In this episode of The Doomsday Prepper Podcast, host Ryan Higa sits down with author, survivalist, and all-around great guy, Dr. Jamie Eichenauer, to talk about what it's like being a prepper in the wilds of California's backcountry, how to survive a nuclear holocaust, and how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. If you're interested in learning more about Jamie, you can find him on all of the social medias, if not, then check out his book, "The Doomsday Project: How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse" which is out now! The Doomsday Project is a podcast about surviving a nuclear apocalypse and the steps you need to take if you're going to survive it. The ultimate goal is to prepare you and your family for the worst possible scenario you can think of. If the unthinkable happens, you have to be prepared to get out of your house, your car, your cell phone, or your vehicle, and get to the other side of the nearest emergency room before it s too late. Don't miss it! If it happens, don't miss this episode! We'll be back next week with Part 2 of the Doomsday Project! Stay tuned for Part 2 next Tuesday. Stay safe out there in the Badger Den! Cheers, Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino and the Doomsday Crew! Timestamps: 8:00 - The Doomsday Crew 9:30 - What would you do in the event of a nuclear attack? 11: How do you prepare for one? 14:15 - What are you ready to leave your home? 16:00: What's the appropriate bug out plan? 17: What do you have? 19:00 21:00 | How do I know you're ready for it? 22:30 | What is a good plan for a nuclear emergency? 24:30 27:15 | What do I need to do in case it happens? 26:15 29:40 | What's a good day? 30:40 35:30 // 35:00 // 36: Should I be prepared? 36:00 / 37:00 + 39: Is it possible to survive in the wilderness? 40: What s a good idea? 39:00 & 45:00 Do you have a safe place to go to the bunker field?
00:00:58.000I guess it's better to have it not to need it than need it not to have it.
00:01:02.000I 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.
00:01:11.000But every once in a while, I'll see someone in a grocery store or whatever, and I'm like, okay.
00:01:46.000One 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,
00:02:18.000So 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.
00:02:27.000I spent a lot of time with them and they told me if – If it ever hits the fan, come visit us.
00:05:21.000To take care of my mom because she was having spinal surgery.
00:05:24.000I had just finished my three-year research fellowship at the University of Sydney that enabled me to write this book with the Doomsday Preppers.
00:05:33.000And I was going to a new job at University College Dublin in Ireland.
00:05:37.000And so I land in LA to take care of my mom for six weeks while she gets her spinal surgery.
00:05:44.000I'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.
00:06:08.000We take my mom home and we lock ourselves inside for a couple of months and kind of wait for this all to unfold.
00:06:15.000So I actually finished this book, like the final proofs of this book I finished in lockdown in the early days of the pandemic.
00:06:21.000You 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?
00:07:41.000If you were positive, we would figure it out.
00:07:43.000We would do it in the parking lot with masks on or something.
00:07:45.000But 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.
00:07:58.000But like I almost experienced a sense of euphoria.
00:08:58.000In 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.
00:09:06.000Now they're pretty sure there was a study done that shows that it dies almost instantly in sunlight.
00:09:13.000So when you're outside at the beach, there's probably very little chance of spreading.
00:09:18.000So 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.
00:09:27.000But the thing is, the protests don't end during the day.
00:09:30.000People were jammed on top of each other all throughout the night, and it easily could have gotten you then.
00:09:36.000They're showing that also even simulated UV light.
00:09:39.000There was a study done that showed that artificial sunlight, like simulated sunlight, also kills it.
00:09:45.000I was out in Joshua Tree yesterday, and I went for a seven-mile trail run.
00:11:12.000But 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.
00:11:52.000Well, it's also people's anxiety and insecurity and people that are emotionally and mentally unstable.
00:11:58.000Now's their time to shine because this is like what they've been – like preppers, I would imagine.
00:12:05.000I'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.
00:12:40.000I'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?
00:12:53.000You didn't think you might mention that to me?
00:12:57.000But, I mean, you know, it's almost deemed pathological, right?
00:13:04.000Like, people equate prepping to hoarding.
00:13:05.000It's like, well, why do you need all that stuff?
00:14:25.000Or cooperate with your neighbor, hopefully.
00:14:27.000You know, I hunt, so I have a lot of meat.
00:14:32.000And 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.
00:14:44.000You know, if you shoot an elk, an elk's 400 pounds of meat.
