The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1515 - Dr. Bradley Garrett

00:00:02.000 Boom.

00:00:02.000 And we're live.

00:00:03.000 What's up, man?

00:00:03.000 How are you?

00:00:04.000 Cheers.

00:00:05.000 Hey, cheers, brother.

00:00:06.000 Nice to meet you.

00:00:07.000 Good to meet you, too.

00:00:07.000 By the way, congrats on the mustache.

00:00:09.000 The mustache, lower piece combo.

00:00:11.000 That's the anarchist guy, that guy that...

00:00:14.000 Who's the mask?

00:00:15.000 Guy Fawkes.

00:00:15.000 Guy Fawkes, that's right.

00:00:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:00:17.000 Perfect, right?

00:00:17.000 Yeah, I was going more for a kind of Doc Holliday.

00:00:20.000 Val Kilmer is Doc Holliday.

00:00:22.000 Dude, how good was he in that role?

00:00:23.000 I'm your Huckleberry.

00:00:24.000 How good was he in that role?

00:00:25.000 He was fantastic.

00:00:28.000 Many people have played Doc Holloway, but he's the best.

00:00:31.000 So are you a prepper yourself?

00:00:34.000 Because you do have one of them GPS watches on.

00:00:37.000 So either you're like a hardcore hiker, or you just don't want to get lost.

00:00:40.000 You were waiting to see the paracord bracelet.

00:00:43.000 They always have that, right?

00:00:44.000 Does that ever come up?

00:00:46.000 When do you ever unravel that thing?

00:00:49.000 Yeah, that always seems to me like someone who preps.

00:00:52.000 You just try a little too hard if you get the paracord bracelet.

00:00:55.000 No, it's a kind of virtue signaling.

00:00:57.000 You never know though.

00:00:58.000 I guess it's better to have it not to need it than need it not to have it.

00:01:02.000 I mean it's kind of funny when I – so I've been hanging out with preppers for about three years now and inevitably you start drifting towards the culture as you're talking to people.

00:01:11.000 But every once in a while, I'll see someone in a grocery store or whatever, and I'm like, okay.

00:01:16.000 They got the Bowie knife.

00:01:17.000 They got the walkie-talkie strapped.

00:01:20.000 I'm like, wow, you are really paranoid.

00:01:22.000 Walkie-talkie?

00:01:22.000 Really?

00:01:22.000 Yeah, I know people walk around with their radios on.

00:01:24.000 Because they want to be ready for action at any moment.

00:01:26.000 You live in the mountains, wilderness-type area.

00:01:29.000 I live in Big Bear.

00:01:31.000 Did you live there before you got obsessed with prepping?

00:01:35.000 No.

00:01:36.000 So did you move there to accustom yourself or to...

00:01:41.000 Acclimate yourself to the culture?

00:01:43.000 So here's the deal.

00:01:46.000 One of the communities that I worked with while I was writing this book, Bunker, was a community in South Dakota where there's 575 sort of semi-subterranean concrete bunkers that were built during World War II and they used to store weapons in there,

00:02:04.000 right?

00:02:04.000 So these are bunkers to protect ordnance.

00:02:07.000 Jamie is going to turn this towards you there.

00:02:09.000 OK, cool.

00:02:09.000 Thanks.

00:02:11.000 I think I've seen this before.

00:02:13.000 Now they drive like RVs in there and stuff.

00:02:17.000 Is that the same?

00:02:17.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:18.000 So now you've got like 30 or 40 families that are moving into those bunkers and those families, super cool people, very generous, very kind.

00:02:27.000 I spent a lot of time with them and they told me if – If it ever hits the fan, come visit us.

00:02:34.000 We've got space for you.

00:02:36.000 You're going to be safe.

00:02:36.000 They're going to eat you.

00:02:38.000 Yeah, maybe.

00:02:40.000 So when the pandemic hit, of course, I thought, well, is this it?

00:02:46.000 Is this the moment we've been waiting for?

00:02:47.000 So I send everyone messages and sure enough, they're packing up and they're going to the bunker field.

00:02:52.000 And then I thought...

00:02:54.000 You know, the obvious thing.

00:02:56.000 Well, you know, what about my family?

00:02:58.000 What about my elderly parents?

00:02:59.000 What about who else?

00:03:00.000 You know what I mean?

00:03:01.000 The list starts growing of people that you have to abandon to save yourself, right?

00:03:06.000 And so I didn't go, obviously.

00:03:09.000 Good for you.

00:03:10.000 But all my family lives in Southern California, my immediate family.

00:03:15.000 And I started thinking about like, what is the appropriate bug out plan?

00:03:28.000 Yeah.

00:03:29.000 Yeah.

00:03:31.000 Yeah.

00:03:33.000 Yeah.

00:03:42.000 We ever needed to all sort of leave together at the same time.

00:03:45.000 We could go to the cabin.

00:03:47.000 It's kind of crazy that you could be at the beach and you could drive two hours and you're in the snow.

00:03:51.000 That's one of the weirdest things about California.

00:03:53.000 I mean, we have some really interesting terrain.

00:03:56.000 Yeah.

00:03:56.000 Well, growing up here, I never took it for granted, right?

00:03:59.000 Yeah.

00:04:00.000 And now I've lived in four countries and visited maybe 40. And every time I come back to California, I think, damn, this place is unique. 0.96

00:04:07.000 How long did it take you to get to the valley? 0.95

00:04:10.000 To get to the...

00:04:11.000 Right here?

00:04:12.000 Oh, to here?

00:04:13.000 Two hours?

00:04:14.000 That's nothing.

00:04:15.000 Yeah.

00:04:16.000 That's not bad at all.

00:04:17.000 But check this out.

00:04:17.000 The really cool thing is that if you go off the backside of Big Bear Mountain, you can just drop down into the Mojave Desert.

00:04:22.000 So you can go from Big Bear to Joshua Tree in like 30 minutes.

00:04:26.000 Really?

00:04:26.000 If you can take dirt roads in a 4x4, you can get there in 20. Wow.

00:04:30.000 Yeah.

00:04:32.000 So if you want to do mushrooms, it's a good spot to live.

00:04:36.000 It's a very good spot to live.

00:04:38.000 Now, you decided to write this book and then you moved there?

00:04:43.000 Was that the idea or had you been thinking about living in a place like that first?

00:04:50.000 No, I never really thought about a plan.

00:04:55.000 To be honest with you, I've been living in cities for 15 years now.

00:04:58.000 I lived in London and then in Sydney.

00:05:00.000 So I've been in Sydney for the past three years.

00:05:02.000 And cities just suck the money out of you.

00:05:04.000 So I never had any money.

00:05:06.000 I never had any way to think about it.

00:05:09.000 And I know the pandemic has been tragic, unfortunate, terrible for a lot of people.

00:05:14.000 But for me, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

00:05:17.000 I came back to California.

00:05:18.000 Check this out.

00:05:19.000 I came back to California...

00:05:21.000 To take care of my mom because she was having spinal surgery.

00:05:24.000 I had just finished my three-year research fellowship at the University of Sydney that enabled me to write this book with the Doomsday Preppers.

00:05:33.000 And I was going to a new job at University College Dublin in Ireland.

00:05:37.000 And so I land in LA to take care of my mom for six weeks while she gets her spinal surgery.

00:05:43.000 Bang.

00:05:44.000 I'm wheeling her out of the hospital and they're putting in the The tents in the parking garage at Torrance Memorial Hospital for the overflow of COVID patients.

00:05:53.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:05:54.000 So what time?

00:05:54.000 When was this?

00:05:56.000 I guess this was early February.

00:05:59.000 So it was just when it was starting to pick up.

00:06:01.000 Yeah.

00:06:02.000 And so I'm with my partner Amanda.

00:06:04.000 We just moved from Sydney.

00:06:06.000 And...

00:06:08.000 We take my mom home and we lock ourselves inside for a couple of months and kind of wait for this all to unfold.

00:06:15.000 So I actually finished this book, like the final proofs of this book I finished in lockdown in the early days of the pandemic.

00:06:21.000 You feel relatively safe when you're in a place like Big Bear because it's woods and, you know, just like by the time the virus gets up here, and how's it going to get to you?

00:06:30.000 You know what I mean?

00:06:31.000 It's not like you're in these crowded areas.

00:06:33.000 It's pretty remote. 0.99

00:06:34.000 Well, you know, the virus doesn't give a shit. 0.99

00:06:37.000 It moves wherever it wants to. 0.99

00:06:38.000 That's true.

00:06:38.000 You know, you have all these people driving from L.A. up there for the weekend.

00:06:41.000 That's true.

00:06:42.000 You were also saying that people are pretty cavalier up there, huh?

00:06:44.000 Oh, yeah.

00:06:45.000 Yeah, they certainly are.

00:06:48.000 Does it feel good to be tested?

00:06:50.000 You were tested today.

00:06:51.000 Do you feel good?

00:06:51.000 Do you feel like a weight lifted off of you?

00:06:53.000 Actually, yeah.

00:06:54.000 Yeah, right?

00:06:55.000 Yeah.

00:06:55.000 It's nice.

00:06:56.000 It feels great.

00:06:56.000 But I was actually kind of disappointed to see I didn't have the antibodies.

00:07:00.000 Everybody thinks they have them.

00:07:02.000 Everybody does.

00:07:02.000 Everybody in here is like, I think in January.

00:07:04.000 I think back in January I had this cough.

00:07:06.000 I'm pretty sure I had it.

00:07:07.000 I beat it.

00:07:08.000 But I have to say...

00:07:11.000 I guess my anxiety about coming here was kind of ramped up by the possibility that they were going to say, you've tested positive.

00:07:19.000 You're like, drag me out by my hair.

00:07:21.000 Well, we wouldn't do that.

00:07:22.000 If you were positive, I would just back up a little and put a mask on, I guess.

00:07:26.000 What would we do?

00:07:28.000 Would you feel comfortable doing a podcast with someone who's in the room who's positive?

00:07:32.000 I think it's a bad move.

00:07:33.000 We probably would do it in the parking lot.

00:07:37.000 We could do that.

00:07:39.000 Just – we would figure it out.

00:07:41.000 If you were positive, we would figure it out.

00:07:43.000 We would do it in the parking lot with masks on or something.

00:07:45.000 But here's – the thing about Big Bear, right, is that when we were in lockdown in LA, in the early days of it, like – again, I'm speaking from a space of privilege here because my paychecks were still coming in or whatever.

00:07:58.000 But like I almost experienced a sense of euphoria.

00:08:00.000 Yeah.

00:08:01.000 Like, all my talks were canceled.

00:08:02.000 I canceled, like, four plane tickets.

00:08:05.000 So the pressure's relieved?

00:08:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:08:06.000 And I was like, I can just hang out with my mom.

00:08:08.000 This is great.

00:08:10.000 But you get through that initial phase, and then you get into the stamina phase, right?

00:08:16.000 And, like, that's something we should really talk about.

00:08:18.000 Because if you're thinking about locking yourself in a bunker, you know, stamina is going to be really important.

00:08:25.000 And when they...

00:08:27.000 I shut down the beaches and the trails in Los Angeles, and I couldn't get outside anymore.

00:08:32.000 I mean, that had a devastating mental effect on me.

00:08:35.000 Did they do that in Big Bear as well?

00:08:36.000 They shut down the trails up there?

00:08:37.000 No.

00:08:38.000 So when we moved up to Big Bear, immediately...

00:08:40.000 Is that San Bernardino County?

00:08:41.000 We could go trail running again.

00:08:42.000 We could be outside and, you know...

00:08:44.000 Is it San Bernardino County?

00:08:45.000 Yeah.

00:08:46.000 So they're allowed...

00:08:47.000 They have different rules, lower population, all that jazz.

00:08:50.000 Yeah, a lot more space.

00:08:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:52.000 Yeah, the trail thing was a real bummer.

00:08:56.000 The locking off the beaches, too.

00:08:58.000 In the beginning, there was so much scrambling because they weren't really sure how it was transmitted or when it was dangerous, when it wasn't dangerous.

00:09:06.000 Now they're pretty sure there was a study done that shows that it dies almost instantly in sunlight.

00:09:13.000 So when you're outside at the beach, there's probably very little chance of spreading.

00:09:18.000 So a lot of people took this that when the protests were happening, it's very little chance that it's going to spread during the protests, which is probably true during the day.

00:09:27.000 But the thing is, the protests don't end during the day.

00:09:30.000 People were jammed on top of each other all throughout the night, and it easily could have gotten you then.

00:09:36.000 They're showing that also even simulated UV light.

00:09:39.000 There was a study done that showed that artificial sunlight, like simulated sunlight, also kills it.

00:09:45.000 I was out in Joshua Tree yesterday, and I went for a seven-mile trail run. 0.99

00:09:50.000 Damn, dude, did you bring some water? 0.97

00:09:51.000 How hot is it out there right now? 0.99

00:09:52.000 I went through four bottles of water.

00:09:54.000 God, that's scary.

00:09:55.000 I usually have my camelback that I run with, and I forgot it, so I stocked up on water.

00:10:00.000 Anyway, I was slamming water.

00:10:01.000 But I was on the trail way out, way out in the middle of the national park, totally open space.

00:10:07.000 And I run up on this hiker.

00:10:11.000 And she puts her backpack on the ground and she pulls the mask out and puts the mask on.

00:10:15.000 And I'm like, the trail's pretty wide.

00:10:18.000 I didn't say anything, but it's kind of like...

00:10:21.000 People are scared, man.

00:10:22.000 I know, people are scared.

00:10:23.000 If you want to really be scared, I'm in the middle of a book right now.

00:10:26.000 My buddy Matt Staggs recommended this. 0.97

00:10:29.000 I want to tell people about this because this is fucking excellent. 0.95

00:10:31.000 Now, I want to say before I say this, do not get this book if you have anxiety. 0.98

00:10:38.000 Just don't.

00:10:40.000 It's called Survivor Song.

00:10:42.000 It's a novel by Paul Tremblay.

00:10:46.000 I guess that's how you say his name?

00:10:48.000 Paul Tremblay. 0.98

00:10:49.000 It's fucking excellent, but it is terrifying. 0.99

00:10:51.000 And it is about a pandemic. 0.99

00:10:52.000 It's about a pandemic that hits the East Coast.

00:10:55.000 It's a fake pandemic, like a type of rabies that has easily spread to people.

00:11:02.000 There's got to be loads of people writing books about pandemics.

00:11:05.000 Well, this obviously was written a long time ago.

00:11:07.000 For sure, for sure.

00:11:08.000 I think, I don't know what year it came out.

00:11:10.000 I don't know what it says here.

00:11:11.000 I got the audio book.

00:11:12.000 But I just wonder if we're going to reach a saturation point on the topic where people are like, I'm not touching a book that has anything to do with the pandemic, you know, after thinking about it for years.

00:11:21.000 Some people.

00:11:22.000 Yeah, but that's just, some people are just, they're angry.

00:11:26.000 You know, like, I had a friend who was across, my friend Bridget Phetasy, she was across the street from someone without a mask.

00:11:33.000 No one around her. 1.00

00:11:34.000 Someone on the other side of the street starts screaming at her, put on your fucking mask! 1.00

00:11:39.000 Put your fucking mask on! 1.00

00:11:41.000 No one anywhere near them, across the street. 1.00

00:11:44.000 Yeah.

00:11:46.000 People are losing their marbles.

00:11:47.000 I know.

00:11:47.000 Well, it's classic Foucault, right?

00:11:50.000 We all start policing each other.

00:11:52.000 Yeah.

00:11:52.000 Well, it's also people's anxiety and insecurity and people that are emotionally and mentally unstable.

00:11:58.000 Now's their time to shine because this is like what they've been – like preppers, I would imagine.

00:12:05.000 I'm not saying all preppers are emotionally unstable, but what preppers have been looking for is this moment Where all of their anxiety and all of this paranoia actually comes to fruition.

00:12:16.000 Like, see, I told you so.

00:12:18.000 Yeah, right.

00:12:18.000 No, the justification for the prepping.

00:12:21.000 But I think a lot of that comes from feeling belittled, right?

00:12:27.000 Like, they've been mocked.

00:12:28.000 They've been made fun of.

00:12:30.000 People were, prior to the pandemic, embarrassed to admit that they were prepping.

00:12:35.000 Yeah.

00:12:37.000 Which is odd.

00:12:38.000 Yeah.

00:12:38.000 In fact...

00:12:40.000 I've been working on this book for three years, and about a month into the pandemic, I get this email from my brother who's here with me right now, and he's like, oh yeah, just so you know, I've got a storage unit with some masks and some food, and I'm like, what?

00:12:53.000 You didn't think you might mention that to me?

00:12:57.000 But, I mean, you know, it's almost deemed pathological, right?

00:13:04.000 Like, people equate prepping to hoarding.

00:13:05.000 It's like, well, why do you need all that stuff?

00:13:08.000 But the thing is, if you...

00:13:11.000 In order to not stockpile in that way, right, you have to have so much faith in capitalism.

00:13:16.000 You have to have so much faith in our social systems.

00:13:18.000 You have to have faith that everything is going to hold together roughly in the way that it is right now.

00:13:23.000 And of course the world that we built, the society that we built, is incredibly new, right?

00:13:28.000 You only have to go back a few hundred years and it's like if you weren't stockpiling, you were effectively committing suicide.

00:13:34.000 You couldn't make it through winter, right?

00:13:35.000 Because people are growing their own food, raising their own animals.

00:13:38.000 Now it's like we have this expectation that you're going to be able to order your takeout or go to the grocery store and stock up.

00:13:48.000 Think about this.

00:13:49.000 Imagine this scenario.

00:13:50.000 Imagine that the lethality rate on this virus was like 10%.

00:13:55.000 What do you have to do to convince those grocery store workers to come to work at that point? 1.00

00:14:01.000 No one's coming to work.

00:14:02.000 No one's driving the trucks.

00:14:03.000 No one's going to deliver anything.

00:14:04.000 And then what preppers would say is we're 72 hours to anarchy.

00:14:07.000 Or 72 hours to animal, right?

00:14:09.000 It's like once you shut down those kind of supply lines, right, our entire mentality starts to shift into a different mode.

00:14:17.000 Yeah.

00:14:17.000 And it doesn't take long before you think, I'm going to take something from my neighbor at this point.

00:14:21.000 I'm hungry.

00:14:22.000 My family is hungry.

00:14:23.000 Sure.

00:14:23.000 Yeah.

00:14:24.000 It gets real scary.

00:14:25.000 Or cooperate with your neighbor, hopefully.

00:14:27.000 You know, I hunt, so I have a lot of meat.

00:14:32.000 And so one of the things that happened during the pandemic when it hit, I had a lot of people come over and I gave them meat because I have three commercial freezers here at the studio.

00:14:44.000 You know, if you shoot an elk, an elk's 400 pounds of meat.

00:14:47.000 That's a lot of meat, yeah.

00:14:48.000 It's the great thing, as long as the power stays on and I have electricity, I have frozen meat, so I can give a lot of it out.

00:14:54.000 So you got a backup generator?

00:14:56.000 Yeah, I do.

00:14:56.000 But I'm not a prepper, you know, but...

00:15:00.000 I'm prepared in some ways and then when all this came down, basically all I did is I stockpiled on a lot of dried stuff like rice, pasta, things that you can cook easily.

00:15:11.000 That's the thing is people get fixated on prepping as this kind of, you know, I built a multi-million dollar bunker or whatever spectacular stories that people hear, which I'm happy to verify if you want to get into those.

00:15:25.000 You know, like prepping on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just common sense.

00:15:31.000 Yeah.

00:15:31.000 Having enough food to last a few days.

00:15:34.000 Yeah, and thinking through what might happen in a blackout or the tap's not working or whatever.

00:15:40.000 These things do happen.

00:15:42.000 Yeah, they do happen.

00:15:43.000 But I wanted to get into the psychology of prepping because it seems to be conflated with conspiracy theorists in some way, like preppers or the tinfoil hat brigade.

00:15:57.000 It's like those type of folks, folks who think 5G is causing COVID. You know what I mean?

00:16:03.000 Like there's, for whatever reason, prepping, which should be just prudence, you know, common sense, preparing, you know, having something that can purify your water if everything goes weird.

00:16:15.000 Yeah.

00:16:15.000 Going camping every once in a while just to get a sense of what it's like to be outdoors and pop your tent and pull your water out of a river and, you know, it's great to have those practical skills.

00:16:24.000 Yeah.

00:16:26.000 Camping is fun as long as you know it's not permanent.

00:16:28.000 Isn't that weird?

00:16:29.000 Well, so, I mean, and this is the thing about disaster, right, is that if it has an endpoint, it's something that we can cope with, right?

00:16:38.000 So take nuclear war, for example, right?

00:16:41.000 Like, let's say we get a text message on our phone.

00:16:46.000 Remember in Hawaii in 2018, everyone got that message that the ballistic missile was incoming, right?

00:16:50.000 So imagine we get that message right now, and you're like, Well, Brad, we actually have a bunker underneath this studio, right?

00:16:58.000 So you go into the bunker, but we know after LA's nuked, right, and it's gone, that if we stay in this bunker for 14 days, the radiation levels are going to be a fraction of what they were when that nuke hit, right?

00:17:12.000 So you have an endpoint there.

00:17:14.000 We have to make it to day 14. And that's why people are able to psychologically cope with it.

00:17:19.000 Whereas the situation we're in right now, when is the end point?

00:17:23.000 That's why people are cracking because they can't see the end of it.

00:17:26.000 Right.

00:17:27.000 Well, they're cracking for a bunch of reasons.

00:17:29.000 First of all, they're cracking because the economic stability is nonexistent.

00:17:33.000 It's gone.

00:17:34.000 50% of our restaurants are dead.

00:17:36.000 You know, I mean, how many retail shops are dead?

00:17:38.000 It's terrible.

00:17:40.000 Yelp had some statistic the other day that I was reading online about all the different businesses that have been impacted.

00:17:47.000 We don't even know what's happening with comedy clubs.

00:17:49.000 It's just guesswork right now.

00:17:51.000 But I think in Los Angeles, a lot of them are probably going to wind up going under.

00:17:54.000 Across the country, a lot of them are going to wind up going under.

00:17:57.000 Restaurants, I had...

00:18:00.000 The owners of Felix and the head chef, Evan, and the owner, Janet, on the podcast recently, and they were explaining how – Felix is a really great restaurant in Venice – that almost every restaurant operates with a very small amount of profit.

00:18:15.000 Their profit margin – what did she say, like 15%, 14%, something like that?

00:18:21.000 Yeah, that sounds right.

00:18:23.000 So imagine all of a sudden that's cut to zero for several months and then you're asked to occupy 50% of your restaurant, which is obviously going to diminish your profits radically as well.

00:18:34.000 It's just a survival game and there's no end in sight, right?

00:18:38.000 So here we are in July.

00:18:40.000 No one anticipated this in March.

00:18:42.000 We thought, you know, by the time June rolls around, everything's gonna be up and running.

00:18:45.000 No.

00:18:46.000 Here we are, July, everything's locked down again.

00:18:49.000 And there's even talk of another stay-at-home order in Los Angeles, which is even scarier.

00:18:54.000 So let's get back to your conspiracy theories.

00:18:56.000 Okay.

00:18:57.000 If someone told you that we would be in this situation a year ago, would you have believed them?

