#650： Why People Are Building Bunkers for the Apocalypse
Episode Stats
Summary
When you think about bunkers, you might be apt to think of the 1950s and people building basement and backyard fallout shelters during the Cold War. But there s a second doom boom going on right now, and people aren t just burrowing into the earth to protect themselves from a nuclear bomb. My guest today travels across four continents to explore what s driving this phenomenon and how it s manifesting itself in the modern age. His name is Bradley Garrett, and he s a professor of cultural geography and the author of Bunker: Building for the End Times.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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And when you think about bunkers, you might be apt to think of the 1950s and people building
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basement and backyard fallout shelters during the Cold War. But there's a second doom boom
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going on right now, and people aren't just burrowing into the earth to protect themselves
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from a nuclear bomb. My guest today traveled across four continents to explore what's driving
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this phenomenon and how it's manifesting itself in the modern age. His name is Bradley Garrett,
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and he's a professor of cultural geography and the author of Bunker, Building for the
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End Times. We begin our conversation with the immersive dive Bradley took into urban exploration
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for his PhD and how it led to his fascination with the building of underground bunkers.
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From there, we dip into the history of bunkers, from the ancient subterranean cities built
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in Turkey to the government decisions made during the Cold War that led Americans to build
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blast shelters in their backyards. From there, we dig into why a multi-billion dollar private
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bunker building industry has emerged in the present day and how it's not being driven by
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a specific threat, but instead a diffuse sense of dread. We discuss how bunker building breaks
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down to individual communal approaches and why the latter one is ascendant. Bradley then
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takes us on a tour of two underground communities, one a complex of her 500 subterranean cement
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rooms in South Dakota and the other a former nuclear missile silo in Kansas, which has been
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turned into a luxe 15-story inverted skyscraper of survival condos complete with a swimming pool,
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dog park, movie theater, and grocery store. We then turn to the modern movement of backyard
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bunker building and how it often represents an act of resistance against the surveillance
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state. We also look at the culture of prepping in different countries, including the building
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of bug-out vehicles and fire bunkers in Australia. We entered a conversation with whether or not
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Bradley ultimately concluded that bunker building and survival prepping is a rational response
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to the state of the world and whether he became a prepper himself. After the show's over,
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check out the show notes at awim.is slash bunker.
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All right, Bradley Garrett, welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me, Brett. It's a pleasure to be here.
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So you got a new book out, Bunker, Building for the End Times. And this is a, I don't know,
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an anthropology, a cultural exploration of the culture of building bunkers and prepping.
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Before we get to that, let's talk about your background because that led into this book.
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You yourself, you're an urban explorer, but you're also a cultural geographer. For those who
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aren't familiar with urban exploration, what is it? And then how did you tie that into your academic
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career? Well, so cultural geography isn't a huge sub-discipline in the United States,
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but it's essentially a cross-section between geography and anthropology. So I find interesting
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groups of people who are kind of redefining the spaces around them. And I did my PhD with these
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urban explorers who were sneaking into off-limits spaces in cities. They were sneaking into abandoned
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buildings, construction sites, infrastructural systems. And they had this kind of really
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fascinating philosophy where they told me that they saw the city as sort of like an operating
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system, right? It's built to force people to function in a particular way, right? It forces
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you to move through the city in a certain way, to interact with it in a certain way.
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And what they were doing, I eventually came to call place hacking because it was kind of like
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they were hacking the operating system of the city. They were trying to wiggle into the guts and
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see how things work. And their curiosity was just overwhelming. And I ended up spending 10 years
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with these explorers, sneaking into hundreds of off-limits locations all over the world and saw some
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pretty incredible things. And that ended up being my first book, Explore Everything, Place Hacking the
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City. What was the most incredible thing you came across during that 10 years?
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There's so much. So we went on this 10-day road trip around Europe and snuck into about 100
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buildings. And at the end of it, we had some intel that there was a metro system in Antwerp in Belgium
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that was, they started constructing in the 1980s, I believe, and they never finished it. And we looked
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on Google Earth and there was a massive hole that you could see from Google Earth. And so we went out
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about 3 a.m. with some ropes and we rappelled into the hole. And we ended up dropping down about 100
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feet onto a train platform. And we flicked on the light switch and all the lights came on in this
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metro system. So imagine this, there's about, I don't know, seven, eight miles of tunnel system,
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but the tracks were never laid. The platforms were there, but the trains were never brought in.
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And we walked the entire thing and thought at one point, actually, that we were stuck in there
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because the ascenders that we had to get back up the ropes got jammed. And luckily, we found a fire
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exit, but it got a bit hairy there for a minute. We thought we were going to have to call the fire
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In urban exploration, it's like that gray area. It's usually illegal, sometimes not, but typically
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illegal. Did you ever get in trouble for doing this stuff?
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You know, I've been caught a handful of times. And more often than not, it's a security guard
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that catches you, not a police officer. And they don't really want to let the people that they work
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for know that they found four people with backpacks and cameras wandering around and wherever.
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We did have one instance where the police were called. We were on top of a roof in London,
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taking photos of the city. And we heard all these sirens. We were like, oh, something's going on
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down there. And we looked over the edge of the building and they had surrounded the building.
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And so they obviously were there for us and they were going to bring in dogs. There was no doubt about
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it. So we just, we went down, hands up, you know, and said, hey, we're photographers,
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you know, we're not doing anything nefarious. And one of the police officers said, you know,
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he's like, well, you're not photographers. Let me see your camera. So we start flipping through
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the photos and he said, oh, these photos are, these are fantastic. He was actually really kind
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of interested in what we were doing. But, you know, eventually he said, look, I'll let you guys go,
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but you need to delete all those photos. Because obviously the property owner is not very happy
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about the prospect of you releasing those online and everyone realizing that their security is lax.
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So yeah, it is a gray area in that not a lot of people, most of the time, people don't know that
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we're there, right? Until the photos are posted. And sometimes people really don't care at all.
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But every once in a while, you know, we get into something that we, it's like super sensitive
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state infrastructure, and then you can end up in some trouble. And eventually we did have a
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police investigation launched against us because we were sneaking into all the abandoned
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metro stations in the London tube. And the British transport police who are in charge of security
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there were really not happy that we were getting away with that. So they eventually took down our
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doors with battering rams and confiscated all of our equipment and sent us to court. And the court
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threw out the charges, but we ended up being on bail for two years. They took my passport,
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so I got stuck in the UK for two years awaiting trial. And, you know, by the time we actually
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got to trial, I felt like I had already served the sentence for what we were doing.
