Doomsday Preppers: Amanda & Scott Bobbin

The last segment of ‘Prepper’s Paradise’ looks at Amanda & Scott Bobbin, living in Waynesville, North Carolina, and I have very little to say about them.
Originally from Florida, they pulled up stakes and moved to the mountains because Greta the ghost told them to get out…because a comet is coming! That’s right, Amanda Bobbin is The SpOoOoOoky Prepper.
So, they move to NC and find a sweet deal on a house called ‘Paragon Jewel’, which I’m already suspicious about, because houses with names—especially New Age-y ones—are weird. Honestly, I get a real The Shining vibe from the whole thing, and I’m sure that’s what they were going for.For what it’s worth, this Paragon Jewel is not the same as the completely-different-looking property up for auction 150 miles away in Bluefield, West Virginia. Seriously, they look nothing alike.

The house is supposedly 8,500 square feet, with 51 rooms, which is a lot for just two people. It seems Greta the Ghost also stipulated that they should extend an invitation to fellow would-be survivors, and make the house a bastion of security in the post-comet-impact world. Or something. And how do they get these messages from Greta the Ghost? Amanda ‘channels’ them. Ohboy. Did I mention that the house’s previous owner was also named Greta? Whoooooaaaaa! It turns out that she was in it for the long haul, because they keep finding survival goods stashed all over the place (they open up a shed and find what looks like several tons of grains and other foods, all sealed up in buckets).

They invite some neighbors over, who are nice enough to bring Scott the coolest housewarming gift ever—a twelve gauge pump shotgun! Apparently he’s never shot one before?, so there’s some nervous-making stuff while he’s getting familiar with the action. Like Brent’s son from a few weeks ago, if you’ve never touched a gun before (videogames don’t count), please ask someone to help you out first.

Oh, and while they’re filming, the couple’s two sons come over for a visit from Ireland. So yeah, if you’re into crystals and ghosts and British accents (and there’s a definite type of person who goes for those things), you’d probably really enjoy this segment.
Eventually the parents explain how they’ve ‘become preppers’, which just makes for a bunch of reality-show drama. Johnny, the younger one, seems to think preparation isn’t bad—“what if there’s a storm or something?”—while Chris wants nothing to do with it. You can explain all you want, how it’s the smart thing to do, but good luck trying to reason with a sixteen year old.

The experts tell them to get security cameras, alarms, and defensive training. They get 65 points, for ten months’ initial survival.

Doomday Preppers: Derek Price

The second group featured in the ‘superbunker’ episode is Derek Price of Bear Grass, North Carolina.
Derek and his family run Deadwood, a Wild West-themed park that they use as a profitable cover for their prepping activities.

Price is worried about a solar flare and/or EMP that will “end civilization and send us back to the wild west!” A bit later on he says something about how he fears a disaster that would be responsible for “sending our way of life at least back to the wild west.”
There are a couple of things that need to be dealt with in those statements. First off, our conception of the so-called ‘Wild’ West is largely a result of Hollywood Westerns and dime-store novels.
Second, as long as people keep thinking like this, the only result of something like a massive solar flare or EMP would be a regression in our level of technology; Derek’s statements reveal Our Culture’s assumption that civilized people in our past somehow lived differently than we do today. The fact of the matter is—technological inflation aside—our ‘way of life’ is the same as that of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, English, and just about every other Empire of the last 6,000 years or so. The Old West, even in its non-Hollywood reality, was still Civilized.

However, yet again, the real fear isn’t having to live without juice, but the “lawless days that might ensue if society breaks down due to loss of electricity.” I wonder if learning to live with less electricity would be a good start? Y’know, wean ourselves off?, so that when the effects of peak oil (which already happened, by the way) dramatically rear their heads, we’ll be used to it? I’m a big fan of the Transition Town movement.
So, while his driving concern is the same as everyone else’s, in a departure from others on the show, Derek is at least able to admit and possibly embrace his paranoia and obsession. It’s a nice change of pace from the suburban folks who look at the camera and say, “I’m not crazy!” as they stack cases of astronaut food; Derek just shrugs and says, “Eh, maybe I am.”

Derek gets together with his brother Daniel (ex-military type) to review possible sniper positions around Deadwood. To patrol their property, they use their miniature train powered by biodiesel. That’s pretty shiny. Then they cut some bamboo punji sticks. Some folks will say, “Bamboo in North Carolina?” It’s not native (though related to native river-cane, which once choked the banks of all the big rivers in the Ohio valley) but I say it’s a sustainable, sturdy material; go for it.
They stick the punjis in the ground, test ‘em out with some kind of dummy, and determine that the intruder would be lethally wounded. Daniel seems pleased, and remarks, “…that person’s dead, and that’s what we want!” WOW. I don’t think we’ve yet heard such blatant death-mongering on this show. Along the same lines, earlier one of the Prices remarks that “If an EMP were to hit, this is where I’d want to make my final stand.” Right, because like everyone else in this terminal death-culture, you’re at war with the world.

And then they wheel out the CANNON. Yes, you read that right. Cannon. I guess they have several around the park for demonstrations and ‘atmosphere’, and they want to see about using them for defense. So, to test the shot spread (to find out if it’s an effective defensive weapon?) they load it with plastic BBs and Pydrodex-type ‘gunpowder’, and then take about five tries to get it to fire. No wonder! Swap the modern powder for some good old-fashioned Black Powder, none of that needs-open-flame-to-ignite junk.
The whole cannon Charlie Foxtrot leads Derek to conclude that “vintage weapons are unreliable.” Hmm, do I detect the voice of Our Mother Culture and her myth of Progress (newer is always better)? If you think vintage weapons are unreliable, I suggest you visit your nearest frontier rendezvous shooting-match, and watch some of the old-timers use their handmade flintlocks to reach out and touch small targets at ridiculous distances.
Also, I understood the cannon was supposed to be part of their wild west show? If so, why do they act like they’ve never used it before?

As part of their anti-intruder techniques, Derek is teaching his son to “patrol in the dead of night”, which is funny…because it looks like the middle of the day the way they seem to have every light in the place switched on. What I don’t get is this: if they’re supposedly preparing for a scenario where the grid doesn’t exist, you’d think they would practice in a situation that approximated what they expect to deal with. Y’know, like with the lights off?

So, they want to do an invaded-by-marauders drill. They divide up into two teams and make their battle plans. Our narrator informs us that they’re wielding “real weapons…but the safeties are on.” Doesn’t matter; firearms should always be assumed to be loaded, and if they are (I swear I heard someone chamber a round), relying on a manmade mechanical device still doesn’t mean they’re safe.
Then there’s the bit when Derek’s eleven-year-old says he’s going to “get his assault rifle”. Ohboy. That’s exactly the sort of thing—especially in this post-Newtown environment—that will give the anti-gun lobby some very potent ammunition (pun…intended?)

In their analysis of his preparations, the experts tell him to beef up his water storage; Derek counters that he can filter (what’s already naturally-occurring on his property?). In the end, he gets 68 points, which now somehow works out to twelve months (funny, the last guy got eleven months for the same amount)?

In the post-filming update, Derek and his dad demonstrate the hand-pumped well they’ve put in. Nice to see a slightly more Appropriate level of technology to get their necessary liquids (compare to Bryan Smith who insisted on hooking his aquifer up to electric pumps and fossil fuel-dependent generators).

Doomsday Preppers: Brent

The series’ next episode (‘No such thing as a fair fight’) is the so-called ‘superbunker’ episode we’ve been hearing about, and I have to say it was certainly underwhelming. Like the last episode, this one also focuses on just two groups, which means I get a little bit more material to chew on!

We start with Brent Bruns, Sr. from Florida.
He’s working on an ambitious construction project somewhere in the Carolinas, where he has fifty acres of woodland—supposedly surrounded by another 1,000 acres (not sure if he owns those too)—on which he is building a 6,000-square-foot ‘castle’. Worried about an uncertain future in a world where everybody’s out to get America with EMPs, he wants a stronghold for his family that could last 100 or maybe even 1,000 years.
And why build a ‘castle’ instead of just burying a tube-bunker like everyone else on this show? I dunno, but he says that “castles are all rock—they can’t burn!” Plus, he thinks it will be able to survive earthquakes and “most other catastrophes”. Which is funny, because it’s not like he’s Michael Guyot, building an actual medieval-style French CASTLE in Arkansas, using centuries-old materials and techniques and letting visitors come and learn. From what we see, it just looks like cinderblocks and concrete, and the design seems pretty spindly compared to an actual Castle—where are the six-foot-thick walls and the narrow arrow loops/windows? Honestly, I see it coming down at the first sign of earthquake or hurricane (all those big square walls would catch the wind like sails).
And since we’re talking fireproof building materials, what’s wrong with Cob? Unlike an entire building made of Portland cement, a cob building actually could last a thousand years, as well as have a small carbon footprint.

