So Daniel sent us this one, and it's personal. He writes that having lived through two wars and the pandemic in Israel, he's lost his shame about calling himself a prepper. But his grievance is that prepper culture tends to fixate on low-probability theatrics — EMP attacks, bug-out rituals, that whole genre — rather than the realistic emergencies people actually face. So the question he's putting to us: if Herman and Corn were designing a practical preparedness course specifically for Jerusalem residents, what would be on the syllabus? What are the skills that actually matter versus the ones that make for good YouTube content?
And I have to say, living here, that question lands differently than it would if we were recording this from, I don't know, a suburb of Phoenix. We've actually done the shelter drills. We've stocked the mamad. We've had the conversations about what happens if the phone networks go down. So yeah, let's build the course.
Before we get into the modules, though, I think the framing Daniel sets up is worth taking seriously, because the critique of prepper culture is not just aesthetic. It's not just that the bug-out crowd is a bit dramatic. There's an actual opportunity cost. If you're spending your Saturday afternoon watching videos about faraday cages and electromagnetic pulse hardening, that is time and mental energy you are not spending learning to apply a tourniquet. And one of those skills has a realistic chance of saving a life in the next decade. The other one almost certainly does not.
The faraday cage guy is never going to need his faraday cage. But the tourniquet thing — I mean, October 7 made that viscerally clear. There were people bleeding out in the south while first responders were overwhelmed or couldn't reach them for hours. The communities where civilians had Stop the Bleed training, where they had hemostatic gauze and knew what to do with it, those communities had meaningfully better outcomes in those first terrible hours.
And that's the through-line of what we're building here. The test for any module in this course is: what is the realistic scenario in which this skill gets used? Not "what if society collapses and I need to survive in the forest." More like: what if there's a siren right now, what if someone next to me has a blast injury, what if the power goes out for four days, what if I need to leave my apartment with thirty minutes notice and not come back for three months?
Those are all things that have happened to people we know. That's not paranoia. That's pattern recognition.
By the way, today's script is being generated by Claude Sonnet four point six. Anyway. Let's build this syllabus.
Module one, and this is non-negotiable as the first module: the mamad. The reinforced safe room. Because if you live in an apartment built after 1992 in Israel, you have one, and most people treat it as a storage closet.
Which is both understandable and a problem. The mamad is one of the most elegant pieces of preparedness infrastructure ever built into civilian architecture. It's not a bunker in the woods. It's in your home. It's integrated into daily life. And yet I've been in apartments where the mamad door is blocked by a bicycle, a broken treadmill, and approximately four hundred cardboard boxes.
The bicycle is doing important work though, to be fair.
The bicycle can move. What the course has to cover: you need to be able to get into that room and seal it within ninety seconds. That's the window in Jerusalem. Ninety seconds from siren to shelter. Fifteen seconds if you're in Sderot, but Jerusalem gives you ninety. And that sounds like a lot until you're doing it with a child under each arm and you can't find where you put the key.
The drill matters. Not the concept of the drill. The actual repeated physical practice until it's automatic. Because under acute stress, you do not rise to the level of your plans. You fall to the level of your training. And if your training is "I know where the mamad is," you are going to discover that knowing and doing are very different things when your hands are shaking.
The course also needs to cover what to keep in the mamad permanently. Not a bag you're going to grab, because you might not have time to grab anything. Things that live in there: water, a phone charger and a charged power bank, a first aid kit, medications for anyone in the household who takes daily medications, a flashlight, some food that doesn't require cooking. And critically: the room needs to be functional. Sealed windows, the ability to close the ventilation if there's a chemical threat.
And for people who don't have a mamad — older buildings, certain rentals — the course has to address the stairwell protocol, interior walls, the logic of putting as many concrete walls between yourself and the outside as possible. That's not as good as a mamad, but it's not nothing.
There's also the earthquake angle here, which I think is underappreciated. Israel sits on the Dead Sea Transform fault. Seismologists have been saying for decades that a major earthquake is overdue — something in the range of what hit in 1927, magnitude six point two, which killed around five hundred people and caused significant structural damage across the region. The irony is that your mamad, which is designed to protect you from blast overpressure, may not protect you if the building itself comes down around it. Earthquake preparedness requires different thinking: knowing how to identify structural damage, not using elevators, knowing where the gas shutoff is.