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All right. So urban exploration, it's sort of, it's a subversive subculture, right? Because
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you're doing things that are, you know, you're going to places where you shouldn't go. And your work
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with urban exploration led you to exploring the cultures of bunkers, prepping, and survivalism.
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Well, one of the places, so we ended up finding all these Cold War bunkers that were underneath
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London. And obviously they were, they were built for a nuclear attack on the Capitol and they were
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never used. And I mean, some of them, they were fascinating. They still had supplies in them.
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They still had food and water, you know, signage to direct people where to go. And you can kind of
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imagine people being down there and thinking about when they're going to emerge from this bunker into
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the post-apocalyptic world, right? Like imagine popping the hatch to that bunker and you emerge
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into this like blast stricken city that's totally irradiated. And I kept running through those
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fantasies in my head about, you know, these bunkers that were never used. And then one of the bunkers
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that we had explored called Burlington, it's in Wiltshire, just outside of London. It's a massive
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subterranean secret city. There's about 60 miles of roads down there, radio broadcasting facilities,
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a library that you would need to reconstruct the government in the event of nuclear war,
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totally fascinating place. Well, this bunker, the government obviously didn't know what to do
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with it after the end of the Cold War. And so they put it up for sale.
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And one of the potential buyers was a California real estate developer called Robert Vecino.
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And I just called Robert and said, what do you want to do with this thing? And he outlined for me
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this incredible scenario where, you know, that kind of mirrored what the government had planned to do,
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but he was going to do it for private individuals. He wanted to purchase the bunker and then kit it out
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for about 300 people. And the idea was that, you know, his paying clients would be able to retreat
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into that bunker, wait out some sort of calamity and then emerge into the post-apocalyptic world.
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And that was the beginning of my research with preppers. And I've spent the past three years
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traveling to four continents and interviewing more than a hundred people, seeing the bunkers that
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they're building and talking to them about the apprehensions that they have about this kind of
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uncertain future that we all seem to be headed into.
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Well, and when we think of bunkers, we typically think of it as like a relatively modern thing,
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right? It's like coming across like the abandoned Cold War bunker because everyone was freaked out
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there was going to be nuclear annihilation. But you highlight the fact that being in the book that
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humans have been building bunkers like for millennia. So what are some examples of ancient bunkers that
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we know about? Well, it's obviously hard to trace back, you know, some kind of original bunker
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because human beings would have been moving into caves where they would have been caching supplies
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and stockpiling things and probably building up some sort of defenses. But in terms of large scale
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communal bunkers, we can actually trace those back 2000 years to central Anatolia, what is now Turkey.
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And if anyone ever gets a chance to go out, I mean, who knows when we're going to travel again,
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but if anyone gets a chance to go to Istanbul, you can actually jump on a bus to Cappadocia
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and see some of these subterranean cities. One of them that was constructed was first carved out by
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the Hittites in 530 BCE, I think. And eventually they had room underground for 20,000 people.
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So again, these are huge subterranean cities. They would have had livestock down there,
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stockpiled supplies. And, you know, this was a space of protection. You know, the underground
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has always been for human beings a place where we protect what is most important to us. It's space
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for defense. It's also where we bury the things that we're scared of. You know, we've got long
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associations with cultural associations with the underground and the underworld, you know,
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so it's a place of fear, but also a place of safety. And that juxtaposition, you know,
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flows through over the next 2,000 years. By the time we get to World War II and the Cold War,
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you know, bunkers are being built en masse all over the world. But, you know, they are a reflection
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of our past. You know, they're a reflection of our speculative anxieties about all the things that
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could go wrong in the world. And for me, that feels like they're a very human space. You know,
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human beings are unique in their ability to speculate about things that might happen and prepare for
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those things. Well, let's talk about, so we've been building bunkers for a long time in different
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forms. But yeah, it really took off in the 20th century, because we all know it's like the threat
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of nuclear annihilation. That was the thing. Everyone started building bunkers. Governments
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started building bunkers. But you also explore, what I didn't know about this, decisions that U.S.
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leaders made in the 1940s, 1950s, that influenced how bunker building was approached in the United
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States. So what decisions did they make that influenced, and like what happened in America that
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differed in other countries? So there was a team of nuclear strategists that were kind of philosophers
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or fascinating people that were trying to think through the psychological, ethical, moral, social,
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political implications of nuclear war. And one of those strategists was called Herman Kahn. He worked
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for the Rand Corporation. And Kahn came up with an estimate, which he supplied to the government
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to create blast shelters for every American. So a blast shelter is different than a fallout
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shelter, right? A fallout shelter is, it couldn't take a bomb hit, right? But you could hide in there
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for a couple of weeks and then re-emerge when the radiation levels are low. So Kahn said that's not
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sufficient. What we need is blast shelters for every American. And the estimate that he submitted,
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I think to the Eisenhower administration, where essentially the, it was essentially our gross
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domestic product for a year. It was an astronomical sum of money. So the Eisenhower administration made
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the decision eventually to spend, I think, one one-thousandth of that on basically locating places
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that could be used as fallout shelters, like parking garages, for instance. And every once in a while,
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when you're traveling around, you'll see these small signs that have the radiation symbol on them,
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and they say fallout shelter. Those are from the Cold War. But essentially what happened is that
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in the background, the government was building bunkers for themselves. So they were the Greenbrier
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Resort in West Virginia, for instance, they started building a massive bunker under there.
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Obviously, the White House has a bunker under it. They started building large-scale underground
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government facilities at NORAD, Raven Rock. And we didn't realize that, you know, the general public
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didn't realize that this had happened until after the Cold War. And I think there was a real sense of
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betrayal because in other parts of the world, the government did build those blast shelters for
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every human being. In Switzerland, for instance, they've got space for 110% of the population,
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which I find hilarious. And I guess they just built some extra space in case tourists are in town or
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whatever. You know, it's a very different philosophy. And it draws a sharp contrast between
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the kind of small state, you know, rugged individualism, take care of yourself ethos that
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we have here in the United States. You know, that sits in stark contrast with places in Scandinavia
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and in Europe, and even in the Soviet Union, where they did a much better job of building protection
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for everyone. Which, which at the end of the day, wasn't needed, of course. You know, these places
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look like architectural follies to us now. They were never used for their intended purposes. But
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if that nuclear war had unfolded in the way that it was expected, it might, the United States would
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have been in a terrible situation. Well, and like most things, if the state's not going to provide
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something, the private sector will step in and provide a service that people want. So you saw, you
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highlight like this too, in the fifties, private companies or even magazines, publications, giving
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families, people instructions on how to build their own blast shelter. Yeah, yeah. Sears was in on it.