00:14:56.000But I'm not a prepper, you know, but...
00:15:00.000I'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.
00:15:11.000That'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.
00:15:25.000You know, like prepping on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just common sense.
00:15:43.000But 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.
00:15:57.000It's like those type of folks, folks who think 5G is causing COVID. You know what I mean?
00:16:03.000Like 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.
00:16:15.000Going 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.
00:16:29.000Well, 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?
00:16:38.000So take nuclear war, for example, right?
00:16:41.000Like, let's say we get a text message on our phone.
00:16:46.000Remember in Hawaii in 2018, everyone got that message that the ballistic missile was incoming, right?
00:16:50.000So imagine we get that message right now, and you're like, Well, Brad, we actually have a bunker underneath this studio, right?
00:16:58.000So 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?
00:18:00.000The 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.
00:18:15.000Their profit margin – what did she say, like 15%, 14%, something like that?
00:18:23.000So 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.
00:18:34.000It's just a survival game and there's no end in sight, right?
00:19:44.000Because this virus most likely had been leaked from a lab.
00:19:48.000What 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,
00:20:11.000It's like the disease is too advanced.
00:20:13.000It 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.
00:20:25.000And so you got both those things, right?
00:20:30.000The possibility of something just morphing in nature, like many other pandemics that have happened in the past.
00:20:36.000And then what we have now, which is this weird virus.
00:20:40.000And we were talking about all the different symptoms that people get from it, neurological problems, blood clotting.
00:20:47.000I 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.
00:20:56.000And they're like, this is astonishing.
00:22:54.000But then once we develop nuclear weapons and we're just past the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test now.
00:23:01.000You 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?
00:23:09.000Now, stack on top of that, artificial intelligence, climate change, you know, synthetic biotech.
00:23:15.000All of these threats that we face are something that we have to kind of hold in our heads all the time.
00:23:20.000And I think it's cracking us mentally to, like, think about these possibilities.
00:23:26.000Yeah, I mean, some of the preppers are conspiracy theorists, right?
00:23:29.000And they're spinning some really outlandish scenarios.
00:23:32.000But a lot of them are just trying to work through these things, right?
00:23:36.000And 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?
00:23:49.000Like, it gives them a sense of, like, it gives them some solid footing in the present.
00:23:58.000Are not actually very anxious or paranoid at all, right?
00:25:07.000I mean you got to have a jet and go to New Zealand like instantly.
00:25:12.000It's like – I don't even know if that's – New Zealand is in a volcanic zone.
00:25:16.000I 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.
00:25:25.000I 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.
00:25:32.000But when shit goes wrong, they want a really strong government to clamp down and take care of it.
00:26:16.000It 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,
00:28:05.000First 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.
00:28:26.000A 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.
00:28:36.000Well they've decided recently, it's a very controversial decision, to eradicate them.
00:28:41.000So 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,
00:28:57.000they'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.
00:29:03.000It's got to be this fantasy of getting back to the kind of pre-colonial past, right?
00:29:07.000Like if you eradicate all the animals that were brought in with colonization and you can get back to some kind of like – Maybe.
00:29:16.000They would have to bring back the host eagle.
00:29:19.000There's an enormous eagle that used to hunt humans that lived on New Zealand.
00:29:23.000The largest eagle that ever lived lived in New Zealand, and they believe that the Polynesian people wound up killing them all.
00:29:30.000Well, you gotta go to Jurassic Park and get the DNA and resurrect that thing.
00:29:50.000Polynesians 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.
00:29:59.000Dude, have you ever seen their maps that are made out of sticks?
00:31:55.000We threw one at UC Riverside where I was studying.
00:31:58.000Yeah, 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.
00:32:12.000Now, 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?
00:32:26.000Or are they getting it down from the people where the knowledge has been handed down?
00:32:31.000Oh, it's definitely the case that the knowledge is being handed down.
00:32:34.000And what's really interesting is that...
00:32:38.000I 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.
00:32:51.000So he talked about Clovis cultures, right?
00:32:53.000Those Clovis points are so hard to make, dude.
00:32:56.000And they're making these like 12,000, 13,000 years ago.
00:32:59.000So it's essentially – You get a piece of rock, right?
00:33:03.000And you have to flatten the rock first, right?
00:33:05.000So you've got to send flakes with a hammerstone across the rock and create like a ridge down the middle.
