someone who needs a shrink prepping instead.

Anyway now she's getting a HAM radio and a Faraday cage to put it in.

She's afraid she's the only prepper in Helena, bless her. Probably she's the only gently weird woman not out to murder people prepper?

She also has a ton of AM/FM radios and walkie talkies. She's sealing them all in metal boxes and storing them in her crawl space so she can give them to emergency services.

The experts want her to have a radiation meter and a second storage location to stash food in. She agrees.

Our last one is Jack, a 65 year old former Marine and photojournalist in Denver whose hobbies include stand up comedy and preparing for a massive solar flare that will set society back hundreds of years.

He started prepping after he saw the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. So he started researching survival scenarios, and learned about solar flares.

The narrator tells us there's a 12% chance of a Carrington Event in the next decade. Wut.

Jack has a get home bag in his car that includes a gun. He's also getting in better shape so he can get home on foot with his get home bag.

He uses his walks around the neighborhood to tell his neighbors how important it is to get into prepping because of they get into prepping they won't try to kill him for his supplies when the solar flare hits and then he won't have to kill them right back.

They hide food around their house.

His wife is Black and wants us to know that she is not a prepper and is humoring him because this is his way of coping with being laid off in the 08 downturn.

He tapes knives next to every door, under every counter, and by the sides of the bed. He is now pretending to be an intruder but the way they're both acting it definitely seems more like a sex thing.

He's building a safe room with a friend. He is telling the friend helping him all about solar flares. His friend just wants this to be over.

He shows the safe room to his wife. She agrees it's really great. He's so pleased.

He says the minute they close the door on that safe room they're admitting the world is gone and they must now murder people. What.

The experts want him to have a defensive perimeter. He agrees he needs traps and spikes. In the yard. In their Denver neighborhood.

And that's a wrap on our latest whirlwind journey through the weirdos.

I feel like this first season has more disaster diversity than season 2 did.