00:19:03.000 Sure.

00:19:04.000 You would have?

00:19:04.000 I would have, yeah.

00:19:05.000 Because the pandemic seemed like a realistic scenario.

00:19:07.000 Well, because I've been in the Center for Disease Control.

00:19:09.000 Right.

00:19:09.000 I went to Galveston, Texas for the Center for Disease Control for a show that I did with my friend Duncan.

00:19:15.000 And Duncan Trussell and I went down there and we talked to these doctors that work with these viruses and they scared the shit out of us.

00:19:21.000 We went down there for a television show that we were doing for sci-fi and it was basically on the idea of weaponized viruses.

00:19:29.000 The basic premise of the show was, what if someone engineered a virus and released it on the country, like a weaponized virus?

00:19:37.000 And they said, that's not what we have to worry about.

00:19:40.000 What we have to worry about is nature.

00:19:41.000 That's what we have to worry about.

00:19:42.000 Turns out, both.

00:19:44.000 Because this virus most likely had been leaked from a lab.

00:19:48.000 What we're dealing with with COVID-19, according to my friend Brett Weinstein, who is a biologist, and he detailed on a podcast that I did with him all of the different points of evidence that lead to what he believes is a very likely scenario that it was accidentally released from a lab and not actually from a wet market,

00:20:09.000 that the wet market is the cover-up.

00:20:11.000 It's like the disease is too advanced.

00:20:13.000 It has too many hallmarks and indicators of a virus that had been tampered with for study, for studying the lab and for examinations and all the different tests that they would run.

00:20:25.000 And so you got both those things, right?

00:20:30.000 The possibility of something just morphing in nature, like many other pandemics that have happened in the past.

00:20:36.000 And then what we have now, which is this weird virus.

00:20:40.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:20:40.000 And we were talking about all the different symptoms that people get from it, neurological problems, blood clotting.

00:20:47.000 I was reading this article where they're saying that the people that have died from COVID, when they've done autopsies on them, they found blood clots in every major organ.

00:20:56.000 And they're like, this is astonishing.

00:20:58.000 Like, this is so weird.

00:20:59.000 Yeah, it does seem very unpredictable.

00:21:01.000 Lungs, liver, kidney, just blood clots everywhere.

00:21:03.000 It's like people are hemorrhaging.

00:21:06.000 It's very strange. 1.00

00:21:07.000 It's a strange fucking virus. 0.99

00:21:09.000 And the transmissibility, is that a word? 1.00

00:21:13.000 The ease of transmission is terrifying.

00:21:18.000 It's so contagious.

00:21:19.000 It's a ridiculously contagious virus.

00:21:23.000 Once we went to that Center for Disease Control, I started getting scared.

00:21:26.000 I saw the 2015 Bill Gates TED Talk on pandemics, about the possibility of a pandemic, and I got scared of it too.

00:21:34.000 So I would have thought it's possible.

00:21:37.000 I never would have thought it's impossible.

00:21:39.000 So here's the thing.

00:21:41.000 Regardless of where this virus came from, you have to imagine that there are governments and individuals I think we're good to go.

00:22:10.000 I think we're good to go.

00:22:33.000 I don't know if the United States is thinking that.

00:22:35.000 Well, I don't know either.

00:22:37.000 But the thing is we – the threats, existential threats that we face now have been multiplied exponentially, right?

00:22:45.000 In the past, post-World War II, right? 0.51

00:22:49.000 We had – I mean this is the first sort of global catastrophe, right?

00:22:52.000 World Wars, right?

00:22:54.000 But then once we develop nuclear weapons and we're just past the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test now.

00:23:01.000 You know, once we create that ability to destroy ourselves and potentially the entire world, we have to live with the possibility of that happening, right?

00:23:09.000 Now, stack on top of that, artificial intelligence, climate change, you know, synthetic biotech.

00:23:15.000 All of these threats that we face are something that we have to kind of hold in our heads all the time.

00:23:20.000 And I think it's cracking us mentally to, like, think about these possibilities.

00:23:24.000 So...

00:23:26.000 Yeah, I mean, some of the preppers are conspiracy theorists, right?

00:23:29.000 And they're spinning some really outlandish scenarios.

00:23:32.000 But a lot of them are just trying to work through these things, right?

00:23:36.000 And rather than get caught in this kind of perpetual future tense, like, you know, thinking about something terrible happening, they're trying to take action now in the present, and that gives them some sense of peace, right?

00:23:49.000 Like, it gives them a sense of, like, it gives them some solid footing in the present.

00:23:58.000 Are not actually very anxious or paranoid at all, right?

00:24:01.000 Because they have a plan.

00:24:04.000 It's those of us who don't have a plan that are anxious.

00:24:07.000 Well, you've talked to them post – do they feel vindicated?

00:24:15.000 No, not really.

00:24:16.000 No?

00:24:16.000 What most of them have told me is that this was a mid-level crisis.

00:24:20.000 Well, they're right about that, right?

00:24:22.000 I mean, if Yellowstone blows, this is going to look like a cakewalk.

00:24:25.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:26.000 If we get hit by an asteroid, I mean, it's a wrap for humanity.

00:24:29.000 Yeah.

00:24:30.000 If there's a solar flare that takes out the power grid, we've got real problems.

00:24:34.000 This is minor in comparison.

00:24:37.000 The actual fatality rate for healthy people is very, very low.

00:24:43.000 It's less than 1%, much less than half of 1% for most healthy people.

00:24:52.000 So when you look at what could happen if Yellowstone blows, that's a continent killer.

00:24:57.000 Oh, yeah.

00:24:57.000 I mean we're talking about volcanic ash clouding the sky.

00:25:02.000 Nuclear winter.

00:25:03.000 Yeah, killing crops all over the United States.

00:25:06.000 Killing everything.

00:25:06.000 All over the world.

00:25:06.000 Yeah.

00:25:07.000 I mean you got to have a jet and go to New Zealand like instantly.

00:25:12.000 It's like – I don't even know if that's – New Zealand is in a volcanic zone.

00:25:16.000 I mean this – like this is one of the great red herrings of our time that all of these wealthy people are going to flee New Zealand and find safety there.

00:25:25.000 I mean I also find it totally ironic that a lot of them are sort of libertarian free market capitalists that are quite happy to make money off this system. 0.82

00:25:32.000 But when shit goes wrong, they want a really strong government to clamp down and take care of it. 0.81

00:25:36.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:25:36.000 Is that what they want? 0.99

00:25:37.000 I think they just want a remote place to escape with a small amount of people and a lot of wildlife resources and real natural beauty.

00:25:45.000 Look, New Zealand's gorgeous.

00:25:47.000 New Zealand's fantastic.

00:25:47.000 I have friends who go there every year.

00:25:49.000 Yeah, I've spent a lot of time there.

00:25:51.000 Matt Lauer bought a crazy farm out there.

00:25:54.000 He's got like a giant ranch.

00:25:55.000 Well, that's, you know, it's got the quality.

00:25:56.000 Why doesn't that guy move there?

00:25:57.000 It's got, you know, clean water.

00:25:59.000 It's English speaking.

00:26:00.000 It's got a stable government, you know, all of that.

00:26:02.000 Abundance of wildlife and no predators.

00:26:05.000 It's a weird situation over there.

00:26:07.000 It's a hunter's paradise, apparently, because...

00:26:10.000 Well, sort of.

00:26:12.000 It's really...

00:26:16.000 It depends on your philosophy, but most hunters that are, I would say, if you look at what the idea of hunting is, the idea of hunting is supposed to be you get your resources,

00:26:33.000 your meat from the natural world.

00:26:36.000 I want there to be a balance in the natural world.

00:26:41.000 There's no balance in New Zealand.

00:26:42.000 In New Zealand, they have to helicopter over these stags and gun them down because they're overpopulated.

00:26:47.000 Because they literally get to the point where they worry about diseases and there's no predators there.

00:26:53.000 Do you know the whole history of how it's populated with animals?

00:26:57.000 No, I don't.

00:26:58.000 They were brought over there by the Europeans in the 1800s as like a hunting sanctuary.

00:27:04.000 They brought over stag and all these animals that don't exist in there, red deer, all these invasive animals.

00:27:13.000 But then they don't have any way to control their population. 0.98

00:27:16.000 So they have these, like, fucking huge herds of these animals roaming over the fields. 0.97

00:27:21.000 Luckily, there's not a lot of people, but there's a lot of controversy behind it. 0.99

00:27:25.000 Like, there's one recently that's going on right now I should tell people about.

00:27:29.000 There's an animal called a tar.

00:27:30.000 Have you ever heard of a tar?

00:27:32.000 No.

00:27:32.000 T-A-H-R. It's a fascinating animal because it looks like it's straight out of Star Wars.

00:27:37.000 I was going to say, it sounds like it's from Star Wars.

00:27:39.000 I think it's an Asiatic animal.

00:27:43.000 I think. 0.99

00:27:43.000 I think it's native to, like, the Alps or some shit. 0.99

00:27:48.000 I forget where it's from.

00:27:50.000 Himalaya.

00:27:50.000 Yeah, there it is.

00:27:50.000 Okay.

00:27:51.000 It's a large... 0.99

00:27:52.000 It's fucking weird-looking, man. 1.00

00:27:54.000 It's this crazy, hairy-looking... 0.99

00:27:56.000 Take that picture right there.

00:27:57.000 Yeah, bam.

00:27:58.000 Go large with that. 1.00

00:27:59.000 Look at that fucking thing! 1.00

00:28:00.000 What? 1.00

00:28:01.000 Yes!

00:28:02.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

00:28:03.000 It's amazing.

00:28:04.000 Well, one of the best...

00:28:05.000 First of all, it's a delicious animal and they are in New Zealand and they're very difficult to hunt because they live in these like really high altitude, rocky areas that are very difficult to traverse.

00:28:22.000 Very hard for hunters to get to them.

00:28:24.000 It's extremely dangerous.

00:28:26.000 A good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, was hunting one and he fell and got really badly injured and he had to get helicoptered out of there and he was by himself.

00:28:35.000 Really hard animal to get to.

00:28:36.000 Well they've decided recently, it's a very controversial decision, to eradicate them.

00:28:41.000 So they're gonna, even though there's just like this really thriving industry where all these people's livelihood depends on this animal, These people in these rural communities, these hunting guides, all these different people that live off of these animals,

00:28:57.000 they've decided for whatever reason – I'm not exactly sure what the reason is – but the New Zealand government has decided to eradicate these animals.

00:29:03.000 It's got to be this fantasy of getting back to the kind of pre-colonial past, right?

00:29:07.000 Like if you eradicate all the animals that were brought in with colonization and you can get back to some kind of like – Maybe.

00:29:16.000 They would have to bring back the host eagle.

00:29:19.000 There's an enormous eagle that used to hunt humans that lived on New Zealand.

00:29:23.000 The largest eagle that ever lived lived in New Zealand, and they believe that the Polynesian people wound up killing them all.

00:29:30.000 Well, you gotta go to Jurassic Park and get the DNA and resurrect that thing.

00:29:34.000 Is that Polynesian people? 0.99

00:29:34.000 Who the fuck lived in... 0.99

00:29:35.000 It's not Polynesian people. 1.00

00:29:36.000 Who are the original settlers of New Zealand?

00:29:38.000 The Maori.

00:29:39.000 The Maori, right?

00:29:40.000 Are they considered Polynesian?

00:29:42.000 I think they were...

00:29:43.000 Yeah, I think they were Polynesian sailors that landed there.

00:29:46.000 We're so white. 1.00

00:29:47.000 We don't have shit. 1.00

00:29:50.000 Polynesians are fucking incredible, though, if you think about the fact those people figured out how to get in a boat and go to literally the most remote spot in the world, which is Hawaii. 1.00

00:29:59.000 Dude, have you ever seen their maps that are made out of sticks? 0.98

00:30:01.000 No.

00:30:02.000 So they're 3D maps that are made from sticks put together, and they can tell wind and air currents, and they can read the stars with them.

00:30:10.000 That's how they navigated.

00:30:11.000 Really?

00:30:11.000 Yeah.

00:30:12.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:30:13.000 Yeah, they're fantastic.

00:30:13.000 Where did you see one?

00:30:15.000 I don't know.

00:30:15.000 Well, actually, I did my master's degree in maritime archaeology, so I probably picked that up during that degree at some point.

00:30:22.000 So you did – some of your studies were in Sydney, right?

00:30:26.000 Yeah, I started – I actually started here at the University of California.

00:30:31.000 I did anthropology and history.

00:30:32.000 I went to Australia to do a degree in maritime archaeology, and then I went to London to do a PhD in cultural geography.

00:30:39.000 Oh, wow.

00:30:40.000 So I've hopped four disciplines.

00:30:42.000 Did you get anything, Jamie?

00:30:44.000 Let me see what this looks like. 0.99

00:30:45.000 Holy shit! 1.00

00:30:47.000 They're sweet, right? 1.00

00:30:49.000 Wow!

00:30:50.000 What is that?

00:30:51.000 Obviously, I have absolutely no idea how to read those things.

00:30:54.000 That's so weird.

00:30:56.000 So how do they tie them together?

00:30:58.000 With twine?

00:30:59.000 Yeah, I think it's twine.

00:31:01.000 And what are those images supposed to represent?

00:31:04.000 What is that?

00:31:05.000 It's the wind, the tides, and the stars.

00:31:08.000 What is that word?

00:31:09.000 Hold on.

00:31:09.000 Scroll up.

00:31:11.000 Micronesian?

00:31:12.000 Whoa.

00:31:14.000 Micronesians.

00:31:14.000 You ever heard that word?

00:31:15.000 Yeah, Micronesian.

00:31:16.000 So Micronesia is like Chook. 1.00

00:31:19.000 What are those four islands?

00:31:21.000 Truck Lagoon that's in Chook and I can't remember the other islands, but...

00:31:26.000 Look how crazy that is.

00:31:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:31:28.000 God, I love learning new shit. 1.00

00:31:30.000 So here's the thing, right, is that one of the things that preppers are into is like recovering these kinds of skills. 0.99

00:31:36.000 So, you know, trying to learn how these things work and building them again.

00:31:40.000 When I was at the University of California, I did two years of lithic technology where I, you know, I can make arrowheads, stone tools.

00:31:47.000 Can you really?

00:31:48.000 You do all that stuff?

00:31:49.000 Yeah, I spent years doing that stuff.

00:31:50.000 You know how to make an atlatl?

00:31:51.000 Yeah.

00:31:52.000 Really?

00:31:52.000 Yeah.

00:31:53.000 Can you throw one?

00:31:54.000 Yes.

00:31:55.000 We threw one at UC Riverside where I was studying.

00:31:58.000 Yeah, we made this atlatl dart and then we sort of like cleared out the kind of alleyway in the experimental archaeology lab where we're working.

00:32:06.000 We were chucking this atlatl dart.

00:32:08.000 Indoors or outdoors?

00:32:08.000 We probably couldn't get away with that now.

00:32:10.000 Yeah, probably not.

00:32:11.000 Outdoors.

00:32:12.000 Now, when they taught you how to do all this stuff, when they're talking about building ancient arrowheads, is the technology behind creating those, the craftsmanship, is it theoretical?

00:32:26.000 Or are they getting it down from the people where the knowledge has been handed down?

00:32:31.000 Oh, it's definitely the case that the knowledge is being handed down.

00:32:34.000 And what's really interesting is that...

00:32:38.000 I know you talked to Graham Hancock, but like – so the earliest spear points that we think are evidence of the earliest occupation of the Americas, these are Clovis.

00:32:51.000 So he talked about Clovis cultures, right?

00:32:53.000 Those Clovis points are so hard to make, dude.

00:32:56.000 And they're making these like 12,000, 13,000 years ago.

00:32:59.000 So it's essentially – You get a piece of rock, right?

00:33:03.000 And you have to flatten the rock first, right?

00:33:05.000 So you've got to send flakes with a hammerstone across the rock and create like a ridge down the middle.

00:33:11.000 And then in one strike, you take that whole ridge off and you create this flat expanse down the middle of the spear point.

00:33:18.000 With one strike.

00:33:19.000 Yeah, and that's what you halved...

00:33:22.000 The shaft too with some sinew or whatever.

00:33:24.000 But the thing is that that one strike, you have to do it on both sides, right?

00:33:28.000 You have to make a flat edge on both sides down the middle of the spear point.

00:33:31.000 It almost always cracks a thing in half.

00:33:33.000 And what is the material that you're using for the striker and what is the material you're using for the arrowhead?

00:33:40.000 So if the easiest stone to flintknapp with is obsidian.

00:33:45.000 It's got a really, really high silica value in it and it's highly heated.

00:33:49.000 So it's like glass, right?

00:33:51.000 And that's what the Aztecs were making their weapons out of too.

00:33:55.000 So you can see obsidian weapons all up and down North, Central, and South America.

00:34:01.000 But you can also work with like Flint or Chert.

00:34:05.000 Those things are a little trickier, right?

00:34:07.000 They're all over Texas.

00:34:09.000 The Comanche left so many arrowheads. 1.00

00:34:11.000 Go to Gary Clark Jr.'s Instagram page. 0.99

00:34:14.000 He has a fucking perfect arrowhead that they found on a friend of his ranch. 0.97

00:34:21.000 It's amazing when you look at this and you go, okay, this is probably hundreds of years ago. 0.99

00:34:27.000 Some guy sent this and look at that.

00:34:29.000 Look how perfect that is.

00:34:30.000 Oh, that's gorgeous.

00:34:31.000 Look how perfect it is.

00:34:32.000 It's perfect.

00:34:33.000 Dude, I'll make you one.

00:34:35.000 I would appreciate that, but I found one once.

00:34:39.000 I was hunting in Nevada. 0.92

00:34:41.000 I was doing a high country mule deer hunt and I found one and I fucking lost it. 0.90

00:34:46.000 I don't know what happened, but it was just... 0.80

00:34:48.000 It was a chunk.

00:34:49.000 It had broken.

00:34:49.000 But that one...

00:34:50.000 Go back to that one again real quick.

00:34:53.000 That's perfect.

00:34:54.000 I mean, look at the...

00:34:55.000 Oh, it's really nice.

00:34:56.000 It's not damaged at all.

00:34:59.000 So what you see...

00:35:00.000 What do you think that's made out of?

00:35:02.000 I think it's chert.

00:35:04.000 So chert often has this kind of chalky exterior that you've got to get off of it before you...

00:35:09.000 Chert?

00:35:09.000 Yeah.

00:35:10.000 I've never even heard of that.

00:35:11.000 Yeah.

00:35:12.000 How old do you think that is?

00:35:13.000 If you had to guess.

00:35:16.000 Seven, eight hundred years?

00:35:17.000 I think so.

00:35:18.000 Check this out, man.

00:35:19.000 One of the coolest experiences I ever had.

00:35:22.000 So I did archaeology for about five years.

00:35:24.000 I excavated in Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, in Hawaii, in Australia, and in Southern and Northern California.

00:35:33.000 And when I was in Mexico, we were working on this old village site.

00:35:37.000 It's a post-classic Maya site.

00:35:39.000 And we're digging up, like, there's just loads of pottery.

00:35:43.000 Right?

00:35:43.000 Because think about it.

00:35:44.000 If you're...

00:35:44.000 You know, you make a pot.

00:35:46.000 Inevitably, you're going to drop and break that thing.

00:35:48.000 And what do you do?

00:35:48.000 You sweep it out the front door.

00:35:49.000 You know?

00:35:50.000 And so we'd find these huge pits that are just full of pottery sherds.

00:35:58.000 And, you know, after a while, you just become totally desensitized to it.

00:36:02.000 You're just chucking them in a bag.

00:36:03.000 And, oh, here's where I found 10 more or whatever.

00:36:05.000 And then one of them I pulled out and it had a fingerprint in it.

00:36:09.000 Oh, dude.

00:36:10.000 And I'm looking at the thing and it's like...

00:36:13.000 Suppressed into the clay?

00:36:15.000 Yeah.

00:36:15.000 Suddenly I've traveled through time, right?

00:36:17.000 I've gone back 1,200 years and I'm sitting there with this person in their house with their thumbprint pressed into this thing.

00:36:24.000 It really unnerved me.

00:36:26.000 Wow.

00:36:27.000 I mean in archaeological terms, meh.

00:36:31.000 It doesn't actually tell us that much.

00:36:33.000 We got 10,000 pieces of those pots.

00:36:35.000 But on a personal level, experiencing that visceral connection to the history of humankind is – Unparalleled.

00:36:43.000 Right, it's because you know someone made the pottery, but it's almost abstract until you see that fingerprint.

00:36:49.000 Yeah. 0.94

00:36:50.000 Boy, that's fucking awesome. 0.96

00:36:51.000 God. 0.97

00:36:52.000 Yeah, we also, one time I found this, we were walking through the jungle, we were actually surveying, we found a temple in the Yucatan that like the local people knew about, but no one from the university had seen it.

00:37:05.000 And so this guy's like, oh, you want a temple?

00:37:06.000 Yeah, the temple over there.

00:37:08.000 You know, and so we're like hacking through the bushes with our, through the vines with our machetes.

00:37:13.000 And, and we come up on this temple and I was like, oh man, this is, this is crazy.

00:37:18.000 Like how many people have seen this thing in the past, you know, 300 years?

00:37:22.000 And then there were kind of some central stairs going up the middle of the temple.

00:37:27.000 And I went there and looked on the ground and there was this figurine there.

00:37:32.000 And it had eyes and like a little hat, but it was like somebody had made this thing out of clay and pressed it together.

00:37:40.000 I never figured out how old that was.

00:37:42.000 I mean, it could have been made more recently.

00:37:43.000 Did you take it?

00:37:44.000 Kind of weird.

00:37:46.000 We bagged it and tagged it, as they say in archaeology.

00:37:49.000 It went back to the lab.

00:37:50.000 What are the rules on that?

00:37:51.000 Like if you go to a temple, they take you to a temple and you find something that's there, are you allowed to say, I'm a scientist?

00:37:59.000 Well, okay, so...

00:38:02.000 I became really uncomfortable with the idea that because I had a degree, I had some kind of authority over other people's culture.

00:38:09.000 Right.

00:38:10.000 That's why I'm asking. 1.00

00:38:10.000 Yeah, and I always felt like, well, that village that's there, that's their shit. 1.00

00:38:15.000 Why are we taking it? 0.98

00:38:16.000 And obviously it's for the advancement of knowledge and maybe it brings some benefit to their village, but we don't know.

00:38:22.000 So this is eventually what drove me out of archaeology.

00:38:27.000 For my master's thesis, I went up to Northern California.

00:38:31.000 And I worked with this tribe called the Winnemum Wintu.

00:38:34.000 And they...

00:38:36.000 It's a pretty tragic story up there, man.

00:38:39.000 They had been there for thousands of years, and we Americans decided that they were going to build a giant dam so they could have a reservoir up there, and they inundated all of their ancestral homelands,

00:38:55.000 like all of their spiritual sites, all of their graveyards.

00:38:58.000 I mean, all this stuff went underwater.

00:39:00.000 So I'd spent two years doing a degree in maritime archaeology.

00:39:05.000 I'd been diving shipwrecks all over the world.

00:39:07.000 I went up there and I said, let me dive in the reservoir.

00:39:13.000 I've got my underwater camera and I said, I'll take some photos.