00:33:11.000And then in one strike, you take that whole ridge off and you create this flat expanse down the middle of the spear point.
00:36:52.000Yeah, 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.
00:37:05.000And so this guy's like, oh, you want a temple?
00:38:36.000It's a pretty tragic story up there, man.
00:38:39.000They 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,
00:38:55.000like all of their spiritual sites, all of their graveyards.
00:38:58.000I mean, all this stuff went underwater.
00:39:00.000So I'd spent two years doing a degree in maritime archaeology.
00:39:05.000I'd been diving shipwrecks all over the world.
00:39:07.000I went up there and I said, let me dive in the reservoir.
00:39:13.000I've got my underwater camera and I said, I'll take some photos.
00:40:24.000So 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.
00:40:33.000And their culture is documented in what way?
00:40:37.000How are they maintaining their historical records?
00:40:41.000Well, this was actually one of my first academic articles.
00:40:44.000I wrote about how a lot of their religious ceremonies...
00:40:52.000So 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,
00:41:11.000So now they do it in sort of drought season so that they can still get to the rock.
00:41:15.000And so they had changed the whole kind of – their cultural fabric had been altered by that inundation event.
00:41:23.000And basically the point that she was trying to get across to me was like that didn't break us.
00:41:29.000We're still us, even though these things have had to change.
00:41:33.000It 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.
00:41:49.000What she was telling me was something that was a little bit more It was more nuanced.
00:42:00.000And that was a big learning lesson for me.
00:42:02.000So 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.
00:42:12.000So how are they keeping records of what happened and when it happened?
00:42:47.000There's probably more people writing things down now these days.
00:42:49.000But they've got oral histories that go back a long time.
00:42:52.000When I was in Australia – get this, man.
00:42:55.000I 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.
00:44:26.000I 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.
00:44:34.000Yeah, 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.
00:45:12.000But we don't talk a lot about all these skills that we've lost.
00:45:16.000So that's why I like going out into the landscape.
00:45:18.000I 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.
00:45:25.000I mean, give someone a sextant and tell them, figure your way across the ocean.
00:48:04.000So this thing, this 2,000-year-old device, was even capable of adding, multiplying, dividing, and subtracting.
00:48:11.000So they found it in May 17th, 1902, and it was discovered in a Roman cargo shipwreck.
00:48:21.000For 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.
00:48:33.000The Antikythera mechanism gathered interest in the 1950s and its complexity, function, and computational powers has led it to be dubbed the first ever computer.
00:48:59.000You 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,
00:49:16.000excuse me, asteroidal or meteorological impacts.
00:49:52.000They 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.
00:50:04.000And 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,
00:50:22.000Noah's Ark flood story, and also why there seems to be some sort of a reset of civilization.
00:50:28.000There'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.
00:52:03.000We 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.
00:52:13.000Yeah, there's many, many, many points of chaos.
00:52:20.000I 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.
00:52:37.000That are really fascinating, particularly the origin of the Caduceus, the origin of the double helix DNA that seems to be...
00:52:50.000When you look at that sign that symbolizes medicine, you know, the two snakes crossing together, that originated in ancient Sumer, and it originated with...
00:53:03.000A lot of these ancient clay tablets that showed what could be...
00:53:08.000It really is open to interpretation, right?
00:53:12.000But what he interpreted, the way he interpreted it, and he's got a very...
00:53:17.000Extraordinarily unusual interpretation of the Sumerian text.
00:53:20.000And 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.
00:53:30.000And the crazy thing is, when you look at these clay tablets in the illustrations, you see these strange things.
00:53:37.000Like, you see these godlike creatures.
00:54:01.000Many 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.
00:54:11.000Well, they had a depiction of the solar system, not just a depiction, but all of the planets in the proper order.
00:54:18.000Pull up the image of the Sumerian solar system.
00:55:02.000But 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.
00:55:21.000But 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.
00:55:35.000You know, there's just a lot of weirdness to that stuff.
00:55:38.000But 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.
00:55:50.000And 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.
00:56:58.000Yeah, no, it's fascinating and I think it's certainly worth – Wherever we fall on these debates, it's certainly worth talking about, right?
00:58:41.000The conspiracy theories were constant.
00:58:43.000But 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.
00:59:00.000But then there are the people who are selling the antidote to their fears.
00:59:03.000In the book, I call these people the dread merchants.
