Citation Needed - Vivos xPoint and Failed Utopias

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Vivos (also known as The Vivos Group) is a California-based company that built underground shelters designed to withstand future disasters and life-extinction catastrophes.[1] Robert Vicino founded the company. Shelters 10,000-square-foot (0.093 ha) have been completed in Indiana, 575 bunkers each 2,150 square feet across a former military base in[2] South Dakota, and others are in the process of construction.[3] As of September 2022, Vicino stated that the company has approximately 100,000 members, of whom more than 1,000 have bought space in one or more of the Vivos shelters.[4]

Hello and welcome to citation needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Noah and I'm going to be welcome you to our little slice of paradise, but it would hardly be paradise if it was just me. So joining us tonight are two men who promised those palm fronds were to fan you off, Eli and Cecil. Well, excuse me for having a big green, flappy dick. Women are so hard to please. Also, I'm very sick. Yes, we've been saying then. Fan you off sounds like a really expensive Patreon option. Well, yeah.

But it's there. But it's there. But it's there. And also joining us tonight, two men who promised to start feeding you grapes once they're full, Heath and Tom. When we're full, get off me. I'm not full. I'm still not full.

And before we get going, I want to tell you about a real paradise, my fucking job. I get to hang out with my friends and make dick jokes for a living. And the reason I get to do that is because of our patrons who are off. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Heath. What person, place, think concept phenomenon or event will we be talking about today? We're going to be talking about failed utopian communities, especially a recent attempt at a luxury survivalist community in South Dakota. That is going about as well as you'd expect based on that description just now.

Oh, awesome. All right. So let's hear about some failed utopias then. All right. I'll start us off at the beginning. I combed through the history books, and the very first failed utopia was created about 6,000 years ago by a guy named God. It was called the Garden of Eden.

And it was good. Two basic rules held it all together. One, obviously, no women allowed. And two, no eating from the tree of consequences. Really simple. But it all fell apart when some fucking lady got invented and then she got tricked by a snake demon into eating from the embargoed tree of consequences. Sorry, they had three rules.

The last one was, don't get tricked by the snake demon and thereby poison all of humidity with the concept of your lady sins. So, Eden fell apart, and it's been the same pattern ever since with these utopias. Idiots try to create magical utopia. Come up with a theme, and that leads to a set of ridiculous, untenable rules. The community devolves into petty grievances and messy fights, and they fail. Just about every attempted utopia ends in very tragic dystopia. Okay, guys, we need to nip this closer to the source.

So new rule, no ribs, okay? No ribs allow. Except mic ribs, which you will pry from my cold dead hands. Yes, thank you, Tom. If you keep eating all these mic ribs, we will, yeah. Okay, so we've already covered some of the other attempted utopias in history, and the pattern was pretty similar to Eden. A quick little stroll down memory lane with a few highlights.

We talked about automobile magnate and paleo-Nazi, Henry Ford, needing rubber for tires and setting up Fordlandia in the Brazilian jungle. The bigotry that he was all about was mostly cool with everybody, but he banned alcohol and premarital sex, so the whole thing went badly. Also, somebody invented synthetic rubber soon after, and that fucked up his whole business model. But it really helped with the pre-materal sex. Let me tell you.

It did. We also covered the Heaven's Gate compound. They had a cult that was pretty sure they could thumb down a ride on a magical comet if they had good sneakers and some loose change in their pocket and put their dicks off and did a mass suicide. That one ended in a mass suicide. That's still pretty strong hint. You're not in a utopia if you're cutting your. dick off. But if you're a woman and all the men are cutting their dicks off, I don't know.

