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

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Dr. Bradley Garrett is an American social and cultural geographer at University College Dublin in Ireland and a writer for The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. His new book "Bunker: Building for the End Times" is now available.

And... Boom. And we're live. What's up man? How are you? Cheers. Salud. Hey, cheers brother. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you too. By the way, congrats on the mustache.

The mustache, lower piece combo. That's the anarchist guy with that guy that... Who's the mask? Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Perfect, right? Yeah, I was going more for a kind of Doc Holliday.

Val Kilmer is Doc Holliday. Dude, how good was he in that role? I'm your huckleberry. How good was he in that role? He was fantastic. Many people have played Doc Holloway, but he's the best. Are you a prepper yourself?

Because you do have one of them GPS watches on. So either you're a hardcore hiker, or you just don't want to get lost. You were waiting to see the paracord bracelet. They always have that, right? Does that ever come up? When do you ever unravel that thing? Yeah, that always seems to me like someone who

preps, you know, you just try a little too hard if you get the paracord bracelet. No, it's a kind of virtue signaling. You never know though. I guess it's better to have it and not to need it, right? Than need it and not to have it. I mean, it's kind of funny when I I've been hanging out with preppers for about three years now. And inevitably, you start drifting towards the culture, right, as you're talking to people.

But every once in a while, I'll see someone in a grocery store or whatever, and I'm like, okay. They got the Bowie knife. They got the walkie-talkie straps. I'm like, wow, you are really paranoid. Really? Yeah, I know people walk around with their radios on. Because they want to be ready for action at any moment. You live in the mountains, wilderness type area. I live in Big Bear.

Did you live there before you got obsessed with prepping? No. So did you move there to accustom yourself or to acclimate yourself to the culture? So here's the deal. One of the communities that I worked with while I was writing this book, Bunker, was a community in South Dakota where there's 575 sort of semi-subterranean concrete bunkers that were built during World War II, and they used to store weapons in there. So these are bunkers to protect ordnance.

Jamie's going to turn this towards you there. Okay, cool. Thanks. I think I've seen this before. Now they drive like RVs in there and stuff. Is that the same? Yeah, exactly. So now you've got like 30 or 40 families that are moving into those bunkers and those families, super cool people, very generous, very kind.

I spent a lot of time with them. And, you know, they told me if, you know, if it ever hits the fan, come visit us. Well, you know, we've got space for you. You're going to be safe. They're going to eat you. Yeah, maybe. But so when the pandemic hit, you know, of course, I thought, well, is this it? Is this the moment we've been waiting for?

So I send everyone messages. And sure enough, they're packing up and they're going to the bunker field. And then I thought, you know, the obvious thing. Well, you know, what about my family? What about my elderly parents? What about who else? You know what I mean? The list starts growing of people that you have to abandon to save yourself, right?

And so I didn't go, obviously. Good for you. But all my family lives in Southern California, my immediate family. And I started thinking about, like, what is the appropriate bug out plan? And I think this is a good one. So basically, Big Bear is within an hour and a half of all my family members. And I bought a cabin out there. It's got a quarter acre. It's relatively remote. I can store some supplies. We can also use that as a family vacation home, right? So in the meantime,

we can just enjoy it. But if we ever needed to all sort of leave together at the same time, we could go to the cabin. It's kind of crazy that you could be at the beach and you could drive two hours and you're in the snow. That's one of the weirdest things about California. I mean we have some really interesting terrain. Yeah. Well, growing up here, I never – I took it for granted, right? Yeah. And now I've lived in four countries and visited maybe 40.

And every time I come back to California, I think, damn, this place is unique. How long did it take you to get to the valley? To get to the – Right here? Oh, to here? Two hours? That's nothing. Yeah.

That's not bad at all. But check this out. The really cool thing is that if you go off the backside of Big Bear Mountain, you can just drop down into the Mojave Desert. So you can go from Big Bear to Joshua Tree in like 30 minutes. Really? If you can take dirt roads in a 4x4, you can just drop down into the Mojave Desert. So you can go from Big Bear to Joshua Tree in like 30 minutes. Really? If you can take dirt roads in a 4x4, you can get there in 20. Wow. Yeah.

So if you want to do mushrooms, it's a good spot to live. It's a very good spot to live. Now, you decided to write this book and then you moved there? Was that the idea or did you – had you been thinking about living in a place like that first or – No, I never really thought about a plan. To be honest with you, I've been living in cities for 15 years now. I lived in London and then in Sydney. So I've been in Sydney for the past three years.