00:39:17.000 I'll bring them back.

00:39:18.000 We can have a chat about it.

00:39:19.000 The spiritual leader of the tribe, Kayleen, she says, All right.

00:39:24.000 Well, why don't you just hang out for a bit?

00:39:26.000 And then maybe we can do that later.

00:39:28.000 So, like, days turn into weeks.

00:39:30.000 And then, you know, a couple months.

00:39:32.000 And I'm getting nervous.

00:39:32.000 I'm like, I have to write my thesis.

00:39:35.000 I have no...

00:39:35.000 I don't have my data.

00:39:37.000 And during these months, you're hanging out with these people?

00:39:39.000 Yeah, I'm just hanging out there.

00:39:40.000 Are you eating dinner with them?

00:39:41.000 Just chilling?

00:39:42.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:39:42.000 How do you have all this time?

00:39:44.000 Yeah, we actually went...

00:39:45.000 Well, it's the degree, right?

00:39:47.000 Like, that's what I'm there to do.

00:39:48.000 I'm doing my field work.

00:39:50.000 And you can just hang out for months.

00:39:51.000 Yeah, but I'm supposed to be like doing research and writing a thesis.

00:39:56.000 And so after a while I press her.

00:39:58.000 I'm like, look, I've got to do something. 0.95

00:40:02.000 And she said, you know what the problem with you white people is? 0.98

00:40:05.000 You're obsessed with stuff. 0.86

00:40:07.000 You just want to get your hands on the things.

00:40:09.000 And she said, if you want to know about our culture, you've been hanging out with us this whole time.

00:40:15.000 What can you tell me about our culture?

00:40:16.000 Why do you need to get all that stuff that's underwater out there?

00:40:21.000 Why do you need that?

00:40:22.000 You can just talk to us.

00:40:24.000 So that was sort of my bridge from moving from archaeology into cultural geography, which is much more about thinking about people's relationships with places and landscapes.

00:40:33.000 And their culture is documented in what way?

00:40:37.000 How are they maintaining their historical records?

00:40:41.000 Well, this was actually one of my first academic articles.

00:40:44.000 I wrote about how a lot of their religious ceremonies...

00:40:52.000 So in one case, there was a rock that young women went to as part of a puberty ceremony, and it used to be above water, and they had that ceremony in the spring, but now that's when the The waters are high,

00:41:11.000 right?

00:41:11.000 So now they do it in sort of drought season so that they can still get to the rock.

00:41:15.000 And so they had changed the whole kind of – their cultural fabric had been altered by that inundation event.

00:41:23.000 And basically the point that she was trying to get across to me was like that didn't break us.

00:41:29.000 We're still us, even though these things have had to change.

00:41:33.000 It was an education for me as an archaeologist because when you go into a place with that very data-driven, empirical mindset, you want hard facts that make sense, that you can write up clearly.

00:41:49.000 What she was telling me was something that was a little bit more It was more nuanced.

00:41:54.000 It was difficult to pin down.

00:41:55.000 It was more qualitative.

00:41:57.000 And so I had to grapple with that.

00:42:00.000 And that was a big learning lesson for me.

00:42:02.000 So in this – but when you're dealing with things that are more nuanced, you still need to kind of know what happened and when it happened.

00:42:12.000 So how are they keeping records of what happened and when it happened?

00:42:17.000 Well, they had oral histories.

00:42:18.000 Oral histories.

00:42:19.000 Yeah, but I could also go to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Forest Service.

00:42:26.000 I was actually working for the Bureau of Land Management at that time.

00:42:30.000 So those federal agencies have records of what happened.

00:42:33.000 Right.

00:42:34.000 I mean with the building of the dam and what was recorded beforehand and all of that. 0.97

00:42:37.000 Which is kind of fucked that they did that, right? 0.97

00:42:39.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:42:40.000 But I mean internally.

00:42:42.000 I mean in the tribe, everything is orally?

00:42:46.000 Yeah.

00:42:47.000 There's probably more people writing things down now these days.

00:42:49.000 But they've got oral histories that go back a long time.

00:42:52.000 When I was in Australia – get this, man.

00:42:55.000 I was talking to – An Aboriginal clan out there, and they were telling me that in the Sydney Harbor, they can actually tell, like, they can draw you a map of what is underwater in the Sydney Harbor, because they have a cultural memory of when that wasn't underwater that goes back.

00:43:13.000 Tens of thousands of years.

00:43:15.000 And they have passed that down.

00:43:16.000 They actually retain that memory.

00:43:18.000 So they have a pre-ice age memory when the oceans were less deep.

00:43:24.000 Yeah, I don't know if it's pre-ice age, but the water levels were...

00:43:28.000 Right.

00:43:28.000 Yeah.

00:43:29.000 So the water levels are a little lower.

00:43:30.000 It has to be pre-ice age before 10,000 years.

00:43:33.000 Yeah.

00:43:33.000 Right?

00:43:33.000 So these people had this idea of what was going on and they just kept passing it down generation to generation.

00:43:40.000 Yeah.

00:43:42.000 How accurate is their memory of it?

00:43:45.000 I don't know.

00:43:46.000 I mean I'm sure people are doing research on that.

00:43:48.000 But if you look at those – the dot drawings, those like traditional paintings that you see.

00:43:56.000 That are often paintings of landscapes.

00:43:59.000 Some of those have been mapped onto aerial imagery and they're startlingly accurate, right?

00:44:07.000 And so you have to wonder, like, how did people who didn't have those aerial views get that view down on the landscape, right?

00:44:17.000 Yeah.

00:44:19.000 Do you stitch that together by just knowing the place so well that you can kind of depict it in that way?

00:44:25.000 Or is there some kind of...

00:44:26.000 I mean, you can get all hippy-dippy about it and it's about astral projection or people were taking hallucinogenics and flying across the landscape.

00:44:34.000 Yeah, when you look at ancient maps that are really accurate, it really is kind of amazing that they did all this stuff from a land level.

00:44:42.000 They did it looking down.

00:44:44.000 They figured out from traversing, going around the...

00:45:02.000 It is amazing.

00:45:04.000 It is amazing.

00:45:08.000 How advanced we are now, right?

00:45:10.000 What we've done with technology.

00:45:12.000 But we don't talk a lot about all these skills that we've lost.

00:45:16.000 So that's why I like going out into the landscape.

00:45:18.000 I love going out for a couple of days, just hiking through the woods with a compass, figuring it out, turn the phone off, leave it at home.

00:45:25.000 I mean, give someone a sextant and tell them, figure your way across the ocean.

00:45:29.000 Right, yeah, good luck.

00:45:30.000 Right?

00:45:30.000 I mean, just looking at one of those things.

00:45:32.000 Or how about that ancient Greek computer thing?

00:45:37.000 What is that called?

00:45:38.000 Oh, the abacus?

00:45:39.000 No, no, no.

00:45:40.000 That's a counting thing.

00:45:42.000 That...

00:45:44.000 There's a device that they found that consists of a myriad of moving gears that took forever for them to try to understand.

00:45:54.000 It's called the anti... 0.91

00:45:56.000 I'm going to fuck up the word. 0.97

00:45:58.000 You know what I'm talking about, Jamie? 0.95

00:45:59.000 Yeah, Jamie knows what I'm talking about.

00:46:00.000 There's this thing that they found that's intensely complex, and it's thousands of years old. 0.91

00:46:07.000 And they found it in a shipwreck, and they had to try to back-engineer what this fucking thing is and how it worked. 0.91

00:46:17.000 Astrolabe, I think, right? 0.98

00:46:19.000 Astrolabe.

00:46:21.000 I don't think...

00:46:22.000 Two-dimensional model of the celestial sphere.

00:46:25.000 That's really cool.

00:46:26.000 That is a different thing, though.

00:46:29.000 It is really cool.

00:46:32.000 Pretty amazing.

00:46:33.000 The original smartphone, that's funny.

00:46:36.000 But no, it's an ancient Greek...

00:46:40.000 Essentially, it's an ancient computer.

00:46:41.000 Just pull up ancient computer antith...

00:46:46.000 I mean, I typed in an ancient Greek ocean exploration tool.

00:46:49.000 No, no, no, but it's not that.

00:46:50.000 It's not an ocean exploration tool.

00:46:52.000 It's actually like a computer.

00:46:54.000 It's an... 1.00

00:46:55.000 God damn it. 0.99

00:46:55.000 I wish I wrote it down. 0.99

00:46:58.000 It's...

00:46:58.000 The word is anti...

00:47:01.000 That's it.

00:47:01.000 Oh, the anti-therica thing.

00:47:04.000 Yes.

00:47:04.000 Kythera.

00:47:05.000 That's it.

00:47:06.000 So click on that thing. 0.98

00:47:07.000 They found that, and they're like, okay, what in the fuck is this?

00:47:11.000 And this anti-Kythera mechanism, a 2,000-year-old computer. 0.72

00:47:19.000 And they found this, and they had to try to figure out what this is and see how they've kind of 3D mapped it and reimagined.

00:47:29.000 Yeah.

00:47:30.000 I mean, I don't even know what they used it for.

00:47:35.000 Let's click on that.

00:47:37.000 What is the article to the right on Daily Express?

00:47:42.000 Yeah.

00:47:43.000 Let's see what it says.

00:47:45.000 Google Doodle marks the discovery of the ancient Greek computer.

00:47:50.000 So this is...

00:47:50.000 Track and calculate position of the moon and sun.

00:47:53.000 Yeah.

00:47:54.000 Position of the moon and sun and planets as well as predict the dates and colors of the colors.

00:47:58.000 So it is a celestial device.

00:48:00.000 Yeah, in some way.

00:48:01.000 But it's a computer, right?

00:48:04.000 So this thing, this 2,000-year-old device, was even capable of adding, multiplying, dividing, and subtracting.

00:48:11.000 So they found it in May 17th, 1902, and it was discovered in a Roman cargo shipwreck.

00:48:21.000 For years, they were baffled by the purpose of the mysterious object and initially assumed the mechanism was a gear or a wheel, but the archaeologists soon discovered that the device was a complex machine capable of various factions.

00:48:33.000 The Antikythera mechanism gathered interest in the 1950s and its complexity, function, and computational powers has led it to be dubbed the first ever computer. 0.97

00:48:44.000 Fucking crazy. 0.93

00:48:45.000 Dude, don't you wonder how much stuff we have lost? 0.99

00:48:47.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:48.000 Or how much stuff is still in the ground?

00:48:50.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:50.000 That kind of haunts me.

00:48:52.000 You could go crazy thinking about when we should start digging up everything and try and unveil these ancient mysteries.

00:48:58.000 Well, you really could.

00:48:59.000 You know, particularly when you think about, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with, you said you know about Graham Hancock, but you know about Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, the two of them sort of combined their data and their research, and Randall Carlson is an expert in astrological or,

00:49:16.000 excuse me, asteroidal or meteorological impacts.

00:49:20.000 What would you say?

00:49:21.000 Meteor impacts?

00:49:22.000 Right.

00:49:22.000 Asteroid impacts.

00:49:24.000 I think once it hits the Earth, it's an asteroid.

00:49:26.000 Yeah.

00:49:26.000 And he is a proponent of this theory that is gaining a lot of traction that the Ice Age ended abruptly because of an impact.

00:49:36.000 And it coincides with soil samples, with these samples that they've shown that show a lot of that tritonite, nuclear glass.

00:49:47.000 Yeah.

00:49:48.000 Trinitite.

00:49:49.000 Trinitite, thank you.

00:49:50.000 From the Trinity Project, right?

00:49:52.000 Yeah.

00:49:52.000 They found this stuff, when they do core samples, somewhere in that neighborhood of 12,000 years, which is the neighborhood where the Ice Age ended, scattered all throughout Europe and the United States.

00:50:04.000 And they believe that something happened, some sort of an impact, multiple impacts, around 12,000 years ago, it ended the Ice Age abruptly and probably caused a lot of flooding and probably was the origin of The Epic of Gilgamesh flood story,

00:50:22.000 Noah's Ark flood story, and also why there seems to be some sort of a reset of civilization.

00:50:28.000 There's a pre-12,000 years ago technology, and then there's sort of a dead zone of several thousand years, and then things reignite again after that.

00:50:37.000 Well, it lends credence to...

00:50:52.000 Yeah.

00:50:58.000 One of the preppers that I spoke to, he's actually here in California.

00:51:02.000 The first time I met him, he started talking about Planet X, Nibiru.

00:51:07.000 Nibiru, yeah.

00:51:09.000 It's all Zacharias Hitchin.

00:51:10.000 You ever read his stuff?

00:51:11.000 No.

00:51:12.000 Fascinating, weirdo stuff.

00:51:14.000 Well, so he told me, you know, Nibiru is hiding behind the sun and it's going to emerge.

00:51:21.000 And the last time it emerged was 4,000 years ago.

00:51:23.000 And that's where the flood story comes from because it's going to create a pole shift. 1.00

00:51:28.000 So the North and South Pole are going to flip and that's what creates the tidal wave event.

00:51:32.000 And so he told me that he was building his bunkers to be submerged in 200 feet of water.

00:51:37.000 Well, he might be adding to the story.

00:51:41.000 That's part of the problem.

00:51:42.000 But what's interesting there is you kind of – with these conspiracy theories, there's always a kernel of truth, right?

00:51:48.000 There's always a kernel of something that you can hold on to, but then it just gets spinned in a slightly weird way.

00:51:53.000 And I think some of it is kind of displaced anxiety, right?

00:51:57.000 Because we – like these disasters have happened.

00:52:00.000 We know they have happened.

00:52:01.000 We know that they will happen.

00:52:03.000 We don't quite want to admit it, but it's a lot easier – To pin it on some kind of impossible event than just to decide that the world is chaos and we have to deal with it.

00:52:13.000 Yeah, there's many, many, many points of chaos.

00:52:15.000 It's not just aliens.

00:52:17.000 Exactly.

00:52:19.000 Zacharias Hitchin is fascinating.

00:52:20.000 I mean, I'm not saying I buy into any of his theories, but what I am saying is what he did expose that is undeniable was the rich history of illustrations from Sumer.

00:52:37.000 That are really fascinating, particularly the origin of the Caduceus, the origin of the double helix DNA that seems to be...

00:52:50.000 When you look at that sign that symbolizes medicine, you know, the two snakes crossing together, that originated in ancient Sumer, and it originated with...

00:53:03.000 A lot of these ancient clay tablets that showed what could be...

00:53:08.000 It really is open to interpretation, right?

00:53:12.000 But what he interpreted, the way he interpreted it, and he's got a very...

00:53:17.000 Extraordinarily unusual interpretation of the Sumerian text.

00:53:20.000 And his interpretation of the Sumerian text is that it is a historical record of these beings that came from another planet and genetically manipulated human beings.

00:53:30.000 And the crazy thing is, when you look at these clay tablets in the illustrations, you see these strange things.

00:53:37.000 Like, you see these godlike creatures.

00:53:40.000 We're good to go.

00:54:01.000 Many people from many different cultures, they did not think that the solar system had a sun in the center and that there was planets that were orbiting it.

00:54:11.000 Well, they had a depiction of the solar system, not just a depiction, but all of the planets in the proper order.

00:54:18.000 Pull up the image of the Sumerian solar system.

00:54:23.000 This is 6,000 years ago.

00:54:25.000 Look at this picture.

00:54:26.000 So these gods, look at that.

00:54:29.000 The sun in the center, all the planets, no extra planets, all the planets.

00:54:34.000 Is Pluto in there?

00:54:35.000 I think it was.

00:54:38.000 How many we got there?

00:54:39.000 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Well, they counted the moon as a planet, which is odd, and then they counted Nibiru.

00:54:49.000 Nibiru is this planet that they claim, that's it right there, that's on this 3,600-year elliptical orbit.

00:54:57.000 Right.

00:54:59.000 There's no evidence in Nibiru.

00:55:00.000 There's no evidence that that's true.

00:55:02.000 But who knows how much of this, you know, we're getting from these people that are interpreting this language that's essentially a dead language. 0.75

00:55:10.000 No one can even speak it. 0.95

00:55:12.000 So how much fuckery is involved in that, I don't know. 1.00

00:55:16.000 I mean, I'm a moron. 0.99

00:55:17.000 I'm not a religious scholar. 0.99

00:55:18.000 I'm not a linguist.

00:55:20.000 I don't really understand this stuff.

00:55:21.000 But I do know that the Epic of Gilgamesh Which is also a Sumerian tale, shares a lot of similarities with the Bible, including the similarities between the flood stories, the origin stories.

00:55:35.000 You know, there's just a lot of weirdness to that stuff.

00:55:38.000 But the fact that these people had this story of the Anunnaki, and the Anunnaki, according to Sitchin, the literal translation is, those from heaven to earth came.

00:55:50.000 And that they had come here, and that they had, you know, done some—and this is his interpretation—they had done—and, by the way, there's a website called SitchinIsWrong.com, and you can go there, and this is another scholar of Sumerian history that refutes all of his claims.

00:56:09.000 Who's right?

00:56:09.000 Who's wrong?

00:56:10.000 I don't know.

00:56:10.000 But it's really weird.

00:56:12.000 Just the stuff that you can't get away from is really weird.

00:56:16.000 And that's the solar system, the fact that they had this detailed map of the solar system.

00:56:21.000 Again, you're talking about, when I say detailed, they scrawled it on clay tablets 6,000 years ago.

00:56:27.000 But clearly the center is the sun.

00:56:30.000 It even looks like the sun.

00:56:31.000 It's much larger than anything else.

00:56:33.000 The sun's a million times larger than Earth.

00:56:35.000 And it's just this big thing and then you see all these things around it that are supposedly representative of Jupiter, Neptune, Venus.

00:56:46.000 It really does look like Mars, Earth.

00:56:49.000 It really does look like this is their drawing on clay of the solar system. 0.99

00:56:55.000 Like how the fuck did they do that? 0.99

00:56:57.000 What were they doing? 0.98

00:56:58.000 Yeah, no, it's fascinating and I think it's certainly worth – Wherever we fall on these debates, it's certainly worth talking about, right?

00:57:06.000 It's worth investigating.

00:57:07.000 When I started working with these doomsday preppers, I took a lot of heat from some of my friends in academia.

00:57:15.000 What did they say?

00:57:17.000 They're right-wingers. 0.98

00:57:18.000 They've got disgusting political views. 1.00

00:57:20.000 They're racist. 1.00

00:57:20.000 They're misogynist. 1.00

00:57:21.000 They're buying into conspiracy theories.

00:57:23.000 Why would you give them airtime basically?

00:57:26.000 Let me stop right there.

00:57:26.000 Why would you generalize an entire group of weirdos like that?

00:57:30.000 That's so crazy. 0.73

00:57:30.000 Exactly. 0.73

00:57:31.000 What do you think that is though?

00:57:32.000 What is the motivation to do that?

00:57:35.000 Well, it's people tribalizing, right?

00:57:38.000 It's part of this partisan divide that we're experiencing, particularly in this country.

00:57:44.000 Or right and left or whatever binary you want to pick.

00:57:49.000 I mean, we could go over the reasons why we've ended up in this situation, but we are running headlong into a very partisan age.

00:58:00.000 And I feel like the solution to that is...

00:58:04.000 Actually, it's going and spending time with people that you disagree with, right?

00:58:08.000 It's extending some empathy, right?

00:58:10.000 And it's not necessarily about giving people voice, but it is about giving people space and time, right?

00:58:16.000 And so I have to be honest, a lot of these preppers I hung out with, it was hard to hang out with them.

00:58:24.000 How so?

00:58:25.000 One of the guys did this thing where every time we were meeting, he would rate women as they walked by.

00:58:32.000 She's a seven.

00:58:33.000 She's a nine.

00:58:34.000 It was really hard not to interject and say, man, this is grocery shopping.

00:58:38.000 Leave her alone. 1.00

00:58:41.000 The conspiracy theories were constant.

00:58:43.000 But there's also a kind of – we can think about like people who are prepping on the everyday, like the – The person who just cares about taking care of themselves and their family and maybe they're interested in building community.

00:59:00.000 But then there are the people who are selling the antidote to their fears.

00:59:03.000 In the book, I call these people the dread merchants.

00:59:06.000 The people who are going to sell you the bunker.

00:59:09.000 Jim Baker and his food.

00:59:12.000 Oh man, his survival water.

00:59:13.000 How amazing are those buckets of food that you could use as the base of a table?

00:59:18.000 Have you seen that whole video?

00:59:20.000 I love those.

00:59:21.000 And he talks about using them as port-a-johns.

00:59:23.000 Yes, yes.

00:59:24.000 Yeah, he sells the Bible buckets as well.

00:59:26.000 Bible buckets?

00:59:27.000 What's a Bible bucket?

00:59:28.000 It's just a bucket full of Bibles, you know, just in case.

00:59:31.000 Why do you need more than one Bible?

00:59:33.000 I know.

00:59:33.000 Yeah, well, maybe you've got a big family.

00:59:35.000 Maybe you want to go Old Testament if shit gets really weird. 0.95

00:59:39.000 Have you ever seen the Vic Berger remixes of the Jim? 0.97

00:59:42.000 Yes, I have.

00:59:43.000 Oh man, they are so much fun.

00:59:45.000 I got really addicted to those when I was working on this project.

00:59:48.000 It became almost like a mantra, having these running in the background.

00:59:54.000 It's so strange that he was the guy that was attached to the Jessica Hahn controversy back in the 1980s.

01:00:02.000 I mean, you remember that?

01:00:03.000 Yeah.

01:00:04.000 Do you remember the Jim Baker?

01:00:05.000 Like, he had had an affair with this woman, and it became, for whatever reason, this big news.

01:00:11.000 And it's the same guy.

01:00:13.000 He's around today.

01:00:14.000 Because then we still expected people to be guided by their moral compass. 1.00

01:00:18.000 Everyone's a hypocrite now. 0.99

01:00:19.000 Right. 0.99

01:00:20.000 Do you remember?

01:00:20.000 Then there was Jimmy Swagger got caught with a hooker, and he was crying, I have sinned.

01:00:25.000 Do you remember that?

01:00:27.000 You remember that?

01:00:28.000 That was good.

01:00:28.000 Yeah, no one confesses anything anymore.

01:00:31.000 No one admits anything anymore.

01:00:32.000 Spread the word Bible bucket. 1.00

01:00:33.000 Yes.

01:00:34.000 I love that one.

01:00:36.000 A bucket of Bibles.

01:00:38.000 Why not?

01:00:38.000 That's only 50 bucks?

01:00:40.000 That's a pretty good deal.

01:00:41.000 How many Bibles do you get?

01:00:43.000 24. Wow.

01:00:44.000 I think that's what it says.

01:00:45.000 Should we get a bucket of Bibles?

01:00:46.000 I feel like we should have one at the studio.

01:00:48.000 Get one.

01:00:49.000 I feel like we should have one at the studio.

01:00:50.000 I don't want to feed the beast, but you should get one. 0.99

01:00:52.000 God, if he gets 50 bucks from me, what the fuck? 0.99

01:00:55.000 We need at least a table worth. 0.99

01:00:57.000 Right.

01:00:58.000 A table's worth of Bibles.

01:01:00.000 Six buckets?

01:01:01.000 How many buckets makes a table? 1.00

01:01:04.000 Shouldn't we get the food?