All right. It's confusing. I could be sold. We also, of course, had the free town project in New Hampshire where they created what they believed to be a libertarian utopia, completely unburdened by taxes and pesky fire departments and authoritarian roads and big government trash pickup. up. And then a bunch of bears showed up to eat the giant piles of trash that were building up. And then a lady added regular donut deliveries to the bears. And then a bunch of people got mauled by bears. I think one of those guys is the head of the EPA now. Or one of the bears. I'm not sure. It could be one of the bears is the head too. And possibly the most successful example that we've talked about was the Oneida community. They thought Jesus Christ,

had actually already returned, and all that Jesus wanted was for everyone to fuck each other. So in 1848, they got a fuck mansion for their pollicule, and it lasted about 30 years. Pretty solid. Eventually, the group started unraveling, though, but I guess they had an MBA on the team, and they made a pivot at that point to Silverware, a company of Silverware, and they became pretty successful. But the utopia thing never really panned out. Maybe the result of happiness is silverware. We certainly wouldn't know, right? They make a good fork. So the running theme of failure, it doesn't bode well for these things,

but I definitely appreciate the visionary pioneers for their spirit. You know, like they have big ideas and they're taking big swings. And when you get a swing and a miss, it's way more fun to watch when it's a big swing in the first place. In a sense, if you think about it, these people, they were doing what they do for us on this podcast, more than anything else. So let's learn about some of the other big swings at Utopia. I'll start with a place called Brook Farm,

created back in 1841 in Massachusetts. It was founded by George and Sophia Ripley, and they wanted a commune that embodied the ideals of transcendentalism. And they invited important figures from that movement, including Ralph Waldo, Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. But pretty much none of the big names wanted to actually move in because fucking suck at this commune. Thoreau actually went out of his way to roast it in his writing. Henry and Ralph went on to start a band shortly after that. It was called Emerson Lake and Ponder.

Oh my God. That's so good. It's so good. The best Transcendentalist band name. Right. Right. So I'm sorry. Let's all take a second to reflect on how shitty your living quarters have to be before Henry David Thoreau.

It's like, no, this does not meet my standards. Guys, this is gauche. Now, here's the thing. Nathaniel Hawthorne was the big exception. He was the only big name Transnitalist who actually moved in. and he showed up all excited and started writing about Brook Farm in his journal using multiple exclamation points for the very first time. For example, I have milked a cow!

Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation. But he quickly hated it there. Most of his day was shoveling manure because George Ripley thought manure was the, quote, gold mine for the commune. before eventually leaving Hawthorne wrote a letter to his fiance that said like don't fucking come here

farming is so goddamn hard it's so hard to farm I thought it'd be easier to farm I'm just shoveling shit and then another letter was asking to be rescued quote before my soul is utterly buried in a dung heap

you know guys I think these early American writers might have had a tendency to romanticize am I writing English managers am I right Romanticide? Come on, this guy.

This guy up here at the front. So it turns out the business model of Brook Farm. The business model had a few holes. Just like being in nature and harvesting manure wasn't quite the gold mine they were hoping for.

So they focused the project on creating a socialist farming commune that could actually sustain itself. But it turns out The transcendentalist philosophy of individualism conflicted a bit with fucking opposite. Nonetheless, they were pot committed, so they built a structure called the phalanstery. That's a portmanteau of phalanx and monastery, and it was meant to combine the best elements of urban and rural living all in one. This is going to be the new key to making socialist philosophy farms at scale, scale.

The scalability, the next big thing, and it burnt down. It burned down right away. Also, they never got insurance, so the whole project disbanded after about six years total. It's a shame, too, because, like, the market for selling huge amounts of bullshit got a lot better over the years, right? If they could have got into the ground floor there. I missed the days when people tried to sell bullshit and got burned, right? So this was the era of peak commune in the United States, and there was another attempt at a transatlantic. Continentalist Farming Utopia in the spring of 1843, also in Massachusetts.

This one was called Fruitlands, and it was founded by Charles Lash and Amos Bronson Alcott. That's actually the father of Louisa May Alcott. And the founders took the untenable philosophy part even further. So they failed even faster, is the result of that. Everyone had to be a strict vegan. they could only drink water and nothing else. They weren't allowed to use any animal labor on their 1843 farm. And they weren't allowed to plant any root vegetables because that would disturb the worms.