The gas shutoff is one of those things where I guarantee that ninety percent of people living in this city do not know where it is or how to turn it off. Including, until recently, me.
The course fixes that in about five minutes of practical instruction. That's the thing — some of this is simple. It's just never been explicitly taught.
Okay, module two. And I want to spend real time here because this is the one that I feel most strongly about as a former physician. Trauma first aid.
Stop the Bleed. This is a campaign that came out of the aftermath of Sandy Hook in the United States, designed to teach civilians the basics of hemorrhage control. Tourniquet application, wound packing with hemostatic gauze, direct pressure. And after October 7, the relevance of this for Israeli civilians is not theoretical.
The Israeli bandage — and I love that it's literally called the Israeli bandage internationally, the emergency pressure bandage developed here — is a remarkable piece of kit. But it's useless if you don't know how to use it. And knowing how to use it in a calm classroom setting is different from knowing how to use it when someone is screaming and you're terrified.
The research on this is pretty clear. The skill degrades under stress unless it's been practiced to the point of automaticity. The military knows this. That's why soldiers train the same drills hundreds of times. The civilian equivalent is: you need to have physically applied a tourniquet, on a training dummy or a willing friend, enough times that your hands know what to do without your brain having to narrate every step.
The course has to include CPR and AED use. Automated external defibrillators are now in most public buildings in Israel, and the survival rate for cardiac arrest in public spaces has gone up significantly in cities where AED use is common. But people walk past those green boxes every day without knowing what they're for.
Burns, blast injuries — these are scenarios that are not hypothetical here. The course needs to cover triage basics: how do you assess multiple casualties when you're the only person there who knows anything? Who do you help first? That's not a pleasant thing to think about, but it's a decision that has to be pre-made, because in the moment you won't be able to think clearly enough to reason through it from scratch.
Mental health first aid is also in this module, and I don't want to treat it as an afterthought. Acute stress reactions — dissociation, freezing, panic responses — are not signs of weakness. They're physiological. And knowing how to recognize them in yourself and in others, and having some basic grounding techniques, is practically useful. The breathing protocols that come out of military stress inoculation training are accessible and they work.
The medication stockpile piece also belongs here. Anyone with a chronic condition — hypertension, diabetes, asthma, psychiatric medications — needs to have at minimum a two-week supply at home. The pandemic taught us that pharmacies can have shortages. A war can disrupt supply chains. This is not dramatic. This is just margin.
Module three: food and water. And I want to immediately distinguish this from the American prepper version of this module, which tends to spiral into freeze-dried bucket food and five-year calorie calculations.
The practical version is simpler. The seventy-two hour rule is the baseline — most emergency management frameworks say that if you can sustain yourself for seventy-two hours without outside assistance, you've covered the gap before institutional help arrives. But given what we've seen in Israel, I'd argue the realistic target is two weeks. Not because you'll necessarily need two weeks, but because having two weeks of food means you're never stressed about the first three days.
What does two weeks of food actually look like? It's not exotic. It's canned goods, dried legumes, rice, pasta, olive oil, nuts. Things your household actually eats. The rotation system matters — you use the oldest stock and replace it, so nothing expires. It's not a museum of emergency food. It's a pantry with a buffer.
Water is the more acute concern. The human body needs roughly four liters per day for drinking and basic sanitation. For a family of four, two weeks of water is two hundred and twenty-four liters. That's a lot of storage. The realistic approach is to store what you can, maybe thirty to forty liters as an absolute floor, and have the means to purify additional water. Filtration, purification tablets, knowing that boiling works if you have a heat source.
Israel's water infrastructure is generally robust, but an earthquake that damages pipes, or sustained infrastructure attacks, could disrupt it. The course has to make that concrete: here is what you store, here is how you store it, here is how you purify water that isn't from the tap.
