When it comes to prepping, look to the Mormons. It’s right there, in the official name of the religion: To be a “Latter-day Saint”' is explicitly to believe in, and prepare for, the end times. This is why, on a calm morning last September, I arrive just outside Salt Lake City in a place called American Fork and knock on the door of Tyler Stapleton, the chief product engineer for off-grid power products at 4Patriots, one of the biggest companies pushing preparedness into the mainstream. Church members play outsize roles in this multibillion-dollar industry—a global concern where politics and technology collide, with sales fueled by social media and conspiracy theories, in addition to the undeniable rise in world chaos.
Stapleton is a bit sheepish but very nice, a nerdy mechanical engineer with degrees from Brigham Young University who lives with his wife and three young children. Inside their tidy home is a big clock, a bright kitchen, and the Book of Mormon on the shelf. After exchanging pleasantries, Stapleton begins showing off new products and prototypes, including a sleek “James Bond-like” solar generator that packs up like a briefcase. All the while, he sticks to the company line, telling me that the typical owner of a 4Patriots power product is not some zealot in camouflage preparing to live in a bunker “for days on end” but rather a family man seeking “energy independence” for the occasional moments when the grid goes down. It’s a well-placed piece of rhetoric, though the line loses some of its luster an hour later, when Tyler lets slip that his childhood home nearby does, indeed, feature a modest bunker, then reluctantly agrees to take us to it.
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