And cities just suck the money out of you. So I never had any money. I never had any way to think about it. And I know the pandemic has been, you know, tragic, unfortunate, terrible for a lot of people. But for me, it was like one of the best things that ever happened to me. I came back to California, check this out. I came back to California to take care of my mom because she was having spinal surgery. California to take care of my mom because she was having spinal surgery. I had just finished my three-year research fellowship at the University of Sydney that enabled me to write this book with the Doomsday Preppers. And I was going to a new job at University College Dublin in Ireland. And so I land in LA to take care of my mom for six weeks while she gets her spinal surgery.

Bang. I'm wheeling her out of the hospital and they're putting in the tents in the parking garage at Torrance Memorial Hospital for the overflow of COVID patients. Oh, Jesus. So what time, when was this? I guess this was February, early February. So it was just when it was starting to pick up.

Yeah. And so I'm with my partner, Amanda. We just moved from Sydney Just when it was starting to pick up. Yeah. And so I'm with my partner, Amanda. We just moved from Sydney. And we take my mom home and we just lock ourselves inside for a couple of months and kind of wait for this all to unfold. So I actually finished this book, like the final proofs of this book I finished in lockdown in the early days of the pandemic. You feel relatively safe when you're in a place like Big Bear because it's woods and, you know, just like by the time the virus gets up here and how's it going to get to you?

You know what I mean? It's not like you're in these crowded areas. It's pretty remote. The virus doesn't give a shit. It moves wherever it wants to. That's true. You know, you have all these people driving from LA up there for the weekend and, you know.

That's true. You were also saying that people are pretty cavalier up there, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they certainly are you does it feel good to be tested you you were tested today do you feel good i feel like a weight lifted off of you it actually yeah yeah right yeah it's nice great because i was thinking i was actually kind of disappointed to see i didn't have the antibodies everybody thinks they have them everybody does everybody in here is like i think in January, I think back in January I had this cough. I'm pretty sure I had it.

But I have to say, I guess my anxiety about coming here was kind of ramped up by the possibility that they were going to say, you've tested positive. You're like, drag me out by my hair. We wouldn't do that. If you were positive, I would just back up a little and put a mask on, I guess.

What would we do? Would you feel comfortable doing a podcast with someone who's in the room who's positive? I think it's a bad move. We probably would do it in the parking lot. We could do that. We would figure it out. If you were positive, we'd figure it out. We'd do it in the parking lot with masks on or something.

But the thing about Big Bear, right, is that when we were in lockdown in L.A., in the early days of it, like, again, I'm speaking from a space of privilege here, you know, because my paychecks were still coming in and whatever. But, like, I almost experienced a sense of euphoria. Like, all my talks were canceled, my plane tickets. I canceled, like, four plane tickets. So the pressure's relieved? Oh yeah. And I was just like, I can just hang out with my mom. This is great. You know, but you get, you know, you get through that initial phase and then you get into the stamina phase. Right. And like, that's something we should really talk about because when, if you're, if you're thinking about locking yourself in a bunker, um, uh, you know, stamina is going to be really important.

And when they shut down the beaches and the trails in Los Angeles and I couldn't get outside anymore, I mean, that had a devastating mental effect on me. Did they do that in Big Bear as well? They shut down the trails up there? No. So when we moved up to Big Bear, immediately we could go trail running again. We could be outside and, you know. Is it San Bernardino County? Yeah. So they're allowed. We could be outside. Is it San Bernardino County?

Yeah. So they're allowed – they have different rules, lower population, all that jazz. Yeah, a lot more space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the trail thing was a real bummer. The locking off the beaches too. It's like there was – in the beginning, there was so much scrambling because they weren't really sure how it was transmitted or when it was dangerous when it wasn't dangerous now they're pretty sure um there was a study done

that shows that it dies almost instantly it's in sunlight so when you're outside at the beach there's probably very little chance of of spreading so a lot of people took this that when the protests were happening it's very little chance that it's going to spread during the protests, which is probably true during the day. But the thing is the protests don't end during the day. People were jammed on top of each other all throughout the night, and it easily could have gotten you then. They're showing that also even simulated UV light. There was a study done that showed that artificial sunlight, simulated sunlight, also kills it.