Like I said earlier, he’s worried that Amerika’s enemies will use an air-burst Electro-Magnetic Pulse to destroy our vulnerable electrical grid. Like everybody else on the show, he’s not worried so much about the doomsday MacGuffin itself, as much as what happens afterwards: he recites the survivalist mantra about after three days the supermarkets are bare, yada yada yada, anarchy reigns supreme, and we all “go back to medieval days”. Right. Except for the crucial difference: back then, most people actually knew how to grow their own food, and/or how to forage.
Y’know, when the overwhelming majority of folks are worried about the same issue (a populace helplessly dependent on the civilized teat), you’d think we’d see folks start actively trying to solve the issue, instead of just buttoning up to deal with the consequences.
And the worst part about life without electricity? “There’d be no way to communicate with people!” Hey, medieval people got along just fine without the juice, and assuming the flashing lights of our gadgets haven’t completely robbed us of our humanity, there’s always letters, and this little thing called face-to-face conversation?

So, by the way, Brent has ten children from two marriages, aged eight to fourty-one. The personalities on display range from superficial (Ashley’s plan is to “grab my makeup, my tiny dog, and head out!”—dad says she’s “more of a primper than a prepper!”, ha!) to pretty reasonable (Dawn-Marie says she “doesn’t know if the end of the world is going to happen, but it’s better to be prepared than not.”). Brent has gathered all the clan together because he wants to set up a trust for them after he dies, and he doesn’t know who should be in charge of it; this means everybody’s spending the weekend at the unfinished ‘castle’ where he will observe them and decide who to pick. This makes for a damned-impressive cocktail of regrettable television: all the talking-to-the-camera, who-will-he-pick? drama of Bachelor Pad, with the challenges of Survivor, with a healthy dose of Fear Factor’s eating nasty things (once they break out the expired MREs). Also, lots of girls in tanktops and shorty-shorts (Buckwild?)

For their first test, Brent has the kids get together and try to assemble a framework for their solar panels. Wait, what? Solar panels? I thought this whole thing was about going medieval so you don’t rely on the vulnerable electric grid? Guess I’m expecting too much. Still, if you’re going to continue living with electricity, thumbs-up for the solar array and wind turbine.

They move on to testing the kids’ familiarity with firearms. Brent tells us that they’ve picked “police-type” and “army-type” weapons. Y’know, “something standard, that there are a lot of.” This boils down to an AK, an AR, and two Mosin-Nagants (yay, East Bloc love!). That’s fine, but if your criteria is ‘standard and widely-available’, why not get a variety of .22s? It’s by far the most common small-arms caliber; it’s cheap, plentiful, doesn’t kick, can be silent, and is perfectly deadly in the right hands.
First up is Brent’s oldest, Brent Jr., age 41. Did we mention this is his first time shooting a gun? So, we don’t see dad give him any instruction, just lets Jr. pick a rifle off the table. He grabs the AK, chambers a round, and proceeds to rapidly fire off about ten rounds. Without hearing protection. Then he tells dad to speak up, because his “ears are ringing!” What a surprise!

It starts raining so they try some kind of coordinated firing exercise in front of one of the big window spaces. I guess they were supposed to step up in pairs and shoot at unseen targets below? Well, it seems this is the first time shooting for just about everybody, because there’s lots of bad form and I kept waiting for somebody to get shot in the foot (thankfully, nothing happens). Again, I would’ve started everybody out with .22s and a basic gun-handling lesson; you can hand a slender girl a double-barreled shotgun for the first time, just don’t be surprised when it knocks her off her feet.
Remember, folks,:

The rain keeps on coming, so they decide to practice bugging-in down in the basement bunker, only to find when the power goes out, the whole place is improperly insulated, and now there’s raw electricity arcing all over the place. Fun! Dad realizes that “we still need a lot of training.” Yup.

