Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Sam Bloch.
Sam Bloch is the founder and lead trainer at Camp DoomsDaddy. Sam comes with 20+ years of emergency response experience at the front-lines of disasters worldwide, from tsunamis and earthquakes to wildfires and war zones. A co-founder of Communitere International and former Director of Emergency Response at World Central Kitchen, he has led response efforts in more than 50 countries and worked at the epicenter of them in more than 30 U.S. disasters alone. After decades helping people who weren’t prepared, Sam is now focused on ensuring individuals and communities have the skills they need to take care of themselves and each other before disaster strikes. Sam is also on the Advisory Board of Watch Duty, and a trained wild land firefighter.
As I’ve discussed in a few other episodes, I’m of the mind that we need to reclaim the notion of prepping and shift it away from a stock stereotype about loner survivalists (though, hey, good for them). Rather, I’m excited by the version of prepping that’s growing out of the mutual aid movement, which foregrounds community care and self-empowerment. I did a collaborative video with forecasting agency Death to Stock outlining some of these ideas, which went a little viral, and beyond vanity, I’m glad it did; it led me to meet Sam Bloch, founder of Camp DoomsDaddy.
Want to go to the next Camp DoomsDaddy? Sign up here.
What Sam is doing is precisely what I see as the potential of turning preparedness and resilience into commonplace aspects of our lives. Essentially, he moves from the twinned premise that community is a superpower and resilience should be fun. He’s run two camps already—and has one coming up in May that, if you can go, you really should!—and if the documentation of their time is to be believed, they really did have a blast. All while learning critical skills to navigate volatile futures.
And Sam is the perfect person to do this; he’s a sort of preparedness and disaster relief auto-didact, having kicked off his career in Southeast Asia two decades ago, and becoming a leading figure in humanitarianism along the way. He sensed—rightly, in my estimation—that while disaster relief remains critical, a missing piece is building communities of people who have learned how to prepare in advance.
In this conversation, we talk about his background in disaster relief, his focus on dignity and community empowerment vs. “aid” in the traditional sense, as well as his present work with DoomsDaddy and what’s on the way. His work inspires me tremendously and I’m sure you will feel the same, so please enjoy this rigorous and fun conversation with Sam Bloch.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Eric Czuleger about Orbán’s loss and fallout from the Iran War:
