A telehealth startup is selling $345 emergency kits packed with medicine that it claims could help people survive nuclear disasters.

Amble Health’s “Oh Sh*T Kit” comes with iodine tablets, Prussian blue pills for removing radioactive cesium and thallium, and anti-nausea medication ondansetron, or Zofran. “If the unthinkable happens, whether from an accident, disaster, or other radiological event, having the right medications on hand can make a critical difference in the earliest hours. Because when radiation is involved panic is optional, but preparation isn’t,” the company’s website says. You’ll need a prescription to order it; Amble also does telehealth appointments with licensed healthcare providers who can issue prescriptions.

The fear of a radiological disaster isn’t unfounded. After decades of declining nuclear weapons stockpiles, America is building more and new kinds of nuclear weapons. The Trump administration’s nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia includes a provision to allow it to enrich its own uranium and, possibly, a path towards a nuclear bomb for the Middle Eastern Kingdom. Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal and field testing new types of nuclear-capable missiles in Ukraine.

If nuclear war doesn’t get you then a power plant meltdown might. The Trump administration has rewritten and outright cut safety regulations around the construction of nuclear power plants. Tech companies are investing billions in new and untested forms of nuclear power generation. Microsoft and others are using AI systems to speed through the lengthy safety processes.

According to Amble, the “Oh Sh*T Kit” is “primarily focused” on people exposed to radiation as part of their jobs, not the next nuclear war. “Millions of workers across medicine, construction, mining, shipping, agriculture, and power generation are routinely exposed to these hazards,” an Amble spokesperson told 404 Media.

“We created this kit to give people an actionable, reliable solution so they have peace of mind and know exactly what to do when the unexpected happens,” the spokesperson added. “Our clinicians (especially in a post pandemic world) identified a growing request-need-concern from their patients having medication available in a situation of emergency when a pharmacy would otherwise be unavailable.”

‘If you have been exposed to enough radiation that you are vomiting [...] you’re already in a lot of trouble.’

Should the worst happen, Amble’s “Oh Shi*t Kit” has promised to help for just $345. But experts told 404 Media that the kits might not actually be all that useful if you’re buying it for prepper reasons.

Amble is an online platform that “connects patients to licensed healthcare professionals in all 50 states, 100% online,” according to a description on its website. The site’s frontage advertises it as a place where people can get prescriptions for weight-loss drugs like GLP-1s and “anti-aging” drugs like NAD+ and Sermorelin.

It was founded by Joey Stiver, an entrepreneur with a felony conviction and a desire to “democratize healthcare,” according to his personal website. According to Stiver, he got a double-tear in his shoulder when he was 18 and didn’t want to have invasive surgery so he bought “healing peptides” online. He liked the product so much he began to sell medical items himself in an “illicit industry” which landed him a federal indictment and felony conviction. Now he’s a telehealth mogul. 

GLP-1s are Amble’s big draw, but it also offers a number of “kits” for basic medical emergencies like a “Cold & Immunity Kit” that comes with a run of prescription antibiotics like Amoxicillin and Azithromycin. The “Oh Sh*T Kit” is part of this line of products. Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear war historian and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, told 404 Media that the “Oh Sh*T Kit” is “a ripoff at $345. Doomsday grifting at its best.” Iodine tablets, potentially the most useful part of the package, are available cheaply without a prescription. A bottle of 60 pills will run you around $13 at a GNC.

“Iodine tablets can be of some benefit if taken directly after some kind of release of fresh fission products (whether a nuclear power plant accident or a nuclear detonation),” Wellerstein said. “They max out the thyroid’s iodine levels and prevent it from greedily up-taking environmental iodine, which means [the thyroid] won’t grab any I-131 that has been produced by nuclear fission.”

I-131 is one of the principal radioactive substances present in the fallout that follows a nuclear disaster. It has a short half life and can wreak havoc on the body. “It is not the only fission product of worry, of course, it is just one that is particularly easy to avoid by taking potassium iodide [...] and a pernicious one as it is so quickly taken up by the body (and also, in turn, excreted relatively quickly, so you have the extra bonus of having radioactive sweat and excrement),” Wellerstein said. Potassium iodide is a medical compound made from iodine.