And, of course, prevent the worms from, you know, thriving and flourishing in the community. So we can't have that. Well, the worms, they did okay. But the humans were completely out of food by the winter of that same. year 1843 and they give up. Guys, guys, I'm not getting enough calories to pretend I'm a horse. Can we just stop? Those interested in more about Louisa May Alcott may enjoy the breathtaking biography for

all ages, scribbles sorrows and russet leather boots, the life of Louisa May Alcott. Who wrote that? What? It doesn't matter. I don't think why that's important. Is it a Lee Better Hopkins Award? It might be a brilliant, might be a genius, a brilliant person, but it also, just if you care about Louisa Malacott.

To women. If you support women, you should buy that book. Scribble stars and rustle leather boots. Noted. Moving ahead to the 20th century, we started getting new flavors of utopian communities. The early 1900s, the flavor was mostly racism. That includes the whites-only Pelican home colony founded by the author Upton Sinclair in Englewood, New Jersey. a very specific

to the state, not the ideas. Okay, but that's still offensive, though. Yes. So, yeah, a lot of racism ones, and before that and after it, but a lot in that era for sure. Then in the 60s, we started getting hippie communes.

That was a popular theme. And that started evolving into libertarian-themed communities that kind of dropped the free love and drugs of the hippie ethos and focused more on guns, tax evasion and not being detained, you know, that flavor of libertarianism. One of the earliest libertarian projects got started in 1971 and was called the Republic

of Minerva founded by a millionaire real estate developer named Michael Oliver. He wanted a micronation with no taxes, no welfare, and no regulation. So he raised about $100 million and he found a reef off the coast of, Tonga, it was about three feet above sea level at low tide. It was about four feet underwater at high tide. I guess he eventually realized how tide works. So he hired a dredging boat to dump a pile of sand on top to make it a little taller. And then he put a flag in the pile of sand, claimed a designation. So of course, Mr. Oliver needed his very important country to get some international support to really make it work, and he wrote letters to about a hundred

existing nations asking for official diplomatic recognition. Only one head of state responded, though. It was the sultan of Okusi Ambaino. Oliver was, of course, very excited to begin the diplomatic talks with that sultan, but it turned out the sultanate was just completely made up by some guy in New Zealand as a prank. I should have when I found him

in the yellow pages for world leaders. And here's the thing, even if you get recognition from an actual sultan in an actual place that exists, you can't just

call dibs on stuff when it's owned by Tonga or really any real country. Oliver had the flag and he did mint some currency for his micrination but nobody could go there because, again, just a pile of sand.

And the king of Tonga didn't exactly share the libertarian values. So the king showed up on his royal boat when he heard about this with a five-man navy, which was made of convicts from a prison,

and also on the boat, a four-piece brass band playing the national anthem of Tonga. He did this all to confront the nobody who was there. So with nobody to fight, the king just waded over to the stupid sandpile and read a proclamation he wrote to the nobody and he took down the flag and that was the end

of the Republic of Minerva. The king's just shamefacedly admitting he expected the dude to be sitting there under a tree like the marooned guy in the far side comics or something. Yeah, if he had, my dad would clip the news coverage out of pure habit alone and send those to me. And also worth noting the most recent attempts

at Libertarian Utopia, they've been more conceptual kind of things, like Twitter and Rumble, that kind of thing. We've also seen Peter Thiel working on a few ideas, but they haven't quite materialized.

He backed a libertarian startup city in Honduras called Prospera, but it's currently stalled while Honduras tells him to go fuck himself in court filings because he's the worst.

He also backed a project called the Seesteading Institute. I know the guy who started that. I do. I know him. Amazing. You don't know Peter Thiel. You're talking about a different guy. No, no, no, no.

The idiot he got to start it. Okay. Yeah, he got some idiot to start. He invested in it. The idea was to build. grandson of Milton Friedman. This dude gets better. This dude gets better by the second.