I was out in Joshua Tree yesterday, and I went for a seven-mile trail run. Damn, dude, did you bring some water? How hot is it out there right now? I went through four bottles of water. God, that's scary. I usually have my camelback that I run with, and I forgot it, so I stocked up on water. Anyway, I was slamming water.

But I was on the trail way out in the middle of the national park, right? It's a totally open space. And I run up on this hiker and she like puts her backpack on the ground and she pulls the mask out and puts the mask on or whatever. And I'm like the trail is pretty wide. I didn't say anything but it's kind of like – People are scared, man. I know. People are scared. If you want to really be scared, I'm in the middle of a book right now.

My buddy Matt Staggs recommended this. I want to tell people about this because this is fucking excellent. Now, I want to say before I say this, do not get this book if you have anxiety. Just don't. It's called Survivor Song. It's a novel by Paul Tremblay.

I guess that's how you say his name. Paul Tremblay. It's fucking excellent. But it is terrifying. And it is about a pandemic. It's about a pandemic that hits the East Coast. It's a fake pandemic, like a type of rabies that has easily spread to people. There's got to be loads of people writing books about pandemics.

Well, this obviously was written a long time ago. For sure. I think I don't know what year it came out. I don't know what it says here. I got the audio book. But I just wonder if we're going to reach a saturation point on the topic where people are like, I'm not touching a book that has anything to do with the pandemic. You know, after thinking after thinking about it for years. Some people.

Yeah, but that's just some people are just they they're angry you know like i had a friend who was across my friend bridget feticide she was across the street from someone without a mask no one around her someone on the other side of the street starts screaming at her put on your fucking mask put your fucking mask on no one anywhere near them across the street. Yeah. People are losing their marbles. I know. Well, it's a classic Foucault, right? We all start policing each other.

Yeah. Well, it's also people's anxiety and insecurity and people that are emotionally and mentally unstable. Now is their time to shine because this is like what they've been – what people – like preppers, I would imagine. What preppers – I'm not saying all preppers are emotionally unstable. But what preppers have been looking for is this moment where all of their anxiety and all of this paranoia actually comes to fruition. Like, see, I told you so. Yeah, right. No, the justification for the prepping.

But I think a lot of that comes from feeling belittled, right. Like they've been mocked. They've been made fun of. Sure. And, you know, people are people were prior to the pandemic embarrassed to admit that they were prepping, you know. Yeah. I mean, which is odd. Yeah. In fact, I've been working on this book for three years. And about a month into the pandemic, I get this email from my brother who's here with me right now. And he's like, oh, yeah, just so you know, I've got a storage unit with some masks and some food. And I'm like, what? You didn't think you might mention that to me? But I mean, it's almost deemed pathological, right? Like people equate prepping to hoarding. It's like, well, why do you need all that stuff? But the thing is,

in order to not stockpile in that way, you have to have so much faith in capitalism. You have to have so much faith in our social systems. You have to have faith that everything is going to hold together roughly in the way that it is right now. And of course, the world that we built, the society that we built is incredibly new, right? You only have to go back a few hundred years.

And it's like, if you weren't stockpiling, you were effectively committing suicide. You couldn't make it through winter, right? Because people are growing their own food, raising their own animals. Now it's like we have this expectation that you're going to be able to, you know, order your takeout or, you know, go to the grocery store and stock up, you know, think about this. Imagine this scenario. Imagine that the lethality rate on this virus was like 10%. Right. Like, what do you have to do to convince those grocery store workers to come to work at that point? No one's coming to work. No one's

driving the trucks. No one's going to deliver anything. And then what preppers would say is we're 72 hours to anarchy or 72 hours to animal, right? It's like once you shut down those kind of supply lines, right? Our entire mentality starts to shift into a different mode. And it doesn't take long before you think I'm going to take something from my neighbor at this point. I'm hungry. My family's hungry. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it gets real scary or cooperate with your neighbor, hopefully. Yeah. You know, um, I, uh, I hunt, so I have a lot of meat. And so, um, 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, uh, three commercial freezers here at the studio. I like, an elk, an elk's 400 pounds of meat.

That's a lot of meat, yeah. The great thing is as long as the power stays on and I have electricity, I have frozen meat, so I can give a lot of it out. So you've got a backup generator? Yeah, I do. I'm not a prepper, but I'm prepared in some ways, and then when all this came down, basically all I did is I stockpiled on a lot of dried stuff like rice,

pasta, things that, you know, you can cook easily. That's the thing is people get fixated on prepping as this kind of, you know, I built a multimillion dollar bunker or whatever, whatever spectacular stories that people hear,

which, you know, I'm happy to, happy to verify if you want to get into those. But, you know, like prepping on a, on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just, it's just common sense. You know, just having, you know, having enough food to last a few days. Yeah.