Cooking without gas or electricity. This is where camping stoves earn their place in the kit — not for bug-out fantasies, but because if the gas is off for three days, you still need to feed your family. A small propane camping stove costs very little and solves a real problem. The course covers this practically: how to use it safely, carbon monoxide risk, how much fuel to keep on hand.
Module four: power and communications. And these are linked because they fail together. When the power goes out, the first thing people reach for is their phone, and then they discover the phone is at twelve percent battery.
The power bank is the single highest-return preparedness investment you can make for the cost. A twenty-thousand milliamp-hour power bank costs maybe forty dollars. It will charge your phone four or five times. That is the difference between being reachable and being unreachable during a crisis. Every household should have one, kept charged.
The failure cascade in a power outage goes roughly like this: lighting goes first, obviously. Then refrigerated food starts to degrade after four hours. Medical devices that run on electricity — CPAP machines, home oxygen concentrators, insulin that needs refrigeration — those become critical within hours. Phone charging becomes urgent within a day. The course has to walk through this cascade so people can prioritize.
Generators are a real option for some households, but the course has to be honest about the risks. Carbon monoxide poisoning from generators used indoors or in enclosed spaces kills people every year during power outages. The safety protocols are not optional. And generators require fuel storage, which has its own considerations.
The analog backup piece is one I feel strongly about. Neighborhood phone numbers stored in your phone are useless if your phone is dead and you have no way to charge it. The course asks people to write down — on paper, physical paper — the phone numbers of their five most important contacts. Their out-of-area contact, because local networks can be overwhelmed while national ones work fine. Their neighbors. Their children's schools. A family meeting point that isn't dependent on anyone having a working phone.
The radio piece. Battery-powered or hand-crank radio for emergency broadcasts. In Israel, Reshet Bet has historically been the emergency broadcast channel. During active hostilities, it's the authoritative source. Social media during a crisis is a noise machine. Knowing that Reshet Bet is where you go for verified information — that's a small thing but it matters.
Family communication plan. This is a tabletop exercise the course actually runs. What do we do if X happens while the kids are at school and we're at work? What do we do if we can't reach each other by phone? Where is the meeting point? Who is the out-of-area contact who can relay messages between family members if local communication is degraded? These decisions need to be made in advance and known by everyone in the household, including children at an age-appropriate level.
Module five is documents and finances, and I know it sounds dry, but displacement makes this module urgent. The people who evacuated from northern Israel in 2024 — some of them left with essentially nothing. And then they discovered that without their identity documents, their insurance paperwork, their medical records, navigating the bureaucracy of displacement was a second ordeal on top of the first one.
The teudat zehut, the Israeli identity card, is the key that unlocks everything here. The course recommendation is: digital copies of everything in a cloud backup, plus physical copies in a waterproof folder in the go-bag. Passports, identity cards, insurance documents, medication lists, the names and contact information of your doctors. This takes about an hour to set up and you never have to think about it again.
The cash piece. ATMs require power. Card readers require power. During a power outage, cash is the only medium of exchange that works. The course recommends keeping a reasonable amount of cash at home — not a huge amount, but enough to buy fuel, food, and basic necessities for seventy-two hours without electronic payment.
Bituach Leumi, the National Insurance Institute, covers war damage in Israel. Most people don't know the specifics of what's covered and what isn't. The course doesn't make people into insurance experts, but it walks through the basics: document damage with photographs, file promptly, know who to call. That knowledge is valuable in the aftermath of a missile strike on your building.
Module six. And I think this is the one where the Israeli model diverges most sharply from American prepper culture, and where the Israeli approach is demonstrably more effective. Community preparedness.
The lone wolf bunker fantasy. It's so deeply embedded in a certain strand of American survivalism. My family, my supplies, my weapons, against the world. And the research on actual disaster outcomes just doesn't support it. Repeatedly, what predicts survival and recovery in disasters is social connectedness. Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you? Have you talked about any of this?
The neighborhood WhatsApp group is, in Israel, the most important piece of emergency communication infrastructure that most people don't think of as emergency infrastructure. During the October 7 period and the subsequent months of conflict, those groups were where people found out about local shelter availability, where they coordinated childcare when schools closed, where they organized food for neighbors who couldn't leave their apartments. That's not trivial. That's the social fabric doing what it's supposed to do.