Hey, Cisle. He's fulfilling the prophecy. I mean, come up. Can I take the safest guess I've ever fucking taken. Sword guy? Yeah. Yeah. See it? He's a sore guy. He's doing a Cata right now with James Lindsay. His dad's a bigger sword guy than he is,

but yeah. Okay. So yeah. The Seasteading Institute, Cecil's a close friend of this place. I said I know him. I didn't fucking big supporter. Big supporter. The idea of this project was to build sovereign floating ocean barges.

They were barges. It was barges, yes, that's correct. And the idea is like, well, we got nothing but the law of the open seas once we create him. Because, you know, no laws. Maritime law. Free time. International water, yeah, exactly. Teal invested millions in this, but he eventually stepped away because this is fucking stupid.

It's not real. All right. Well, I'm starting to think that we could talk Peter Thiel into investing in a, there's no laws in the parts of the man. where they draw the lines real estate scam and apparently Cecil's got an end. So we're going to get that a quick try while you listen to a bit of apropos of nothing. All right, everyone. Welcome to the How Idiots Think International Waters Work meeting.

I am Grand Admiral Marshall of the People's Independent Navy. And for our first order, go quick. Yeah. Yes. I'm Grand Admiral Marshall now. What? No, you're not. Yep, yep, uh, sure am. There, there's no laws out here, so I just do.

I, okay, fine, I take it back. Uh, okay, uh, I take it back again. It's me. Stop, stop. Stop. You stop. Guys, guys, can we do a meeting? Okay, as I was saying, because I'm the head of the Navy, no Baxies. Is Baxie's a law? No, no, it's not. Anyway, out here on the open sea, sounds like, we're, we're going to do things different. Please don't interrupt. Under the thumb of civilization, it's different. going to do things totally different than that. That's totally what I was going to say, except for I wasn't going to mess up so. So, so, there will be

no taxes. Instead, we're using basic economic principles to meet our needs. For example, who would like to shovel all the shit? No, no. No, someone else. Did one of you? No. My fingers on my nose.

I don't know it. Not doing it. Nope. Can't make me. Okay. Well, guys, someone has to shovel all the shit. I want to start an internet cafe. I was really hoping to get my band off the ground. Okay, fine, fine. I will shovel the shit. But if you want your shit shoveled,

you're going to pay me. Okay, how much? I don't know. Let's say five bucks a person. I refuse to pay. I'm just going to fill my room with shit. Okay. Everyone give two bucks.

Like, we'll call it once a week, and then I'll do every, everyone's room. But he's not going to let you. He has to let me. It's the... Fuck. All right.

I'm going to think on this and come back to you. Guys, this is just about child porn for everyone else, right? Yeah. Finally someone said it. Yeah. That's what my band's songs

are all about. And we're back to officially disavow the end of that sketch. And with that disavowed, tell us, Heath, has anybody cracked the Utopia Code yet? They have... They have...

Maybe. I'm not going to say yet. You tell me. That brings us to the luxury survivalist Preperts, as I mentioned in the media. And their idea of utopia, it's a bit different. They're pretty sure we're going to have a terrifying event that destroys most of the human race.

But they're going to live on and they want to create a utopian version of that like within the dystopia of probably nuclear Armageddon. I learned about their project from an article by Joe Barry it entitled A Luxury Survivalist Community is tearing itself apart. Subtitle, they went to South Dakota to ride out the apocalypse at a five-star bunker compound. They're already at each other's throats with HOA style of grievances. Fucking hell.