And thinking through, you know, what, what might happen, you know, in a blackout or the, you know, the taps not working or whatever. These things do happen. Yeah, they do happen. And, but I wanted to get into the psychology of prepping prepping because it seems to be conflated with uh conspiracy theorists in some way like uh preppers or it's the tinfoil hat brigade it's like those those type of folks folks who think 5g is causing covid you know know what I mean? Like there's, for whatever reason, prepping, which should be just prudence, you know, common sense,

preparing, you know, having something that can purify your water if everything goes weird. Yeah. Going camping every once in a while just to get a sense of what it's like to be outdoors, you know, and pop your tent and pull your water out of a river. And, you know, it's great to have those practical skills. Yeah. Camping is fun as long as you And it's great to have those practical skills. Yeah. Camping is fun as long as you know it's not permanent. Isn't that weird?

Well, so I mean – and this is the thing about disaster, right? Is that if it has an endpoint, it's something that we can cope with, right? So take nuclear war for example, right? Like let's say we get a text message on our phone. Remember in Hawaii in 2018, everyone got that message that the ballistic missile was incoming, right? So imagine we get that message right now. And you're like, well, Brad, we actually have a bunker underneath this studio, right? So you go into the bunker, but we know after LA's nuked, right, and it's gone, But we know after L.A.'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?

So you have an endpoint there. We have to make it to day 14. And that's why people are able to psychologically cope with it. Whereas the situation we're in right now, like when is the endpoint? Like that's why people are cracking because they can't see the end of it right well they're cracking for a bunch of reasons yeah first of all they're cracking because the economic stability is non-existent it's gone 50% of all restaurants are dead you know I mean how many retail shops are dead it's it's terrible rap Yelp had some statistic the other day that I was reading online

about all the different businesses that have been impacted. We don't even know what's happening with comedy clubs. It's just guesswork right now. But I think in Los Angeles, a lot of them are probably going to wind up going under. Across the country, a lot of them are going to wind up going under. Restaurants, I had the owners of Felix and the head chef, Evan, and the owner, Janet, on the podcast recently. And they were explaining how Felix is a really great restaurant in Venice, that almost every restaurant operates with a very small amount of profit, their profit margin.

What did she say, like 15%, 14%, something like that? Yeah, that sounds right. I think something like that. So imagine all of a sudden that's cut to zero for several months and then you're asked to occupy 50 of your restaurant which is obviously going to diminish your profits radically as well it's like it's like just a survival game and there's no end in sight right so here we are in july no one anticipated this in march we thought you know by the time june rolls around everything's going to be up and running. No.

Here we are, July. Everything's locked down again. And there's even talk of another stay-at-home order in Los Angeles, which is even scarier. So let's get back to your conspiracy theories. Okay. If someone told you that we would be in this situation a year ago, would you have believed them? Sure. You would have?

I would have, yeah. Because the pandemic seemed like a realistic scenario. Well, because I've been in the Center for Disease Control. Right. I went to Galveston, Texas for the Center of Disease Control for a show that I did with my friend Duncan. And Duncan Trussell and I went down there, and we talked to these doctors that work with these viruses,

and they scared the shit out of us. We went down there for a television show that we were doing for SyFy, and it was basically on the idea of weaponized viruses. The basic premise of the show was, what if someone engineered a virus and released it on the country, like a weaponized virus? And they said, that's not what we have to worry about. What we have to worry about is nature.

That's what we have to worry about. Turns out, both, because this virus most likely had been leaked from a lab. What we're dealing with with COVID-19, according to my friend Brett Weinstein, who is a biologist, and he detailed on a podcast that I did with him all of the different points of evidence that lead to what he believes is a very likely scenario that it was released from accidentally, released from a lab and not actually from a wet market, that the wet market is the cover-up. It's like the disease is too advanced. It has too many hallmarks and indicators of a virus that had been tampered with for study, for studying in the lab and for examinations and all the different tests that they would run.

And so you got both those things right you have you have um the possibility of something just morphing in nature like many other pandemics that have happened in the past and then what we have now which is this weird virus it doesn't make any sense and we were talking about all the different different symptoms that people get from it, neurological problems, blood clotting. I was reading this article where they're saying that people that have died from COVID, when they've done autopsies on them, they found blood clots in every major organ. And they're like, this is astonishing. Like, this is so weird. Yeah, it does seem very unpredictable.