00:59:06.000The people who are going to sell you the bunker.
01:03:08.000And 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.
01:03:18.000So essentially the wall would be hollow and he said he was going to fill it with buckets.
01:03:34.000Just a fucking 12-foot high wall of Bible buckets.
01:03:37.000But they had this ex-Navy SEAL working for them.
01:03:41.000And I'm waiting to meet with the CEO of...
01:03:45.000He's kept me there for about three days trying to interview this guy.
01:03:49.000In 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.
01:03:56.000So 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?
01:04:11.000And he told me, as a geographer, you've got to understand you've got to control the geospace.
01:08:57.000I asked him about the security guards, right?
01:08:59.000Because 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.
01:09:06.000I said, dude, what keeps the security guards here?
01:10:14.000I 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.
01:10:27.000So they buy them – a lot of them they buy from the government.
01:10:30.000The 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.
01:11:27.000I had a couple of preppers tell me, you know, how you prep depends on what you're prepping for, right?
01:11:33.000And 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.
01:12:03.000You 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?
01:12:48.000And they said, oh, no, you misunderstand.
01:12:49.000We're not building these vehicles to escape the disaster.
01:12:52.000We're building these vehicles to assist.
01:12:54.000And actually, they've got a – they call it a disaster relief crew.
01:12:58.000And they've been going into disasters like – I think it was Hurricane Harvey.
01:13:04.000They actually drove the vehicles down and they were rescuing people from the floodwaters.
01:13:09.000And 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.
01:13:18.000And 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.
01:14:57.000This 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!
01:15:22.000And 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.
01:15:47.000Mitt 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.
01:15:59.000They're like, well, we're going to just go over here.
01:16:01.000Because Mexico was not that different to be in Mexico or America back when there was no cars or buildings.
01:16:13.000And then the Industrial Revolution kicked in, and buildings, and electricity, and air travel, and these motherfuckers are still stuck in Mexico.
01:16:22.000Now, 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.
01:17:13.000They 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.
01:17:22.000And they were like, you can volunteer anytime.
01:17:51.000Yeah, 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.
01:18:04.000So then I started doing research on this and it turns out that there was a guy called Ezra Taft Benson.
01:18:10.000And 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.
01:18:20.000So he's like – he was high up in the Mormon church.
01:18:22.000But he also worked for the Eisenhower administration and he was advising the president on how to prepare for nuclear war.
01:18:30.000And so he was one of the people pouring honey in the president's ear about like you've got to have fallout shelters.
01:18:38.000So 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.
01:18:51.000A lot of that actually came from the Mormon church.
01:18:53.000So there's a long history of them being wrapped up with the government on this.
01:19:03.000It'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.
01:19:47.000So 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.
01:19:54.000It actually freaked me out when I read this thing.
01:19:56.000And 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.
01:20:05.000But at the top of this silo, there are these screens that are showing you the outside, right?
01:20:11.000And of course what you see is this sort of blast-stricken landscape and red sand and – I mean it's impossible.
01:20:17.000It's the post-apocalyptic world out there.
01:20:19.000And of course people after a while start having discussions about how do we know – That that's a window.
01:20:27.000Like what if it's – you know what I mean?
01:20:29.000Like because it's cameras that are filming from outside and they're projecting onto the window.
01:20:34.000And 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,
01:20:50.000OK. 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.
01:20:58.000Like, he's just flipping through these feeds, right, that are your reality.
01:21:57.000But 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.
01:22:09.000Me 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.
01:22:47.000Yeah, 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.
01:22:57.000I mean, it's kind of concerning in the context of prepping, right?
01:23:00.000Because 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.
01:23:17.000And 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?
01:23:45.000Isn't the likelihood of them just hitting the button and starting the fabled mutually assured destruction?
01:23:52.000Well, that's what everybody was worried about with Reagan, and we should probably be equally concerned, especially if Trump gets a second term.
01:24:21.000And 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.
01:25:10.000I mean, North Korea's pretty pissed off, too.
01:25:13.000There's so much shit going on simultaneously, plus natural disasters.
01:25:18.000And it's hard to know whether There are more disasters or whether there's more awareness of disasters, right?
01:25:24.000Like 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?
01:25:37.000Like we think, yeah, the world is in constant chaos.
01:25:41.000And then of course they unfold because we're all thinking – we're all expecting them.
01:25:45.000Well, 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.
