How to Survive 2025 Episode 1- The Pilot

Regardless of their associations. Americans agree that something bad is on the horizon. In an era of increasing wildfires, hurricanes, drought, political violence, power outages, economic uncertainty, and more, what can average everyday citizens do to assure the safety of themselves and their loved ones? Renowned national preparedness expert Jim Cobb, ‘Dystopian Mom’ Dacia M. Arnold, and international bestselling author Brian Keene offer simple, no-nonsense tips and recommendations free from politics or fear-mongering on how to survive what might happen tomorrow.

Listen to Episode 1

The Pilot

The Pilot

Transcript

Brian Keene: And welcome to the introductory episode of How to Survive 2025. My name is Brian Keane. I’m just one of your hosts. I’m going to allow my other hosts to introduce themselves. Starting with you, young lady.

Dacia M Arnold: Hi, I am Dacia M Arnold.

Jim Cobb: and I am Jim Cobb.

Brian Keene: And, yeah, it’s exciting to have you guys here. I come from a a podcasting background. For nearly six years. Of course. I was the host of the popular The Horror Show with Brian Keene podcast. Also The Defenders dialog podcast with Christopher Golden. Never thought I would be podcasting again. But this opportunity presented itself, and, it’s exciting to be doing it with the two of you.

Jim Cobb: I appreciate, being involved with this. I was really excited when you hit me up about it. I think it’s a wonderful idea. And, I think we’re gonna have a lot of fun with this.

Dacia M Arnold: Yeah, and I’m not sure that, I belong so, But you will see, I’m very excited to be here, too. My background in emergency management and and combat at field medicine is going to be very fun and interesting, to say the least.

Brian Keene: I think I think we’re going to learn very quickly and listeners are going to learn as well. You’re going to be the heart of the show station. So I guess, speaking of what we should do, for our listeners, let’s take a couple moments to introduce ourselves what our background is. And then we’ll talk about why we wanted to do this show. I’ll go ahead and start us off. My name, as I said, is Brian Keane. For those of you who have never read a book in your life, that’s okay. I’m not going to be talking about my books here, but I am, a writer. I’ve written over 50 books, well, over 300 short stories, probably four dozen comic books, couple movies, assorted other things. My background, as far as this goes is, I’m a country boy. I drive my my suburban raised wife crazy with Hank Williams Jr as a country boy can survive song. And I can understand why she doesn’t care for that song, but that song has always been my anthem. Because there’s a lot of truth in that song. You know, I was I was raised by Appalachians who, you know, were hunter gatherers, basically. They grew their own food. They hunted their own food. Did their own medicine, etc.. And I think that’s something that’s being lost in this age. So I’m, I’m all about proselytizing that they should. Dacia, how about you?

Dacia M Arnold: So my background is I was, Army veteran for ten years. I deployed twice, I worked in Baghdad emergency room, and then my second deployment, I managed an outpatient clinic in southern Iraq. I from there works in the hospital systems throughout Denver until Covid, when I was called in to work at, managing the field hospitals that we built in response to Covid. So I spent a long time doing that in emergency management. I am I am known as dystopian mom in the literary world. I write, I write science fiction and horror. Basically, mom saves the world instead of the teenage girl. It’s far more realistic. I wasn’t saving shit when I was 19 years old. But today I we own a little piece of heaven and in the woods of western Pennsylvania, and I’m living my best life. I’m a good piece of property and and trying to figure out what what the world has in store for the future.

Brian Keene: Okay. And, Jim, I, I almost feel like it’s it’s silly to have you introduce yourself. But but then it occurs to me that, you know, the listeners we’re trying to reach probably aren’t that familiar with prepping. But trust us, folks, when we tell you Jim is like the Stephen King of the prepping field. So let’s go ahead.

Jim Cobb: I don’t know if I’d go that far. Maybe I’m the Brian Keene of the prepping world

Brian Keene: You don’t want that, Jim.