Liver, kidney, just blood clots everywhere. It's like people are hemorrhaging. It's very strange. It's, liver, kidney, just blood clots everywhere. It's like people are hemorrhaging. It's very strange. It's a strange fucking virus. And the transmissibility, is that a word? The ease of transmission is terrifying. It's so contagious. It's a ridiculously contagious virus. So once we went to that Center for Disease Control, I started getting scared. I saw the 2015 Bill Gates TED Talk on pandemics and about the possibility of a pandemic, and I got scared of it too. So I would have thought it's possible. Yeah, I would never would have thought it's impossible.

So here's the thing, regardless of where this virus came from, you have to imagine that there are governments and individuals who are now keyed into how effective this visit, this virus was at crippling capitalist economies. COVID's pathways, right? I mean, it's international flights, it's international trade, it's people moving around, it's, you know, the neoliberal global capitalist system that we built over the past 30 years that created the pathways that took the virus everywhere at once, right? So if this were to be a test run, it's now proven to be extremely effective. And so you have to imagine the governments around the world, probably including the United States, are thinking, well, how could we weaponize this potentially? I don't know if the United States is thinking that.

Well, I don't know either. But the thing is we, you know, the threats, existential threats that we face now have been multiplied exponentially, right? In the past, you know, post-World War II, right, we had, I mean, this is the first sort of global catastrophe, right? You know, world wars, right? But then once we develop nuclear weapons, and we're just past the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test now, you know, once we create that ability to destroy ourselves and potentially the entire world, we have to live with the possibility of that happening, right? Now stack on top of that

artificial intelligence, climate change, you know, synthetic biotech, all of these threats that we face are something that we have to kind of hold in our heads all the time. And I think it's cracking us mentally to like think about these possibilities. So yeah, I mean, some of the preppers are conspiracy theorists, right? And they're spinning some really outlandish scenarios. But a lot of them are just trying to work through these things, right? And rather than get caught in this kind of perpetual future tense, like, you know, thinking about something terrible happening. They're trying to take action now in the present, and that gives them some sense of peace, right? Like it gives them a sense of like it gives them some solid footing in the present.

And a lot of the preppers I talked to were – are not actually very anxious or paranoid at all, right? Because they have a plan. It's those of us who don't have a plan that are that are anxious well you've talked to them post post yeah yeah um do they feel vindicated no not really no what what most of them have told me is that this was a mid-level crisis well they're right about that right i mean ifstone blows, this is going to look like a cakewalk. Yeah, exactly.

If we get hit by an asteroid, I mean, it's a wrap for humanity. Yeah. If there's a solar flare that takes out the power grid, we've got real problems. This is minor in comparison. When you look at the actual fatality rate for healthy people, it's very, very low. For healthy people, it's very, very low. It's less than 1%, much less than half of 1% for most healthy people. So when you look at what could happen if Yellowstone blows, that's a continent killer.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we're talking about volcanic ash clouding the sky. Nuclear winter. Yeah, killing crops all over the United States. All over the world. Yeah. I mean, you got to have a jet and go to New Zealand like instantly. It's like, I don't even know if that's... New Zealand is in a volcanic zone.

I mean, this is one of the great red herrings of our time that all of these wealthy people are going to flee to New Zealand and find safety there. I mean, I also find it totally ironic that a lot of them are sort of libertarian free market capitalists that are quite happy to make money off this system. But when shit goes wrong, they want a really strong government to clamp down and take care of it. Is that what they want? I think they just want a remote place to escape with a small amount of people and a lot of wildlife resources and real natural beauty look new zealand's gorgeous new zealand's fantastic i have friends who go there every year yeah i've spent a

lot of time there matt lauer bought a crazy farm out there he's got like a giant ranch well that's you know it's got the quality move there it's got you know clean water it's english speaking it's got a stable government you know all of that abundance of wildlife and no predators they got a it's a weird situation over there it's a a hunter's paradise apparently because um well sort of it's really it's it depends on your philosophy but most most hunters 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, your meat from the natural world. I want there to be a balance in the natural world. There's no balance in New Zealand. In New Zealand, they have to helicopter over these stags

and gun them down because they're overpopulated because they literally get to the point where they worry about diseases and there's no predators there. Do you know the whole history of how it's populated with animals? No, I don't. They were brought over there by the Europeans in the 1800s

as like a hunting sanctuary. They brought over stag and all these animals that don't exist in there, red deer, all these invasive animals. But then they don't have any way to control their population. So they have these like fucking huge herds of these animals roaming over the fields. Luckily, there's not a lot of people, but there's a lot of controversy behind it. There's one recently that's going on right now I should tell people about.