01:01:05.000 Or we should just get the Bibles?

01:01:06.000 One bucket of Bibles and five buckets of food.

01:01:11.000 I love watching him feed the audience from the giant trough.

01:01:15.000 You can get real good freeze-dried food that'll last forever.

01:01:20.000 Hell yeah, you can.

01:01:21.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:01:24.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:01:25.000 Creamy potato soup. 1.00

01:01:27.000 Oh my god, look at that slop. 1.00

01:01:30.000 And they do a big thing of rice and they mix it all together.

01:01:34.000 A big bucket of slop is poured on top of it.

01:01:36.000 Google peakrefuel.com.

01:01:39.000 This is my friend Chad Mendez has a really delicious company that they make actual...

01:01:47.000 Is it freeze dry?

01:01:48.000 I think his stuff is freeze dry or dehydrated.

01:01:50.000 I'm not sure.

01:01:52.000 People are doing it now.

01:01:55.000 People are doing it now where you can keep this stuff forever.

01:01:58.000 This is my buddy Chad's stuff.

01:02:00.000 This is really good for you.

01:02:02.000 It's actually delicious and healthy.

01:02:04.000 He's doing mylar bags too.

01:02:06.000 That's much better than doing buckets.

01:02:08.000 Chad is a former UFC fighter who's a great guy who's actually a hunter.

01:02:15.000 Everything's organic and really healthy.

01:02:17.000 When you reconstitute it, it actually tastes good. 0.99

01:02:21.000 So you don't have to buy that Jim Baker bullshit. 0.98

01:02:24.000 You can actually buy this. 0.99

01:02:25.000 Check this out.

01:02:25.000 I went to a community just outside of Dallas.

01:02:29.000 And this is a budding prepper community.

01:02:32.000 And they had built this 50-foot fountain ringed by the four horses of the apocalypse.

01:02:37.000 Oh, Christ.

01:02:38.000 I mean, it's like in a rural county, in a town with like 300 people.

01:02:43.000 They bought all this land.

01:02:44.000 It was a square mile of land.

01:02:46.000 And it had these sort of green lagoons in there that were dredged out for grazing cows at some point.

01:02:55.000 And they were going to revitalize these into these kind of like crystal blue lagoons with white beach sand.

01:03:01.000 And they were going to build a bunker community in there called Trident Lakes.

01:03:05.000 So the lakes are the blue lagoons.

01:03:08.000 And he told me that their plan was to do a kind of outer perimeter wall around this that was going to be a giant berm around shipping containers.

01:03:18.000 So essentially the wall would be hollow and he said he was going to fill it with buckets.

01:03:24.000 Of food and whatever.

01:03:26.000 And I kept imagining Jim Baker's Bible buckets just lined up down the walls of this thing.

01:03:32.000 To keep intruders out. 0.99

01:03:34.000 Just a fucking 12-foot high wall of Bible buckets. 0.99

01:03:37.000 But they had this ex-Navy SEAL working for them. 0.99

01:03:41.000 And I'm waiting to meet with the CEO of...

01:03:45.000 He's kept me there for about three days trying to interview this guy.

01:03:49.000 In the meantime, they put me on the phone with this ex-Navy SEAL and he's going to go over their security plan with me.

01:03:56.000 So he tells me about the wall and then they're going to put up a chain link fence with barbed wire and they're going to have dogs and CCTV cameras and they've got a kind of no man's land between the fence and the shipping containers, right?

01:04:11.000 And he told me, as a geographer, you've got to understand you've got to control the geospace.

01:04:17.000 The geospace.

01:04:19.000 What's the geospace?

01:04:19.000 I don't know, man.

01:04:21.000 I guess it's just space.

01:04:23.000 You've got to have control of it.

01:04:25.000 Don't you love when people use extra words?

01:04:28.000 I know.

01:04:28.000 But then he started going down this rabbit hole where he's like, you know… We did some Googling.

01:04:35.000 There's Muslim groups in Texas.

01:04:37.000 Oh my goodness.

01:04:38.000 And I was like, oh, okay.

01:04:39.000 And he goes, and you know, it's not just Muslim groups.

01:04:44.000 It's not just Black Lives Matter.

01:04:46.000 There's white nationalists.

01:04:47.000 We don't like any of those extremist views.

01:04:50.000 I'm thinking, well, this is kind of extreme, like what you guys are planning here.

01:04:56.000 We don't like any extremists. 0.82

01:04:58.000 We don't like white nationalists. 0.98

01:05:00.000 That's hilarious.

01:05:02.000 I met some really interesting people on this project.

01:05:07.000 There were people who were kind of on the deep end of things.

01:05:11.000 I met one guy in Kansas.

01:05:13.000 I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have run into this place, a survival condo in Kansas.

01:05:19.000 No, I've never heard of it.

01:05:20.000 Dude, it's awesome.

01:05:22.000 Survival condo?

01:05:23.000 Survival condo.

01:05:23.000 Is it actually a condo?

01:05:24.000 It's a condo.

01:05:26.000 One condo?

01:05:26.000 Listen to this.

01:05:28.000 There's two kinds of nuclear missile silos from the Cold War that are in the Midwest.

01:05:35.000 The first kind is a kind of horizontal one where they would lift the missile up to fire it.

01:05:39.000 And then the later ones they built, the Atlas F silos are vertical.

01:05:43.000 So they're 200 feet deep and they had a nuclear-tipped ICBM, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

01:05:49.000 Jamie found it.

01:05:50.000 Yeah.

01:05:51.000 Bunker home with a price tag of $2 million.

01:05:53.000 Oh my god.

01:05:54.000 $2 million?

01:05:55.000 So it's $1.5 million for a half floor inside this thing or $3 million for a full floor.

01:06:00.000 What is this?

01:06:01.000 Dude, this guy converted the entire missile silo into a subterranean condo complex.

01:06:06.000 So those are like LCD screens that make it look like you're outside?

01:06:10.000 Yeah.

01:06:10.000 Oh my god, that's so nuts.

01:06:12.000 And nobody told me...

01:06:13.000 Wait, wait for it.

01:06:14.000 Hold on.

01:06:15.000 He's got a pool.

01:06:16.000 Yeah, he's got a pool.

01:06:17.000 With a waterfall.

01:06:18.000 Beach.

01:06:18.000 Actually, it's pretty dope.

01:06:19.000 Dude, there's a rock wall.

01:06:20.000 It's fantastic.

01:06:21.000 It's got a theater, pool table, rock wall.

01:06:23.000 We watched 007 in there.

01:06:25.000 Wow!

01:06:25.000 What is that?

01:06:26.000 That's where they melt the bodies. 0.79

01:06:27.000 That's where they're raising fish in there. 0.99

01:06:29.000 Tilapia.

01:06:30.000 Oh my goodness.

01:06:32.000 Yeah, they've got an FDA certified growing facility in there.

01:06:35.000 Duncan went to one of these places.

01:06:37.000 When I was telling you I did that television show where we went to the CDC, Duncan met with these people.

01:06:42.000 I don't know if it was this group, but it was real similar.

01:06:45.000 Penthouse was the penthouse.

01:06:47.000 That's where Drake lives, right?

01:06:51.000 Some ballers probably have some sort of crazy setup up there. 0.98

01:06:54.000 So get this.

01:06:55.000 The guy, he bought this thing for $300,000, the missile silo.

01:07:01.000 Is he selling these?

01:07:02.000 Yeah, and he dumped, I think, $10 million.

01:07:04.000 $4.5 million?

01:07:06.000 Jesus!

01:07:07.000 That's the penthouse.

01:07:07.000 That's fat, though.

01:07:08.000 That's a fat house. 0.64

01:07:09.000 Would you live there?

01:07:10.000 Yeah, totally.

01:07:11.000 If you did, would you have, like, a velvet robe and invite people over with, like, a cuvasier and a snifter?

01:07:19.000 Come on over.

01:07:19.000 Sit there and smoke my pipe on top of my Bible bucket.

01:07:22.000 Cigars!

01:07:22.000 Don't you want cigars in a place like that?

01:07:24.000 You're a baller. 1.00

01:07:25.000 You don't have time for a fucking cigar. 1.00

01:07:27.000 Cigars you have to—or a pipe, rather. 1.00

01:07:28.000 Pipes you have to relight.

01:07:30.000 It's annoying.

01:07:31.000 This is true.

01:07:31.000 You're a mover and a shaker.

01:07:32.000 You're in a condo that's $4.5 million under the ground protecting you from bombs.

01:07:38.000 Well, so I'm down there.

01:07:40.000 Like, we're 100 feet underground.

01:07:42.000 How'd they get their air?

01:07:43.000 And I'm inside.

01:07:44.000 He's got...

01:07:46.000 Redundant filtration systems, pulling air from the outside.

01:07:50.000 Pulling air with a mechanism?

01:07:52.000 He's got nuclear, biological and chemical air filtration systems.

01:07:55.000 He's also got a volcanic ash scrubber.

01:07:57.000 So if the caldera does blow, he can actually scrub the ash out of the air.

01:08:00.000 Come on! 0.61

01:08:00.000 Yeah, no serious. 0.61

01:08:02.000 So Larry Hall told me that the guy who built this, Larry Hall, told me they could stay in there for five years. 1.00

01:08:07.000 But then you hang out with Larry for five years, smelling his farts, listening to his stupid jokes. 1.00

01:08:13.000 He does have a condo in there. 1.00

01:08:15.000 Does he?

01:08:16.000 Four and a half million bucks.

01:08:17.000 And where is this again exactly?

01:08:19.000 Dude, it's in the middle of Kansas.

01:08:20.000 It's in the middle of a bunch of cornfields.

01:08:22.000 There's nothing out there at all.

01:08:24.000 I have a buddy who lives in Iowa right now, and I'm trying to get him to move.

01:08:28.000 I mean, there's issues out there, man.

01:08:31.000 Yeah.

01:08:31.000 I mean, one of the problems is how do you get to it?

01:08:34.000 Right.

01:08:34.000 You're going to have to hike.

01:08:36.000 It's going to take you weeks.

01:08:38.000 But it depends on what kind of disaster you've got.

01:08:40.000 Right.

01:08:40.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:08:41.000 Hike.

01:08:42.000 He's got a – if you buy into one of his packages, he's got a like SWAT-style bulletproof vehicle.

01:08:49.000 Oh, great.

01:08:49.000 He'll kind of pick you up.

01:08:51.000 Great.

01:08:51.000 Then you're hanging out with Larry in a bulletproof vehicle.

01:08:54.000 You're going to have to thank him for saving your life.

01:08:56.000 You know what?

01:08:57.000 I asked him about the security guards, right?

01:08:59.000 Because he's got these camouflaged security guards with ARs standing at the gates and they roll the gate open when you get there and they let you through.

01:09:06.000 I said, dude, what keeps the security guards here?

01:09:10.000 After the caldera blows or whatever.

01:09:15.000 I asked if they had space in the bunker and they didn't.

01:09:18.000 So, I mean, I guess you just lose your exterior security. 0.99

01:09:22.000 They don't have a fucking security condo? 0.99

01:09:25.000 Larry! 1.00

01:09:26.000 Stop being such a greedy fuck! 1.00

01:09:28.000 He needs someone like you around to, like, give him, like, sort of a peripheral view, or an objective view, rather, of the outside. 1.00

01:09:35.000 Like, hey, Larry, you're missing this.

01:09:37.000 You got a hole in your theory.

01:09:39.000 So, in my previous life...

01:09:41.000 Look at all those security people. 1.00

01:09:43.000 They're like a shitty fucking action movie. 1.00

01:09:47.000 Look at these people. 1.00

01:09:48.000 That's Adam Curry in the middle.

01:09:49.000 That's our buddy Adam.

01:09:50.000 Look at him.

01:09:51.000 Closing on that guy in the middle with the black vest. 1.00

01:09:53.000 That's fucking Adam Curry. 1.00

01:09:56.000 That's Adam. 1.00

01:09:57.000 Is that Adam Curry?

01:09:58.000 No.

01:09:59.000 That's the podfather.

01:10:02.000 He's gonna do his podcast, No Agenda, from the condo.

01:10:07.000 That's what he's doing.

01:10:08.000 Some pretty sweet trucks.

01:10:09.000 They are sweet.

01:10:10.000 Yeah.

01:10:11.000 It's not gonna lie, right?

01:10:12.000 The trucks are the real deal.

01:10:13.000 Those are pretty dope. 0.75

01:10:14.000 I went to another place in Utah called Plan B Supply and this is all they do is they build these kind of bulletproof, armored, four-wheel drive, sometimes six-wheel drive trucks.

01:10:26.000 They're crazy rigs.

01:10:27.000 So they buy them – a lot of them they buy from the government.

01:10:30.000 The government retires equipment and they'll just buy – 30 Humvees or whatever and have them delivered to the shop and then they'll put bulletproof plating on them.

01:10:38.000 Yeah, they tune them up.

01:10:40.000 Look at that.

01:10:40.000 These guys are super cool.

01:10:43.000 How little does your dick have to be before that becomes an option? 0.99

01:10:47.000 Oh, that looks dope though. 0.99

01:10:49.000 But so what they told me is they said you're never going to get to the bunker in a serious event, right?

01:10:53.000 So what you need is the vehicle needs to be your bunker.

01:10:56.000 That one right there.

01:10:57.000 You're never going to get to the bunker?

01:10:59.000 Yeah, no.

01:11:00.000 They said just turn the vehicle into your bunker.

01:11:02.000 So I drove that one there.

01:11:04.000 Maybe you don't want to live.

01:11:05.000 You ever thought about that?

01:11:06.000 Yeah.

01:11:08.000 This is what I say. 1.00

01:11:09.000 If there's an asteroid impact, I want it to hit me in the fucking face. 1.00

01:11:13.000 I really do. 1.00

01:11:14.000 I don't want to do this, man.

01:11:16.000 You know, I watched that movie.

01:11:17.000 What is that movie with Viggo Mortensen, The Road?

01:11:20.000 I watched that for five minutes.

01:11:22.000 When he was teaching his kid how to shoot himself in the mouth, I'm like, check.

01:11:25.000 I have kids.

01:11:26.000 I'm not doing this.

01:11:27.000 I had a couple of preppers tell me, you know, how you prep depends on what you're prepping for, right?

01:11:33.000 And a lot of them told me if we're talking about an extinction level event, the caldera, nuclear war, whatever, they just would run into it.

01:11:41.000 Run into it, yeah.

01:11:42.000 Yeah, there's no point in trying to survive that.

01:11:44.000 Yeah, that's the move.

01:11:45.000 Yeah, they're thinking more about, you know.

01:11:47.000 You've got to restart evolution.

01:11:49.000 That's what it is. 0.99

01:11:50.000 Whatever's underground, moles and shit. 0.99

01:11:53.000 They just have to start all over again. 0.99

01:11:56.000 Shrews.

01:11:57.000 That's what we came from, right?

01:11:58.000 Yeah, things that were underground survived previous catastrophes.

01:12:01.000 That does look dope, though.

01:12:03.000 You know what you like to do if you ever got divorced and you just were like seven years old and you had some money in the bank and you like to do ecstasy?

01:12:11.000 You take that to Burning Man.

01:12:12.000 Hell yeah! 1.00

01:12:13.000 Fuck yeah! 1.00

01:12:15.000 Now we're talking. 1.00

01:12:18.000 Yeah, we need one of those.

01:12:19.000 You pick people up and you bug out.

01:12:21.000 We need an Airstream, right?

01:12:23.000 We need a dope Airstream.

01:12:25.000 Get a Raptor.

01:12:27.000 Pull the Airstream.

01:12:29.000 Yeah, I like it.

01:12:30.000 Anyway, those guys are doing well.

01:12:32.000 They're working overtime.

01:12:33.000 Are they though?

01:12:34.000 Who wants to hang out with them?

01:12:36.000 They're pretty cool.

01:12:36.000 Actually, they're Mormons.

01:12:39.000 You know what they told me?

01:12:40.000 So I asked them, what is the plan to escape the disaster when it hits in this vehicle?

01:12:46.000 Like, lay out the logistics for me.

01:12:48.000 And they said, oh, no, you misunderstand.

01:12:49.000 We're not building these vehicles to escape the disaster.

01:12:52.000 We're building these vehicles to assist.

01:12:54.000 And actually, they've got a – they call it a disaster relief crew.

01:12:58.000 And they've been going into disasters like – I think it was Hurricane Harvey.

01:13:04.000 They actually drove the vehicles down and they were rescuing people from the floodwaters.

01:13:09.000 And they told me a couple of stories about people who were waiting for FEMA to show up basically, waiting for FEMA to get their act together.

01:13:18.000 And Plan B went down there with their vehicles and essentially just drove past them as FEMA is saying, you know, you're not welcome here.

01:13:24.000 We've got them under control.

01:13:25.000 And they just drove past them and rescued people and got them out of there.

01:13:28.000 That's awesome.

01:13:28.000 Yeah, it's pretty cool.

01:13:30.000 I mean, you know, they probably have some ulterior motives there.

01:13:33.000 As Mormons, maybe they're thinking, hey, if we're the ones that rescue these people...

01:13:38.000 I mean, certainly their aid programs are aimed at conversion, right?

01:13:42.000 Sure.

01:13:42.000 If you send all of this food...

01:13:45.000 Missionaries.

01:13:46.000 Yeah, they're missionaries.

01:13:47.000 So yeah, I started to think of these as rescue rigs with missionary zeal.

01:13:51.000 You're building these to kind of...

01:13:53.000 I feel like Mormons, someone could come in, someone who's like... 0.99

01:14:01.000 Very influential and logical.

01:14:03.000 Could come in and talk to Mormons and go listen. 1.00

01:14:07.000 Like if the shit hits the fan and you're around a lot of Mormons, you go listen. 1.00

01:14:10.000 You guys got a lot of things right. 0.99

01:14:12.000 A lot of things.

01:14:13.000 You're the nicest cult members ever.

01:14:15.000 Like Mormons are so nice.

01:14:17.000 I lived next to a Mormon for 10 years.

01:14:19.000 He was so nice.

01:14:20.000 He was a great guy. 1.00

01:14:23.000 But out of his fucking mind. 1.00

01:14:25.000 He was out of his fucking mind. 1.00

01:14:26.000 He really believed that Joseph Smith found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus. 1.00

01:14:31.000 But as a human, wonderful.

01:14:34.000 They're some of the nicest cult members.

01:14:37.000 100%. 0.99

01:14:37.000 We all believe weird shit. 0.99

01:14:38.000 But that's the weirdest shit. 1.00

01:14:39.000 I know. 0.99

01:14:40.000 It is pretty weird.

01:14:40.000 Because the problem is they know who the guy was.

01:14:43.000 It's like L. Ron Hubbard in Scientology.

01:14:45.000 You know who the guy is.

01:14:47.000 We're not talking about- It's not a mythology.

01:14:49.000 Yeah.

01:14:50.000 Right.

01:14:50.000 It's not talking about some scrolls they found in Qumran and clay jars.

01:14:55.000 No, this isn't the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1.00

01:14:57.000 This is a fucking book written by a liar who was 14. It was a liar, and they caught him lying, and he's like, the angels came and took it away! 1.00

01:15:06.000 That's what he said.

01:15:07.000 Like, when you read the Joseph Smith story... 1.00

01:15:10.000 And then he was murdered because he was a piece of shit. 1.00

01:15:13.000 Like, it's a crazy story. 1.00

01:15:14.000 The Joseph Smith story is nuts.

01:15:15.000 He had a seer stone, and only he could read it. 0.96

01:15:19.000 Like, it is like a 14-year-old's lie.

01:15:22.000 And the fact that it's prevalent today, in 2020, not only that, that there's literally gigantic groups of them that live in Mexico so they could still have 10 wives. 0.66

01:15:34.000 Which is nuts. 0.98

01:15:35.000 And that Mitt Romney, a guy who fucking ran for president, his family comes from that. 0.99

01:15:41.000 Mitt Romney's dad couldn't run for president because he was born in Mexico. 0.99

01:15:45.000 Do you know that?

01:15:46.000 No, I didn't know that. 1.00

01:15:47.000 Mitt Romney's whole tribe is from the people who escaped America back in the fucking wagon train days because they told me, hey, you can't have ten wives, asshole. 1.00

01:15:59.000 They're like, well, we're going to just go over here. 1.00

01:16:01.000 Because Mexico was not that different to be in Mexico or America back when there was no cars or buildings.

01:16:07.000 You know what I mean?

01:16:07.000 Like, you have a house over there or you have a house over here.

01:16:10.000 You have a house over there, you can have your eight wives. 0.99

01:16:12.000 So they stayed over there. 0.99

01:16:13.000 And then the Industrial Revolution kicked in, and buildings, and electricity, and air travel, and these motherfuckers are still stuck in Mexico. 0.99

01:16:22.000 Now, I'm sure you know the story about the groups of Mormons down there that had a run-in with the cartel, and the families are murdered, and children and wives. 0.99

01:16:31.000 That's what that is. 1.00

01:16:33.000 Those are the Mormons that fucking Mitt Romney came from. 0.99

01:16:37.000 Well, you know, when I actually looked back at the history of Mormons and prepping, I mean, they're the most prepared people on earth. 1.00

01:16:43.000 There's no doubt about it.

01:16:44.000 Dude, they have massive stockpiles.

01:16:46.000 And as you say, like when I went, I mean, a lot of the work that I did for this book was really difficult to get access to these places.

01:16:53.000 Like preppers don't want to talk about what they're doing, right?

01:16:55.000 But when I went to Salt Lake City, they were like, come on in!

01:16:59.000 They want to bring people into the fold.

01:17:01.000 And they wanted me to volunteer at their factories.

01:17:04.000 They're the opposite of Jews. 1.00

01:17:06.000 Jews make it really hard to join. 1.00

01:17:08.000 Mormons are like, you can join anytime you want. 0.96

01:17:10.000 Come on in.

01:17:11.000 We'll knock on your door.

01:17:13.000 They brought me to the factory and they were showing me all the 25-year cans of oats and spaghetti bites and all the flour that they're producing.

01:17:22.000 And they were like, you can volunteer anytime.

01:17:24.000 That's why they have so many wives. 1.00

01:17:25.000 The preppers.

01:17:26.000 You lose one, you have eight more laying around, ready to go.

01:17:30.000 I went to a conference in Salt Lake City, and there was this guy there, Dave Jones, who was giving a talk about EMPs.

01:17:38.000 And he says, just out of curiosity, how many of you people have basements?

01:17:43.000 And like 80% of the audience raises their hands.

01:17:46.000 What are EMPs?

01:17:46.000 That's an electrical surge?

01:17:48.000 An electromagnetic pulse, right?

01:17:49.000 That would wipe out electronics.

01:17:50.000 Right, that kills the power grid. 1.00

01:17:51.000 Yeah, so he was doing kind of a workshop on how you could like turn your basement into a Faraday cage that would protect it from the EMP. And I swear like 80% of the audience had basements because they're Mormons and they've got food storage down there.

01:18:04.000 So then I started doing research on this and it turns out that there was a guy called Ezra Taft Benson.

01:18:10.000 And during – at sort of the height of the Cold War or the beginning of the Cold War, that was – he served on the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

01:18:20.000 So he's like – he was high up in the Mormon church.