Jim Cobb: Let’s see. I I’ve been involved with preparedness to one degree or another for nearly 40 years. I started when I was a very young child. Grew up in the upper Midwest where we would have, you know, routinely, you know, weather alerts, bad storms, things like that. And when that little scrawl would come across the bottom of the TV screen and tell you to take shelter, I was the one in our family even at, you know, 8 or 9 years old. I’m the one grabbing all the supplies and taking them down into the basement just in case. Now, being a young child, those supplies consisted of, you know, stuffed animals, pillows and, you know, random canned goods. But nevertheless, the thought process was there. As I got older, I, I became very interested in, post-apocalyptic survival. You know, the back in the 80s. And, Brian, I know you’re you’re fan of it, just as I was the post-apocalyptic men’s adventure series. Like the Survivalist and Traveler and Outrider and all that stuff. That stuff just fascinated me. And yes, I went beyond just, oh, this is cool to read about. I wanted to know how you could legitimately survive this type of stuff. So I started seeking out as much education as I could find back then. Books like Life After Doomsday by Doctor Bruce Clayton. That became, you know, my quote unquote Bible for survival for a long time. You know, I read that thing so many times, it almost fell apart. And I just continued that, that self-taught education as best I could. Today I’ve written nearly a dozen books. I am the editor in chief for Backwoods Survival Guide magazine. I was the editor in chief for Prepper Survival Guide magazine that was just recently taken off the shelves by the publisher. I’ve published several hundred magazine articles over the last ten years or so. I’ve filmed a series of instructional videos with Pantheon Productions. And all along. My goal is always been to share what I feel is a common sense and practical approach to this stuff. You know, I I’ve never been a fan of fear mongering. I’ve never been a fan of wild predictions or any of that just, you know, let’s prepare for life’s little and not so little curveballs.

Brian Keene: Well, you provide a great Segway there. Again, this is an introductory episode. Think of it as a pilot. We’re trying to encourage listeners to check this show out and help them understand what they’re going to hear every week. You know, there aren’t going to be politics on the show. There isn’t going to be fear mongering on this show. But it occurs to me as we record this, we’re recording this on August 6th, listeners will probably hear it about a week or two from now, but as we’re recording this, Hurricane Debbie is just pummeling Florida right now. Yep. The United Kingdom is in its fourth night of violent riots. Political violence is, of course, on the rise daily here in the United States. There are wildfires burning on several different continents right now. Drought is an issue on several different continents right now, and extreme heat is an issue all across the globe. So, you know, when we talk about prepping and hearing a little bit, I, I’d like you to talk about the history of prepping. But before we get to that, when we talk about prepping, I want to make sure our audience understands where there are certain negative connotations for some of our society when they hear the word prepping, they think of, you know, beer bellied, camouflage wearing good old boys out in the woods on the weekend, you know, playing militia against United Nations shock troops, which they think are going to invade tomorrow. And maybe that’ll happen, I don’t know, but we are not that show. And that’s not the kind of prepping we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is, is common sense things on on how single moms and retirees and economically deprived folks in the city and just regular, everyday Americans from all walks of life, all socio political creeds can protect themselves against extreme weather or political extremism or all. Some of you know, all those things I just mentioned. It’s very clear to me as a writer, as someone who spends his days studying the people around him, that no matter which side of the political spectrum you’re on in this country, everybody right now is scared whether they’ll admit it or not. They all feel that something bad is coming. And when I suggested doing the show, the reason I wanted to do it was for those people, you know, this this isn’t a show for somebody with Jim’s level of skill. Although I hope they’ll listen to it anyway, if only to tell us, you know, point out weekly the things we forgot or you’ll correct us. That’s cool if you want to do that. But this show is for people who want to keep their loved ones safe and aren’t sure where to start and what to do. And those are the topics that I’m hoping we can cover. What about you? What? What do you see as the show’s purpose? Who are you wanting to talk to and reach?

Dacia M Arnold: Me? I’m. It is me. But it is. I will ask a ton of questions of you gentlemen. And it’s. It’s not. They won’t always be questions that I don’t know the answer to. They’re they’re going to be questions that I anticipate somebody listening is, is going to want to know. My intention out of doing this podcast is to kind of, yeah, break the stigma of, preppers are a bunch of wackadoo that think that something bizarre is going to happen. And whether the bizarre thing happens or not, I mean, we’ve we’ve all already experienced the bizarre. We had Covid shut down. Who would have ever thought that that would have ever happened? But I also want to call attention to the humanity that exists in situations like that. I am a mom. My kids are small, like their elementary school. Middle school? They’re small kids. But we got through Covid. I cried through teaching second grade like, I’m not a second grade teacher, but you adapt. People adapted. We did what we had to do. And then every night at 8:00, we’d walk outside in the neighborhood and howl at the moon, and the whole neighborhood got in on it. And then the fire department got in on it. And it was just this moment, these, these nights of solidarity that, you know, we we are we’re we’re isolated, but we’re not alone. And I want people to then have the mindset going into whatever is next that, hey, you know, there’s still humanity, there’s still good people, and we’re going to make it.

Brian Keene: Jim, what about you?