There's an animal called a tar. Have you ever heard of a tar? No. T-A-H-R. It's a fascinating animal because it looks like it's straight out of Star Wars. I was going to say, it sounds like it's from Star Wars, a tar.

I think it's an Asiatic animal. I think. I think it's native to the Alps or some... I forget where it's an Asiatic animal. I think. I think it's native to like the Alps or some shit. I forget where it's from. Here, Himalaya. Yeah, there it is. Okay. It's a large, it's fucking weird looking, man.

It's this crazy hairy looking. Take a look at that picture right there. Yeah, bam. Go large with that. Look at that fucking thing. What? Yes. Look at that thing.

It's amazing. Well, one of the best first of all it's a delicious animal and um 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 very hard for hunters to get to them. It's extremely dangerous. A good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, was hunting one, and he fell and got really badly injured, and he had to get helicoptered out of there, and he was by himself. Really hard animal to get to.

Well, they've decided recently, it's a very controversial decision, to eradicate them. So they're going to, even though there's this really thriving industry where all these people's livelihood depends on this animal, these people in these rural communities, these people, hunting guides, all these different people that live off of these animals, they've decided for whatever reason, I'm not exactly sure what the reason is, but the New Zealand government has decided to eradicate these animals. It's got to be this fantasy of getting back to the kind of pre-colonial past right like

if you eradicate all the animals that were brought in with colonization and you can get back to some kind of like indigenous stasis or whatever i mean maybe they would have to bring back the host eagle there's an enormous eagle that used to hunt humans that lived on New Zealand. The largest eagle that ever lived lived in New Zealand and they believe that the Polynesian people wound up killing them all. Well, you got to go Jurassic Park and get the DNA and resurrect that thing. Is that Polynesian people? Who the fuck lived in – it's not Polynesian people. Who are the original settlers of New Zealand?

The Maori. The Maori, right? Are they considered Polynesian? I think they were – yeah, I think they were Polynesian sailors that landed there. We're so white. We don't know shit. Polynesians are fucking incredible, though, if you think about the fact those people figured out how to get in a boat and go to literally the most remote spot in the world, which is Hawaii. Dude, have you ever seen their maps that are made out of sticks?

No. So they're these, they're 3D maps that are made from like sticks put together and they can tell wind and air currents and they can read the stars with them. That's how they navigated. Really? Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, they're fantastic. Where did you see one? I don't know. Well, actually, I did my master's degree in maritime archaeology. So I probably picked that up during that degree at some point. So you did – some of your studies were in Sydney, right? Yeah. I started – I actually started here at the University of California. I did anthropology and history.

I went to Australia to do a degree in maritime archaeology and then I went to London to do a PhD in cultural geography. Oh, wow. So I've hopped four disciplines. Did you get anything, Jamie? Let me see what this looks like. Yeah, look at those things. Holy shit. They're sweet, right? Wow. So I've hopped four disciplines. Did you get anything, Jamie? Let me see what this looks like. Yeah, look at those things. Holy shit. They're sweet, right?

Wow. What is that? Obviously, I have absolutely no idea how to read those things. That's so weird. So how do they tie them together? With twine? Yeah, I think it's twine. And what are those images supposed to represent?

What is that? It's the wind, the t those images supposed to represent? What is that? It's the wind, the tides, and the stars. What is that word? Hold on. Scroll up. Micronesian? Whoa. Micronesians.

You ever heard that word? Yeah, Micronesians. So Micronesia is like Chuk. What are those four islands? Truk Lagoon that's in Chuk. And I can't remember the other islands. Look how crazy that is. God, I love learning new shit.

So here's the thing, right? Is that one of the things that preppers are into is like recovering these kinds of skills. So trying to learn how these things work and building them again. When I was at the University of California, I did two years of lithic technology where I can make arrowheads, stone tools atlatl darts, axes I spent years doing that stuff you know how to make an atlatl?

can you throw one? we threw one at UC Riverside where I was studying we made this atlatl dart and we cleared out the alleyway in the experimental archaeology lab where we're working. We were chucking this atlatl tart down the middle. Indoors or outdoors?