The experts tell Brent to get some new food because eating twelve-year-old MREs aren’t the best idea (unless, of course, you’re going for the real medieval experience, and want your castle to be ankle-deep in shit). I would agree, although earlier Brent bragged that he’s bought 40,000 heirloom seeds. That’s great, but how many has he planted? That said, take a minute to understand the differences between Sell By, Best By, and Use By dates on food (hint: except for baby formula, they don’t really mean anything).
The experts also give him extra ‘x-factor’ points for the “unique defensive structure” of his ‘castle’. Huh. Did I miss the star fort he was secretly building?, because it just looked like a concrete box to me.
He gets 68 points for eleven months’ initial survival.
And in the update, Brent informs us that he has built up the pillars to the final height and is now ready to pour a concrete roof? Wow. So, just waiting for an earthquake, then?

ADDENDUM:
Looks like NatGeo has picked up Brent and his ten offspring for a late-summer spinoff series, “Doomsday Castle“. *eyeroll*…ohboy.

Doomsday Preppers: Josh Wander

Our next prepper is Josh Wander, from Pittsburg, PA. Josh fills an interesting demographic, because while it seems a majority of those featured on the show are Judeo-Christians, Josh seems to be the first one to represent the Judeo- half of that particular salvationist tradition.
Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot to say about this segment.
This father of six (all biblical names, surprise) originally hails from Jerusalem, but they moved to the States ten years ago, and now Josh is running for city council. His big push is to make preparedness a part of his campaign. When his big fear is coordinated terrorist attacks, it’s easy to get civic-minded citizens onboard. I wonder if he got elected?
He gets together with some other Jews and organizes a terror-attack-drill with lots of fake blood in the park, I guess to get the responders used to dealing with gory injuries.

Josh finds himself in a tough position with regards to his food storage. Although it seems he’s been ‘prepping’ for three years, he only has a few months’ worth of food stockpiled, because apparently kosher shelf-stable prepper food is hard to find. Hmm, I think that’s what you call a niche market. Someone with more business-savvy than me could really make a boatload of money with that!

So, even though they’re un-kosher, the family keeps rabbits. Smartly, Josh makes sure the kids don’t name the animals, so they’re not pets. Although if you are going to name your livestock, I’m a fan of Doug Huffman’s approach—calling each animal by the dish it’s going into (“Stir-fry”, “Stew”, &c.).

Josh takes some of his kids to the range to teach them gun safety and how to shoot, which gives us an image one doesn’t often see: a Jew with an AK! Hey, it’s probably a good idea to get familiar with your enemy’s weapons. We can’t all train with IDF machineguns.

With a focus on terrorism, Josh is big on bugging out, and their practice drill looks like it should—they all pile into a van and head out, with none of that ‘let’s spend an hour packing stuff into a trailer at the last minute’ that so many of this show’s ‘bug outs’ depict. Additionally, I really love his take on that everyone’s favorite cinematic OT episode: “Exodus was a bug out.” Love it.

Experts give him 70 points—higher than I expected—for twelve months.

And in his update segment, now-bearded Josh announces that his family has decided—should it become necessary—they’re going to move back to Israel, “where Jews are protected and safe.” I wonder what brought that about? Was he a victim of an anti-Semitic hate-crime? I dunno, but I’d rather live where, while you might get the odd slur thrown at you, at least you’re not living in a regional powderkeg, surrounded by hostile nations praying for your destruction on three sides. Just sayin’.

Doomsday Preppers: Tom Perez & Steve Vanasse

Be warned: this is a ridiculously long write-up. But it’s not my fault!—this episode (‘The Time of Reckoning’!) takes a detour from the show’s usual format to focus on just a single group of would-be survivors. I understand the film crew spent almost two weeks with these folks, which is staggering, when you consider that someone like Chris Nyegres from Season 1 was with the film crew for just three days.
So, this group is headed up by Dr. Tom Perez; he’s a retired chiropractor from Houston, TX with a wife and three kids between the ages of seventeen and six or so. Living in a sub/urban area, Tom is concerned about a terrorist ‘dirty bomb’, but as with most of the folks profiled, what he’s really afraid of is the potential chaos of terrified people taking to the streets (as the caption reminds us, a dirty bomb wouldn’t likely be a WMD but rather a weapon of mass panic).