01:25:54.000You 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,
01:26:10.000If 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.
01:26:17.000If you know that there's a storm coming in that's going to wipe out your island, that's very dangerous.
01:26:21.000But 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?
01:26:32.000But if you're on Google, it's going to affect you.
01:26:35.000If 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.
01:26:42.000But then you're like, it's like that old Bill Hicks bit.
01:26:45.000There was a Bill Hicks bit about CNN from, I mean, this is like, Bill Hicks wrote this.
01:31:31.000Let's have a balanced version of this information, and let's look at it in terms of how we communicate with each other.
01:31:39.000Instead 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.
01:31:50.000When 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.
01:32:00.000What's instead happening is this massive tribal outburst.
01:32:04.000One 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.
01:32:21.000There's a lot of screaming and shouting and a lot of tribal behavior.
01:32:25.000But there's very little one-on-one recognition of each other's humanity.
01:32:37.000I was thinking a lot in this book about the differences between dread and anxiety.
01:32:44.000If you're anxious about something, it's specific.
01:32:48.000You're anxious about a particular thing.
01:32:50.000But if you feel dread, it's more of – rather than like an emotion, it's more of an affect.
01:32:57.000It's just kind of a sense of unease that you live with.
01:33:00.000And I think we're dreadful about so much right now that it's – we're experiencing a sort of collective psychotic break.
01:33:08.000And so the inevitable result of that is tribalization.
01:33:13.000You'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.
01:33:22.000So the preppers are one manifestation of that, right?
01:33:24.000They'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.
01:33:30.000And then these rioters are in other communities.
01:33:32.000They're like, we're going to burn this shit down.
01:34:16.000The 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?
01:34:27.000So instead of doing that, what we know now – and this was a conspiracy theory in the past, right?
01:34:33.000What we know now is that the government built bunkers for themselves but not for us, right?
01:34:39.000And a lot of the – you know, if there's a through line there, right?
01:34:43.000That if you move from the Cold War into like the age of survivalists, right?
01:34:49.000Like the 80s, you know, when you had Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, right?
01:34:55.000In his cabin, he's kind of like – he stands as a kind of symbol of this like lone wolf survivalist, right?
01:35:05.000Beau Grites, the guy who ran for president on the – I think it was on the Libertarian ticket.
01:35:10.000He built a community called Almost Heaven.
01:35:13.000He called it a constitutional community where like they were going to stop paying taxes and go off grid.
01:35:18.000They were going to become self-sustaining, whatever.
01:35:22.000What 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.
01:35:31.000Because they're like, if you can't protect us, we'll protect ourselves, right?
01:35:35.000And so now we get to today and we've got 3.7 million Americans identify as preppers now.
01:35:43.000They self-identify as preppers, right?
01:35:47.000And what you hear from a lot of them is this kind of – what we now interpret as a kind of libertarian narrative.
01:35:54.000It's like, well, I'm just going to take care of myself and my family.
01:35:57.000It's like I'm just going in on my own.
01:36:53.000I 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.
01:37:12.000I mean that country is essentially underground.
01:37:14.000They have fleets of aircraft inside mountains.
01:37:20.000I mean, it would actually be incredibly difficult to attack that country because after the Korean War, it was essentially flattened, right?
01:37:28.000And they learned from that experience, like, we've got to go underground if we're going to survive the next war.
01:37:33.000Do we have an accurate account of what they have?
01:37:38.000But 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?
01:37:53.000And it's kind of fun to dig through their website.
01:37:55.000Because most of it was constructed pre-satellite?
01:38:19.000I'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.
01:38:39.000And so he was actually developing a theory for spoofing the gravity measurements.
01:38:46.000So like you could build a bunker to look like a subterranean river, right?
01:38:51.000So you look at it from space and you're like, oh no, that's a geological structure.
01:39:47.000You 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?
01:39:58.000And these beautiful tunnels that stretch down.
01:40:01.000They're gravity-fed and that's how they're cleaned as well.
01:41:04.000This 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.
01:41:12.000And they later turned that into a set for Stargate.
01:41:37.000What are you using for these photographs?
01:41:41.000At 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.
01:42:43.000I 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.
01:43:37.000And what occurred to me over and over again as we were sneaking into these places is that it was really easy.
01:43:44.000And 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.
01:43:54.000And 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?
01:44:12.000When 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?