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There were a number of companies that were, that were selling these kind of backyard fallout shelters.
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Social scientists call this the doom boom, this kind of multi-million dollar industry that emerged
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almost overnight in response to the nuclear threat. And, and the clear government mandate pushing the
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burden of preparation on individuals. There was actually a famous speech that Kennedy gave in
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1961, where he said, essentially, it was the responsibility of every American to make their
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own preparations for nuclear war. And, and so yeah, a private market emerged as it always will
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to serve those needs. And what we're seeing right now around the world, and what, what my book is
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primarily about is this second doom boom. We're, we're back in a moment where people feel incredibly
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uneasy about not just nuclear war, but the possibility of, you know, artificial intelligence running
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rampant or an asteroid slamming into the earth or, you know, political unrest, you know, civil war 2.0
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breaking out. And, and so people are going to these bunker builders in droves and the private
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industry is emerging to meet those demands again. And now we're looking at a, a multi-billion dollar
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industry, which is serving up, according to my most recent estimates, almost 12 million Americans
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who are actively prepping. Well, okay. So let's talk about the, the state of bunker building today
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and like what's driving it, like the psychology of it. So in times past ancient times, they were
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probably bunkering for war in the fifties. They were, people were bunkering because they're afraid
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there's going to be a nuke drop near them. So they had to be ready for that. And you just talk,
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highlight a whole bunch of things that the people you talk to, you know, spouted off and the reason why
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they were building a bunker where they were prepping. And what's interesting about all these
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different things, whether it's AI, political unrest, you know, nuclear stuff still on the table
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is that it's not like a specific fear. You said it's more like instead of people are just sort of
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dread, they're just dreading the future. So how, what's the, what do you think is the difference
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between fear and dread? And like, why do you think dread is like a big driving cause of the bunker
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building? It's a, it's a great question. I spent inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the
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difference between anxiety, dread and fear as I was working through this book, because you're right.
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It's, you know, fear, fear has an object, you know, it's, it's concrete. It's, you can, you can
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pinpoint the thing that you fear. Whereas dread is more amorphous or anxiety is more amorphous as well,
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right? It's, you're feeling a sense of dread about a general sense. It's a general sense of unease.
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It's kind of hard to put parameters around. And a lot of the people, a lot of the preppers that I
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spoke to for this book, they didn't have a specific thing that they were prepping for. They were prepping
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for a range of calamities and that it affects the way that you build, you know, because if you're,
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if you're putting a, an air filter on your bunker, for instance, you make sure that it, it can filter
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out nuclear biological and chemical contaminants. If you're worried about an electromagnetic pulse,
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you know, that, that could be produced from a, a coronal mass ejection from the sun or potentially
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the detonation of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere that would wipe out electrical systems,
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then you, you harden for that, right? You get hardened solar panels, battery backups, you,
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you shield everything. And if you interpret the architecture of these bunker builders who are,
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you know, who are all around us building these communities in that way, you start to see the
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architecture of dread. You start to see that people are building for, they're building for the unknown.
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And we can see that in other points in the past too. One of my favorite examples is in Mexico,
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in the Yucatan Peninsula, just at the end of the, the post-classic Maya era, when the Spanish had come
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over and brought disease with them, the Maya didn't know what, where these diseases were coming from.
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And so they started building walls. They'd never built walls before around their settlements. And so
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you get these kind of, you know, beautiful pyramids that had been there for thousands of years. And then
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suddenly they start building these, these kind of really haphazard walls around the places that
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they're residing to keep out the virus, to keep out the diseases that they can't see because they don't
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know where they're coming from. The architecture of dread that I'm seeing now that, that I explore
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in this book, you know, feels to me like a, like a similar, you know, like it's mirroring that
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history, you know, that if we were to look back at this a hundred years from now, it tells a story
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about our collective sense of unease. And that's, that's essentially what the book is about.
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Yeah. So it sounds like, it sounds like, I mean, sure if humans have experienced dread throughout,
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you know, history, but it sounds like dread is a very modern phenomenon because there's,
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because we, we know, we know so many possible unknowns. And so you have to like prepare for
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all of them. And that's pretty much impossible to do. Well, you know, like we all have this sense
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that watching the news makes us really depressed because you, you learn about things that you don't
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necessarily need to know about, but it's depressing to know them anyway. If you had no idea that an
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asteroid was coming to hit the earth, you wouldn't care. It would just happen and you'd be dead.
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Right. But now of course we would have, we would have information about that. We would be,
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we would all be watching it approaching on the news and, and, you know, going through.
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It'd be a live stream. Yeah, completely. But it's kind of, you know, we're just saturated with this,
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with this drip feed of dread, you know, bad news from every corner of the world, 24 hours a day.
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And we're also, I think this is really important. We're also confronting more existential threats
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than we ever have in history. So an existential threat, meaning something that could actually
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exterminate our entire species. Most of the existential threats that we face are things
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that we've created. And so that's kind of an interesting thing that we're putting ourselves
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through all of these psychological machinations because of situations that we've created.
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We created nuclear weapons. You know, we, we are creating the automation that may put us out of
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jobs. We're creating the artificial intelligence that may decide that we're in the way of its own
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advancement and wipe us out. You know, all of these things are issues that, that, you know,
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some people are concerned about and are running through in their heads all the time. And that's,
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that's absolutely affecting our psychology. It's affecting our behavior. It's affecting our social
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systems, our social fabric. You know, all of these things are being drastically affected. And it's,
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this is a unique point in human history. There's never been another time when we face such
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myriad existential threats. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So as you explore different companies, building bunkers for people,
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what I found, there's like basically two general approaches on how in the, in this bunker building
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world and how to do it. There's a communal approach where you build bunkers where a whole
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bunch of people live together. And then there's like the rugged individualist where everyone has
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like sort of like the 1950s in America model. Like everyone has their own bunker in their backyard
00:22:51.740
that they can go to. When you talk to people who in these two camps, like why would,
00:22:56.960
did you ever get a feel like why one person would be drawn to one approach or the other?