As part of their preparations, the family does an all-out bugout drill twice a month, from their 6,800 square-foot home to their rural retreat 300 miles west. Channeling last week’s Johnny O and his focus on redundancy , Tom has three backup routes in place to ensure he reaches their 700-acre compound.
For what it’s worth, if you’re all about ‘operational security’ and keeping your location under wraps, perhaps showing a satellite image of your property with a clearly-labeled map later on is not the best idea. Anyone with GoogleEarth and too much time on their hands could probably zero in on it pretty easily.

So, about this compound. Dr. Tom calls it ‘the Alamo’, and according to our narrator, he has poured  TWO MILLION dollars into its two cinderblock houses, which are supposedly bulletproof.
Their pantry is full of buckets of food from the company whose ads get shown during commercial breaks. Meta product placement! Tom claims that of their food stockpile, ten percent has been purposefully contaminated, and he’s apparently the only one who knows which. I have to wonder at this—first off, what’s the point of poisoning food? Is this some kind of ‘nutrient denial system’ to intruders should they take the compound—a kind of “If I can’t have it, no one can!” sentiment? Seems selfish. Second, why doesn’t he let his family in on the secret too? What if something happens to him, and his family unknowingly eats a can of poisoned peas? Now they’re all dead.

Food aside, he has a nice water-getting setup, which uses a windmill to pump sweet, sweet H2O directly from his local aquifer. This water he stores in a couple of massive concrete tanks. Tom seems to think that in a disaster scenario, the roving bands of marauders who get through his seven-foot-high perimeter fence will make it their priority not to attack his home, but his concrete water tanks. Well, you can’t be sure until you test it, so he mixes up some homemade ‘molotov cocktails’ to lob at the tanks. Unlike last season’s Pat Brabble, Tom keeps it legal by getting supervision from some local law enforcement, but he also bases his half-assed firebombs on high-proof liquor. Granted, he does go one step beyond Mr Brabble and adds some laundry detergent, but it’s still pretty dumb: a gallon of only 80-proof Kentucky vodka will run you twenty dollars or so, while you could get five gallons of unleaded petrol for the same price, and the petrol would make his little Molotovs actually perform like he wants. For what it’s worth, I recommend diesel fuel with a quantity of Styrofoam melted in, or petrol and laundry soap (not detergent).

While he’s got the (Border Patrol?) officers around, Tom decides to spring an ambush scenario on his family, with the off-duty LEOs playing the role of marauding ‘bad guys’. Basically, he comes inside, gives the code word for ‘someone’s coming!’, and everybody take ups what I’m sure are supposed to be ‘defensive positions’.
Pop quiz time! If you knew there was trouble on the way and were  in a bulletproof house, where would you go for maximum defensive advantage? If you said Outside at ground-level out in the open, well, congratulations, you think like the Perez family. Because that’s honestly what they do. We’ve been told the house is bulletproof; people are not! Stay in the house, go upstairs(at least one of the Alamo houses has two stories), and sight in your targets from a window. Faulty tactics aside, while this ‘ambush’ is going on and everybody’s making themselves into easy targets, one of the cops sneaks up behind Tom’s teenage daughter and disarms her. Well, the youngest son is watching, with his gun trained on the officer who has a gun to his sister’s head. I can’t believe I actually wrote that. And supposedly “the kids don’t know” that it’s a drill. Which begs the question—what’s to stop the kid from shooting the officer? Either dad made sure to lock up all the ammo before this went down, or the kids really do know it’s a drill. Because if not, that could’ve ended really badly.

Now, when you have 700 acres and a six-mile perimeter to defend, it’s a lot for just five people. That’s why Tom has joined forces with another Houston family to share  the work of running a prepper fortress. Help comes in the form of Steve Vanasse and his wife and daughter. Because he does radiation contamination testing for a living (as a “Nuclear Assessment Officer”), he also shares Tom’s apprehension towards the possibility of a dirty bomb attack in Houston.
To help make his family a valuable addition to the Brackettville compound, Steve takes his daughter to the gun range to teach her to shoot. Excellent! As an NRA Range Safety Officer, I’m all about teaching younglings the essentials of safe gun handling. Steve is surprised that his timid daughter is apparently a naturally good shot, but I’m not: in my own experiences and those of folks I’ve talked to, women are generally better shooters than men.