The course module here asks people to do a simple audit: who in your building or on your street is elderly and might need help during an emergency? Who has young children? Who has medical needs? Who has skills — is there a nurse in the building? A former soldier? Someone who knows how to shut off the building's water main? This is not surveillance. This is mutual aid. And it costs nothing to establish.
The October 7 lesson about armed community response teams is significant and worth naming directly. The kitat konenut — the rapid response teams that some kibbutzim had — made a measurable difference. Kibbutz Mefalsim, which had a trained and armed civilian response team, held off attackers for hours. Communities without that capacity had worse outcomes. Now, that specific lesson applies more to rural and border communities than to Jerusalem, where the security environment is different. But the broader principle — that community-level organization and preparedness matters, not just individual household preparedness — applies everywhere.
United Hatzalah, Magen David Adom, ZAKA — these organizations exist and they need volunteers and they provide training. The course points people toward them. If you want to be useful in an emergency, volunteering with one of these organizations and getting their training is the highest-return investment you can make. You get skills, you get a network, and you become a community asset rather than just a prepared individual.
Module seven: psychological preparedness. And I want to be careful here because this can sound soft when you're making a syllabus, but it's not. It's probably the module with the most practical leverage.
The chronic threat exposure problem is real and specific to Israel. People who have lived through multiple rounds of conflict, multiple wars, multiple periods of heightened alert — there's a genuine risk of either hypervigilance or, paradoxically, desensitization. Both are problems. Hypervigilance is exhausting and unsustainable. Desensitization leads to the kind of complacency where you stop taking the siren seriously.
The psychology of denial is fascinating and well-documented. Amanda Ripley's work on this — she wrote a book called The Unthinkable about how people behave in disasters — found that the most common initial response to a threat is not fight or flight. It's denial. People stand around saying "that can't be a real siren" or "that's probably just a drill." The course has to inoculate against this by making the automatic response so practiced that denial doesn't get a foothold.
Children and trauma. This is where my pediatric background makes me feel very strongly that this module has to be done right. The goal is not to terrify children. It's to give them a sense of agency and competence. A child who has practiced the shelter drill, who knows what the siren means and what to do, is less frightened by it than a child who doesn't know. Competence is the antidote to helplessness, at any age.
Decision fatigue during emergencies is underrated. When you're scared and things are happening fast, the cognitive load of making decisions is enormous. The way to reduce it is to pre-make as many decisions as possible. The go-bag is packed. The meeting point is agreed on. The out-of-area contact is known. The shelter protocol is automatic. Every decision that's been made in advance is one fewer decision to make under stress.
The post-traumatic growth angle is also worth including, because the Israeli experience is not only one of trauma. There's substantial research showing that communities that go through shared adversity and come out the other side often report stronger social bonds, clearer priorities, and greater resilience to subsequent stressors. That's not a reason to wish for emergencies. But it is a reason to engage with preparedness as something that builds capacity rather than just something that costs time and money.
Module eight: mobility and evacuation. And this is where we explicitly distinguish ourselves from bug-out culture.
The Israeli version of evacuation is not "head for the hills with a backpack and a water filter." It's "drive to your cousin's apartment in Tel Aviv" or "get on a bus to a hotel the government is subsidizing for displaced residents." The northern evacuation of 2024 involved hundreds of thousands of people moving to other Israeli cities. The logistics were urban. The support was institutional. The skills required were not wilderness survival.
The go-bag for this context is a seventy-two hour bag. Documents, medications, phone charger and power bank, change of clothes, cash, comfort items for children. A book or a game that travels. The things that make three days in an unfamiliar place manageable. It's not a hundred-liter assault pack with a water filtration system and a month of freeze-dried food.
Car preparedness. Keep the tank above half. Know alternate routes out of the city. Have a destination in mind — not just "I'll figure it out," but an actual address where you could go if you had to leave tonight. These are not onerous requirements. They're the kind of low-level readiness that pays off when you need it.