00:23:01.900
Yeah, it was really interesting. The, the backyard bunker builders would tell me that,
00:23:06.160
you know, the problem is other people. And so you, you can't trust people. You don't know who
00:23:10.400
you're going to end up in that bunker community with. And the people who are moving into communities
00:23:14.960
were saying, you're never going to survive on your own. You know, you need a community of people
00:23:19.660
with complimentary skills that can help people get through things. So it is very much a breakdown
00:23:25.880
between, you know, are we creating a new tribe to make it through together or is it, or is it,
00:23:32.040
you know, every, every man for himself and the, the cold war reaction to the existential threat of
00:23:39.320
nuclear war was definitely a, you know, I'm going to protect myself and my family and build a bunker
00:23:45.800
in my backyard. And I'm going to protect that bunker from my neighbors. It's interesting to me
00:23:51.120
that we're now seeing, I would say the majority of prepper communities or prepper developments
00:23:58.180
are communities. Now they're, they're people who are moving in together and seeking not just safety
00:24:05.280
in a material defensive sense, right. But, but also seeking community. People are kind of desperate to
00:24:11.740
find a connection again. And so the, the building of the bunker and the stockpiling of it and learning
00:24:18.760
about renewable technologies and, and all of that is part of the process of building a new community
00:24:24.560
of, of like-minded people that you might survive with. So let's talk about one of these companies
00:24:28.800
who, who's trying to build communities of bunkers. And it's the first one is the Vivos group. Tell us
00:24:33.940
about them and what's their approach and what are the people who are buying space from them?
00:24:37.440
Well, so just to be clear, the Vivos group is, is Robert Vecino. He's the guy who was going to buy
00:24:42.560
that bunker in England that initially got me, got me into this project. And when I spoke to him,
00:24:48.680
he was just in the process of acquiring these bunkers in South Dakota from the U S government.
00:24:55.460
These are World War II bunkers. They were built originally to store ordnance. So they were,
00:25:00.220
they were full of bombs, which is wonderfully ironic that you would build a bunker to protect bombs.
00:25:04.760
And now they're protecting people. But Roberts, his idea was that he would purchase this bunker
00:25:12.220
field. There's 575 semi-subterranean concrete bunkers there that stretch over an area about
00:25:19.880
three quarters the size of Manhattan. It's an absolutely huge facility. And his idea was that
00:25:25.440
he would buy this, this facility and then sell off the individual bunkers. Initially they were 25
00:25:30.800
grand. I think he's now in phase two. So it's, it's literally like a, like a real estate development,
00:25:36.060
you know, phase one sold out and now he's selling phase two and phase two is going for, for 35,000.
00:25:41.920
And I was there, I was there on day one. I met the first four preppers that moved into the place.
00:25:48.020
There was Milton. He was, uh, he worked for the Chicago VA as an IT manager. He eventually
00:25:54.120
quit his job and moved into the bunker full-time. Mark, an engineer from Minnesota. Tom, who's working
00:26:01.400
in, in biotech in Atlanta. A totally fascinating community of, of people from very different
00:26:08.460
backgrounds who came there with their families and they were interested in, in buying into this
00:26:13.820
community and building something new. And we're about, I think three years on now from my first
00:26:20.300
visit to that place. And I've, I've gone back periodically to check in with everyone and,
00:26:24.040
and it's, it's blooming. I mean, it's kind of incredible. There's, there must be 30 or 40
00:26:28.660
families and individuals living there now. And it's starting to look like a, like a typical
00:26:34.560
American suburban cul-de-sac, you know, with white picket fences and American flags hanging over the
00:26:40.940
blast doors. At the beginning of the, the coronavirus pandemic, I sent them a message to ask if they were
00:26:47.060
all going to be retreating to their bunkers. And, and they said, yep, we're all here. No one's
00:26:52.060
infected. Everyone's safe. No one's coming in or out. We've got all the supplies we need. And they
00:26:56.240
were happily barbecuing while the rest of us were panic shopping for toilet paper.
00:27:00.720
And so just to be clear, some of the people who own these bunkers plan to come to these bunkers
00:27:04.640
whenever there's an emergency, but there's some people who live there full-time already,
00:27:07.980
but these bunkers, they're just basically little cement rooms, right?
00:27:11.660
Exactly. Yeah. Like, you know, you could fit an 18 wheeler in there,
00:27:14.640
you know, they're about that size, but the, but the blast door, you couldn't actually get a vehicle
00:27:19.240
through the blast door, which are incredibly heavy. Or so the, the Vivos group, they seem to be
00:27:23.400
offering a very like basic, you know, relatively affordable bunker option. Like you get a, you get
00:27:27.820
the cement room and then you, it's up to you to deck it out how you want. But then you go visit this
00:27:33.160
company who is trying to build like a community of like a lux bunker for like high net worth individuals.
00:27:41.620
Let's talk about the, it's being built in an abandoned missile silo. So this is the other,
00:27:46.060
this is another irony, right? So we're, we're turning these, we're turning things that were
00:27:50.220
once housing missiles with that had warheads on them. Now we're going to go to them for safety.
00:27:55.560
Tell us about this company and what they're doing and who's, who's the, who are the type of people
00:27:59.080
who are joining this community? Yeah, this guy is called Larry Hall. He's a, another property
00:28:03.800
developer based in Kansas. And he purchased an Atlas F nuclear missile silo from the U.S.
00:28:11.180
government for $300,000 and then spent 10 million of his own money, turning this into a 15 story
00:28:18.560
inverted skyscraper. So there's, there's condos inside this missile silo now. And when you take,
00:28:25.660
you get in the elevator and it takes you down instead of up and you descend into the building
00:28:30.280
and he's selling half floor condos for 1.5 million, full floor condos for 3 million.