Jim Cobb: Well, one of the reasons, probably the primary reason that I wanted to do this podcast, you know, when you you brought the idea to me is because I feel like you and Dacia both are going to bring a new audience to this type of thinking. You know, Brian, you’ve been very open and up front over the years about your feelings about preparedness, and you’ve talked about it on Patreon and things like that. But at the same time, I feel like that there’s a large segment of the your audience and Dacia probably, you know, to some degree yours as well, who aren’t nearly as experienced with this type of thing as we are. And this is a excellent opportunity to share with them some practical tips, some common sense suggestions. And like we’ve been saying, take the stigma away from it. Take the fear out of it and explain and show to these people that there are things that anybody and everybody can do to put themselves in a much better position for negative experiences that that might come to pass, whether it’s, you know, another pandemic or, you know, a terror attack or just, hey, you lost your job and now what? You know, that type of thing. You know, for a long, long time when it comes to prepping it, particularly teaching, prepping as an instructor and author, my mantra has been no politics, no scare tactics, no bullshit. And that’s what I’m really excited to share with everybody.

Dacia M Arnold: I’m really excited for that too. I jumped on this podcast or saw that that it was a thing, and I, I know because I’m terrified, like, to be honest, I am terrified. I live in Butler, Pennsylvania. I, I’ve been to war. I know what war does to a country. And I was terrified and I needed it. I needed someone to talk to about this. And so. And that’s not like my dad. I need somebody outside of myself that I can talk to about this. And and make sense of it all. So when I say I’m kind of like the target audience, that’s the angle that I’m coming from. Yes, I have the skill set. And yes, I have the knowledge base and the experience, but can I just experience that outside of my own brain?

Jim Cobb: Right. Absolutely. Yep.

Brian Keene: All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the history of prepping, because, you know, I think we’ve done a good job here of explaining to the listeners, you know, what we’re about and what we’re not going to be about. But, you know, my I, there’s no other way to say this, Jim. You’re the expert on the history, right? Yes. You know, my my own knowledge is, like I said, it’s just it’s familial and social. You know, I my my kin who came to this country from Ireland and we landed in West Virginia, Kentucky. And, it wasn’t until my parents moved to Pennsylvania that we even left that area. But, you know, my my great grandparents built their own home. That home still stands. You know, he made his money as a logger and a moonshiner. They built the community church. My great grandmother was the community doctor for years, and she didn’t have penicillin and antibiotics. She was using the stuff she found growing out in the woods. You know, I personally witnessed her, stop bleeding on somebody when I was a kid. You know, without suturing the wound or anything like that. You know, they were. They. And my grandparents and my parents, they were folks who knew how to fend for themselves. You know, and they they were raised that way. And I was raised that way. And as I said, I think it’s a it’s a skill that’s getting lost in and and I’m guilty of it as well when I can pick up, you know, this magic little rectangular thing that fits in my back pocket and order food. Why should I go out and run a trout line and catch dinner for that night? I can I can just have Uber bring it to me. So I, I, I like what you said, Dacia, about asking questions for yourself. I view this as things I want to pass along to my sons and and my daughter. And since all three of them are sick to death of me trying to pass along to them, but pass along to others anyway. But but, Jim, please give us a, CliffsNotes version of the history of preparation.

Jim Cobb: Well, and let me preface this by saying that one of the reasons why I like talking about the history of prepping is to illustrate that this is nothing new. This is nothing that you know, just came about in the last ten years. We as a society in the United States, we’ve been at this since the 40s to one degree or another. You know, back in the early 40s, FDR created what was called the Office of Civilian Defense. The purpose of that was to coordinate efforts to protect citizens against attack during wartime. And one of the duties that office had was to establish what they called the United States Civilian Defense Corps. Millions of people, millions of citizens, were trained in a variety of essential duties. First aid to, decontaminating after a chemical attack. Things like that. And over time, that kind of shifted toward the threat of a nuclear attack. Civilian defense became more about, like, bomb shelters and, the duck and cover drills that, you know, our parents might remember from school. We didn’t have duck and cover when I was in school. We just had the invulnerable school desks that were going to protect us from everything. By the 70s, formal civil defense kind of was falling apart. And in 1979, the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency was disbanded. That was the latest version of what had been the Office of Civilian Defense. They were disbanded or replaced by what we know today is FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. And the role of FEMA was geared toward providing direct support and aid when disasters occurred. Following the attacks of 911, FEMA was rolled into the Department of Homeland Security. Now, let’s back up just for a minute. And back in the late 60s, public trust in the government started to falter a little bit. People started to feel that they couldn’t or shouldn’t rely on federal or state agencies to protect them. And in fact, there were some people who felt that the government itself was the largest threat. That’s when we started hearing from people like Kurt Saxon, who was the author of Poor Man’s James Bond, among other things. He in the mid 70s, he created a newsletter called The Survivor. And in it he talked a lot about homesteading and pioneer skills, things like that. And along the way he coined the term survivalist who he he referred to that or he used that to refer to people who were taking steps toward being more self-reliant. Around the same time, Mel Tappan started his newsletter calling it the personal survival letter or letter. And that’s when we started hearing from people like Colonel Jeff Cooper and Doctor Bruce Clayton. In large part the focus of that, of the letter was establishing what they called a survival retreat, a place that you could escape to if things got really bad. Now, with the arms race ramping up between the U.S. and Soviet Union, interest in survival planning also started to increase through the 80s and even into the early 90s. And that’s right about when I kind of slipped into the niche that that’s when I started ramping up my own interest and them as we got closer to the year 2000. There was the Y2K bug. And for all of the, the nonsense that people went through about the Y2K bug, there was one really, really great result. People started talking about prepping in mainstream media, and that’s when prepper became the new survivalist. To a degree. Now, I early on, I differentiated. I thought there was a difference between survivalist and prepper. I always thought that prepper was survivalist. Like where you were interested in taking steps to be more self-reliant in the case of an emergency, but you weren’t really looking to take it as far as the stereotypical survivalist, where you’re not looking to, you know, have an off site survival retreat. As a prepper, you just want to make sure you’ve got food and water and things like that for your family in case of an emergency.