Medical-grade Prussian blue is a prescription substance that binds to heavy metals like cesium and thallium. According to the CDC, the medicine traps the heavy metals in the intestine and keeps them from being absorbed in the body until the afflicted can shit them out. “[Cesium] has a much longer half-life than I-131 (30 years), and is in the ‘worrisome chronic carcinogen’ category rather than the ‘will give you radiation poisoning’ that I-131 is in,” Wellerstein said. “I suspect it is the sort of thing that would be administered by a doctor, not taken by an individual, assuming there are doctors around after said ‘radiological event.’ It is not something that one should take without knowing exactly what dosages are required, I gather.”

Zofran will keep you from throwing up, but that will be cold comfort. It’s possible that in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, there are things in your stomach that your body does not want to absorb. “If you have been exposed to enough radiation that you are vomiting (e.g., suffering from some form of acute radiation syndrome), you’re already in a lot of trouble,” Wellerestein said. “Anyway, that would be symptom management, a different category. It has its own possible adverse health effects.”

If you’re worried about nuclear disasters, you can do worse than buying some iodine tablets online. “I think the risk/reward tradeoff for potassium iodide is not terrible for people who worry about being exposed to radiological hazards,” Wellerstein said. “Which is to say, the risk of it happening is pretty low, and it is very cheap when bought on its own and not from grifters, and so if it brings you peace of mind to keep some around, I see no harm in that.” The rest, however, is probably not worth the money.

As probably comes across in the episode of the podcast, I went all over Upstate New York, but also a lot of the places I went were not super exciting. If I took pics of everywhere I went, there would be more pics, but they would be of nothing.

After returning from my trip to Indiana Beach, I was surprised to learn that I’d taken about 20 pictures disrespecting monsters in the Monster House, but somehow forgot to even take a single shot of The Big Hog. You can google images and video of that coaster if you feel the need.

The view from the South Bridge

On this trip, I ended up taking more pictures than in past excursions, but when I went back to look at them, not a lot of them feel fit for posting. Some of them were doomed by poor photography skills, but others were just not as interesting as they seemed in the moment. For example, I took a picture of a paper weight that Sam Butcher’s son had given him, which is kept on display behind glass. When I was there, it seemed like the kind of thing you’d want to take a picture of, but that’s not true.

Mexico City is frenetic and saturated with color, a sprawling metropolis of more than 20 million people and nearly 2,000 neighborhoods. In upscale Las Lomas, Talo Atelier explores what it means to “align yourself” in this uniquely charged context. Align Studio, designed by Talo Atelier and led by Tadeo López Toledano, is a 2,150-square-foot Pilates and yoga sanctuary; the transition from the energy of the city to a calm interior is treated as an exercise in itself—recasting physical movement as a journey inward.

Here, alignment refers to harmony between body, mind, and spirit—as well as between material, matter, and inhabitable space. From the moment of entry, wood and warm light form a calming, consistent palette throughout the facility.

“Coherence” is another key concept for López Toledano and his firm’s approach to Align Studio. Here, everything fits—but he doesn’t think of the space as “formal uniformity.” Instead, he says he understands it as “fidelity between the idea that gave origin to the commission and what ultimately took shape.”

A defining architectural element at Align Studio is a spine of oak slats. The vertical profiles wrap across walls, ceilings, and movable panels, establishing a continuous linear rhythm. This fluid “second skin” accompanies visitors as they move from the entrance into the studio. The wood also conceals storage and technical infrastructure, including bi-fold partitions that can be configured to divide or open the space.

In contrast, curved openings—reminiscent of cave dwellings—punctuate the slatted surfaces with softer, more organic forms, housing large mirrors inside the studio.

The reception area forms part of a continuous circulation path designed to accommodate peak traffic moments when classes begin and end simultaneously. From here, visitors move naturally toward the lockers and training zones. This intuitive flow belies considerable technical complexity: Specialized acoustic treatments isolate sound, while advanced thermal regulation supports high-temperature hot Pilates sessions.

Light is treated as an active material. Warm, indirect illumination traces floor edges and ceiling junctions, while a large backlit circular mirror and suspended luminaires emphasize shapes and amplify the space’s depth. Chromotherapy (color therapy) further allows individual training rooms to transform as needed.

By treating design as a tool for orientation and transformation, Talo Atelier makes the promise of “aligning with oneself” tangible—an inhabitable condition shaped through movement, material, light, and atmosphere.