00:28:37.460
And the incredible thing about this facility, we'll get into the technical details, but the,
00:28:43.640
the most incredible thing about it is that he sold out within the first year. He sold every single
00:28:48.620
condo in there and I think made about 10 million in profits, which he's now using to build a second
00:28:54.260
one. He bought another one from the federal government. So you could eventually imagine this
00:28:59.600
kind of archipelago of subterranean citadels stretching across Kansas. I mean, in a, in a,
00:29:06.400
in a landscape, it's almost devoid of topography. You know, the only hills that you see are the
00:29:12.260
mounds sitting on top of the bunkers, but this could withstand a nuclear warhead. You know, you could drop
00:29:18.340
it right on this bunker and it would survive. They've got nuclear biological chemical air filters,
00:29:24.100
volcanic ash scrubbers, reverse osmosis, water filtration systems. I think he has three
00:29:30.960
different power systems. He's got solar, wind, and diesel generators as a backup. And he's got
00:29:37.780
diesel fuel for five years. So they could, they can run totally off the grid inside this bunker.
00:29:44.020
And he's also got a lot of amenities down there, a rock climbing wall, a dog park, swimming pool,
00:29:50.800
library, movie theater. It's a, you know, I was down there for a day and I could quite happily
00:29:58.840
stay down there for three months. I actually offered to finish my book in the bunker and he,
00:30:02.580
he kicked me out. But I mean, it's a, they even got a shooting range down there. And when I asked him
00:30:08.960
about all of those, you know, luxuries, he said, he said, these aren't luxuries. He said, if you're
00:30:14.040
going to lock people inside a bunker and tell them that they can't leave because it's in their own best
00:30:19.860
interest. And this is the service they paid for is we're going to protect them from what's
00:30:23.440
happening outside of the bunker. You've got to keep those people distracted. You know, his,
00:30:28.200
his goal was to, to have people feel a sense after they had gone into lockdown that they were
00:30:34.420
continuing life as they had been as much as possible. So he told me he wanted it to function
00:30:38.380
like a cruise ship. And there's an interesting, all of the bunker builders that I spoke to were kind
00:30:44.540
of obsessed with time. Like they, they had a, they had a number that they wanted to hit like three
00:30:49.900
months, one year, five years, and they would build the bunkers for that time. So this goes back to
00:30:55.700
what we were talking about. You know, you don't build for a specific threat, you build for a time
00:31:01.120
period. And so Larry Hall told me, you know, I've built this thing for five years. And in those five
00:31:07.260
years, there's going to be rotating jobs. We're going to make sure that everyone knows how to do
00:31:12.080
everything in this bunker, but we're also going to make sure that people are keeping themselves
00:31:16.400
entertained, that things are kept under control. They had a grocery store in there. And he said,
00:31:20.820
we, we insist that everyone comes grocery shopping every three days, just so that they
00:31:25.900
see each other. You know, we don't want anyone taking all the food and locking themselves in their
00:31:29.540
room. He put a great deal of thought into maintaining psychological and social equilibrium inside
00:31:37.320
the bunker. However, I think this is a really important point in contrast to South Dakota,
00:31:43.520
where all of those residents were, were building together, talking together, like they've already
00:31:49.240
built a community. In contrast to that, the people who had bought space in Larry Hall's bunker, who
00:31:55.120
obviously are millionaires and billionaires that can afford to spend that much money, cash, by the way,
00:32:01.060
for these bunkers, they had never lived in it. So, and they don't know each other. So you,
00:32:06.160
you really have no idea who you're going to end up locked in this bunker with for five years. And
00:32:10.120
I, I guess that's, you know, that's the beginning of the fictional horror story that you could write
00:32:14.360
about the survival condo. Right. It sounds like a Twilight Zone episode or like a 1950s existential
00:32:20.000
novel, like by Sartre or Camus or something like that. So that's the setup. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:25.160
It's what Sartre said. Hell is other people. Right. You know, that's his play. No exit is just
00:32:30.360
three people stuck in a, stuck in a room. It's like the worst possible thing you can imagine.
00:32:34.020
All right. So we got that luck. So these are, these are companies who are catering towards
00:32:38.500
helping people build communities or live together, building bunkers and lots of people together.
00:32:42.700
But then there's still companies out there who are catering to people who just want a bunker in
00:32:46.000
their backyard. And so these people, they say they just want to take care of themselves. And it seems
00:32:50.480
like it's not just, they don't want to, they think other people are the problem. It seems like I got
00:32:55.500
the hunch from reading your book that these folks also like building a bunker in their backyard was
00:33:00.060
sort of an act of rebellion or they're trying to, it was about privacy. Like they didn't want
00:33:04.440
the government or like Amazon or Google to know they had this thing in their backyard.
00:33:09.440
Yeah. So I guess that's one of the arguments of the, of the backyard builders is they would say
00:33:14.300
that these communities, whether it's survival condo or X point or wherever they, those communities
00:33:20.620
are known, you know, they are on the map and they feel that those communities are going to become
00:33:26.240
a target if things go rapidly downhill. And so these backyard builders, you know, are buying bunkers.
00:33:33.620
Often they're having them delivered in the middle of the night and having them buried in their
00:33:37.980
backyards when no one's looking. And for a lot of them, they're concerned about surveillance,
00:33:46.140
tracking, they're worried about aerial imagery, satellites, the phone in their pockets, which are
00:33:52.540
tracking their every movements. And, and so the, the bunker for them is a, it's kind of like the
00:33:57.340
ultimate man cave, right? It's like where you can hide your phone doesn't work. No one knows that
00:34:01.760
it's there if you've done a good job hiding it. And yeah, for many of them, they, they explained it to
00:34:07.380
me as an act of resistance against the surveillance state. You know, they didn't want people, they wanted
00:34:12.360
to have something that was, that was theirs and that was secret and a secret they didn't need to share
00:34:17.500
with anyone. And I, it feels to me like that is now the primary reason for building backyard bunkers.
00:34:24.880
You know, no one is under the illusion that you're going to be able to survive for, you know, three
00:34:29.860
months in this bunker. I mean, particularly after, you know, we've all now suffered the self-isolation
00:34:36.500
of dealing with the pandemic and we know how we all start to crack, you know, just six weeks in.