We probably couldn't get away with that now. Yeah, probably not. Outdoors. Outdoors. Now, when they taught you how to do all this stuff, when they're talking about like building ancient arrowheads, is the technology behind creating those, the craftsmanship, is it theoretical or are they getting it down from the people where the knowledge has been handed down? Oh, it's definitely the case that the knowledge is being handed down. And what's really interesting is that – I know you talked to Graham Hancock. But like the – so the earliest spear points that we think are evidence of the earliest occupation of the Americas, these are Clovis.

So he talked about Clovis cultures, right? Those Clovis points are so hard to make, dude. And they're making these like 12,000, 13,000 years ago. So it's essentially you take – you get a piece of rock, right? And you have to flatten the rock first, right? So you've got to send flakes with a hammer stone across the rock and create like a ridge down the middle. And then in one strike, you take that whole ridge off and you create this flat expanse down the middle of the spear point. With one strike.

Yeah, and that's what you halved the shaft to with some sinew or whatever. But the thing is that that one strike, you have to do it on both sides, right? You have to make a flat edge on both sides down the middle of the spear point. It almost always cracks the thing in half. And what is the material that you're using for the striker? And what is the material you're using for the arrowhead? So if the easiest stone to flintknapp with is obsidian. It's got a really, really high silica value in it and it's highly heated. So it's like glass, right?

And that's what the Aztecs were making their weapons out of too. So you can see obsidian weapons all up and down north, central and south America. But you can also work with like Flint or Chert. Those things are a little trickier, right? They're all over Texas. The Comanche left so many arrowheads. Go to Gary Clark Jr.'s Instagram page. He has a fucking perfect arrowhead that they found on a friend of his ranch.

It's amazing when you look at this and you go, okay, this is probably hundreds of years ago. Some guy sent this. Look at that. Look how perfect that is. Oh, that's gorgeous. Look how perfect it is. It's perfect. Dude, I'll make you one. I would appreciate that, but I found one once. I was hunting

in Nevada. I was doing a high country mule deer hunt, and I found one, and I fucking lost it. I don't know what happened, but it was just it was a chunk. It had broken. But that one, go back to that one again real quick. That's perfect. I mean, look at the

Oh, it's really nice. It's not damaged at all. What do you think that's made out of? I think it's chert. So chert often has this kind of chalky exterior that you got to get off of it before you – Chert. Yeah. I've never even heard of that.

Yeah. How old do you think that is if you had to guess? 700, 800 years? I think so. Check this out, man. One of the coolest experiences I ever had – so I did archaeology for about five years. One of the coolest experiences I ever had. So I did archaeology for about five years.

I excavated in Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, in Hawaii, in Australia, and in southern and northern California. And when I was in Mexico, we were working on this old village site. It's a post-classic Maya site. And we're digging up, like, there's just loads of pottery, right? Because think about it. If you make a pot, inevitably you're going to drop and break that thing. And what do you do? You sweep it out the front door. And so we'd find these huge pits that are just full of pottery sherds.

And after a while, you just become totally desensitized to it. You're just chucking them in a bag. And here's what I found, 10 more or whatever. And then one of them I pulled out and it had a fingerprint in it. Oh, dude. And I'm looking at the thing and it's like – Suppressed into the clay? Yeah.

Suddenly I've traveled through time, right? I've gone back 1,200 years and I'm sitting there with this person in their house with their thumbprint pressed into this thing. It really unnerved me. Wow. I mean, you know, in archaeological terms, meh. You know, it doesn't actually tell us that much. We got 10,000 pieces of those pots. But on a personal level, you know, experiencing that visceral connection to the history of humankind is unparalleled.

Right. It's because you know someone made the pottery, but it's almost abstract until you see that fingerprint. Yeah. But that's fucking awesome. God. Yeah. We also, one time I found this, we were walking through the jungle. We were actually surveying.

We found a temple in the Yucatan that like the local people knew about, but no one from the university had seen it. And so this guy is like, oh, you want a but no one from the university had seen it. And so this guy is like, oh, you want a temple? Yeah, the temple over there. You know, it's so we're like hacking through the bushes with our, through the vines with our machetes. And we come up on this temple and I was like, oh man, this is crazy.