Brian Keene: I would agree.

Jim Cobb: For a long time, the one of the biggest differences was the role of firearms between the two groups. Survivalists tend to lean towards firearms as being more for defense, whereas preppers looked at it more for hunting and things like that. There’s considerable overlap in that Venn diagram, but that’s kind of, you know, that was for a long time those kind of the big biggest difference. You know, you flash forward to today and depending on whatever which source you consult, there’s anywhere from 5 to 10 million or more people in the United States who will readily admit to being a prepper to some degree. You’ve got countless million other people who are preppers, but they just don’t want to use that term. You know, when I teach classes, one of the first questions I’ll ask people is, okay, raise your hand if you have enough food in your home to last your family for at least one full week. And hands will go up. Keep your hand up. If you have enough money in the bank to pay your bills for a solid month. Some of the hands stay up and I’ll look at those people and say, congratulations, you’re preppers.

Dacia M Arnold: It’s that easy.

Jim Cobb: You know, that’s really all it is. We when you take the reactionary out of the equation, all we’re talking about is being able to be self-reliant for, you know, a minimal period of time. That’s all it is.

Dacia M Arnold: And I think it would even go back like, like in the 30s when, I mean, my my grandparents, parents were squirreling money away in the air vents and, and beds and, and books. And I mean that, you know, that prepping during, you know, the, the Great Depression and we’re rolling back to the 30s. You know, we’re right on the threshold. So Roaring 20s and then the Great Depression. But we’re not very. I’m just I’m just just oh yeah.

Jim Cobb: Yeah.

Brian Keene: We’re not fearmongering. I am just thinking. And when Jim was talking about, you know, we didn’t have duck and cover, but we had the impervious desk.

Dacia M Arnold: We sure did.

Brian Keene: I had a I had a clear as day flashback. I was in elementary school when Three Mile Island, you know, went, oh, no. And, you know, we live here in central PA, so three of my island was literally just up the river a ways. And, I, I distinctly remember they, they told us all stay at the classroom. Your parents are going to come get you. And I distinctly remember asking my, my teacher shouldn’t we get under the desks like, you know, your parents. That’s what I thought. Well, this whole test thing is bullshit.

Dacia M Arnold: So for context, for our listeners, if you’re not familiar with Three Mile Island, it’s basically the potential equivalent of Chernobyl in the United States. It was that nuclear reactor in central PA on an island they called Three Mile Island that, it did shut down, but it didn’t. And there was some radiation from, the site. But I know it wasn’t nearly as badass as Chernobyl, obviously.

Brian Keene: You know, obviously not. But. All right, well, guys, I anything any of you want to add before we wrap up this little introductory pilot.

Dacia M Arnold: I do I want to circle back to what you were saying about how your parents, weren’t preppers, but they lived on the land, and they did things, and they built things and they did everything themselves and and didn’t order off Amazon and and you learned that skill set. But now, like our children are starting to get away from it. And I was having a conversation with another mother, earlier this week in regards to learning these things and how it was actually, my father in law was talking about how he fixes all this cars, but my husband does not write. And, and now that that we have children of our own, like, there’s like this level of I don’t want my kids to have to work as hard as I did. I want my kids to be kids. They should be kids. They shouldn’t have 9 to 5 jobs working on the farm at four in the morning. But at the same time, it’s like, but are we really setting them up to succeed, you know. Right. Child labor.