00:34:42.180
I mean, it's just insufferable. You know, you want to get outside, you want to see people and talk to
00:34:45.840
people. So no, no one's under the illusion that they're going to be able to spend months or years
00:34:51.080
in their backyard bunker, but it does give them a place, you know, it's like a, it's like a storm
00:34:56.080
shelter, right? It gives them a place where they could, they could go down for two or three days
00:35:00.580
and make it through an event. And in the meantime, they can use it as a kind of, you know, secret
00:35:06.860
space to work on their own projects without being, without being tracked and surveilled.
00:35:11.700
And these things, these backyard bunkers, they're usually just like a corrugated pipe,
00:35:14.100
right? Like a big giant thing you put in the ground and you put dirt over it.
00:35:17.260
Yeah. So there's two major manufacturers. The first is, is Atlas shelters. And the second
00:35:22.460
is Rising S. And I spent time in both of their factories and they've got totally different
00:35:26.860
methods. Atlas S does these, these circular corrugated iron backyard shelters. And then
00:35:33.420
Rising S does these big blocky steel shelters that almost look like, like Legos. Like you could
00:35:39.940
piece them together. So if you, if you wanted a bigger bunker, you could just kind of weld
00:35:43.740
another one onto it and make, build a longer one. And these guys are hilarious. They're,
00:35:49.080
they're at war with each other on social media, on YouTube, just trash talking each other constantly,
00:35:55.260
you know, trying to find the other guy's bunker that has collapsed, you know, to prove that they're
00:36:00.420
a fraud. I mean, it's, it's a, they should, they should make a reality TV show about these
00:36:04.960
guys. I bet there will be. So we've been talking about bunker building the United States and we
00:36:10.900
typically think of prepping and survivalism as sort of an American phenomenon, but you visited
00:36:14.620
other countries where there's also prepping cultures. Any, any countries stood out to you
00:36:20.100
in particular? Like, how is it different from the United States? Well, it's so in, in Europe,
00:36:26.260
for instance, people don't have the space that we have. And so, you know, prepping for them
00:36:31.100
often was having an escape plan, stockpiling a bit of extra food. I mean, I saw people stuffing
00:36:38.860
things under their beds, you know, absolutely filling every nook and cranny in, in their tiny
00:36:45.320
apartments that they could to be better prepared. And then I went to, I went to Thailand because
00:36:50.920
there was a Canadian who had moved to Thailand to build this, what he called it an eco fortress.
00:36:56.380
It was kind of, it was like a, like a block citadel that he had built in an abandoned orchard
00:37:02.160
in, uh, just outside of Chiang Mai. It was the most bizarre location to build a bunker that
00:37:09.380
I can imagine in this, in this tiny village. But his idea was that it would, he wanted to
00:37:14.160
build this kind of off grid second home that was a bunker. I mean, it had a nuclear fallout
00:37:20.480
shelter and man traps and, uh, you know, CCTV systems. There were no windows on the bottom.
00:37:27.040
So it's incredibly difficult to assail. All of the windows are bulletproof, but he went,
00:37:32.600
he didn't want it to feel like a bunker. So it had this, the middle of the building was
00:37:37.100
an open atrium and light would flood through into the center of the building down to the
00:37:42.840
swimming pool. He was growing vines of passion fruit along the walls. I mean, it was a, it was
00:37:49.260
a beautiful location. And then he took me up to the roof where he had, he had a hatch that
00:37:54.060
he could lock from the roof. So if someone actually got into the building, he could get
00:37:57.860
onto the roof and lock the hatch. And that would be his, his final holdout. And, uh, he
00:38:03.500
was showing me his solar panel array on the roof. And I looked across the, the jungle that
00:38:08.640
was behind his bunker and there was a Buddhist watt there. And there's this like 20 foot tall
00:38:16.500
gold Buddha that was emerging from the jungle, staring at this doomsday bunker that a Canadian
00:38:22.120
had built in the middle of the jungle. It was just one of those moments that is just, I
00:38:26.920
mean, there were a lot of surreal moments in the course of writing this book, but I think
00:38:30.960
that that really takes the cake in terms of just being utterly shocked by people's ambition
00:38:36.700
and audacity and building these kinds of spaces. And that story, actually this, this didn't
00:38:42.680
make it into the book because it happened after I finished, after we published, but that story has
00:38:47.320
a really unfortunate ending. Augie, the guy who had built that, he worked on oil rigs. That's how
00:38:53.120
he made his money. And he was actually on an oil rig when the pandemic hit and he got stuck on the
00:39:00.140
rig for two months, I think, and then stuck for another two months because Thailand wouldn't let him
00:39:05.880
in because he didn't have a Thai passport. And so his wife and kid were, were inside his like
00:39:12.680
80% finished bunker while he got trapped kind of floating around the world in the midst of the
00:39:18.840
pandemic, precisely the thing that he had been building the bunker for.
00:39:23.140
Man. So, I mean, besides Thailand, you went to Australia and I thought that was interesting.
00:39:27.480
The prepping culture in Australia, they're prepping, their main concern is like wildfires.
00:39:31.800
That was like the wildfires they had a few years ago. That really kicked off prepping in Australia.
00:39:36.700
Yeah. They had terrible fires in Victoria. Hundreds of people died or burned to death. I mean,
00:39:41.680
it was a really tragic situation. And of course the bushfires have been escalating every year.
00:39:47.060
Last year, essentially the entire continent was on fire. I think over a billion animals died in those
00:39:53.320
wildfires. And so people there, they respond to that in two ways. And you'll find this is common
00:39:59.100
with preppers that they either want to bug in or bug out, right? Do you hunker down and stay where you
00:40:05.660
are to make it through things? Or do you pack up a rig, four-wheel drive, mobile bunker, and then take
00:40:12.500
off and get out of harm's way? So I met a lot of Australians that had built these like incredible
00:40:17.600
four-wheel drive vehicles with tents on top of them and every supply you could possibly imagine
00:40:23.320
towed in trailers. Those were pretty cool to watch people deploy in the middle of the bush,
00:40:29.700
you know, a hundred miles from anything. And they're like doing their laundry on a solar panel,
00:40:35.660
you know? But then there were also people who were buying, they're called fire bunkers. For about
00:40:40.780
25 grand, you can have someone put a bunker in your backyard, just like those nuclear fallout shelters
00:40:46.480
people were building during the Cold War. But these are, they're sealed, they're airtight. So if you've
00:40:53.140
got a fire that's raging through, you can get into this bunker and lock the hatch and it's fireproof.
