“It won’t take very much, I’m telling you,” he says passionately. “It will not take much for people to hit the panic button. The amount of convenience that people rely on based on electricity alone. You start taking out electricity and satellites, and people are going to lose their noodle.” He continueswith exasperation. “People don’t have maps anymore,” he says, his voice rising with incredulity. “People use their iPhones or GPS systems, so if there’s no electricity, nobody has maps.

“And people are going to go, ‘That land’s not yours, prove that it’s yours,’ and the only thing you have to prove it’s yours is on an electric file. Then it’s like, ‘What’s the value of currency, and whose food is whose?’ People’s alarm systems at their homes will no longer work. Neither will our heating, our garbage disposals, hot-water heaters that run on gas but depend on electricity - what happens when all our modern conveniences fail? I’m going to be ready to take myself and my family to a safe place where they don’t have to worry.”

Talking to Kutcher, it’s easy to think that maybe his end-of-the-world rant is just another big Punk’d prank, but he’s serious. So serious, in fact, that one of his favorite memories in years was last Christmas, when he and his family lost power for 14 hours at their Southern California mountain cabin. “It was 20 below zero,” he says. “I got my guns out. We made a fire. We went to the grocery store, and the doors were open because they’re all electronic. People were rolling in and out, clearing out the shelves.

“I’m telling you, it was like a preview [of what's to come]… All of my physical fitness regimen is completely tailored around the end of day. I stay fit for no other reason than to save the people I care about.”

[From Men's Fitness, print edition, February, 2011]
People should use whatever works for them and motivates them to work out. I picture myself in a bikini by the pool. It’s probably not as vivid a scenario as running away from a pack of flesh-eating zombies, hence the easy excuses I make for skipping the gym. I get how scary an apocalypse seems. For me the more I watched Walking Dead and read the comics the more realistic an end-days type of situation seemed. Now that it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen a Hollywood zombie, I realize that it’s totally foolish to be scared by a creative story and some excellent special effects. But I did look closely at this one year emergency supply of dried food at Costco. It was $3,000 for four people and has since sold out. That would last Ashton and Demi over a decade. They probably purchased enough food for 30 years and have a whole underground bunker prepared, complete with stockpiled Kabbalahwater, a gym and a backup personal trainer who lives down there waiting to be of service when the world as we know it ends. Maybe it will end up being a big cosmic joke to Kutcher when only the fattest people are immune to the “virus” leaked by the secret biodefense lab.
Photos from Men’s Fitness print edition, where there are more.