So just from that, I was picturing a very delightful idiot fight, and I was absolutely correct. any state that has a star rating for bunkers isn't a place you visit outside of the apocalypse. I'm sorry. Look, you can have utopia or you can have South Dakota. And some guy builds a spite bunker to eclipse the other bunkers view of the glowing wasteland. Yeah. And here's the rest of the intro, just to set the scene. Quote, Igloo, South Dakota, row upon row of concrete bunkers with

steel blast doors peek up from the rolling grasslands like hobbit holes for the apocalypse. There are 575 of them, clustered on a former munitions depot near South Dakota's Black Hills and billed as the largest survival community on Earth. The pitch, ride out nuclear war, the next pandemic, or societal collapse in relative comfort. Yet for many residents, dream has soured. The threat hasn't come from Armageddon, but from friction that resembles a suburban

HOA battle. Who knew that the paranoid and delusional would make bad neighbors? That's crazy. I feel like the idea of relative comfort does a lot of work in South Dakota even before the bombs start falling. It does. Relatives

doing a lot of lifting there. So here's the origin story of this community. It's called Vivos X-Point, the X's lowercase, just so everybody knows, and it was founded by a proper-themed entrepreneur from Los Angeles named Robert Vichino, who had a vision in 1980. That vision included a life extinction event that was looming, and he needed to build a giant underground compound that could hold over a thousand people and keep them alive through the apocalypse.

And since then, he's put together a network of doomsday prepper compounds across the globe. That's his job. Okay. So it's 46 years of looming and counting, Bobby. I hope you started young, man. So, Vicino's Preper Development Company, it's called Vivo's Global Shelter Network. And their website is a very special place. Just a few highlights.

There's a video montage. of dudes in wrap-around sunglasses pretending to inspect the structural integrity of a concrete bunker with their hands. They're just like slapping stuff pretending they know what just happened. Yeah, they're literally literally doing that'll hold. They don't make them like this anymore. There's also an AI-generated aerial drone battle video. This baby can fit so many crazy people. There's a video of a guy getting hit by a giant title.

What? Just one guy? Just one guy. And he's just like, You're going to hold back the ocean. You know what? Daniel son, you ain't. I'm going to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Cool with it. Yeah. And there's a list on this website of all the stuff that Vivo's bunkers can save you from. That includes nuclear war. No, I can't bioterrorism Also regular terrorism

Not without bio stuff Anarchy Just conceptually Electo magnetic pulse Sick Electo Amazing Solar flare

Just the one I guess A planetary pole shift Oh that's tricky Yeah You need a bunker for those A killer Comet slash asteroid

sick a global tsunami oh no yeah the global ones are the worst ones those are the worst ones that's a concrete's underwater but we're still cool right

that's cool yeah that guy stopped the wave up stops so we're good yeah that's why we put him up there Frank that's why he's up there Jesus you have a shop back but the list is not finished.

I got a battery backup on my sub pump. We should be okay in here. My Silverado's got V to H technology. I can't. I can't. I didn't get it hooked up. We're all dying. We're all underwater.

Carbon monoxide poisoning and drowning. But the list is not finished. You can also be protected from a super. a volcano. Hey, our bunker's under a lava. Is that okay? We put that guy up top to stop to do you have a shop back for magma, lava, whatever? Also, protects you from global economic collapse. Really? I don't know how it would do that. And I put all my stocks and bonds inside the concrete bunker. They're fine. Keeping my NFTs down here in cold storage on a thumb drive. Nobody gets them. Cool man.

I have an aura frame. It's my NITES. Wait, it's coming back around. It seems to be. It's just teetering. It's just teetering. It might not be a full collapse. Outstanding.

Okay. And last but not least, it will protect you from Nibiru. Oh, you're fucking kidding. Okay, apparently no one knows what this is. That is Planet X. That's the other name. I thought it was a kaiju. I'm sorry.

I'd never heard about that, but they explain. That was a sex thing. Don't worry, they explain. It says on the website, Planet X or Nibiru is believed by some to cause catastrophic gravitational disruptions. Vivo's shelters are built withstand extreme global disasters. There you have it. AI drone battles feels like the closest one on the timeline.