01:18:22.000 But he also worked for the Eisenhower administration and he was advising the president on how to prepare for nuclear war.

01:18:30.000 And so he was one of the people pouring honey in the president's ear about like you've got to have fallout shelters.

01:18:36.000 You've got to have food preparation.

01:18:38.000 So all of those Cold War shelters, you think back to the Civil Defense Administration and the construction of all of those shelters and stocking them with those disgusting biscuits and stuff.

01:18:51.000 A lot of that actually came from the Mormon church.

01:18:53.000 So there's a long history of them being wrapped up with the government on this.

01:18:56.000 Wow.

01:18:56.000 Have you ever seen the television show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?

01:18:59.000 No. 0.98

01:19:00.000 It's fucking hilarious. 0.97

01:19:01.000 Tina Fey produced it. 0.94

01:19:03.000 It's a really, really funny show that's on Netflix, but it's based on a girl and her friends that were kidnapped into an underground bunker cult, and she lived in this cult for 15 years, and then they rescued her, and now she has to exist in modern society in New York City.

01:19:20.000 It's really, really funny.

01:19:23.000 All right, I'm in.

01:19:24.000 But it's based on that.

01:19:25.000 I mean they're in a bunker and they think the world above them is gone. 1.00

01:19:29.000 And they're living with this crazy guy who is – what the fuck is his name? 1.00

01:19:36.000 Ham. 1.00

01:19:36.000 What's that guy's name? 1.00

01:19:37.000 John Ham.

01:19:38.000 Yeah.

01:19:39.000 He's the main guy.

01:19:40.000 He's the main cult leader guy.

01:19:41.000 So there's a science fiction novel by this guy, Hugh Howey.

01:19:45.000 Wool?

01:19:46.000 Have you ever read that?

01:19:47.000 No.

01:19:47.000 So it's kind of a similar plot where these people are born inside of a silo that's very much like Larry Hall's silo.

01:19:54.000 It actually freaked me out when I read this thing.

01:19:56.000 And they wake up in there and they – their whole lives exist within here and there's a kind of social hierarchy like on the mechanical levels.

01:20:03.000 You've got people doing grunt work.

01:20:05.000 But at the top of this silo, there are these screens that are showing you the outside, right?

01:20:11.000 And of course what you see is this sort of blast-stricken landscape and red sand and – I mean it's impossible.

01:20:17.000 It's the post-apocalyptic world out there.

01:20:19.000 And of course people after a while start having discussions about how do we know – That that's a window.

01:20:27.000 Like what if it's – you know what I mean?

01:20:29.000 Like because it's cameras that are filming from outside and they're projecting onto the window.

01:20:34.000 And when I was down there with Larry Hall in the survival condo, he turned on the quote-unquote windows and we're looking at the security guard standing out there and I can see my rental car and I see his truck and I'm like,

01:20:50.000 OK. And then he says, oh, you know, most people want to see the outside, but, you know, I can show you, like, a beach in San Francisco or whatever.

01:20:58.000 Like, he's just flipping through these feeds, right, that are your reality.

01:21:02.000 So it could be, like, Terminator.

01:21:04.000 She could show you a scene from Terminator.

01:21:05.000 Dude, you have no idea whether what you're seeing is real.

01:21:09.000 And so he flips back to...

01:21:11.000 You want some more of this?

01:21:12.000 Yeah, thank you.

01:21:13.000 So he flips back to that feed of the security guard standing there, and I'm thinking to myself...

01:21:17.000 Cheers.

01:21:18.000 Hey, cheers, Brent.

01:21:19.000 And I'm thinking to myself...

01:21:23.000 What if that is a recording of when I got here, right?

01:21:27.000 And I have no idea whether that's a live feed.

01:21:29.000 So he – I mean imagine the power that this man wields with the 57 people that have space in the bunker, right?

01:21:38.000 That once he shuts the blast door, he could tell them absolutely anything.

01:21:41.000 That's literally the plot of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

01:21:44.000 There you go.

01:21:44.000 Well, it's real.

01:21:45.000 And so here's the really weird thing.

01:21:47.000 I met Hugh Howey, the guy that wrote that book, Wool.

01:21:50.000 He was – like he's actually sailing around the world right now. 0.96

01:21:53.000 He's a fucking awesome guy. 0.95

01:21:54.000 You should have him on the podcast. 0.98

01:21:55.000 Sounds good.

01:21:56.000 Dude, he's really fascinating.

01:21:57.000 But he was in the Sydney Harbor and I was living there and I actually – I just sent him a message on Twitter and I'm like, hey, I'm at the library right now.

01:22:04.000 I think you're in the harbor.

01:22:06.000 You want to hang out?

01:22:07.000 And he goes, yeah, sure.

01:22:08.000 I'll pick you up in the dinghy.

01:22:09.000 Me and my girlfriend jump in there and he takes us out to his catamaran and – The first thing I asked him, I said, look, I went to this bunker in Kansas and there's a remarkable similarity between this and the fiction that you wrote.

01:22:24.000 And he said, I've never heard of it.

01:22:27.000 I later emailed Larry Hall and I said, have you ever read this book?

01:22:30.000 And he said, never heard of it.

01:22:32.000 It turns out, though, that Hall was building the bunker at the same time that Howie was writing the novel.

01:22:38.000 It's just one of those weird kind of moments where you're like, what?

01:22:42.000 Is it kind of...

01:22:43.000 Morphic resonance.

01:22:44.000 It's in the air.

01:22:45.000 Yeah, the collective consciousness.

01:22:47.000 Yeah, that's that thing where if a rat learns a maze on one side of the planet, other rats on the other side of the planet can learn it quicker.

01:22:54.000 Yeah.

01:22:57.000 I mean, it's kind of concerning in the context of prepping, right?

01:23:00.000 Because if you've got a lot of people thinking about this way, thinking in this way about a post-apocalyptic world and whether that's fiction or whether it's video games, whether it's novels or whether it's people actually building spaces, the concern is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:23:17.000 And that comes back to your question about, well, if you spend all this time prepping, you kind of You kind of want the disaster to happen, right?

01:23:25.000 Yes.

01:23:25.000 You want to test your preps.

01:23:27.000 Especially as you get older.

01:23:28.000 And you want to be vindicated. 0.98

01:23:29.000 Yeah, if you're like 70, and your fucking hip's gone, you're probably like, let's get this party started. 0.98

01:23:36.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:23:36.000 Let's hit the reset button and see what happens next. 0.99

01:23:39.000 Well, isn't that the problem with having a president who's that old, too?

01:23:42.000 Oh, yeah.

01:23:43.000 I mean, yeah.

01:23:45.000 Isn't the likelihood of them just hitting the button and starting the fabled mutually assured destruction?

01:23:52.000 Well, that's what everybody was worried about with Reagan, and we should probably be equally concerned, especially if Trump gets a second term.

01:23:58.000 Absolutely.

01:23:59.000 I mean … You start to become nihilistic in your old age and thinking … Plus you're on speed.

01:24:05.000 Right?

01:24:06.000 You're on speed.

01:24:08.000 You're nihilistic.

01:24:10.000 Yeah.

01:24:11.000 I mean prepping also is something that starts to happen in middle age, right?

01:24:15.000 Because you become aware of your own mortality.

01:24:18.000 Yes.

01:24:18.000 When you're young, you're like, I'm invincible.

01:24:20.000 I can do anything.

01:24:21.000 And then at some point you're like, actually, I need a bit of armor here because I'm not – I'm not able to do the things I was able to do before.

01:24:27.000 And you can feel yourself declining.

01:24:29.000 I think you probably have a more comprehensive audit of the variabilities or the variables.

01:24:35.000 All the different things that are happening at the same time all over the world.

01:24:40.000 All the different possibilities.

01:24:42.000 All the different vulnerabilities that we all have.

01:24:46.000 There's so many things going on.

01:24:48.000 Your own body.

01:24:50.000 The coronavirus pandemic.

01:24:54.000 Other diseases that are still here.

01:24:55.000 There's a new swine flu that they're concerned with that's emanating out of China.

01:25:01.000 Perfect.

01:25:02.000 All kinds of things can happen.

01:25:04.000 Then China hates us now. 1.00

01:25:07.000 Everyone's mad at each other.

01:25:09.000 Iran hates us. 0.99

01:25:10.000 I mean, North Korea's pretty pissed off, too. 1.00

01:25:13.000 There's so much shit going on simultaneously, plus natural disasters. 0.99

01:25:18.000 And it's hard to know whether There are more disasters or whether there's more awareness of disasters, right? 0.98

01:25:24.000 Like does our awareness of all these things happening all the time and our obsession with knowing about them and ingesting all of that information constantly, like again, does it start to manifest because it becomes part of our consciousness?

01:25:37.000 Like we think, yeah, the world is in constant chaos.

01:25:39.000 These disasters are unfolding.

01:25:41.000 And then of course they unfold because we're all thinking – we're all expecting them.

01:25:45.000 Well, I think that's certainly the issue with social media and the interpretation of the world around us because the only things that gain any traction are things that are bad.

01:25:54.000 You know, we have In many ways, this ancient tribal mind that focuses on threats and the threats of imminent danger that are specific to where you're living are valid, 0.98

01:26:10.000 right?

01:26:10.000 If you're living in a small tribe and you know that there's another tribe that's about to attack, well, that's very dangerous.

01:26:17.000 If you know that there's a storm coming in that's going to wipe out your island, that's very dangerous. 0.98

01:26:21.000 But if you're in the middle of fucking Kansas in your multi-million dollar bunker condo and some shit's going down in North Korea, how is that even affecting you? 0.99

01:26:32.000 But if you're on Google, it's going to affect you. 0.99

01:26:35.000 If you're looking at your Google News feed every day, if you're on Twitter and you're reading about the riots in Portland, you're like, oh my god, the world's ending.

01:26:42.000 But then you're like, it's like that old Bill Hicks bit.

01:26:45.000 There was a Bill Hicks bit about CNN from, I mean, this is like, Bill Hicks wrote this.

01:26:50.000 He did this in like the early 90s.

01:26:52.000 He's like, AIDS, war, pitbulls, like all these different things.

01:26:56.000 He goes in, you open up your window, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. 0.99

01:26:59.000 He goes, where the fuck is all this happening? 0.99

01:27:01.000 Like Ted Cruz is, or it wasn't Ted Cruz. 0.99

01:27:04.000 Who's the guy who owns CNN? Ted Cruz.

01:27:09.000 The guy who owns the buffaloes.

01:27:13.000 Jane Fonda's husband. 1.00

01:27:16.000 The fuck's his name, man? 1.00

01:27:18.000 How do we not know his name? 1.00

01:27:19.000 Oh, wow.

01:27:20.000 No.

01:27:20.000 CNN. Ted Turner.

01:27:22.000 Ted Turner. 1.00

01:27:23.000 He's like, Ted Turner's making this shit up. 1.00

01:27:25.000 Jane Fonda won't fuck him, and now he wants everybody to die. 1.00

01:27:29.000 It was a great Hicks bit from the early, early 90s. 0.99

01:27:33.000 But it's kind of the same thing.

01:27:34.000 It's true, though. 0.82

01:27:34.000 We're not designed to take in the threats of 7 billion people. 0.82

01:27:46.000 The distribution of information is we get all of the bad news first because you need the bad news.

01:27:52.000 You know, if you said, if I came over your house and I said, hey man, what's going on?

01:27:56.000 You say, everything's good.

01:27:58.000 I got a birthday cake.

01:27:59.000 You know, we're celebrating.

01:28:01.000 We got this cool craft beer.

01:28:03.000 I got some friends coming over.

01:28:05.000 Oh, and there's a bunch of guys that are plotting to murder us.

01:28:08.000 Like, hey, why didn't you tell me that first?

01:28:10.000 The murderous – we got to get out of here.

01:28:12.000 We can't drink the craft brew and eat the cake.

01:28:15.000 We got to take care of business.

01:28:17.000 That's localized, right?

01:28:18.000 I mean think about it in the context of the Cold War, right?

01:28:20.000 So the nuclear threat never manifested.

01:28:23.000 I mean we had some nuclear emergencies at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

01:28:27.000 Right, but the nuclear threat of attack is a perfect example because it brought the world together in an instantaneous fashion.

01:28:34.000 Not instantaneous, but a couple minutes.

01:28:36.000 If they launched – From Soviet Union. 0.75

01:28:39.000 They launched nuclear weapons at us.

01:28:41.000 How much time did we have?

01:28:42.000 We had a couple minutes.

01:28:43.000 And so there was this threat.

01:28:45.000 I mean, I'm 52. How old are you?

01:28:47.000 How old am I now?

01:28:48.000 You don't even know how old you are?

01:28:49.000 39. Jesus Christ, man.

01:28:51.000 When I was in high school, we were really worried.

01:28:53.000 There was this constant threat of nuclear war with Russia.

01:28:57.000 The Cold War was real.

01:28:58.000 Yeah, I didn't really live through it.

01:29:01.000 We would read stuff or we would see something on the news and go to bed.

01:29:05.000 And I remember being a kid, like 12, 13 years old, thinking, oh my God, we're going to go to war with Russia.

01:29:10.000 They're going to blow us up. 0.99

01:29:11.000 We would watch those videos of the fucking experiments with the atomic bombs in the ocean. 1.00

01:29:16.000 Like, we're gonna die. 1.00

01:29:17.000 We're gonna die.

01:29:18.000 We're gonna go to war with Russia, and this is gonna be the end of humanity as we know. 0.98

01:29:21.000 We know they already did it with Chernobyl, or with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 0.87

01:29:26.000 That wasn't that long ago.

01:29:27.000 When I was in high school, that was 30 years ago.

01:29:29.000 Like, that's not that long.

01:29:31.000 You know?

01:29:31.000 Yeah.

01:29:32.000 No, I get you.

01:29:32.000 Did you ever see that photo of Bikini Atoll where they do the nuclear explosion?

01:29:38.000 In the ocean?

01:29:38.000 And the battleship is being sucked into the mushroom cloud.

01:29:41.000 Oh my god.

01:29:42.000 It's insane.

01:29:43.000 It's a terrifying thing.

01:29:43.000 They didn't know what that was going to be like either.

01:29:45.000 They thought those battleships were far enough away that they would be okay.

01:29:50.000 Yeah.

01:29:50.000 But, you know, imagine the collective psychological damage that did to everyone on the planet living with that fear.

01:29:57.000 And we don't know whether having that fear instilled within us prevented the nuclear war from happening, right? 0.60

01:30:04.000 I mean, that's the catch-22.

01:30:06.000 Well, I think we're in this stage as human beings where we have this...

01:30:13.000 Incredible ability to send and receive information, but we haven't quite caught up yet in terms of our ability to manage that.

01:30:25.000 Like, we have this insane, unprecedented Ability to access and send information.

01:30:33.000 It's never existed like this before.

01:30:35.000 And also for everybody, right?

01:30:37.000 You could make a YouTube video. 0.97

01:30:39.000 You could have 400 fucking YouTube subscribers and make a YouTube video tonight that reaches millions of people. 0.99

01:30:45.000 For whatever reason. 1.00

01:30:46.000 You send it to me. 1.00

01:30:48.000 I go, holy shit. 0.99

01:30:49.000 I send it to Jamie. 0.99

01:30:50.000 Jamie sends it to his friends.

01:30:51.000 I put it up on Twitter.

01:30:53.000 Some famous person puts it up on their Twitter.

01:30:55.000 And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:30:57.000 Next thing you know, it's gigantic.

01:30:59.000 It reaches the whole world.

01:31:01.000 We don't have an equivalent ability to manage that type of information.

01:31:08.000 So it's this new thing, but we don't have the tools in terms of the understanding and the psychological preparedness.

01:31:17.000 We don't have the ability to go, okay, but let's look at this in terms of...

01:31:24.000 Let's have a perspective that's honest to our environment.

01:31:28.000 Let's have an objective view of this.

01:31:31.000 Let's have a balanced version of this information, and let's look at it in terms of how we communicate with each other.

01:31:39.000 Instead of going into full-blown panic, Let's treat each individual person as a friend and a neighbor and collectively let's manage this because that's what's not happening today.

01:31:50.000 When you look at the riots in Portland or Seattle or any of these things like that, what's not happening Is the one-on-one communication of people who care about each other.

01:32:00.000 What's instead happening is this massive tribal outburst.

01:32:04.000 One tribe wants to take down the government and defund the police and to break into the courthouse and prove that they won and the other tribe wants law and order and they're macing each other and fucking launching bombs and spray painting things and it's like There's very little real communication.

01:32:21.000 There's a lot of screaming and shouting and a lot of tribal behavior.

01:32:25.000 But there's very little one-on-one recognition of each other's humanity.

01:32:31.000 No, I think you're right.

01:32:32.000 I think it's because we're all living with dread.

01:32:35.000 We're just saturated with dread.

01:32:37.000 I was thinking a lot in this book about the differences between dread and anxiety.

01:32:44.000 If you're anxious about something, it's specific.

01:32:48.000 You're anxious about a particular thing.

01:32:50.000 But if you feel dread, it's more of – rather than like an emotion, it's more of an affect.

01:32:57.000 It's just kind of a sense of unease that you live with.

01:33:00.000 And I think we're dreadful about so much right now that it's – we're experiencing a sort of collective psychotic break.

01:33:08.000 And so the inevitable result of that is tribalization.

01:33:13.000 You're like – I need to find my community that I can hang with that's going to protect me and we're going to come up with answers to solve this problem.

01:33:22.000 So the preppers are one manifestation of that, right?

01:33:24.000 They're like, we're all going to move into our bunker community and we've got our guns and we've got our supplies and we're going to ride this thing out.

01:33:30.000 And then these rioters are in other communities. 1.00

01:33:32.000 They're like, we're going to burn this shit down. 1.00

01:33:34.000 We're going to start over. 0.99

01:33:35.000 And so that tribalization is extremely problematic because you're right.

01:33:40.000 The conversation we need to be having is a collective conversation about like what are the threats and how do we address them?

01:33:46.000 And there seems to be a breakdown in our ability to have those conversations.

01:33:51.000 And I have a theory here that I'll try out on you.

01:33:55.000 I think this actually goes back to the Cold War.

01:33:58.000 Prior to the Cold War, we always had a sense that our government was there to protect us, that our government would protect us.

01:34:06.000 But once we developed nuclear weapons, I mean, it was impossible to shelter everyone from this disaster.

01:34:14.000 I mean, I think the...

01:34:16.000 The early estimates that were given to the Truman administration was that it would be like the GDP of the country for an entire year to build blast shelters for everyone, right?

01:34:27.000 So instead of doing that, what we know now – and this was a conspiracy theory in the past, right?

01:34:33.000 What we know now is that the government built bunkers for themselves but not for us, right?

01:34:39.000 And a lot of the – you know, if there's a through line there, right?

01:34:43.000 That if you move from the Cold War into like the age of survivalists, right?

01:34:49.000 Like the 80s, you know, when you had Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, right?

01:34:55.000 In his cabin, he's kind of like – he stands as a kind of symbol of this like lone wolf survivalist, right?

01:35:01.000 It's kind of – Sort of.

01:35:02.000 But anti-government, right?

01:35:04.000 I mean there are other examples.

01:35:05.000 Beau Grites, the guy who ran for president on the – I think it was on the Libertarian ticket.

01:35:10.000 He built a community called Almost Heaven.

01:35:13.000 He called it a constitutional community where like they were going to stop paying taxes and go off grid.

01:35:18.000 They were going to become self-sustaining, whatever.

01:35:22.000 What you can see with a lot of those survivalists is a sense of betrayal that's manifesting in them wanting to break away from the government and build a new tribe.

01:35:31.000 Because they're like, if you can't protect us, we'll protect ourselves, right?

01:35:35.000 And so now we get to today and we've got 3.7 million Americans identify as preppers now.

01:35:43.000 They self-identify as preppers, right?

01:35:47.000 And what you hear from a lot of them is this kind of – what we now interpret as a kind of libertarian narrative.

01:35:54.000 It's like, well, I'm just going to take care of myself and my family.

01:35:57.000 It's like I'm just going in on my own.

01:35:59.000 I don't trust the government.

01:36:01.000 Is that 1%?

01:36:02.000 It's basically in the neighborhood of 1%.

01:36:03.000 It's 1%, yeah.

01:36:05.000 I mean it's a significant amount of people.

01:36:08.000 I hung out with – I went to half a dozen countries.

01:36:14.000 I interviewed maybe 100 people and I was just – I mean I just got to the tip of this thing.

01:36:24.000 Do we have the most?

01:36:25.000 Oh, for sure.

01:36:26.000 Without a doubt.

01:36:28.000 Without a doubt.

01:36:28.000 What country is number two?

01:36:30.000 OK. But look, if you contrast this to Switzerland for instance where they did build the bunkers for the entire population. 0.60

01:36:37.000 Really?

01:36:37.000 For 110 percent of the population just in case visitors are in town.

01:36:41.000 Wow.

01:36:42.000 Dude, the whole country can go underground.

01:36:44.000 Right now?

01:36:45.000 Right now.

01:36:45.000 Still functional?

01:36:46.000 Yeah, totally.

01:36:47.000 Well, yeah, you know, I don't know.

01:36:48.000 Isn't it funny that they're neutral? 0.99

01:36:50.000 And they're like, trust anybody, let's fucking... 0.99

01:36:52.000 But that's... 0.98

01:36:53.000 I mean, you know, but once you've prepared yourself, you've built your defenses, you're able to do that because you're like, yeah, go ahead and attack.

01:37:00.000 Good luck.

01:37:00.000 Yeah, we should have known from their knives that they're preparing for things.

01:37:04.000 For sure.

01:37:04.000 You can make a knife with scissors on it and a screwdriver.

01:37:07.000 What are you planning?

01:37:09.000 Yeah.

01:37:10.000 But North Korea is another example.

01:37:12.000 I mean that country is essentially underground.

01:37:14.000 They have fleets of aircraft inside mountains.

01:37:20.000 I mean, it would actually be incredibly difficult to attack that country because after the Korean War, it was essentially flattened, right?

01:37:28.000 And they learned from that experience, like, we've got to go underground if we're going to survive the next war.

01:37:33.000 Do we have an accurate account of what they have?

01:37:37.000 No, not at all.

01:37:38.000 Really?

01:37:38.000 But there's a place here in California, an institute called the Nautilus Institute, and they do a lot of that research where they're just like, Scrolling around on Google Earth and trying to figure out, you know, is that a vent shaft to a bunker and can we estimate the size of that thing?

01:37:53.000 And it's kind of fun to dig through their website.

01:37:55.000 Because most of it was constructed pre-satellite?

01:37:58.000 Is that what it is?

01:37:59.000 Yeah.

01:38:00.000 Yeah.

01:38:00.000 But there are telltale signs of a bunker.

01:38:03.000 Can you go Google Earth over North Korea?

01:38:06.000 Parts of it, I think.

01:38:08.000 Huh.

01:38:10.000 That's interesting.

01:38:11.000 Yeah.

01:38:12.000 I think parts of it you can look at.

01:38:13.000 Ultimately, the entire surface of the earth is going to be mapped out, right?

01:38:19.000 Yeah.

01:38:19.000 I've actually got a friend who's been – he gave a paper at a conference I hosted where he was talking about – Measuring gravity from space and basically you could measure the mass or the density of subterranean infrastructures and essentially you could see inside the earth.