Back on the ranch, the Perez family is playing poker, with bullets as currency. Haha! Nice to see they keep themselves occupied while they’re practicing survival living, instead of just like, staring at the wall until it’s time to go home, though it’d be better if they were engaged in some sustainable, long-term activities like gardening. Anyway, dad decides it’s time to learn the boys how to butcher livestock. Wonder why his daughter misses out on all the fun?—hopefully because she already knows how. Tom thinks the sound of a shot will be too noticeable (or something) in his postapocalyptic wasteland, so he’s making the boys dispatch a goat with a knife. For what it’s worth (quite a lot actually), I’d personally risk the bullet and do it proper-like, and shoot Brother Goat from the back of the head (with such thick butting foreheads it’s not much use stunning sheep and goats from the front like you do with cattle). Regardless, that’s not as TV-dramatic as having your boy slit the trussed-up goat’s throat while it’s still alive, so that’s what he does. Afterwards, Tom dabs some of the fresh blood on his boys’ faces, as a kind of rite-of-passage. Which is good, because that’s something sorely lacking in this culture.

The Vanasse family decides they’re going to come out to the compound too, so they break out the Tyvek suits and Geiger counter, and bug out. And because they’re so concerned with simulating a dirty bomb attack, they seal up the car’s vents with Duct Tape…which means they can’t run the air conditioner!—which was probably the scariest thing yet for most of the folks watching. When they reach the gates of the ‘Alamo’, Tom uses it as an opportunity to test his family’s friend-or-foe training, or something. Even though I assume they’ve seen each other before, the Perezs train their guns on the Vanasses and treat them like they’re a pack of wild raiders. It’s dramatic and stuff.

At some point, the wide-eyed Steve quips something about how in a disaster, their families could “form the basis of a whole new society—maybe a better society!?” So that’s why these two families joined up?—so that someday they’d have two breeding pairs of youngsters to repopulate the earth? (Which means somebody’s winding up with his sister. Ewww.)

Tom and Steve go out in the bush and test out some more ‘defensive’ devilry. This time, Exploding Targets!!!1! (I’m guessing this is some of that Tannerite/Sure Shot mix I see in Sportsman’s Guide.)
The guys take it up a notch and strap their exploding target on a coupla bottles of petrol for a nice big fireball, which they observe from their hunting-shack-on-stilts. Well, Tom shot the first one, so it’s Steve’s turn next. Steve is armed with some kinda high-dollar black plastic short-barreled rifle with a 100-round magazine(!), skeleton buttstock, big honkin’ scope, and (as our narrator reminds us) a muzzle brake.
Apparently when he takes the shot, the muzzle was well inside their phonebooth-sized shack, and so the report is amplified so much that (even with fancy hearing protections) it knocks Tom onto the ground. Well, he’s stunned and dizzy and vomiting and generally concussed; of course he’s not bleeding out of his ears or anything, so it can’t have been that bad. Then there’s some friend drama when Tom threatens to cut Steve out of the group for being so safety lax, but eventually he comes around, and they barbecue the goat and Steve sucks out the eyes. Yum!

Whew. So, the experts assess them and say that their “food resupply plan is impressive”. Which is weird, because I didn’t see any gardening going on, nor did I see a huge pen full of goats. So what’s that all about?
The experts suggest that they should  “build a bunker under the Alamo, in case they come under attack”. Y’know, because it’s not enough to have two million dollars’ worth of bulletproof houses. Early on in the segment, Tom talks about how he likely spends five to six hours a day just “determining what [he] [has] prepped…to have the most current MREs, rifles, ammo &c.” That combined with the experts’ bunker recommendation just proves what I’ve always thought—that the Type I survival model (of which these guys are perfect examples) has little to do with actual survival and is just the latest iteration of Keeping Up With the Joneses. Look folks, if you have discretionary income, there’s always gonna be someone out there with something bigger, newer, or shinier than yours, so maybe take a big step back and ask yourself if more purchases will really help fill that empty place inside.
The experts give them 77 points (a new high!), which is supposed to equal fifteen months survival time.
And in the post-filming update, we learn that Steve’s daughter is taking defensive driving training (now, I know Tejas is pretty wild, but isn’t she like, eleven?), while he and his wife are learning fencing (not sure what good that’ll do in defending the Alamo), and HAM radio. Tom’s update reveals that he’s started homeschooling his kids (he calls it “Doomsday Academy”), and to my dismay, they’ve taken the expert’s advice and started building a bunker. Oh boy.