Pet preparedness is in this module and it's not trivial. A significant percentage of people in disasters delay or refuse to evacuate because of their pets. If you've made a plan in advance — carrier, food, veterinary records, a destination that accepts animals — you remove that delay when it matters.
Module nine: situational awareness and information literacy. And this one has two very different components that belong together.
The Tzeva Adom app — the Home Front Command's alert system — should be on every phone in Israel. It gives localized alerts, it tells you the shelter time for your specific location, it has guidance for different scenarios. It's free. It's official. It's the single best piece of preparedness technology available to Israeli civilians and the course starts this module by making sure everyone has it installed and knows how it works.
The information literacy piece is the other side of that coin, because during an acute crisis, the social media environment becomes dangerous. Rumors spread faster than facts. Misinformation about casualty numbers, about the location of threats, about what civilians should or shouldn't do — all of it floods in before anyone has verified anything. The skill here is knowing which sources to trust and which to ignore until official confirmation comes through.
There's also the basic situational awareness piece that applies to everyday public life. This is not about paranoia. It's about being present rather than absorbed in your phone when you're in public spaces. Knowing where the exits are. Noticing things that seem out of place. The Israeli security culture around this is actually quite good — there's a general public awareness that's been built over decades. The course reinforces it rather than building from scratch.
Module ten: scenario-based drills. Because this is where all the other modules become real.
The difference between having knowledge and having a skill is practice. I can describe tourniquet application in precise anatomical detail, and that description is worth almost nothing compared to having physically done it ten times on a training mannequin. The same is true for the shelter drill, for the family communication plan, for the earthquake protocol.
The tabletop exercise is a specific tool from emergency management that the course adapts for families. You sit around a table and you run a scenario: it's two in the afternoon, the kids are at school, there's a siren. What does each person do? Who calls the school? What if the phones are down? You talk through it, you find the gaps, you fill them. It takes an hour and it is worth more than a year of reading about preparedness.
The ninety-second drill. The course doesn't just explain it. It runs it. Participants actually go through the physical motion of getting to shelter in ninety seconds, with whatever complicating factors are realistic for them. Kids, elderly family members, pets, being in the middle of cooking. You discover very quickly that ninety seconds is both enough and not enough, depending entirely on whether you've practiced.
There's a meta-point here that I think is worth making explicitly. The purpose of this course is not to make people afraid. It's to make them competent. Fear without competence is just anxiety. Competence — knowing what to do, having the equipment, having practiced — is what transforms a threatening situation from one where you're helpless into one where you have agency. That shift, from helplessness to agency, is psychologically significant. It's actually good for your mental health to be prepared.
And the Israeli model, for all its imperfections, demonstrates this. The Home Front Command's preparedness messaging is not fearmongering. It's civic instruction. Here is what you need to do, here is how to do it, here is where to get help. The social destigmatization of preparedness — the fact that stocking your mamad and knowing your shelter time is just normal responsible behavior here, not a sign that you've gone off the deep end — is valuable. Daniel's point about losing his shame is part of that. The shame was never warranted.
The framing of "prepper" carries all this American cultural baggage — the paranoia, the politics, the antisocial individualism. The reframe that the course implicitly offers is: prepared citizen. Someone who has thought about realistic risks, made reasonable preparations, and built connections with their community. That's not extreme. That's just responsible.
And to bring it back to the critique Daniel started with — the EMP crowd, the bug-out ritualists — the issue isn't that those people are wrong to prepare. It's that they've been captured by a genre of preparedness that is more entertainment than education. The scenarios are dramatic. The gear is impressive. The YouTube videos are compelling. And none of it prepares you for the actual emergencies that are statistically likely to affect your life.
The pandemic was the great test case for this. Millions of people had bug-out bags and faraday cages and none of that was relevant. What was relevant was: do you have a two-week supply of food? Do you have your medications? Can you work from home? Do you have relationships with your neighbors? Can you manage your mental health during extended isolation? Those are the questions that practical preparedness answers.
And the people who had invested in those capacities — even just the basics, even just the food stockpile and the ability to stay home — found that the pandemic was significantly less stressful than it was for people who had to scramble. That's not a small thing.