01:44:25.000Well, that's a strong narrative, right?
01:44:28.000That the way we prep now, we couldn't have prepped 10 years ago because technology is facilitating it, right?
01:45:00.000The 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.
01:45:10.000So in 1898, there was an event called the Carrington event where there was a massive solar burp.
01:45:17.000And this CME burned out telegraph lines in Canada and people in the Caribbean were seeing the Borealis.
01:45:28.000In New York City, apparently people were reading the newspaper in the middle of the night by the lights that were in the sky.
01:45:35.000So 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,
01:45:51.000is that if we had a Carrington-sized event today, we would be fucked.
01:45:57.000It would burn out all of our transformers.
01:46:00.000We could lose electricity, gas pumps, ATMs, refrigeration, medical equipment, and our vehicles.
01:46:09.000I mean, there's a long list of things that could get totally torched by one of these things.
01:46:14.000And the most concerning of that list are the transformers.
01:46:20.000Because they take a couple of years to build.
01:47:39.000The resistance is, hey, we should trade with these other communities and these other cultures and countries.
01:47:44.000But 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.
01:48:59.000Yeah, I've seen those lines of miners going down into the pits and passing buckets up.
01:49:06.000Dude, what's fucked is they're doing it with sticks in a lot of places.
01:49:09.000You'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.
01:49:21.000You're carrying these things around in your pocket, and if you could trace it back, that would be a fascinating documentary.
01:49:29.000Even 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.
01:49:38.000You're taking these guys in Africa that essentially, they're not slaves, but they don't have a lot of other options.
01:49:44.000I mean, they're kind of in a slavery-like situation.
01:49:48.000Those 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.
01:50:07.000They have nets around the building to keep people from committing suicide because it's so common.
01:50:12.000And 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?
01:51:03.000Where they're breaking down all the electronics?
01:51:06.000So 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?
01:51:19.000So it's like a kind of – not recycling but reuse of some of these things.
01:51:43.000And 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.
01:52:17.000At 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.
01:52:29.000So I found this broken big gulp cup from 7-Eleven and I was trying to bail his boat out.
01:52:34.000How come they couldn't seal it properly?
01:53:43.000Ability to take on that notion of kind of reuse and waste and what should be done with all these materials.
01:53:48.000Yeah, well, we certainly have an issue with that.
01:53:51.000I mean, we certainly have an issue with landfills.
01:53:53.000Our solution is stuff those things into the ground.
01:53:56.000And 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.
01:54:10.000One of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases is landfills.
01:54:14.000I 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?
01:54:35.000And 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.
01:54:49.000Like, 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.
01:54:58.000So it's rotting in this one area, concentrated, and it just...
01:55:04.000Yeah, we've got a family member that actually works.
01:55:07.000He does environmental monitoring for landfills.
01:55:09.000Yeah, he was telling me that they got a call at some point in this one landfill that it was smoking.
01:55:19.000And 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.
01:56:17.000I 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.
01:56:34.000And 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.
01:56:50.000And, 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.
01:56:55.000So there's a tremendous amount of waste involved in this method of hunting.
01:56:59.000Yeah, no, it's definitely a myth that, you know, Native Americans were at one with their environment.
01:57:04.000When you need to eat, you're going to drive 100 buffalo off a cliff.
01:57:48.000If 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...
01:57:57.000It would feed so many different animals, bacteria.
01:58:01.000It would eventually go into the ground and feed the soil.
01:58:04.000It's only wasteful in terms of the direct relationship between the person that killed the buffalo and did they consume that buffalo.
01:58:11.000But any animal that gets killed in the wild does not go to waste.
01:58:15.000If 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.
02:00:05.000That's the thing about the tribes, Indians, that the Europeans couldn't understand.
02:00:09.000They 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.
02:01:09.000A bunch of different tribes who ate each other.
02:01:12.000They would kill other tribes and eat them.
02:01:15.000I mean, it wasn't what they primarily ate, but it wasn't uncommon.
02:01:21.000Yeah, because there was a sense that if you ingested somebody's body, you would also ingest some of their power, right?
02:01:26.000Yeah, there was a lot of craziness to that.
02:01:28.000There 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.
02:02:35.000What really changed it, though, was the cult revolver and then the repeating rifle.
02:02:42.000Those 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,
02:03:00.000the horses were introduced into North America by the Europeans, but they used to be native to North America.