01:38:39.000 And so he was actually developing a theory for spoofing the gravity measurements.

01:38:46.000 So like you could build a bunker to look like a subterranean river, right?

01:38:51.000 So you look at it from space and you're like, oh no, that's a geological structure.

01:38:56.000 Formation.

01:38:57.000 Because obviously a bunker is pretty obvious if you see a giant square hole.

01:39:02.000 Would it be possible to spoof it by doing something that would offset whatever signal that's giving off?

01:39:09.000 Definitely.

01:39:10.000 I think he had three theories for spoofing and that was another one.

01:39:14.000 The third one.

01:39:15.000 But dude, the earth is already Swiss cheese.

01:39:19.000 There's so much stuff underground.

01:39:21.000 I mean, before I worked with Preppers, my previous project was working with urban explorers.

01:39:27.000 I spent 10 years in London breaking into abandoned buildings, construction sites, and subterranean infrastructure.

01:39:35.000 And we started – so we started by opening manholes and getting into the London sewer system, which is quite cool.

01:39:42.000 Yeah.

01:39:45.000 250 years old.

01:39:47.000 You open a manhole and you climb down a ladder and then you're suddenly in this Victorian infrastructure where there's, I think, 318 million hand-laid bricks, right?

01:39:58.000 And these beautiful tunnels that stretch down.

01:40:01.000 They're gravity-fed and that's how they're cleaned as well.

01:40:05.000 And they're a combined system.

01:40:07.000 So it's fresh water and sewage.

01:40:09.000 How old are they?

01:40:10.000 These are 1850s.

01:40:13.000 So we went down there because a lot of these used to be subterranean rivers.

01:40:19.000 And we were curious, like, what the hell happened to the rivers?

01:40:21.000 Well, they were all turned into sewers.

01:40:23.000 So I know, but the sewers are actually, they're not as bad as they sound.

01:40:27.000 What does that mean?

01:40:30.000 They're beautiful.

01:40:31.000 They're beautiful poop streams.

01:40:33.000 I've got photos on my Flickr page and Instagram, whatever.

01:40:36.000 You can go see the sewer in London.

01:40:38.000 That's my photo, actually.

01:40:40.000 So that's a sewer in London?

01:40:41.000 How's it smell down there?

01:40:42.000 That's actually a sewer in Paris.

01:40:44.000 Oh.

01:40:45.000 But that is my photo.

01:40:47.000 Wow, that's you?

01:40:48.000 There's me climbing a crane.

01:40:49.000 Dude, what are you doing?

01:40:50.000 Why are you doing that?

01:40:51.000 I'm climbing a construction crane.

01:40:52.000 That's terrifying.

01:40:54.000 Do you have a harness on or anything?

01:40:55.000 No. 1.00

01:40:56.000 Fuck, bro. 1.00

01:40:57.000 Don't die. 1.00

01:40:57.000 Dude, this thing... 1.00

01:40:58.000 So look at this thing right here.

01:40:59.000 This is a...

01:41:01.000 You know, remember the Concorde jets?

01:41:03.000 Uh-huh.

01:41:04.000 This is a Concorde jet engine testing facility, and we found this giant abandoned factory where they're producing the Concorde engines and snuck in there.

01:41:12.000 And they later turned that into a set for Stargate.

01:41:15.000 Uh-huh.

01:41:15.000 What?

01:41:16.000 We found, like, the gate for the Stargate.

01:41:18.000 Really?

01:41:18.000 That they slid open.

01:41:19.000 Yeah.

01:41:20.000 Oh, wow.

01:41:21.000 So that's London.

01:41:22.000 That's a London sewer, but that's a newer one.

01:41:23.000 That's a sewer?

01:41:24.000 Yeah.

01:41:24.000 How's that smell?

01:41:26.000 That's fine.

01:41:27.000 What does that mean? 1.00

01:41:28.000 Do you have a t-shirt on that says, Do Epic Shit? 1.00

01:41:31.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:41:31.000 That's over Chicago. 1.00

01:41:33.000 Wow.

01:41:35.000 You took some cool photography.

01:41:37.000 Thanks.

01:41:37.000 What are you using for these photographs?

01:41:41.000 At the time, I was shooting on a Canon 5D Mark III. Basically, I had a big DSLR. Now I've got a mirrorless camera, but they're all tripod shots.

01:41:52.000 That's the Queen Mary.

01:41:53.000 That's amazing.

01:41:54.000 These are crazy pictures.

01:41:55.000 Is this in one of those books that you gave me?

01:41:58.000 Yeah.

01:41:59.000 So I gave you two books.

01:42:00.000 I gave you Subterranean London and London Rising.

01:42:03.000 And basically that's a span of 10 years from like 2008 to 2018, something like that, where we were sneaking into all of these places.

01:42:13.000 We were trespassing and taking photos.

01:42:15.000 That was like – so these urban explorers, they're interested in – like they see the city as kind of like an operating system, right?

01:42:24.000 Like We're good to go.

01:42:40.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:42:40.000 When you flush your toilet, where does it go?

01:42:42.000 And we figured it out.

01:42:43.000 I went underneath my own house and followed the pipe that came from my house into a sewer that went to an interceptor sewer that went to a pumping station.

01:42:52.000 I walked the whole thing.

01:42:53.000 It was super fascinating to actually figure out how it functioned, right?

01:42:57.000 So after 10 years of doing this, I now have this map of London in my head that is in three dimensions, right?

01:43:04.000 So underneath the sewers, you had...

01:43:08.000 Utility tunnels.

01:43:09.000 So gas, electricity, telecommunications.

01:43:12.000 What is happening there?

01:43:13.000 Water.

01:43:14.000 That's me coming out of a manhole into an electricity tunnel.

01:43:18.000 Oh.

01:43:18.000 Yeah.

01:43:19.000 That's the electricity tunnel under London?

01:43:21.000 Yeah.

01:43:22.000 Well, there's tons of them. 0.98

01:43:24.000 So you could just get in there and just fucking chop at those wires if you wanted to? 0.99

01:43:28.000 Oh, well. 0.99

01:43:30.000 You could do some damage.

01:43:31.000 Isn't that weird?

01:43:32.000 It's really weird.

01:43:34.000 Like, someone could just leave a bomb there.

01:43:37.000 Yeah.

01:43:37.000 And what occurred to me over and over again as we were sneaking into these places is that it was really easy.

01:43:44.000 And so we're all – again, we're all saturated by these narratives about terrorism and people are out to get us and they're all in our cities and there's sleeper cells and we're all in danger.

01:43:54.000 And then we're going out like a bunch of 20-year-olds with some keys that we bought on Amazon and just opening everything up and going into it, right?

01:44:05.000 Yeah.

01:44:06.000 I don't know.

01:44:06.000 It made me feel like I was being lied to.

01:44:09.000 The threat wasn't what was promised.

01:44:12.000 When you talk to all these prepper folks, how concerned are they about the power grid and how many of them believe that the future is going to be being autonomous, having some sort of autonomous power supply, whether it's wind or solar?

01:44:25.000 Well, that's a strong narrative, right?

01:44:28.000 That the way we prep now, we couldn't have prepped 10 years ago because technology is facilitating it, right?

01:44:34.000 We've got solar panels.

01:44:36.000 We've got battery backup systems.

01:44:37.000 We've got ways of creating – of going off-grid, becoming self-sufficient that we didn't have before.

01:44:45.000 A lot of preppers that I talk to are really concerned about a CME, a coronal mass ejection, a plasma burp from the sun.

01:44:55.000 Which happens.

01:44:56.000 It happens all the time.

01:44:58.000 Yeah.

01:45:00.000 The Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis is – Coming from the sun, it's hitting the magnetic field around the earth and it's creating those lights.

01:45:10.000 So in 1898, there was an event called the Carrington event where there was a massive solar burp.

01:45:17.000 And this CME burned out telegraph lines in Canada and people in the Caribbean were seeing the Borealis.

01:45:28.000 Yeah.

01:45:28.000 In New York City, apparently people were reading the newspaper in the middle of the night by the lights that were in the sky.

01:45:35.000 So what the preppers were telling me and actually what I end up reading later in both Ted Koppel's book, Lights Out, and also in this book by Toby Ord at the University of Oxford called The Precipice, 0.96

01:45:51.000 is that if we had a Carrington-sized event today, we would be fucked. 0.85

01:45:57.000 It would burn out all of our transformers. 0.80

01:46:00.000 We could lose electricity, gas pumps, ATMs, refrigeration, medical equipment, and our vehicles.

01:46:09.000 I mean, there's a long list of things that could get totally torched by one of these things.

01:46:14.000 And the most concerning of that list are the transformers.

01:46:20.000 Because they take a couple of years to build.

01:46:23.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:46:24.000 Yeah, they're really complicated.

01:46:25.000 And of course, like everything else, we've offshored their production.

01:46:31.000 So, you know, when we get hit with that CME and all the transformers are burned out and then we call China on what?

01:46:40.000 We telegraph them or whatever.

01:46:41.000 However we get in touch and we say, hey, we're going to need 20,000 transformers.

01:46:46.000 And they say, well...

01:46:49.000 Actually, we kind of like you being in the dark ages over there.

01:46:51.000 We might just not ship those.

01:46:53.000 Well, that's also medical supplies as well.

01:46:55.000 When we found out how much of our medicine is actually being produced in China, that was terrifying.

01:47:00.000 Yeah.

01:47:00.000 Because a lot of it you couldn't get in the beginning of the pandemic because of a supply chain problem.

01:47:05.000 But that's what I was talking about with, you know, we created COVID's pathways, right?

01:47:09.000 Like we are creating our own vulnerabilities and this is something that we've always done.

01:47:17.000 We're creating these threats for ourselves.

01:47:19.000 And it's usually in the name of economics.

01:47:23.000 It's like, well, we have to make this more efficient.

01:47:24.000 We've got to make it cheaper.

01:47:25.000 We've got to offshore it.

01:47:26.000 And we need to go the other way.

01:47:28.000 And I think this is – it's strangely one of the few things that Trump and Biden both agree on.

01:47:33.000 Yeah, the resistance of it is the worry that people are going to be xenophobic, right?

01:47:38.000 That's the resistance.

01:47:39.000 The resistance is, hey, we should trade with these other communities and these other cultures and countries.

01:47:44.000 But the reality is if there's something happens and we can't get a hold of anybody that's on the other side of the ocean, we need medicine.

01:47:53.000 We need a lot of electronic supplies.

01:47:56.000 Like, how about the fact that we all have phones?

01:47:59.000 Everyone in this country has a phone.

01:48:00.000 None of them are made here.

01:48:02.000 That is crazy.

01:48:03.000 It is crazy.

01:48:04.000 I mean, we obviously have a good supply of them here. 0.99

01:48:06.000 I mean, if the shit hit the fan, we'd probably hold up for a year or two. 0.96

01:48:09.000 But how long would it take before we can manufacture our own cell phone here in the United States and be self-sustaining? 0.99

01:48:15.000 Do we even have the minerals?

01:48:17.000 Do we even have the essential minerals that you need? 0.96

01:48:22.000 Lithium-ion, all the shit that you need to make cell phones? 0.83

01:48:26.000 I mean, all the different... 0.98

01:48:29.000 Coltan, all the different things that they need to make a lot of the electronics that we find essential for our daily lives.

01:48:37.000 Do we have those here?

01:48:39.000 Can we get them?

01:48:40.000 We can't even get them out of the ground.

01:48:42.000 One of the things that we're doing in Afghanistan is extracting lithium and many valuable minerals.

01:48:48.000 It's one of the things they're doing in the Congo right now as well.

01:48:53.000 Vice has covered that.

01:48:55.000 Coltrane, right?

01:48:56.000 Isn't that what it's called? 1.00

01:48:56.000 That shit, they're literally pulling... 1.00

01:48:59.000 Yeah, I've seen those lines of miners going down into the pits and passing buckets up. 1.00

01:49:06.000 Dude, what's fucked is they're doing it with sticks in a lot of places.

01:49:09.000 You're going from sticks digging into the ground, pulling out these minerals, pulling out these elements, and then it goes into the most complicated electronics the world's ever known. 0.92

01:49:21.000 You're carrying these things around in your pocket, and if you could trace it back, that would be a fascinating documentary.

01:49:29.000 Even a short one, like a 10-minute documentary from the moment a stick goes into the ground, breaks off the mineral, where the mineral goes.

01:49:38.000 You're taking these guys in Africa that essentially, they're not slaves, but they don't have a lot of other options.

01:49:44.000 I mean, they're kind of in a slavery-like situation. 0.95

01:49:48.000 Those minerals go, eventually they go to China, they get brought to these places like Foxconn where they're manufactured into this, put into these cell phones in these buildings where these people are working 16, 17 hours a day living in dormitories where the system is so fucked up. 0.80

01:50:07.000 They have nets around the building to keep people from committing suicide because it's so common.

01:50:12.000 And then it goes from there to Tim Cook and he's doing this presentation smiling and then it goes to like Palo Alto with these kids like, oh my god, you have the iPhone 12?

01:50:22.000 It's amazing.

01:50:23.000 The new Zoom, the nighttime feature.

01:50:25.000 And like this is where we are.

01:50:28.000 What is that?

01:50:29.000 Oh, there is a documentary.

01:50:31.000 Blood in the Mobile.

01:50:32.000 There you go.

01:50:33.000 Blood in the Mobile.

01:50:35.000 74% like this movie. 1.00

01:50:36.000 The other 26% were shit in their pants. 1.00

01:50:39.000 Filmmaker directly connects cell phone purchases to the Civil War in the Congo through Conflict Minerals. 1.00

01:50:45.000 Conflict Minerals.

01:50:47.000 Oh my god, it's 10 years old.

01:50:48.000 It's on YouTube too.

01:50:49.000 It's on YouTube, too.

01:50:50.000 It's from Denmark.

01:50:51.000 Blood in the mobile.

01:50:52.000 Well, there you go. 1.00

01:50:53.000 A lot of my ideas suck. 0.98

01:50:55.000 They're not bad ideas, but they've already been done. 0.99

01:50:59.000 Let's go to the other end of it.

01:51:00.000 Have you ever been to 35th Street in Manhattan?

01:51:03.000 Yes.

01:51:03.000 Where they're breaking down all the electronics?

01:51:06.000 So there's a – on this one street, there's a whole bunch of warehouses that are sort of back-to-back where people are getting all this stuff, TVs, cell phones, whatever, and they're taking it all apart and trying to get those minerals out of them, right?

01:51:19.000 So it's like a kind of – not recycling but reuse of some of these things.

01:51:25.000 Deconstruction.

01:51:25.000 Yeah.

01:51:26.000 I met this amazing artist, James Bothorp, a couple of years back.

01:51:31.000 And he had this crazy idea.

01:51:32.000 He said, I want to go to 35th Street and just gather shit from the street and build a boat from it. 0.93

01:51:40.000 Like whatever he could just cull. 0.96

01:51:43.000 And then he wanted to take it to the source of the Hudson at Lake Tear of the Clouds and paddle the boat back to 35th Street and then put it in a dumpster.

01:51:53.000 And fly back to England. 0.53

01:51:54.000 That dude needs a better hobby.

01:51:55.000 He did it!

01:51:56.000 Why would he do that?

01:51:57.000 He did it, dude!

01:51:58.000 It seems like a waste of time.

01:52:00.000 Paddling?

01:52:01.000 Didn't he know about engines?

01:52:02.000 It was a commentary on reuse and recycling and waste.

01:52:06.000 But why would he put it in a dumpster after he's done?

01:52:08.000 He had a perfectly good boat.

01:52:09.000 It's true, yeah.

01:52:10.000 Go fishing with that thing. 0.84

01:52:11.000 I went with him for the last week of the thing and it was fucking hilarious. 0.97

01:52:15.000 He was just constantly sinking. 0.74

01:52:17.000 At first we were trying to bail out his boat because I was in the safety boat and we're going alongside him and I'm trying to bail out his boat with a cup because everything that we were using had to be found.

01:52:29.000 So I found this broken big gulp cup from 7-Eleven and I was trying to bail his boat out.

01:52:34.000 How come they couldn't seal it properly?

01:52:36.000 Well, he tried, but he got tired. 0.98

01:52:40.000 He was paddling all day, and then he would get out at night, and then he had to find the shit to fix the boat. 0.86

01:52:45.000 So he had to go find some kind of sealant, or find a piece of styrofoam to keep it floating, or whatever. 0.94

01:52:51.000 That's it right there?

01:52:52.000 Oh, no, that's not it.

01:52:55.000 Setting off his homemade boat from Red Hook.

01:52:59.000 Maybe he nailed it this time.

01:53:00.000 I think that was a previous iteration of the project, and then he kind of refined it.

01:53:05.000 It's a weird project, man.

01:53:06.000 Yeah, it was a really weird project.

01:53:08.000 And what's even weirder is he decided to do it in the middle of winter.

01:53:12.000 So in the beginning, he was like breaking through the ice at the source of the Hudson to get this homemade boat through the thing.

01:53:19.000 But we had some hairy moments in that week.

01:53:22.000 What's going on in that guy's personal life?

01:53:26.000 Well, now he has a kid and his partner's like, you're never doing anything like that again.

01:53:31.000 Yeah, that seems like there's probably a distraction element there in his actions.

01:53:36.000 Yeah.

01:53:37.000 He's probably distracting himself from some other things.

01:53:39.000 But I really admire his, you know...

01:53:43.000 Ability to take on that notion of kind of reuse and waste and what should be done with all these materials.

01:53:48.000 Yeah, well, we certainly have an issue with that.

01:53:51.000 I mean, we certainly have an issue with landfills.

01:53:53.000 Our solution is stuff those things into the ground.

01:53:56.000 And the real problem with landfills is, you know, we talk about the release of greenhouse gases into the environment and the negative effect it has.

01:54:10.000 One of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases is landfills.

01:54:14.000 I mean, they're finding when they did this, they did like sort of a survey of the, like, I forget how they did it, but they did it with, I believe it was a satellite, where they looked at the earth from the sky and tried to say, okay, where are these gases coming from and what's the primary source of these gases?

01:54:35.000 And they thought they would be They thought it would be cattle ranches, you know, that these cattle were giving off methane, and they found out, no, it doesn't even compare to landfills. 0.84

01:54:49.000 Like, landfills are just a disaster, because it's all this biodegradable shit that's stacked on top of each other, and it's just rotting. 0.79

01:54:58.000 So it's rotting in this one area, concentrated, and it just... 0.98

01:55:04.000 Yeah, we've got a family member that actually works.

01:55:07.000 He does environmental monitoring for landfills.

01:55:09.000 Yeah, he was telling me that they got a call at some point in this one landfill that it was smoking.

01:55:19.000 And so he drives over to the landfill and sure enough, like, all of the crap at the bottom of the landfill that had been compressed and compressed over time had turned into a liquid and then had turned into a gas and it sort of ignited somehow.

01:55:31.000 And so he had to...

01:55:36.000 Inject something into the landfill to basically put out this subterranean fire, right? 0.91

01:55:42.000 I mean if there's any better indication of how we fucked everything up, it's a subterranean fire of waste.

01:55:51.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:55:51.000 Well, waste is a great method of destruction and it actually – you can take that back to the Native Americans. 0.95

01:55:58.000 They would do buffalo jumps.

01:56:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:56:01.000 Buffalo jumps.

01:56:02.000 Yeah.

01:56:03.000 They would corral these buffalo and chase them off the side of a cliff. 0.96

01:56:08.000 And when they would land in these great big piles, they would rot and then they would combust.

01:56:15.000 They would just burst into flames.

01:56:17.000 I don't understand the whole mechanism behind it, but it's really common that they would find these buffalo jumps and because of the fact they were all rotting together in this great big pile, something would ignite.

01:56:32.000 And they would burst into flames.

01:56:34.000 And so a lot of these cliff sides where these buffalo jumps are are scarred and charred with just blackened soot and everything from these buffalo just eventually catching on fire because, you know, they have no preservation back then other than drying it.

01:56:50.000 And, you know, when you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of buffalo, there's really not much they can do to preserve all the meat.

01:56:55.000 So there's a tremendous amount of waste involved in this method of hunting.

01:56:59.000 Yeah, no, it's definitely a myth that, you know, Native Americans were at one with their environment.

01:57:04.000 When you need to eat, you're going to drive 100 buffalo off a cliff.

01:57:10.000 You might only use three of them.

01:57:12.000 There's two ways of looking at that, though.

01:57:14.000 You could say, oh, it's very wasteful.

01:57:16.000 But also, animals have to eat, too.

01:57:19.000 Coyotes have to eat.

01:57:20.000 Bacteria has to eat.

01:57:22.000 Nothing really goes to waste.

01:57:23.000 Yeah, you think if coyotes couldn't figure out how to corral all of those buffaloes.

01:57:27.000 They wouldn't do it.

01:57:29.000 They certainly would.

01:57:30.000 But the thing is that it is wasteful in terms of the human being killing the animal.

01:57:36.000 Do they use all that animal?

01:57:37.000 No, they don't.

01:57:39.000 I think Native Americans looked at it very differently than we did.

01:57:43.000 I think they had a greater understanding of this whole cycle of life.

01:57:46.000 And even if you leave...

01:57:48.000 If they shot a buffalo and they took whatever meat that they could carry and left the rest of it there, hundreds of pounds of meat, that meat would...

01:57:57.000 It would feed so many different animals, bacteria. 0.59

01:58:01.000 It would eventually go into the ground and feed the soil.

01:58:04.000 It's only wasteful in terms of the direct relationship between the person that killed the buffalo and did they consume that buffalo.

01:58:11.000 But any animal that gets killed in the wild does not go to waste.

01:58:15.000 If someone shoots a deer and maybe they hit it and it only hits one lung and this deer can go a mile and then dies and they can't find it.

01:58:24.000 Well, they wasted that deer.

01:58:27.000 Well, the person who shot that deer does not get to eat that deer.

01:58:30.000 That is a problem, but it's not a problem in terms of the wild.

01:58:33.000 The wild will consume that deer 100%.

01:58:37.000 There is no question whatsoever.

01:58:39.000 There is no waste.

01:58:40.000 It will find a way to not only that the soil will absorb it, animals will find it, crows will circle.

01:58:47.000 That's one of the ways people find carcasses is like birds circling over carcasses.

01:58:54.000 If someone's looking for someone that went missing, it's one of the things they look for.

01:58:58.000 They look for buzzards or crows or birds flying in the air.

01:59:02.000 So these American Indians that did this, in our eyes, they wasted all those animals. 1.00

01:59:08.000 But in their eyes, probably not.

01:59:10.000 They probably looked at it like, we're staying alive and the great earth has a use for all this.

01:59:17.000 It's going to figure out a way to make all this.

01:59:20.000 It's going to feed something.

01:59:22.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:59:23.000 Yeah.

01:59:23.000 I think we just have this idea that if you shoot an animal, you should eat that whole animal.

01:59:27.000 And you definitely should.

01:59:29.000 But their idea was this...

01:59:32.000 I mean, we have to think...

01:59:34.000 I mean, I got really, really obsessed with Native Americans over the last year.

01:59:39.000 And I read seven or eight books on them.