00:41:00.000
And you've got an hour or two of oxygen in there and then a couple of backup tanks if you need to go
00:41:04.420
onto those. And essentially you just let the fire pass over you. And the idea is, you know, you might
00:41:10.280
lose your property, but you won't lose your life. And people, one of the guys that I talked to who was
00:41:15.860
building these bunkers said he was absolutely overwhelmed. I mean, he's got like, the backlog goes on for
00:41:21.100
years for projects. So if anyone wants to make some serious money, move to Australia and go open a
00:41:26.820
fire bunker company. Well, you mentioned bugging out. And so these in Australia, they're building
00:41:31.380
these rigs, but there's like, there's a market in the United States for building what's called bug
00:41:34.660
out vehicles. And they look like, like a war rigs from, you know, some apocalyptic movie. I mean,
00:41:40.280
like, so what are the, I mean, are, are these, are these bug out vehicles? Are they designed to get
00:41:43.960
you somewhere or are they just designed where you can like live in it too? It's a bit of both. So I visited these
00:41:49.280
guys in Utah that started buying Humvees from the U S military. And essentially when you buy it from
00:41:57.500
the military, you can get them with really low miles because sometimes they just use them to
00:42:01.160
drive around a base or whatever. And, but before they sell them, they take the, they take the armor
00:42:06.260
off of them. And so these guys were started making armor kits and they would buy the vehicles from the
00:42:12.260
government, put the armor back on them and then sell them on the private market. So again, you know,
00:42:17.640
private industry stepping in to do what government isn't doing is you can't, you know, you can't buy
00:42:21.980
these vehicles commercially. And these guys made it very clear that they didn't have any faith in
00:42:27.980
FEMA, for instance, to show up on time and ready to go in the case of an emergency. So they just
00:42:35.640
started building their own vehicles and the vehicles got more and more extreme. Eventually they started
00:42:41.600
putting gun turrets on top of them. They've got these kind of armored RVs, six wheel drive RVs
00:42:48.160
with beds and showers in them. And some of those are stocked with supplies as well. So you could
00:42:53.420
essentially live out of it. And what they told me, so they, they, they started going into disasters
00:43:00.340
and they, they told me that they never intended to build these vehicles to escape from something.
00:43:05.540
They built these vehicles to assist. So they, again, they were stepping in where the government,
00:43:10.000
they felt the government wasn't doing their job and they had gone into a couple of disasters.
00:43:15.260
Like there was some flooding in Wimberley, Texas, a couple of years ago, and they went into the flood
00:43:20.880
zone and were actually rescuing people. And they had a couple of encounters with FEMA where FEMA told
00:43:25.560
them to, to, to stop helping, which is kind of incredible because they felt like they were doing a,
00:43:31.100
a public service almost, but they've, they've now created a disaster relief crew and they've got
00:43:37.900
people on call all over the country who have bought these vehicles. And when disaster strikes
00:43:42.740
somewhere, they will call people in the local area who they know have the vehicles and are equipped
00:43:47.360
to help and they'll send them into the, the disaster zone.
00:43:50.740
Well, yeah, this is interesting because you talk about different approaches. Like there's different
00:43:53.180
like subcultures of prepping within the larger prepping culture. And these guys in Utah are in
00:43:58.460
Utah that you're, they're Mormon. And it seemed like you were, you went to Utah to also talk to Mormons
00:44:03.400
because Mormons, they do a lot of prepping, they got food storage and whatnot. And you kind of,
00:44:07.280
you saw like a subtle difference in how, what their approach was to say someone in some other
00:44:11.700
part of the United States. Yeah. You know, I mean, getting access to some of these facilities,
00:44:15.800
like the survival condo, the, the, uh, subterranean skyscraper in Kansas, it took me over a year.
00:44:22.980
You know, I had to just, I had to just badger the hell out of them to, to be able to get access to that.
00:44:26.780
When I went to Utah, the Mormons just let me into everything. They were, they're,
00:44:31.220
they're the easiest people to do field work with. I would roll up to, uh, these factories where they
00:44:38.860
were, they were producing oats, pasta, you know, long-term food storage that they were putting in
00:44:44.740
25 year shelf life cans. And those end up in, in people's basements all around Salt Lake City,
00:44:51.160
all around Utah, you know, they would just let me into the factory. Let me see everything volunteer
00:44:56.540
on the line if I wanted to. And then eventually I started going to people's houses and seeing their
00:45:01.240
basements and talking to them about their, the preparations they'd made. And they all made it
00:45:05.540
very clear that the, since the cold war, the church has asked them to prep. They've asked these
00:45:12.200
people to set aside at least three months worth of food. And the idea was, was never that that food
00:45:19.000
was to sustain themselves or their families solely. It was about being able to pool those resources in
00:45:25.900
the event of a disaster and make sure that everyone in the church could make it through. So again,
00:45:29.820
a community ethos. And there's another interesting connection there because one of the, I guess,
00:45:35.120
prophets of the church that was on the quorum of the 12 apostles, Ezra Taft Benson, he was one of
00:45:41.220
those people that was encouraging Mormon families to prep during the cold war. And he also ended up
00:45:47.460
advising the, I think it was the Eisenhower administration on.
00:45:55.100
Secretary of agriculture. Right. And, and so the idea that the government would encourage
00:46:01.060
everyday citizens to make their own preparations, I think that actually came from him. So it actually
00:46:08.520
So we, when you talk to these people, a lot of their focus is like on building the bunker and
00:46:14.300
preparing and being safe whenever, whatever event they're preparing for happens. But when you talk
00:46:19.440
to these people, like, did they have like, do you get an idea they had a plan of what they're going
00:46:22.500
to do after, like when they had to leave the bunker?
00:46:26.500
Yeah. The, the emergence into the post-apocalyptic world. I, you know, a lot of, um, a lot of these
00:46:33.540
preppers and particularly the bunker builders who I, who I call the dread merchants in the book,
00:46:39.340
you know, it's, it's in their interest to stoke people's fears. It's in their interest to, to make
00:46:45.860
people feel that the world is a terrible place and that we're, we're headed down the wrong track
00:46:51.460
because all of that's going to help sales. But when I would ask them, well, you know, what is the
00:46:55.660
plan on the other side? Then it would turn into this total fiction very often where it's like,
00:47:01.440
you know, well, it's, you know, a large percentage of the population is going to be gone.