I feel like that's the one. Do we know if Planet X is accepting submissions? This one has a field full of bunker idiots who think they can survive a global tsunami and I'd like to switch. And water reached South Dakota, but we're probably all right. It's going to fill up the low part of the badlands first. We're good. We got waterfront property now. And lava front.

That's good. Nice. Okay. So, Vichino started working on Vivo's Expoint of South Dakota in 2016. He wanted a location that's, quote, far from known nuclear targets and far from high-crime anarchy zones. I mean, you just say black people, man. They aren't really much.

That is accurate. So he landed on Igloo, South Dakota, hoping to attract like-minded survivalists. He bought a piece of land that contains a bunch of igloo-shaped bunkers. They were used for storage by the U.S. Army during World War II. These are the housing units at Vivas X-Point. They're about 2,200 square feet, and Bobby Vee offers 99-year leases for each unit. You pay $55,000 as the initial buy-in, plus you agree to pay monthly rent and monthly service fees for the communal compound stuff.

The fucking concrete bunker has a condo fee? It sure does. This is the worst timeshare pitch since any timeshare pitch in Florida. And to be clear,

this is much better than Florida. Sure. Yeah. You'll die way after the Florida people when there's that global tidal tsunami. Yeah.

So once you buy in at this place, you can decorate your fucking cave, however you want. You can build it out yourself. Or,

you can hire Bobby's contractors. They offer five-star survival, luxury, and comfort. Exact words from their site. And just to give you an idea, here's a before and after. I'm going to paste it into the notes for you of a basic bunker with no decoration. And then the after, a VVos X-Point showroom bunker with all the fixings. This looks like when the mouse from an American tale upgraded to the top half of the barrel he was living in.

Yeah, podcast was there. He just put photos of this makeover in our notes. And if you wanted to survive the apocalypse in the style of a guy who's getting through his divorce by redecorating, you are going to love it here. Let me tell you. Yeah, that's got to be like 95% of this community. So let's meet one of the happy preppers.

Philippe Briggs is a retired police officer and he actually got a sweet deal by getting in on the underground floor at this place. He bought in about seven years ago for only $25,000 and he's sitting pretty with 92 years remaining on the lease. He lives in Vegas but his bunker acts as a sweet vacation spot and of course it's going to be great for the end times, which as we all know are nigh.

According to Briggs, quote, you can do fishing over there, you can do hunting, you can do hiking, and if you need to, yeah, I could use it as a bug out if I can get there. Jesus Christ, man. The level of honesty that he doesn't hear, it's the best. And he's got a full year of food in his bunker.

It's mostly rice, so that's going to be perfect for the nuclear Armageddon if he can get there. from Vegas I have planned a treacherous journey across the wasteland to the last place a man like me can survive

if I-15 remains open Yeah Fuck it man Three days of eating only rice I'm opening the blast doors anyway Right 100% Take me now

All right That brings us to the unhappy Preppers and their HOA style grievances Lots of the grievances are about several amenities that were promised by the developers. For example, they promised a restaurant and a pool and a big stable for horses. But in bunker form, of course, everything's a bunker. So that's a restaurant bunker, a pool bunker, and a horse bunker.

Those things have not been built at all. Also, the septic doesn't really work very well. also the horse has to stand directly in the center of the bunker or he bumps his head. Gotta have a lot of room to wander there at all. Some of the other grievances are centered around the official rules for dealing with grievances. They got meta grievances. This is a big problem too. The VVos X-Point company has a big list of requirements that apply to every lease,

including the first rule of fight club and VVos X-Point. There's a full ban on talking to the media about VVos X-Point or about its ownership. What? And the penalty for violating that gag rule is eviction and losing, well, your amazing investment that you've already made. Feels kind of like a red flag, if that's a rule, but they have leased hundreds of the bunkers somehow. Yeah, okay, so when the first clause in the lease is, okay, first promise not to get mad, you got to look elsewhere. You got to give up right now. Another interesting rule is that Vivo's X-Point can change the rules whenever they want, even mid-lease. And that led to a lawsuit with a now discontal prepper named Daniel Sindorf. He's been a Vivo Bunkerman since 2020. when he bought in for $35,000