02:03:07.000Horses were actually – they originated in North America.
02:03:11.000And then – But they were exterminated here, right?
02:03:16.000And 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.
02:03:46.000These 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.
02:04:00.000Some way, they don't exactly know how, but then reintroduced by the Europeans, then the Native Americans started taking over the horses.
02:04:07.000And figuring out how to do combat on horses.
02:04:09.000And they figured out how to do it far better than the Europeans.
02:04:16.000Like the Mongols in the 1200s had spectacular horse riding abilities and the ability to fight off horseback.
02:04:23.000But Native Americans appear to have figured out how to do it independently.
02:04:28.000Because the people who introduced the horses here, the Europeans didn't know how to do it.
02:04:33.000So they didn't know how to fight off horses.
02:04:34.000They would get off their horse to shoot their musket.
02:04:36.000And the Native Americans would run up on them and fill them full of arrows.
02:04:39.000Because they figured out how to shoot literally an arrow a second.
02:04:42.000They had this spectacular technique of holding their arrows in their fingers.
02:04:47.000So they would have their left hand where they were holding the bow.
02:04:50.000And 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.
02:06:13.000Because they were used to these East Coast agrarian Native Americans.
02:06:17.000These 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.
02:06:32.000And so they were this incredibly warlike tribe that everyone was terrified of.
02:06:36.000All the other tribes were terrified of them.
02:06:38.000And they dominated this one chunk of the country and no one can get past them.
02:06:44.000They literally couldn't get through them.
02:07:36.000So Tulum is on the coast, like just over from Chichen Itza.
02:07:40.000And what you find are these like incredibly elaborate structures that are built there.
02:07:44.000But 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.
02:07:58.000It's like it doesn't conform to everything else that's happening on that site.
02:08:04.000We don't know – these people disappeared.
02:08:07.000We don't know what happened to them, right?
02:08:09.000But one of the theories that I heard is that it was a virus, right?
02:08:21.000These people showed up and we're not – and so that's one interpretation.
02:08:26.000I thought about this with the bunker builders too, right?
02:08:29.000That 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.
02:08:38.000And 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,
02:08:54.000places 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?
02:09:04.000You'd have all these different iterations of people responding to the current situation.
02:09:09.000And I guess that's – like I always kind of held this in my mind as I was touring all of these doomsday communities, right?
02:09:17.000Is that there's like – there's a future interpretation of these that I'm – It's elucidating now, right?
02:09:23.000Because a lot of these communities don't, like, let people in.
02:09:26.000You know, they don't want people telling these stories, right?
02:09:28.000So it did feel like I was writing through a historical moment.
02:09:34.000And that's before the pandemic, right?
02:09:37.000Like, I started this book in 2017. By the time the pandemic hit, I mean, some of the quotes in the book were utterly prophetic.
02:10:10.000And then if a crisis hits, you can retreat to any of his sort of campuses, you know?
02:10:15.000And 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.
02:10:26.000When I was editing the book, I had forgotten this quote, right?
02:10:30.000And I saw it again and I went, holy shit.
02:10:32.000And 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.
02:10:45.000They're planting secret groves in the forests out there so they can like retreat to their fruit trees if things go wrong.
02:11:17.000I've never had a sense of living through a historical moment quite in this way, right?
02:11:22.000A lot of us are experiencing this in the midst of the pandemic.
02:11:25.000Like 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.
02:11:57.000I wonder why they're saying that to us.
02:12:00.000I 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.
02:12:11.000Because obviously this pandemic has thrown us into a lot of shock.
02:12:14.000George 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.
02:12:29.000There's so much chaos right now and there's so much so much division.
02:16:31.000There'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.
02:16:46.000So it's this really normal thing that we do when we generalize.
02:17:02.000Meanwhile, they're right about a lot of shit.
02:17:05.000And if that guy really did work for the Department of Defense and really did see some things when it comes to UFOs...
02:17:12.000Bob 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.
02:17:27.000I was a nuclear physicist for Los Alamos Labs, and they hired me to go to Nevada.
02:17:34.000They flew me out to the middle of the fucking desert to work on something that's not from this planet.
02:17:40.000And they were like, oh, you're so crazy.
02:18:20.000Personally, I doubt they will disclose much more and wouldn't be surprised if they issue a correction and say their statement was in error.
02:18:27.000In any case, I never thought I'd see this day.