Jim Cobb: Or no. Exactly. I mean, I grew up kind of different. My parents didn’t know how to do any of this stuff. My my grandparents did. My parents were I, I like to refer them as wannabe yuppies. Okay. Where we lived in a small town or just outside of a small town, we weren’t wealthy by any stretch, but my parents like to pretend they were, and my dad was in car sales, so he always drove a brand new car and always got a good deal on a car for my mom. And Christmas was all about visibility. You know, and like, for example, I was not allowed to work on my car if I needed an oil change, something went wrong with my car. I wasn’t allowed to do anything to it. My dad would take it into the dealership and have them do it, which as a kid I thought, well, that’s kind of cool. I don’t have to do anything. But then as a young adult, when I moved out and I needed a new alternator and I couldn’t afford to have somebody put that in. I didn’t have that skill set just built in from years of doing it. I had to figure out all this stuff on my own. So early on, I kind of committed to myself that, you know, I’m going to try to learn the skills that I should have learned growing up. And I’m not. I’m. I’m in my 50s. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there. You know, every day I try to learn something new. But it’s an interesting experience for me to talk to people who grew up doing these things where I didn’t, and I kind of had to figure it out on my own, which can be frustrating. But the other angle here is, and where I’m going with this is, I think as a society, sometimes we have a tendency to get angry or upset with somebody for not knowing something. We expect them to know.

Dacia M Arnold: Yes.

Brian Keene: And I’m guilty of that.

Jim Cobb: We should be angry at the person or people who are supposed to teach them that. You know what I mean? We look at, you know, young people, well, if they don’t even know how to make change or they don’t know how to do this, or they don’t want to do that,

Dacia M Arnold: Write a check.

Jim Cobb: Well, nobody’s taught them how to do it.

Dacia M Arnold: no one taught them.

Jim Cobb: It’s not a skill. That’s just you’re not born with that. And prepping is the same thing. We can’t expect people to just know how to canned food, or how to grow a garden, or how to budget their money if they’ve never been taught. And that’s where we come in.

Brian Keene: Right. Exactly. All right. Well, this was fun. This, this feels very natural. I think, the three of us are going to have a good time doing this. I hope the listening audience will have a good time doing this. We don’t have any social media set up for the show yet. Yeah, as of this recording. But in the meantime, where can folks find the two of you online?

Brian Keene: Where do you frequent these days?

Dacia M Arnold: I am on X now. Again, I’m back on X, I am on Instagram. I’m on Facebook, Dacia M Arnold across all platforms. My my website also Dacia M Arnold. Or you could Google dystopian mom and I will pop up.

Brian Keene: There you go. And Dacia is spelled D-A-C-I-A for for our listeners,

Dacia M Arnold: Oh thank you.

Brian Keene: Jim, what about you?

Jim Cobb: I’m mostly active on Facebook. You can find me there. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever the hell we’re calling it this week. I think I’m Jim Cobb. Survival there. I’m Jim Cobb, seven, eight two or something like that on Facebook. I have an Instagram, but I’m never using it. Otherwise, it, you can always find me by email. Jim at Survival weekly.com.

Brian Keene: There you go. And of course, the easiest way to find me is Brian Keane dot Com and once you there, folks at the top of the page to all my social media, I’m mostly active on Twitter because I refuse to call it X. Instagram like. Our intro and outro music is by my dear friend Zander Harris. On this album, California Chrome, you can buy it on Bandcamp, Spotify, or even on vinyl and good old fashioned record stores everywhere. Thanks to him for letting us use it. We will be on a weekly schedule next week. We’re going to talk about self-reliant mindset and license, what to do, and the chocolate and the nicotine on all.

Brian Keene: Dacia M Arnold, Jim Cobb, I’m Brian Keene. 2025 is coming folks. But we’re going to help you survive. Peace.

Jim Cobb: See you later.

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About the Hosts of How to Survive 2025

International Bestselling Author

Brian Keene

BRIAN KEENE is the author of over fifty books and three-hundred short stories, mostly in the horror, crime, fantasy, and non-fiction genres. They have been translated into over a dozen different languages and have won numerous awards. His 2003 novel, The Rising, is credited with inspiring pop culture’s recurrent interest in zombies. He has also written for such media properties as Doctor Who, Thor, Aliens, Harley Quinn, The X-Files, Doom Patrol, Justice League, Hellboy, Superman, and Masters of the Universe. He was the showrunner for Realm Media and Blackbox TV’s Silverwood: The Door.

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