and then spent about $100,000 more doing improvements. Then the company told him they were raising the monthly fees to cover property taxes. I can't imagine South Dakota is charging like a really big millage on igloo bunkers,

but that was the claim by Vivo's X-Point. But more importantly, you didn't let Daniel finish. Daniel is mad about that damn dog that keeps running loose. One of the contractors one of the contractors at Vos X-Point has a dog. And Daniel says the dog charged at his wife.

So naturally, Daniel pulled out his gun for protection. Does the dog no guns? Sorry? Let me finish. While riding on his motorcycle, he pulled out his gun for protection. He was riding his motorcycle. He saw a dog, allegedly, according to him, charge his wife. but he saw a dog.

He's riding his motorcycle. He saw a dog. His wife was also in his field of vision. And he pulled his gun, presumably with plans to, like, pull off an action hero biker thingy with like a big slide. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. But then the dog jumped off his motorcycle with two guns sideways.

Okay, to be very fair, this is just a standard South Dakota arbitration meeting. Heath, there's really nothing to see. Okay. that like if you told me that was like officially true in the law of South Dakota, I'd be like, yeah, that sounds right. It's not not true. But here's the other side of the story, very importantly. According to that contractor's girlfriend who witnessed this confrontation, Daniel Sindorf pulled a gun while riding a motorcycle, yes, and he pointed the gun at her. And that is actually a violation of the terms of his lease at Vivo's X-Point.

you're not allowed to brandish a firearm at somebody else. But that wasn't the rule from the original lease. The company added that rule after the lease was already signed. I feel like Daniel was the reason for that rule, right? It doesn't strike me as a one strike in your out situation. Either that or a bait and switch. Like anybody who might buy one of these bunkers would never accept no brandishing firearms originally. And then they were like, ah, we should probably not allow.

guns because it's been going badly. Well, regardless of the details of the motorcycle gun standoff with a dog, a contractor, and a girlfriend, Vivo's X-Point told Mr. Sindorf that he's being evicted. All of your basement belonged to us. Yeah, so that happened. He refused to leave, and they filed a lawsuit against him. He responded, of course, with a countersuit. And the counter suit actually worked when the court said something.

along the lines of, yeah, this guy, Mr. Sindorff fucking sucks, but you can't just change the lease after the fact. That's not how contracts work. But that got appealed, and the South Dakota Supreme Court reversed the ruling and sent the case back down for another review. In the meantime, while that's pending, Sindorf finally did decide to leave the compound, but he strung up a bunch of chains and padlocks on his unit.

So the Vivo's company can't, you know, physically take back their cave bunker. We'll see if that works out. Okay, now I'm actively hoping for an apocalypse just so that these assholes have to try to rebuild society with a big line of tape down the center of the continent. Like, I want to see. What does that movie?

All right, that brings us to another unhappy prepper named David Streeter. He bought a unit in 2023 and moved in full time with his wife, his daughter, and his four grandkids. And at some point after all that moving, he realized the septic doesn't work. So he tried to file a complaint with the company, but that was met with some threats rather than repairs. The company told him they don't take kindly to complaints and agitators get evicted. And of course, he'd lose the buy-in money and the value of any renovations he made.

So Mr. Streeter filed a lawsuit, and he claimed in court that he's been the victim of harassment and intimidation ever since. That includes an incident that ended in, you guessed it, gunfire. Yeah, I feel like most of the incidents in that area end in gunfire, right? Often they start and end in gunfire. So here's the exchange that happened from this article I read between Mr. Streeter and a Vivo's ex-point contractor. One of the contractors drove a front-end loader up to Streeter's bunker and challenged him to a fistfight.