01:59:42.000 And what the world was like before the European settlers came was this spectacular but incredibly brutal environment. 0.99

01:59:55.000 These tribes, what they did to each other was fucking horrific. 0.97

01:59:59.000 And there was no quarter given. 1.00

02:00:02.000 There was no surrender.

02:00:03.000 No one ever surrendered.

02:00:05.000 That's the thing about the tribes, Indians, that the Europeans couldn't understand.

02:00:09.000 They fought to the death because they knew that if they were captured in their world, if a tribe was captured, They were tortured to death in the most horrific way.

02:00:23.000 So they knew that that was coming.

02:00:26.000 And they gave no quarter and asked for no quarter.

02:00:30.000 They fought to the death.

02:00:31.000 And it was something that the early American pioneers and soldiers found incredibly remarkable.

02:00:38.000 They're like, these people, there's no give up in them at all.

02:00:43.000 They thought of these encounters as...

02:00:47.000 A fight to the death always.

02:00:49.000 Either they retreated or they fought to the death.

02:00:52.000 There was never surrender.

02:00:53.000 There was no white flags.

02:00:54.000 They didn't even understand the concept of it.

02:00:57.000 Cannibalism was rampant.

02:00:58.000 I mean, it was multiple tribes, different tribes all across the country, whether it was I mean, there's different tribes.

02:01:07.000 The Nez Perce had a history of this. 0.99

02:01:09.000 A bunch of different tribes who ate each other. 1.00

02:01:12.000 They would kill other tribes and eat them. 1.00

02:01:15.000 I mean, it wasn't what they primarily ate, but it wasn't uncommon.

02:01:21.000 Yeah, because there was a sense that if you ingested somebody's body, you would also ingest some of their power, right?

02:01:26.000 Yeah, there was a lot of craziness to that.

02:01:28.000 There was one story about this guy who was in love with this woman and he killed her husband and ate her and then married – or killed her husband, ate him and then married her.

02:01:39.000 Wow.

02:01:41.000 I mean it's interesting to think about – like here's a thought experiment, right?

02:01:45.000 If – we know that – we know that – That that war wasn't won by soldierly techniques, right?

02:01:54.000 It was won by disease.

02:01:57.000 Some of it was.

02:02:01.000 Up until the Comanches.

02:02:02.000 It was catastrophic for Native Americans, right? 1.00

02:02:05.000 The disease that ravaged all these communities.

02:02:07.000 I mean, you can actually see it.

02:02:08.000 There was something on the BBC recently.

02:02:16.000 Yeah.

02:02:34.000 Perhaps.

02:02:35.000 What really changed it, though, was the cult revolver and then the repeating rifle.

02:02:42.000 Those two things changed it incredibly because the barrier between Western settlers and conquering the West was the Comanche because they were the first tribe that really understood warfare on horseback, which is kind of ironic because they didn't – Like, 0.92

02:03:00.000 the horses were introduced into North America by the Europeans, but they used to be native to North America.

02:03:07.000 Horses were actually – they originated in North America.

02:03:11.000 And then – But they were exterminated here, right?

02:03:13.000 Yes.

02:03:13.000 They were – well, we don't know why.

02:03:15.000 We don't know what happened.

02:03:16.000 And this is part of the hypothesis that goes along with the extinction event that happened somewhere around where these core samples indicate that there's asteroidal impacts.

02:03:28.000 It's really fascinating stuff.

02:03:29.000 And there's a great...

02:03:31.000 Well, there's a bunch of great books on it.

02:03:34.000 But there's a guy named Dan Flores who wrote about all these different...

02:03:40.000 He wrote a great book about the coyotes, too, called Coyote America.

02:03:43.000 But he wrote about how all these...

02:03:46.000 These Native American horses were eventually, they found their way to Europe, they found their way to Asia, and so like all the Mongols, the steppe tribes, all the ones that rode horseback, those horses originated from Native America, but then they were exterminated here.

02:04:00.000 Some way, they don't exactly know how, but then reintroduced by the Europeans, then the Native Americans started taking over the horses. 0.97

02:04:07.000 And figuring out how to do combat on horses.

02:04:09.000 And they figured out how to do it far better than the Europeans. 0.99

02:04:13.000 And independent of even the Asians. 0.97

02:04:16.000 Like the Mongols in the 1200s had spectacular horse riding abilities and the ability to fight off horseback.

02:04:23.000 But Native Americans appear to have figured out how to do it independently.

02:04:28.000 Because the people who introduced the horses here, the Europeans didn't know how to do it.

02:04:33.000 So they didn't know how to fight off horses.

02:04:34.000 They would get off their horse to shoot their musket.

02:04:36.000 And the Native Americans would run up on them and fill them full of arrows. 1.00

02:04:39.000 Because they figured out how to shoot literally an arrow a second.

02:04:42.000 They had this spectacular technique of holding their arrows in their fingers.

02:04:47.000 So they would have their left hand where they were holding the bow. 0.80

02:04:50.000 And they would hold their arrows in their fingers and just one after they had like a fistful of arrows and just go one arrow, two hours, three hours, four hours, and they would just shoot like an arrow a second while these poor bastards from, you know, Spain or France were trying to pump their muskets and put a lead ball in there and they just fill them up full of arrows. 0.99

02:05:09.000 It's really crazy shit. 0.98

02:05:10.000 Can you imagine the panic as you're trying to stuff the powder and stuff the ball? 1.00

02:05:16.000 And then you know they're going to scalp you too.

02:05:18.000 So they killed – literally they couldn't get past the Comanches because the Comanches were the ones who figured out how to do this. 1.00

02:05:26.000 And they were a nomadic, really primitive tribe with very little artwork, no songs, no stories.

02:05:33.000 They only ate meat.

02:05:34.000 They only ate – they lived off a buffalo and they took over a giant chunk of the West.

02:05:40.000 All through Texas, Oklahoma, that was all the Comanche. 1.00

02:05:44.000 And everyone was terrified of them.

02:05:46.000 What's really crazy is Mexico set up the settlers. 0.87

02:05:49.000 There's a fantastic book about it called Empire of the Summer Moon.

02:05:52.000 But Mexico set up the settlers. 0.83

02:05:54.000 They said, hey, my friend, come live over here.

02:05:57.000 We'll give you plenty of land.

02:05:58.000 They wanted a buffer.

02:06:00.000 Between them and the Comanche. 1.00

02:06:01.000 So they allowed all these people to think it was okay to build these settlements.

02:06:06.000 And they built these settlements and the Comanche slaughtered everybody. 1.00

02:06:08.000 And then they had to figure it out. 1.00

02:06:10.000 Like, holy fuck! 1.00

02:06:11.000 This is a dangerous goddamn place! 1.00

02:06:13.000 Because they were used to these East Coast agrarian Native Americans. 0.99

02:06:17.000 These ones who, like, they had set up agriculture, and they didn't ride on horseback, they didn't do battle on horseback, they did everything on foot, and the Comanche were doing everything off of horseback, and they had thousands of horses, and all of their wealth was determined by how many horses you had.

02:06:32.000 And so they were this incredibly warlike tribe that everyone was terrified of.

02:06:36.000 All the other tribes were terrified of them.

02:06:38.000 And they dominated this one chunk of the country and no one can get past them.

02:06:44.000 They literally couldn't get through them.

02:06:45.000 It's amazing history.

02:06:46.000 Yeah.

02:06:46.000 I mean it's incredible to think about what we never really perceive are all of the political factions, right?

02:06:53.000 And the nuances and all the difficulties because we tend to think about it in these kind of – again, these binary terms, right?

02:06:59.000 It's like, oh, the settlers are coming in and they have opposition from Native Americans.

02:07:03.000 But of course they were all at war with each other and they had different alliances and things were shifting.

02:07:08.000 I mean I think that's where the archaeological record is really interesting because it starts to reveal these things.

02:07:15.000 But it also reveals more mystery.

02:07:18.000 Right?

02:07:19.000 Like there are things that we dig up that we can't explain, right?

02:07:22.000 Like what?

02:07:23.000 There's no oral history for it.

02:07:24.000 Well, I'm thinking of – I went to this site in the Yucatan, Tulum.

02:07:32.000 Have you been there?

02:07:33.000 I've been to Yucatan.

02:07:34.000 Yeah.

02:07:34.000 I've been to Chichen Itza.

02:07:35.000 Oh, cool. 1.00

02:07:36.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:07:36.000 So Tulum is on the coast, like just over from Chichen Itza. 1.00

02:07:40.000 And what you find are these like incredibly elaborate structures that are built there.

02:07:44.000 But then – Just at the end of this – whatever this place was in this Maya settlement, they started building this really janky wall around the thing. 0.90

02:07:58.000 It's like it doesn't conform to everything else that's happening on that site.

02:08:04.000 We don't know – these people disappeared.

02:08:07.000 We don't know what happened to them, right?

02:08:09.000 But one of the theories that I heard is that it was a virus, right?

02:08:13.000 It was disease, right?

02:08:15.000 And if you don't know what it is, what do you do?

02:08:18.000 You're like, well, something is attacking us.

02:08:20.000 We're building a wall.

02:08:21.000 These people showed up and we're not – and so that's one interpretation.

02:08:26.000 I thought about this with the bunker builders too, right?

02:08:29.000 That like all of these factions and nuances and people with different ideas about how to combat the dread that we're all feeling right now.

02:08:38.000 And then if you were like – if you were an archaeologist in 100 years and you excavated some of these bunker sites, you would find these – I mean incredibly different sites, places where people are growing, where they're – Building kind of off-grid communities,

02:08:54.000 places with sniper posts, and then you would find these subterranean condominiums, and then you would find the shipping containers filled with Bible buckets, whatever, right?

02:09:04.000 You'd have all these different iterations of people responding to the current situation.

02:09:09.000 And I guess that's – like I always kind of held this in my mind as I was touring all of these doomsday communities, right?

02:09:17.000 Is that there's like – there's a future interpretation of these that I'm – It's elucidating now, right?

02:09:23.000 Because a lot of these communities don't, like, let people in.

02:09:26.000 You know, they don't want people telling these stories, right?

02:09:28.000 So it did feel like I was writing through a historical moment.

02:09:34.000 And that's before the pandemic, right?

02:09:37.000 Like, I started this book in 2017. By the time the pandemic hit, I mean, some of the quotes in the book were utterly prophetic.

02:09:45.000 I mean, actually disturbing.

02:09:48.000 I interviewed this guy.

02:09:51.000 Yeah.

02:10:10.000 And then if a crisis hits, you can retreat to any of his sort of campuses, you know?

02:10:15.000 And I sat down with him to have lunch at one point, and he said to me, you know, what people don't understand is that we're overdue for a pandemic.

02:10:26.000 When I was editing the book, I had forgotten this quote, right? 0.98

02:10:30.000 And I saw it again and I went, holy shit. 0.66

02:10:32.000 And then I met this other woman in Tennessee that runs a survivalist store out there and they've got like space in Smoky Mountains National Park that they would retreat to. 0.98

02:10:45.000 They're planting secret groves in the forests out there so they can like retreat to their fruit trees if things go wrong.

02:10:53.000 Not so secret now.

02:10:54.000 Well, yeah.

02:10:55.000 And she told me – I know all the park rangers are going to be out there.

02:10:59.000 Where the hell is that orange tree?

02:11:01.000 But she told me – at one point she said 2020 is going to be a wild ride.

02:11:07.000 Buckle up. 0.96

02:11:08.000 I kept reading these quotes as I was editing the book.

02:11:11.000 I was like, God, this is so weird.

02:11:12.000 It feels like I've never – I've studied history.

02:11:16.000 I've studied archaeology.

02:11:17.000 I've never had a sense of living through a historical moment quite in this way, right?

02:11:22.000 A lot of us are experiencing this in the midst of the pandemic.

02:11:25.000 Like we know people are going to be – I mean if we still exist in 100 years, we're going to be writing about this and thinking about this and interpreting it.

02:11:33.000 In more ways than one, right?

02:11:34.000 Yeah.

02:11:35.000 But imagine the remains.

02:11:36.000 Civil unrest.

02:11:37.000 Oh, yeah.

02:11:37.000 There's so much going on.

02:11:39.000 And then the Pentagon saying they've recovered UFOs.

02:11:42.000 Oh, God.

02:11:42.000 Did you read all that?

02:11:44.000 That's terrifying.

02:11:45.000 They've recovered crafts, in quotes, not of this world.

02:11:50.000 Yep.

02:11:51.000 What?

02:11:51.000 Yeah.

02:11:52.000 Which is fucking bonkers. 0.98

02:11:55.000 That's where we're going next. 0.99

02:11:56.000 That is what we're going next.

02:11:57.000 I wonder why they're saying that to us.

02:12:00.000 I wonder if they're preparing us for some inevitable encounter and they want to give us like a slow drip of information to get us accustomed to the idea so that we don't go into full shock.

02:12:11.000 Because obviously this pandemic has thrown us into a lot of shock.

02:12:14.000 George Floyd's murder brought us into a higher level of shock, it appears, because of civil unrest and this demand for a change in our culture and the way we communicate with each other and the way law enforcement works and the way government works.

02:12:29.000 There's so much chaos right now and there's so much so much division.

02:12:33.000 Then, boom, aliens. 0.99

02:12:37.000 I mean, it just seems like the nuttiest fucking year of all time. 0.99

02:12:40.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:12:40.000 I mean, we were all sort of preparing for the election before this happened. 0.98

02:12:45.000 Look at that quote.

02:12:45.000 Popular Mechanics.

02:12:46.000 Pentagon has off-world vehicles not made on this earth.

02:12:50.000 That is a quote from the Pentagon. 0.99

02:12:52.000 That is fucking bananas. 0.99

02:12:54.000 I spoke to Commander Fravor on this podcast, who was the Air Force pilot. 0.99

02:13:02.000 Air Force or Navy?

02:13:03.000 I think he's an Air Force pilot.

02:13:05.000 A fighter pilot who chased this Tic Tac UFO. Oh, the one that was moving erratically?

02:13:11.000 It went from 60,000 feet to one feet above the surface of the ocean in a second. 0.98

02:13:20.000 They have no idea what the fuck it is. 0.99

02:13:21.000 U.S. Navy pilot. 0.99

02:13:23.000 He came on the podcast and described it.

02:13:25.000 This rock-solid individual, military man, lifelong, totally trustworthy, has no other history of crazy stories.

02:13:34.000 They tracked it on their weapon systems.

02:13:39.000 They found this thing doing things that defied the laws of physics and their understanding of propulsion systems.

02:13:46.000 They're like, what is this?

02:13:47.000 And then the people in the Navy were saying, we've been seeing these things like every couple weeks.

02:13:52.000 We don't know what they are.

02:13:53.000 So when they scrambled this jet and these other jets came back to support him, they were all trying to decipher this.

02:14:01.000 They're like, what is this?

02:14:02.000 Like, what are we dealing with?

02:14:03.000 And this was, what is it, 2007 when that happened?

02:14:06.000 2004?

02:14:07.000 2004?

02:14:08.000 So he's been, you know, holding on to this information, trying to figure it out for 16 years.

02:14:13.000 And, you know, people kind of laughed and made fun of him, but there was no other stories like this from him.

02:14:20.000 And then there was some stories from the East Coast.

02:14:22.000 And then a couple of years ago, the New York Times released a story about these things, these credible accounts of UFOs.

02:14:29.000 And now finally, the Pentagon's like, yep.

02:14:32.000 I don't know what to tell you.

02:14:34.000 Well, check this out.

02:14:35.000 Larry Hall, the guy that was building that underground condo in Kansas, he's now building a second one, by the way.

02:14:43.000 I asked him how he made the decision to dump $10 million into this thing.

02:14:49.000 Is that just a business plan?

02:14:51.000 Did he model that out?

02:14:53.000 And he said, oh no, it turns out he used to be a contractor for the Department of Defense.

02:15:00.000 And he was working on projects for them.

02:15:02.000 And he said, I saw some things when I was working there that made me very uncomfortable.

02:15:08.000 And that's why I'm building the bunker.

02:15:09.000 And I heard that from more than one prepper.

02:15:12.000 I mean, there were a lot of...

02:15:21.000 I mean, at the beginning of this project, it was like, It just seemed interesting culturally.

02:15:34.000 They're kind of kooky and weird and fun.

02:15:36.000 I want to get to know these people and know what makes them tick.

02:15:38.000 And by the end of it, I was severely disturbed.

02:15:44.000 Because they do seem credible to me.

02:15:47.000 And it makes...

02:15:49.000 It forces you to reinterpret what they're doing as rational, right?

02:15:54.000 I kept saying to people, these are rational people responding to an irrational world.

02:16:00.000 The problem is not them and what they're doing.

02:16:02.000 The problem is the context in which it's driving them to- Well, the problem is our interpretation of them, right?

02:16:08.000 The problem is this knee-jerk reaction where we want to generalize and put people in this category.

02:16:13.000 Oh, you're a prepper.

02:16:14.000 Oh, I know what you are.

02:16:15.000 Well, you're not just a human being.

02:16:17.000 You're not nuanced.

02:16:18.000 You're not a unique individual with your own ideas and life experiences.

02:16:22.000 No, you're a prepper.

02:16:23.000 Put you in that box.

02:16:24.000 Oh, you're a Trump supporter.

02:16:26.000 Put you in that box.

02:16:27.000 Oh, you think Biden should be president no matter what?

02:16:30.000 Let me put you in that box.

02:16:31.000 There's things that we do with people because it's too hard to really have an open mind and not take into account all the various possibilities of behavior and ideas that you could expect from a person.

02:16:46.000 So it's this really normal thing that we do when we generalize.

02:16:51.000 And we like to do that.

02:16:53.000 It makes the world simpler for us.

02:16:56.000 We like things binary, one or zero.

02:16:58.000 We like good or bad.

02:17:00.000 We like that. 0.97

02:17:01.000 Prepper, oh, look at this dummy. 1.00

02:17:02.000 Meanwhile, they're right about a lot of shit. 0.99

02:17:05.000 And if that guy really did work for the Department of Defense and really did see some things when it comes to UFOs... 0.99

02:17:12.000 Bob Lazar, who's another guy who's been on this podcast, he's the guy that in 1989 did this story with George Norrie in Las Vegas, where it was an investigative report where he said, listen, I work for Area S4. I was back engineering UFOs.

02:17:27.000 I was a nuclear physicist for Los Alamos Labs, and they hired me to go to Nevada. 0.97

02:17:34.000 They flew me out to the middle of the fucking desert to work on something that's not from this planet. 1.00

02:17:40.000 And they were like, oh, you're so crazy. 1.00

02:17:42.000 That's so crazy. 1.00

02:17:42.000 That's so ridiculous. 1.00

02:17:43.000 Meanwhile, 30 years later, Bob Lazar just put up a post on his Instagram. 0.72

02:17:48.000 Go to UnitedNuclearBob, his Instagram.

02:17:54.000 This guy has been dealing with this story and this ridicule of this story for 30 plus years.

02:18:01.000 And people said he's crazy.

02:18:03.000 The government does not have UFOs.

02:18:06.000 They don't have something that came from another planet.

02:18:08.000 That's crazy.

02:18:08.000 How would you keep that a secret?

02:18:10.000 But this guy's been talking about it forever.

02:18:12.000 There he is right there.

02:18:14.000 Finally, after waiting 30 years, the government admits to possessing alien craft.

02:18:19.000 Time will tell what happens next.

02:18:20.000 Personally, I doubt they will disclose much more and wouldn't be surprised if they issue a correction and say their statement was in error.

02:18:27.000 In any case, I never thought I'd see this day.

02:18:31.000 Thanks so much to all of you that supported me throughout these years.

02:18:35.000 On another note, this is the only social media account I have.

02:18:38.000 No Facebook, Twitter, etc.

02:18:39.000 There are apparently lots of imposters out there.

02:18:41.000 So he's UnitedNuclearBob on Instagram.

02:18:44.000 And I went to dinner with him.

02:18:48.000 And then I had him on my podcast, I talked to him for three hours, and I found him eerily credible.

02:18:53.000 His story has never changed.

02:18:55.000 Over 30 years, he's been telling the exact same story.

02:18:57.000 I can't say that.

02:18:59.000 I know things that have happened for true, that 100%, no lies at all that I was a part of that I can't tell you 30 years ago. 0.87

02:19:08.000 I can't, I'm not good at, I'll fuck it up.

02:19:11.000 I'll go, oh yeah, Mike said that. 0.95

02:19:12.000 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot that happened first.

02:19:14.000 I go and fuck up the order of events. 0.68

02:19:16.000 He's been insanely consistent. 0.96

02:19:18.000 And he's legitimately really intelligent.

02:19:22.000 Like when you talk to him, he's an absolute comprehensive understanding of science and of elements.

02:19:28.000 And one of the things he talked about in 1989 was this thing called Element 115 that back then was really only theoretical.

02:19:36.000 They didn't even know Element 115 was real until 2013. In 2013, a particle collider detected it.

02:19:44.000 So they proved that it's an actual real thing.

02:19:46.000 He was talking about a stable version of Element 115 that they used to bend gravity and propel these vehicles.

02:19:52.000 He described how the Tic Tac UFO that Fravor saw in 2014 worked.

02:19:57.000 He said it would turn sideways and then jut off at insane rates of speed.

02:20:02.000 That's exactly what Fravor said.

02:20:04.000 They have video of these things doing this.

02:20:06.000 They have the tracking systems of these fighter jets trying to explain what these things are and why they move the way they move.

02:20:14.000 Well, this guy's been talking about it since 1989. It's bonkers, man.

02:20:19.000 It is bonkers.

02:20:19.000 And that the Pentagon comes out in 2020 and tells us that this is real, that they really have crafts that they've recovered that are not of this world.

02:20:31.000 That was their statement. 0.98

02:20:32.000 Like, maybe they're fucking with us. 0.99

02:20:34.000 Maybe they said that because they want to influence the election. 0.99

02:20:36.000 Maybe they said that because they want to take our attention. 0.97

02:20:39.000 Maybe like, hey, what's the best way to stop all this fucking chaos and all this global unrest, all this civil unrest that you're seeing or people trying to burn down courthouses? 0.98

02:20:49.000 How about we tell them the aliens are coming? 0.98

02:20:51.000 Yeah, that's classic Orwell, right?

02:20:52.000 Like you create the other over here and then everyone consolidates to confront that thing.

02:20:58.000 I would be lying if I said I understood any of how they operate or how they disseminate information or why they do it and why they do it in the order they do it. 0.98

02:21:08.000 But if I was in charge, if I was Trump, I'd make a fucking press conference about the aliens. 0.99

02:21:14.000 I'd tell everybody, please settle down. 1.00

02:21:17.000 They're coming, baby.

02:21:19.000 I mean, he did a thing with his son.

02:21:22.000 It's really weird.

02:21:23.000 It's like one of those weird interview shows.

02:21:27.000 It's clunky.

02:21:28.000 It's clunky in a few ways.

02:21:31.000 His son interviewed him on YouTube.

02:21:34.000 And it's clunky because his son's not that good at it.

02:21:37.000 And it's clunky because they have this strange relationship where his dad is the president and he clearly has a great reverence and respect for his dad.

02:21:46.000 So there's not a balanced conversation.

02:21:49.000 But when they're talking about UFOs, he says, I've seen some very interesting things, but he wouldn't talk about it.

02:21:57.000 Have you ever read The Black Swan?

02:21:59.000 No.