00:47:06.980
There's going to be all this land, the economy's going to boom, there's going to be plentiful
00:47:12.360
resources. So it's this kind of fantasy that we see playing out in post-apocalyptic films and
00:47:19.820
literature, right? But I mean, we all kind of like to think about the idea of, of being in a world
00:47:24.660
that's still full of stuff, like full, you know, grocery stores are packed, but there's no one there.
00:47:29.520
You know, it's the kind of zombie narrative and you can just grab whatever you want and kind of make
00:47:34.040
your own way through the world. Americans love those, those narratives, you know, that they'll
00:47:37.880
just be totally on their own. But realistically, I didn't hear people talking about what they were
00:47:43.800
going to do, what the plan was, how would they rebuild, you know, how would, how would they find
00:47:48.320
community again? And I think that that's one of the, the major blind spots in all of these scenarios.
00:47:55.000
I have to say that over, after spending years with them, I, I became convinced that, you know,
00:48:00.760
we are in a unique point in human history. We do face more threats than we ever have in the past.
00:48:05.760
The possibility of things going wrong is in front of us all the time because of the way we've built
00:48:11.160
our, our society. You know, it's incredibly fragile, the infrastructural supply lines and,
00:48:16.380
and global trade that we depend on, the technology that we depend on now. It's, it's all put us in a,
00:48:22.380
in a very fragile position. But, you know, I didn't hear a lot of people telling me
00:48:27.400
what the alternative was. No, no one wants to go back to some, you know, there's not some
00:48:34.740
Edenic time in the past that people want to return to. And they're fantasizing about this future where
00:48:40.200
things will be different because they're frustrated with the present, but they're not necessarily telling
00:48:46.800
Well, and so, I mean, I think it's interesting, sort of the conclusion that I got from the book was,
00:48:52.340
so we typically in the broader culture, people look at people who build bunkers, the prepping
00:48:56.300
community is sort of, they're out there, right? It's like, it's a subculture, kind of weird,
00:49:00.880
maybe a little bit crazy. But I got the idea that after spending so much time with these guys and
00:49:05.400
talking, you just said that, like, there is a logic, like they are actually being pretty rational
00:49:09.920
because there's so, as you said, there's so many potential things that could wipe us out.
00:49:13.980
It would just make sense to prepare for that moment.
00:49:16.500
Or not even wipe us out, but just, I mean, just cause chaos. You know, the pandemic has caused chaos.
00:49:21.800
I mean, who knows what's going to happen with the election, right? I mean, we're constantly,
00:49:25.520
we're constantly facing all sorts of turmoil. And yeah, it came to feel like these preppers are
00:49:32.580
rationally responding to an irrational world. You know, things are complicated and frustrating.
00:49:39.560
And many of them felt, you know, helpless in being able to change any of this. You know,
00:49:44.400
what can they do about the climate crisis? What can they do about nuclear weapons? You know,
00:49:49.840
it feels kind of hopeless and helpless. And so building a bunker for them was about taking
00:49:54.880
control of their immediate parameters. You know, if you can at least control what's in front of you
00:50:00.400
and what's around you, then for many of them, it gave them a sense of peace. And so, yeah, I kind of,
00:50:05.900
I was shocked how calm many of them were. I kind of expected them to be, as you say, kind of kooky
00:50:12.980
and weird and paranoid. And that's not at all what I found. I found communities of people,
00:50:19.320
and here I'm talking about the preppers themselves, not the people selling bunkers who are hysterical for
00:50:24.520
the most part. But, you know, the preppers themselves that are moving into these communities
00:50:28.380
and buying these bunkers are just, you know, they're just everyday people doing jobs like you
00:50:33.300
and me. And they're frustrated and they're scared, they're worried, and they're trying to take control
00:50:38.520
of what they can to give themselves and their families a bit of peace.
00:50:43.000
Have you become a prepper a little bit since you finished this book?
00:50:47.260
Yeah. I'm supposed to be in Ireland right now, but I've ended up remote teaching because of the
00:50:52.580
pandemic. And so I came back to California and I bought a quarter acre of land in the forest. And
00:50:59.900
I've got a fantastic internet connection out here, but everything's super cheap. And I'm starting to
00:51:06.080
stockpile just some basic stuff. I mean, I'm not building a bunker or anything, but, you know,
00:51:10.960
I'm just gathering some tools, starting to do my own projects, learning how to do electrical wiring.
00:51:16.540
I bought a 1972 GMC long bed pickup that I love. I've been working on that all the time. I mean,
00:51:23.620
you know, these are things that I've been sitting in front of screens for 15 years, you know,
00:51:27.480
writing books, doing research, being an academic. And for, you know, that was one of the revelations
00:51:33.420
that I came to from this project is I don't know how to do anything. So prepping for me is actually,
00:51:39.420
I'm just building up skills and giving myself a little bit of space and breathing room to be
00:51:44.660
able to do that. And I think it's, I mean, I'm finding it to be incredibly valuable. I can feel
00:51:49.480
my confidence building with everything that I learn how to do. And that's enough preparation for me,
00:51:55.020
just knowing that, you know, if something does go wrong, I've got a kind of basic skill set that can
00:51:59.760
get me through some things. I don't necessarily feel a need to start pouring concrete, but maybe
00:52:05.760
Maybe one day. Well, Bradley, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:52:10.160
My website's bradleygarrett.com. You can find me on social media. My handle is Goblin Merchant.
00:52:16.360
You can find me at Goblin Merchant on Twitter, Instagram, wherever. And you can find the book,
00:52:21.360
Bunker, Building for the End Times, everywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you want to find it.
00:52:26.700
Hopefully go into a bookshop, if you can, wherever you are. And I hope everyone enjoys it. I really
00:52:31.580
enjoy getting feedback from it. So if anyone does pick it up and read it, shoot me an email.
00:52:36.160
Well, Bradley Garrett, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:52:40.260
My guest today was Bradley Garrett. He's the author of the book, Bunker. It's available on
00:52:43.440
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his
00:52:46.600
website, bradleygarrett.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash bunker. We find links to
00:52:52.000
resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
00:52:56.700
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:53:04.440
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00:53:08.120
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Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you not only listen to the Win Podcast, but put what