02:18:31.000Thanks so much to all of you that supported me throughout these years.
02:18:35.000On another note, this is the only social media account I have.
02:20:19.000And 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.
02:20:34.000Maybe they said that because they want to influence the election.
02:20:36.000Maybe they said that because they want to take our attention.
02:20:39.000Maybe 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?
02:20:49.000How about we tell them the aliens are coming?
02:20:52.000Like you create the other over here and then everyone consolidates to confront that thing.
02:20:58.000I 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.
02:21:08.000But if I was in charge, if I was Trump, I'd make a fucking press conference about the aliens.
02:21:34.000And it's clunky because his son's not that good at it.
02:21:37.000And 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.
02:21:46.000So there's not a balanced conversation.
02:21:49.000But when they're talking about UFOs, he says, I've seen some very interesting things, but he wouldn't talk about it.
02:22:00.000This is a great book by, I think his name's Taleb.
02:22:05.000And basically his theory is that human beings spend all of our time justifying things that have already happened and sort of explaining them away.
02:22:16.000But those things before they happened were totally unexpected.
02:23:36.000Well, people are scared of ridicule because it can be devastating to your career.
02:23:42.000I mean if you're not self-sustaining, if you're not – If you're not autonomous, right?
02:23:47.000If 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,
02:24:04.000an additional conflict regarding your work, they can just dismiss you based on that.
02:24:11.000If 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.
02:24:50.000That would be the end of all their hard work.
02:24:52.000And there's other people that relish in that.
02:24:55.000They 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,
02:25:20.000Instead 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.
02:25:48.000Social 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.
02:25:56.000And 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.
02:26:09.000Even 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.
02:27:13.000I'm based at University College Dublin.
02:27:16.000You know, I have to be careful about what I say.
02:27:19.000But at the same time, Because I do ethnographic research because my – from the Greek, I'm a culture writer, right?
02:27:26.000Like 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.
02:27:37.000Anthropologists 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.
02:28:35.000So imagine there's like five layers under the city, right?
02:28:39.000So we go from those sewers to the electricity tunnels to the...
02:28:43.000Infrastructural systems to the bunkers.
02:28:45.000And then we started getting into what are called deep level systems, right?
02:28:48.000And they're very similar to the bunkers that the US government is building here that they called DUMBs, Deep Underground Military Bases, right?
02:28:59.000We started getting into like serious critical infrastructure.
02:29:02.000At some point … Trevor Burrus How easy was it to get into those?
02:29:11.000But I mean at some point we got into what are called the BT Deep Level Tunnels, British Telecommunications Deep Level Tunnels.
02:29:18.000And we were like inside the telecommunications trunk for all of the United Kingdom.
02:29:25.000And at this point we're like 100 feet underground, 120 feet underground.
02:29:32.000We 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.
02:29:43.000I was like, what do you mean there's a manhole above us?
02:30:24.000At the same time, we had been cracking all of the abandoned tube stations, metro stations in London, right?
02:30:31.000So 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.
02:30:47.000Then 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.
02:30:57.000There's something there that you could find.
02:30:59.000So we started sneaking into the tube to go and find these places.
02:31:03.000We 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.
02:31:11.000And we were finding these stations, one after another.
02:31:14.000Incredible 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.
02:31:57.000And we're all excited about it and like the window is narrowing.
02:32:01.000And 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?
02:32:13.000The British Transport Police and kind of know where we're going to go next because there's only a few stations left.
02:32:21.000And 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.
02:33:05.000And 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.
02:33:17.000And they say, can everyone please sit down again?
02:34:18.000Like, 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?
02:36:23.000But they spent, you know, 300,000 pounds, I don't know, $400,000 of taxpayer money to run this prosecution.
02:36:30.000So they were going to see it to the end.
02:36:32.000And 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.
02:36:45.000So essentially, I just made a deal with them.
02:36:59.000I 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.
02:37:11.000Oh, that was aiding and abetting, because I had opened a window for someone to crawl through.
02:37:15.000I 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.
02:39:00.000So 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.
02:39:11.000And the guy at the embassy swipes it and he says, oh, wow.
02:39:14.000And then he gets out a hole puncher and he goes, thunk, thunk, thunk, right through my passport.
02:40:21.000It 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.
02:40:28.000Tell everybody, again, the names, the books.
02:40:38.000So 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.