02:22:00.000 This is a great book by, I think his name's Taleb.

02:22:05.000 And basically his theory is that human beings spend all of our time justifying things that have already happened and sort of explaining them away.

02:22:16.000 But those things before they happened were totally unexpected.

02:22:20.000 So he calls them Black Swan events.

02:22:22.000 Is this Nassim Taleb?

02:22:24.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:22:25.000 Okay.

02:22:25.000 Yeah.

02:22:26.000 Yeah, I know who that guy is.

02:22:27.000 Mathematician, right?

02:22:38.000 We're all shocked by them.

02:22:40.000 Cue the pandemic, for instance, right?

02:22:42.000 And then afterwards, we say, actually, we knew this was coming.

02:22:45.000 We can totally explain this.

02:22:46.000 And then we always make the mistake of preparing for the disaster that's already happened.

02:22:50.000 I mean, that's just human nature, right?

02:22:53.000 As you think, well, how do we fix the thing we just dealt with, right?

02:22:57.000 Rather than thinking about how do we prepare for the impossible thing that's coming next?

02:23:21.000 I don't know.

02:23:24.000 And when you do, inevitably people say you're a conspiracy theorist. 1.00

02:23:28.000 You're crazy. 0.99

02:23:28.000 You can't talk about it. 0.99

02:23:29.000 You can't go down that road, right?

02:23:31.000 But what's the harm in just running the thought experiment?

02:23:34.000 The harm is ridicule.

02:23:35.000 And just modeling it out.

02:23:36.000 Well, people are scared of ridicule because it can be devastating to your career.

02:23:42.000 I mean if you're not self-sustaining, if you're not – If you're not autonomous, right?

02:23:47.000 If you have some real connection to an institution and your reputation relies on the respect and trust of your peers, and you say something that's really outside the norm, and you can just – if there's some sort of conflict,

02:24:04.000 an additional conflict regarding your work, they can just dismiss you based on that.

02:24:08.000 It's very dangerous.

02:24:09.000 It's very dangerous to say things.

02:24:11.000 If you have a job where maybe you work for a university but you don't have tenure, if you write for a newspaper, and there's a lot of woke people that also write for that newspaper, and they're very critical of the way you dismiss certain things that are taken into part of the cultural zeitgeist today.

02:24:34.000 It's real dangerous. 0.97

02:24:35.000 Because in this day and age, everybody's fucking scared. 0.98

02:24:39.000 And people will turn on you. 0.98

02:24:41.000 And if they turn on you, it can be devastating to your career.

02:24:45.000 And sometimes people will say certain things that are controversial.

02:24:48.000 And that would be the end.

02:24:50.000 That would be the end of all their hard work.

02:24:52.000 And there's other people that relish in that.

02:24:55.000 They relish in dismissing you by one particular misstep or one controversial perspective, whether it's about aliens or viruses or masks or the immune system or politics or anything or fake news, 0.99

02:25:13.000 whatever the fuck it is. 0.96

02:25:14.000 It's like people are always looking to step on the other person that's climbing up. 1.00

02:25:18.000 It's crabs in a bucket.

02:25:20.000 Instead of uniting and sort of working it out together and embracing the ethic of community and of understanding and of compassion and companionship and the fact that we should be very rarely attacking and almost always trying to understand each individual perspective.

02:25:44.000 And we don't do that right now.

02:25:47.000 We're scared.

02:25:48.000 Social media has put us into this weird position where it's so easy to attack, so easy to be attacked, and so attractive to pile on.

02:25:56.000 And one of the reasons why people pile on is because you want to identify yourself as the tribe that's in the good on the right side, and therefore you stand up and jump in, jump into the fray when you see anybody stepping out of line.

02:26:09.000 Even if they're stepping out of line with something that will, in history and in the future, point to an actual perspective that's pretty reasonable.

02:26:19.000 In the time, it's not.

02:26:22.000 In the time, reasonable perspectives right now are very dangerous if they are not in the norm.

02:26:28.000 If they're not what we consider to be this This conglomeration of opinions that you have to have and you have to project.

02:26:37.000 And so there's a lot of people right now that are terrified.

02:26:40.000 Because of these newfound tools and this newfound...

02:26:43.000 This is the real downside of cancel culture, right?

02:26:48.000 There's a lot of people that will secretly talk to you.

02:26:50.000 And they'll say, look, I can't say this publicly, but I completely agree with you.

02:26:54.000 And you're very brave telling the truth.

02:26:57.000 But I have to protect myself.

02:26:58.000 I have a family.

02:26:59.000 I have a this.

02:27:00.000 I have a that.

02:27:00.000 My job at this and that.

02:27:02.000 And once I'm free, then I'm going to be honest.

02:27:04.000 But right now, I can't jump in.

02:27:06.000 We're dealing with a lot of that right now.

02:27:09.000 No, you're absolutely right.

02:27:10.000 And I mean, I'm an academic.

02:27:11.000 I deal with this.

02:27:13.000 I'm based at University College Dublin.

02:27:16.000 You know, I have to be careful about what I say.

02:27:19.000 But at the same time, Because I do ethnographic research because my – from the Greek, I'm a culture writer, right?

02:27:26.000 Like I'm writing about other people's perspectives fundamentally and that does act as an effective shield to be able to spend time with people, to be empathetic to their views.

02:27:37.000 Anthropologists have a long history of this, of hanging out with people that are committing infanticide or murder or cannibalism or whatever and saying, look, this is their culture.

02:27:45.000 This is what's happening.

02:27:47.000 If you don't agree with it, that's fine.

02:27:49.000 But I'm just – I'm passing on – I'm documenting it.

02:27:52.000 I'm passing on the information and we can debate it in a different forum.

02:27:59.000 The work that I've done in the past, particularly with the Urban Explorers, has got me into a lot of trouble.

02:28:04.000 I mean I got arrested. 0.98

02:28:07.000 My – all of the people that I worked with ended up getting arrested because the police got my fucking notes. 0.98

02:28:13.000 And I mean, it was a terrible situation. 0.96

02:28:16.000 How did the police get your notes?

02:28:17.000 It was a terrible situation.

02:28:18.000 Well, I was going out with these urban explorers into all of this subterranean infrastructure underneath London.

02:28:26.000 And after we went into those sewer systems, then we got into electricity tunnels.

02:28:31.000 Then we started getting into bunkers.

02:28:33.000 How illegal is this stuff?

02:28:34.000 These are like layers under the city.

02:28:35.000 So imagine there's like five layers under the city, right?

02:28:39.000 So we go from those sewers to the electricity tunnels to the...

02:28:43.000 Infrastructural systems to the bunkers.

02:28:45.000 And then we started getting into what are called deep level systems, right?

02:28:48.000 And they're very similar to the bunkers that the US government is building here that they called DUMBs, Deep Underground Military Bases, right?

02:28:59.000 We started getting into like serious critical infrastructure.

02:29:02.000 At some point … Trevor Burrus How easy was it to get into those?

02:29:06.000 It took us years.

02:29:08.000 It took us years.

02:29:09.000 It was quite a lot of research.

02:29:11.000 But I mean at some point we got into what are called the BT Deep Level Tunnels, British Telecommunications Deep Level Tunnels.

02:29:18.000 And we were like inside the telecommunications trunk for all of the United Kingdom.

02:29:25.000 And at this point we're like 100 feet underground, 120 feet underground.

02:29:32.000 We were actually – we were walking through – I've seen this tunnel about 100 feet underground and one of the explorers I was with is like, there's a manhole above us.

02:29:43.000 I was like, what do you mean there's a manhole above us?

02:29:45.000 We're in the deepest level right now.

02:29:49.000 And we pop this manhole and a camera swivels and stares at us like, oh, God. 0.99

02:29:56.000 And then we realized we were into some critical shit. 0.99

02:30:00.000 What was it? 0.99

02:30:01.000 It was just telecommunication hubs, right?

02:30:04.000 It's just like the trunk of all of the infrastructure for fiber optics and phone lines.

02:30:10.000 And they just have an exposed manhole cover and a tunnel that you can get to.

02:30:14.000 Dude, we wiggled through like – we wiggled from tunnel to tunnel like through tiny crevices.

02:30:18.000 We were getting into like the deep underbelly of the city.

02:30:20.000 I mean it was not easy to get to.

02:30:22.000 But here's the thing.

02:30:24.000 At the same time, we had been cracking all of the abandoned tube stations, metro stations in London, right?

02:30:31.000 So we took a map of the tube from 1932. And we set a map from 2008 on top of it, and what you see are a bunch of stations that are no longer on the map.

02:30:44.000 That's your first clue.

02:30:45.000 So there were like 40-some.

02:30:47.000 Then we started doing research and we figured out that there's got to be at least 14 stations that still have ticket offices or platforms.

02:30:57.000 There's something there that you could find.

02:30:59.000 So we started sneaking into the tube to go and find these places.

02:31:03.000 We would wait until the train stopped at 2 in the morning and then we would climb up a bridge and get onto the tracks and we'd run through the tunnels.

02:31:11.000 And we were finding these stations, one after another.

02:31:14.000 Incredible time capsules, you know, where there were artifacts left behind, posters, like we'd find tickets on the ground that were 40 years old, you know.

02:31:24.000 I mean, really cool stuff.

02:31:26.000 A lot of these stations were bombed out.

02:31:28.000 During World War II. But finding these is like – again, this kind of like – like here's the archaeologists in me, right?

02:31:36.000 Like we were having this visceral connection to history.

02:31:38.000 We were finding this stuff that was giving us like a real sense of being inside history in material terms.

02:31:46.000 So we're posting – every time we crack one of these stations, we post it on our blogs.

02:31:51.000 Like, oh, you know, we've cracked Mark Lane.

02:31:54.000 We've cracked Downstreet.

02:31:56.000 We've cracked whatever.

02:31:57.000 And we're all excited about it and like the window is narrowing.

02:32:01.000 And we get towards the end of the 14 stations and we're starting to think, you know, like the cops are surely watching what we're doing, right?

02:32:13.000 The British Transport Police and kind of know where we're going to go next because there's only a few stations left.

02:32:18.000 So we stop posting stuff.

02:32:20.000 Yeah.

02:32:21.000 And on Christmas of 2012, we cracked the last station underneath the British Museum, which, like, there's all sorts of cool stories about, like, there was a ghost in here, it's a haunted station, whatever.

02:32:33.000 But we did it.

02:32:34.000 We never got caught.

02:32:35.000 So for me, this is the end of the research project.

02:32:39.000 Trevor Burrus Is there a fear of being like retroactively prosecuted for this stuff?

02:32:45.000 We'll get there.

02:32:46.000 Trevor Burrus Oh.

02:32:48.000 So I'm done with my research project.

02:32:49.000 I've written my PhD.

02:32:51.000 I published my first book, Explore Everything, about all of our – or I hadn't published the book yet actually.

02:32:57.000 And I fly to Cambodia to work on a totally different research project, right?

02:33:02.000 Like I'm switching gears.

02:33:03.000 I'm going to go do something else.

02:33:05.000 And I fly back from Cambodia via Singapore and the plane lands at Heathrow and the thing goes off ding and you stand up and you get your bags and then nothing is happening.

02:33:17.000 And they say, can everyone please sit down again?

02:33:20.000 I sit down.

02:33:21.000 I look out the plane and there's cop cars everywhere. 1.00

02:33:23.000 And I'm like, oh shit. 0.99

02:33:25.000 You know, I came from Singapore. 0.99

02:33:26.000 Someone brought drugs.

02:33:27.000 I don't know.

02:33:28.000 There's a terrorist in the plane.

02:33:29.000 I have no idea what's going on.

02:33:31.000 And the cops get on the plane and they're like, 42K, 42K. Dr. Garrett?

02:33:36.000 Yeah?

02:33:36.000 You're coming with us.

02:33:39.000 Okay.

02:33:40.000 So they cuffed me.

02:33:42.000 They have me like retrieve my bag from the baggage claim and they take me through passport control in handcuffs.

02:33:50.000 And obviously the UK government's like, yeah, we'll go ahead and keep that passport.

02:33:53.000 Thank you.

02:33:55.000 So they eventually charge me with conspiracy to commit criminal damage.

02:34:01.000 Now, what's weird about England is that trespass isn't a criminal offense.

02:34:05.000 So you can't charge people with trespass unless you're in very specific circumstances.

02:34:11.000 So they tried out this charge of conspiracy to commit criminal damage because it's about intention.

02:34:16.000 It's a thought crime.

02:34:18.000 Like, if I text you and I'm like, hey, dude, you know, the bar is closed right now because of COVID, you want to break in and just like pour ourselves a beer?

02:34:26.000 And you're like, yeah, let's do it.

02:34:28.000 We've committed conspiracy to commit criminal damage.

02:34:31.000 We've committed to the crime.

02:34:34.000 So anyway, for years, we're dragged through the British legal system.

02:34:39.000 And I got trapped in the UK for three years.

02:34:43.000 They kept my passport, dude.

02:34:45.000 I was trapped there.

02:34:46.000 And here's where it gets really weird is that when the plane landed at Singapore...

02:34:53.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:35:01.000 And he's like, you know, by the time I got out of jail, like 48 hours later, I had all these messages from like, you asshole. 0.99

02:35:09.000 I showed up at the airport and you weren't there and whatever, you know. 0.99

02:35:13.000 And I finally find this guy, Matthew Power.

02:35:16.000 And he's like, are you serious?

02:35:19.000 Because we had timed it to land at the same time.

02:35:21.000 And he's like, are you serious?

02:35:23.000 You got arrested at that moment?

02:35:24.000 And he said, what about your house?

02:35:26.000 I said, I have no idea.

02:35:27.000 So we go to my house.

02:35:28.000 And we unlock the door with these keys that the police had given me because they took down my door with a battering ram, right?

02:35:35.000 And then like put some padlocks on there that they drilled into the door in the doorframe.

02:35:40.000 And I open it up and my apartment has just been ravaged, right?

02:35:44.000 Like stuff everywhere.

02:35:44.000 The mattress is flipped over.

02:35:46.000 All the cupboards are torn apart.

02:35:47.000 There's like pieces of the door all over the floor.

02:35:50.000 And underneath all of it, there was a job contract from the University of Oxford to do a postdoc because I had just finished my PhD.

02:35:59.000 And the journalist from GQ is like, dude, I can go home right now.

02:36:02.000 I've got this story.

02:36:03.000 I don't need to explore anything.

02:36:04.000 I'm done.

02:36:06.000 And how did it resolve?

02:36:07.000 Well, by the time we got to court, I mean, the prosecution was just in shambles.

02:36:14.000 I mean, it was a total debacle because there was no evidence that we had broken anything.

02:36:19.000 Because of their laws, you had just trespassed, which isn't a law.

02:36:22.000 We just trespassed, yeah.

02:36:23.000 But they spent, you know, 300,000 pounds, I don't know, $400,000 of taxpayer money to run this prosecution.

02:36:30.000 So they were going to see it to the end.

02:36:32.000 And essentially, they confiscated my computers, my hard drives, my notebooks, and that was the central component of the evidence that was used to prosecute everyone.

02:36:45.000 So essentially, I just made a deal with them.

02:36:48.000 I was like, look, I'll take a hit.

02:36:51.000 If everyone else can just get off, I'll take the hit for it.

02:36:56.000 So I pled guilty to...

02:36:59.000 I think it was four counts of criminal damage, which included damage to a screw from a board that I had taken off and put back on to a vent shaft.

02:37:09.000 Ooh.

02:37:09.000 I know.

02:37:10.000 Sliding open a window.

02:37:11.000 Oh, that was aiding and abetting, because I had opened a window for someone to crawl through.

02:37:15.000 I mean it was just like a list of ridiculous things but they didn't care because they just – they needed their … Trevor Burrus They needed a win.

02:37:21.000 They needed a win.

02:37:22.000 So I gave them that.

02:37:23.000 But now I've got this criminal record in England.

02:37:26.000 Trevor Burrus So when you land, do you get pulled aside if you go to England?

02:37:30.000 I used to.

02:37:30.000 I actually filed a complaint with the government and they would like severely harass me.

02:37:35.000 And then when I moved to Australia, I had the same problem.

02:37:38.000 Like they had put flags on my passport.

02:37:40.000 And you filed a complaint and did it go through?

02:37:43.000 And I filed a complaint and they fixed it.

02:37:44.000 They took the flags off the passport, yeah.

02:37:46.000 Essentially saying, like, you know, I did my thing, you know?

02:37:50.000 Like, why do I have to keep paying for this over and over again?

02:37:54.000 But it was really funny when they originally gave me my passport back.

02:37:58.000 So, like, I go to court and then, you know...

02:38:00.000 The judge is like, Dr. Garrett, you're very naughty or whatever.

02:38:03.000 Take your passport back.

02:38:05.000 Do they have wigs on? 0.86

02:38:06.000 Yes.

02:38:07.000 Really?

02:38:07.000 Yeah, the wigs are fantastic.

02:38:08.000 Really?

02:38:09.000 Yeah.

02:38:09.000 They still do that?

02:38:10.000 Yeah, they still do that.

02:38:11.000 They're really good.

02:38:12.000 Wow, that's real.

02:38:13.000 Yeah.

02:38:13.000 Yeah, the barristers all have their wigs and they carry them around like a cat, you know?

02:38:19.000 And then they have to put it on when they're doing that fucking bonkers. 0.94

02:38:23.000 So they give me my passport back and the next day I was supposed to fly to Sydney to go speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. 0.86

02:38:31.000 I was the obvious speaker, right?

02:38:34.000 And I go to the airport and the guy swipes it and he's like, oh yeah, you don't want to use this.

02:38:41.000 I was like, what does it say?

02:38:43.000 What does the screen say?

02:38:44.000 And he's like, I can't relay that but you should probably go.

02:38:49.000 He gives me my passport back and then I … Trevor Burrus You should probably leave the country?

02:38:53.000 No, like you should not get on a plane with this.

02:38:55.000 Like you're going to have a problem on the other side.

02:38:58.000 Whatever he saw … Trevor Burrus Well, how else can you travel?

02:39:00.000 Well, exactly.

02:39:00.000 So then I missed my flight and I had to go back – I had to go to the US embassy and I'm like – I've just tried to fly with my passport and it doesn't work.

02:39:11.000 And the guy at the embassy swipes it and he says, oh, wow.

02:39:14.000 And then he gets out a hole puncher and he goes, thunk, thunk, thunk, right through my passport. 0.98

02:39:18.000 And he says, you shouldn't use that.

02:39:21.000 And then, like, three hours later, they gave me another passport and I flew out the next day.

02:39:25.000 And the passport's good.

02:39:26.000 The new one's good.

02:39:26.000 It was fine.

02:39:27.000 Yeah.

02:39:27.000 Wow.

02:39:28.000 But then I started getting stopped again.

02:39:30.000 So they, like, I don't know, tacked the flags on there later. 0.99

02:39:33.000 God damn. 0.99

02:39:33.000 I mean, it was a real ordeal. 0.99

02:39:34.000 But, you know, the thing...

02:39:37.000 I mean, it was traumatic for me, of course.

02:39:40.000 I was, like, stuck in a foreign country and, you know, like, you get worried about your income.

02:39:44.000 Like, I was worried about being...

02:39:45.000 They did try to deport me.

02:39:47.000 At some point.

02:39:47.000 Because once you have a criminal offense, they keep trying to deport.

02:39:50.000 So anyway, I beat that down.

02:39:52.000 Did they fine you?

02:39:53.000 What was the ultimate judgment?

02:39:55.000 Yeah, I think it was 2,000 pounds, about $3,000 I got fined.

02:40:02.000 Not too bad.

02:40:02.000 Not a big deal.

02:40:03.000 I'm sure you made some money off the book.

02:40:05.000 If not, you're going to make some now.

02:40:06.000 You know what, dude?

02:40:09.000 All the money that I made on my first book, Explore Everything, went to my lawyers.

02:40:13.000 Who I have to say were phenomenal.

02:40:15.000 Like they did a great job.

02:40:16.000 But it was like every time I get a royalty check, I just sign it over to them, you know?

02:40:19.000 And it did seem like karma. 0.88

02:40:21.000 It was like, well, I broke into all this shit and then I wrote a book and then the money went to the lawyers and the lawyers got me off and it all kind of worked out. 0.97

02:40:28.000 Tell everybody, again, the names, the books. 0.98

02:40:30.000 Let's sell some books for you here.

02:40:32.000 Sweet. 0.99

02:40:33.000 Because the book really has some amazing imagery, particularly the underground shit. 0.99

02:40:38.000 Yeah, okay. 0.88

02:40:38.000 So the first book that is all about my time with the urban explorers and our trespasses into the underground and also into skyscrapers and abandoned buildings, that was called Explore Everything. 0.88

02:40:49.000 I wrote that in...

02:40:50.000 That was published in 2013. There it is.

02:40:53.000 Explore everything.

02:40:54.000 That's got the whole story of the court case.

02:40:56.000 Bradley Garrett, not to be confused with the giant person from Everybody Loves Raymond...

02:41:02.000 I will topple his Google rankings someday, I promise.

02:41:06.000 You're getting me closer.

02:41:07.000 Subterranean London, that's your second book?

02:41:10.000 Yeah, Subterranean London is the second book, so those are all of our photographs over 10 years.

02:41:15.000 Amazing photographs, too, by the way.

02:41:16.000 Of the subterranean layers of London. 1.00

02:41:18.000 Just spectacular shit. 1.00

02:41:21.000 And then London Rising is the third book. 0.99

02:41:24.000 Oh, actually, scroll up there.

02:41:27.000 Scroll up in the image.

02:41:28.000 See at the top there?

02:41:28.000 That's us climbing into an abandoned tube station.

02:41:31.000 Up left?

02:41:32.000 This one right here.

02:41:34.000 That one?

02:41:35.000 Yeah, that's climbing into the new crossrail.

02:41:38.000 It's just so weird that all that stuff is open.

02:41:41.000 It's not.

02:41:42.000 It's not anymore?

02:41:43.000 It kind of is.

02:41:44.000 Kind of?

02:41:44.000 Do they do anything to tighten it down after your books?

02:41:48.000 They try.

02:41:49.000 They try.

02:41:50.000 Okay, let's keep it.

02:41:51.000 We got really good at breaking into things.

02:41:53.000 I mean, you know.

02:41:55.000 This is a skill you build.

02:41:57.000 Bradley, thank you very much, man.

02:41:59.000 This was a lot of fun.

02:42:00.000 We just went through three hours, if you can believe it.

02:42:02.000 Are you serious?

02:42:02.000 Yeah, it's 340. Wow.

02:42:05.000 It's a time warp in here, right?

02:42:07.000 It's crazy. 1.00

02:42:08.000 People always say that, like, what the fuck? 0.99

02:42:10.000 That is so weird. 0.99

02:42:11.000 Yeah.

02:42:12.000 It was a fascinating conversation, man.

02:42:13.000 Very thrilling.

02:42:14.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:42:15.000 Thank you very much.

02:42:16.000 That was a lot of fun.

02:42:16.000 Thanks for being here, man.

02:42:17.000 I really appreciate it.

02:42:18.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:42:18.000 What a great invitation.

02:42:19.000 Thank you.

02:42:19.000 Bye, everybody!

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 28, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1515 - Dr. Bradley Garrett

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Transcript