So if I were to summarize the syllabus in terms of actual priorities, it goes roughly like this. One: know your shelter, practice getting there, keep it functional. Two: learn trauma first aid to the point where your hands know what to do. Three: maintain a two-week food and water buffer and know how to cook and purify water without utilities. Four: keep your devices charged, have a power bank, have a battery radio, have a written communication plan. Five: know your neighbors, build the WhatsApp group, know who needs help and who has skills. Six: have your documents organized and accessible and keep some cash at home. Seven: do the psychological work — make decisions in advance, practice the drills, prepare your children. Eight: know the earthquake scenario is different from the rocket scenario and prepare for both. Nine: have a go-bag and a destination, keep your car fueled. Ten: have the right apps, trust the right sources, stay present.
That's a real course. That's something you could teach in a weekend, practice over a month, and maintain with minimal ongoing effort. And it would meaningfully improve outcomes for anyone who went through it in the realistic emergencies that are actually foreseeable here.
What strikes me about building it out this way is how much of it is not about stuff. It's about skills, relationships, and decisions made in advance. The gear matters at the margins. The tourniquet matters. The power bank matters. But the thing that actually determines how well you do in an emergency is whether you've thought about it beforehand, practiced the skills, and built the connections. That's not something you can buy.
Which is the deepest critique of the prepper gear industry, really. It profits by selling you the idea that preparedness is a product. Buy this bag, buy this filter, buy this freeze-dried food subscription. And some of that is useful. But the industry has an incentive to keep you buying rather than to tell you that the most important things cost almost nothing and require only time and attention.
The community piece being undervalued in American prepper culture and central to Israeli resilience is not a coincidence. It reflects something about the different social philosophies. The Israeli experience of collective survival — the kibbutz model, the reserve military system, the civil defense infrastructure — is built on the assumption that people are resources for each other. That's a very different starting assumption than "every family for itself."
And the data from disasters consistently supports the Israeli intuition. People who know their neighbors survive better. Communities with existing mutual aid networks recover faster. Social capital is not soft. It is a material survival resource.
Alright. Practical takeaways, because we should be specific. If someone listening to this is in Jerusalem and wants to start today, here's the minimum viable action list. First: go to your mamad right now, clear it out if it's being used as storage, and make sure the door opens and closes freely. Put a power bank and a flashlight in there this week. Second: download the Tzeva Adom app if you don't have it. Third: buy a tourniquet — they're available at pharmacies and online — and watch a Stop the Bleed tutorial on applying it. Not just watch. Practice on yourself until it's fast. Fourth: do a rough inventory of your food and water situation. If you have less than three days of supplies, start building toward two weeks. Fifth: write down five phone numbers on paper and put that paper somewhere you can find it without your phone. Sixth: have one conversation with one neighbor this week. Just introduce yourself if you haven't. That's the beginning of the community layer.
The earthquake preparation specifically: find your building's gas shutoff, learn how to turn it off, and make sure someone else in your household knows too. That's a fifteen-minute task that could matter enormously in a scenario that is overdue in this region.
And the document piece: spend one afternoon scanning your important documents and putting them in a cloud backup and a waterproof folder. Teudat zehut, passport, insurance documents, medication lists. Once it's done, it's done.
The thing I'd leave listeners with is the point about competence and anxiety. The research on this is consistent: people who have made preparations and practiced skills report lower anxiety about emergencies than people who haven't, even though the prepared people are thinking about emergencies more. Because the anxiety isn't really about the emergency. It's about the helplessness. And preparedness resolves the helplessness.
Daniel, if you're building this course — and it sounds like you've been thinking about it seriously — I think the community module is the one to start with, because it has the highest return and the lowest barrier. The WhatsApp group, the neighbor conversation, the awareness of who in your building needs help. That costs nothing and it builds the foundation that everything else runs on.
A big thank you to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for putting this one together, and to Modal for keeping our pipeline running — serverless GPU infrastructure that makes daily episodes like this one possible. All two thousand one hundred and sixty-three of them.
This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com, and if this one was useful, leave us a review — it helps people find the show. Stay prepared out there.