Streeter? Streeter drew his gun and told the man to leave. You ain't never killed nobody, have you? The contractor said, according to a video, shot by Streeter's daughter and entered into the court record. Oh, yeah? replied Streeter. a former prison guard, EMT, and army veteran who served in Bosnia. I have with these hands, the contractor said.

A few moments later, the camera goes out of frame. A shot can be heard. Streeter testified that the man charged him and he fired once striking the man. Streeter rendered aid afterward and, with a friend, drove the man to meet an ambulance. The man survived. A grand jury declined to indict Streeter, and a judge later granted him immunity under South Dakota's Stand Your Ground Law. The state Supreme Court later affirmed the decision. Vivas moved to evict Streeter for the shooting, and for an incident earlier in the day in which he shoved another contractor.

Streeter is fighting the proceeding in court. What I like about these stories is that every bad thing that happens is, is demonstrably great. Like, I want a two wrecks to get you right. It's great. Yeah, this is like if your shitty ex gets in a car crash with your wife's shitty ex and like,

it doesn't really matter what happens next. You know, it's going to be great. Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes for Mr. Streeter. I'm sure the legal system of South Dakota knows what the fuck they're doing. It's going to be fine. In the meantime, preppers are going to keep prepping

and everyone else, we're going to be rolling the dice above ground and trying to prevent nuclear war and warding off magnet-based attacks from Nibiru, Planet X, and sustaining the societal infrastructure that makes it even possible to build prepper compounds in the fucking first place. Right. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Okay, if a dog doesn't like you, you deserve to get mauled.

I hope you get mauled. Pretty much. That's fair. Sometimes people think I'm being sarcastic, but like, I hope you get killed by a dog if a dog doesn't like you. You're always wearing it on that t-shirt. Each person, they die from a dog. He has this as a bumper sticker. It's a wrap for the car, essentially.

And are you ready for the quiz? Ready. All right, Heath, when the apocalypse comes, what has this cast stowed away for the end times? A. An undisclosed location full of later cheese. B. All the bad luck of future. civilization could ever need.

C, a bloodstream that definitely counts as a class A narcotic at this point. D, a bunch of swords that I think still work after an EMP. And E, a deep commitment and plenty of thought practice if suicide becomes a necessity.

Jesus Christ. What is happening? Okay. I don't know, you said later cheese. I'm going A. Later cheese? That's the one. Yeah. All right, Heath. we heard about some terrible neighbors in your prepper commune but what's the best neighbor to have a archie bunker b b oh my god michael j foxhole c peter sellers or d transcendental throwback vault whitman

It's so good. There's no atheist sin of Michael J. Foxhole. I'm going to do. It's so good. Absolutely correct. All right. I've got one for you here, Heath. How is living at this place worse than just dying in the apocalypse?

A, mine isn't a multiple choice. This is just an open-ended question. Nice. A. Nailed it. Heath, the end is indeed nigh. A. Cool. B. Not nearly nigh enough, though. We'll see.

Way more nigh. TikTok. C. All the above. Yes. With Tom's luck, he would survive the apocalypse. God damn, and I fucking would. And then break his glasses.

All right. Well, it looks like Tom is this week's Victor somehow. So Tom, you get to pick next week's essayist. All right. Sounds like it's going to be Cecil. All right. Well, for Tom, Cecil, Eli, and Heath. I'm Noah.

Thank you for hanging out with this today. We're going to be back next week. By then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, be sure to check out Tom on dear old dads. More of Cecil on No, the No Rogan Experience, more Heath on the skeptocrat, more, Eli on God Off of Movies and More of Me on The Scathing Atheist. Also, more of others of us on those shows and cognitive dissonance and D&D minus. If one more of us starts another fucking podcast, they swear.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation of Patreon.com slash citation pod or leave a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you want to get in touch with us, check out past episodes. Connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.

Dot. Dude, this is serious. Come on. If you want the cootie shot, I'm Lord Admiral again. Fine, fine. There. Few.

Okay. That's what I thought.