CNN airing documentary about The Prepared and this growing community

This Saturday, August 7th, CNN Films is premiering a half-hour documentary on the main CNN channel at 9pm ET / 6pm PT, with another airing at 9pm PT. It will be available for streaming on CNN’s paid plan starting the following day.

Myself, Jon Stokes, Tom Rader, Caleb Causey, and some of our family members sat down for a few days of interviews that (we’re told) make up around half the film. CNN’s crew visited while we were working on the new Austere First Aid video course, so they got some behind-the-scenes as we were on location shooting that series.

The doc is (was?) supposed to be about how more people from all walks of life are getting into the self-reliance / modern preparedness movement, how the community is different than the old stereotypes, how you can become prepared in rational non-bunker ways, and so on.

It’s wonderful to see this community get the mainstream attention you all deserve. So we agreed to participate because it’s supposed to be a fair and objective look — not the clickbait many producers/execs try to force into this market.

This film is made by the same people behind the Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak series that dropped on Netflix in January, 2020 — which must win some kind of prize for great timing. That doc (filmed in 2019) even had interviews with experts proclaiming: “I’m worried about a novel coronavirus coming from something like a bat in China. We’re just not ready for it.”

(Yet another example of how these things are predictable and we need to listen to experts more!)

Since Covid changed the world, CNN asked that crew to do a sort of follow-up piece: “Okay, it happened, so how are people reacting?”

To be honest, I’m cautious about how this is going to turn out. The mainstream media doesn’t have a great track record with this narrative. But we came to trust the filmmakers and thought it was worth a shot. Hopefully people tune in for the “doomsday bunker porn” but come to learn the real story  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here’s the trailer.

So, we’ll see how it goes. But if you want to catch it for free — and make fun of us being awkward dorks — tune in to CNN this Saturday night!