Like how many people have seen this thing in the past, you know, 300 years. And then there were kind of some central stairs going up the middle of the temple. And then there were kind of some central stairs going up the middle of the temple. And I went there and looked on the ground and there was this, like a, there was this figurine there. And it had, it had eyes and like a kind of a little hat, but it was like somebody had made this thing out of clay and pressed it together. I never figured out how old that was. I mean, it could have been made more recently. Did you take it? Kind of weird.

We bagged it and tagged it as they say in archaeology. It went back to the lab. What are the rules on that? Like if you go to a temple, they take you to a temple and you find something that's there. Are you allowed to say, I'm a scientist? Well, OK. So I became really uncomfortable with the idea that because I had a degree, I had some kind of authority over other people's culture. Right. That's why I'm asking.

Yeah. And I always felt like, well, that, you know, that village that's there, that's their shit. Why are we taking it? You know, and obviously it's for the advancement of knowledge and maybe it brings some benefit to their village, but we don't know. Right. So this is eventually what drove me out of archaeology. For my master's thesis, I went up to Northern California and I worked with this tribe called the Winnemem Wintu. And it's a pretty tragic story up there, man. They had been there for thousands of years. And we Americans decided, we, we Americans decided that they were going to build a giant dam so they could have a reservoir up there. And they and they inundated

all of their ancestral homeland, like all of their spiritual sites, all of their graveyards. I mean, all this stuff went underwater. So I'd spent two years doing a degree in American maritime archaeology. I'd been diving shipwrecks all over the world, and I went up there, and I said, let me dive in the reservoir, and I've got my underwater camera, and I said, I'll take some photos. I'll bring them back. We can have a chat about it, and the spiritual leader of the tribe, Kayleen, she says,

all right, well, why don't you just hang out for a bit? And then maybe we can do that later. So like days turn into weeks and then, you know, a couple of months and I'm getting nervous. I'm like, I have to write my thesis. I have no, I don't have my, I don't have my data. During these months, you're hanging out with these people? Yeah, I'm just hanging out there. Eating dinner with them, just chilling. Yeah, exactly. I'm good. How do you have all this time? Yeah actually went uh well it's but it's the degree right like like that's what i'm there to do i'm doing my field work and you can just hang out for months yeah but i'm supposed to be like doing research and writing a thesis you know and so i after a while i press her i'm like look i've

gotta i've gotta do something and she said you know what the problem with you white people is? You're obsessed with stuff. You just want to get your hands on the things, you know? And she said, if you want to know about our culture, you've been hanging out with us this whole time. What can you tell me about our culture? Like, why do you need to get that, that, that all that stuff that's, you know, underwater out there? Why do you need that? You know, you can just talk to us. So that was sort of my bridge from moving from archaeology into cultural geography, which is much more about, you know, thinking about people's relationships with places and landscapes. And their culture is documented in what way? Like, how are they maintaining

their historical records? Well, that's what this was actually my one of my first academic articles is I wrote about how a lot of their religious ceremonies had changed because the places that they used to go were now underwater, right? So in so in one case, there was this, 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 when the that's when the the waters are high. Right. So now they do it in sort of drought season so that they can still get to the rock. And so they had they had changed the whole kind of, you know, cultural their cultural

fabric had been altered by that inundation event. And basically, you know, the point that she was trying to get across to me, it was like, that didn't break us. Like, we're still us, even, even though these things have had to change, you know, and that it was an education for me as an archaeologist, because, you know, when you when you go into a place with that very kind of like data driven empirical mindset, you know, you want you want hard facts that make sense that you know, that you can you can write up clearly. And, and what she was telling me was something that was a little bit more, it was more nuanced, you know,

it was difficult to pin down, it was more, you know, qualitative, right. And so I had to, I had to grapple with that. And that was a that was a big learning lesson for me. So in this, but when you're dealing with things that are more nuanced, you still need to kind of know what happened and when it happened. So how were they keeping records of what happened and when it happened? Well, they had oral histories. Oral histories. Yeah, but I could also go to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Forest Service. You know, I was actually working for the Bureau of Land Management at that time.

So those federal agencies have records of what happened. Right. I mean, you know, with the building of the dam and what was recorded beforehand and all of that. Which is kind of fucked that they did that, right? Yeah. But I mean internally. I mean in the tribe, everything is orally? Yeah.

There's probably more people writing things down now these days, but they've got oral histories that go back a long time. When I was in Australia, get this, man. 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 tens of thousands of years and they have passed that down they actually retain that memory so they have a pre ice age memory when the oceans were less deep yeah i don't know if it's pre-ice age, but the water levels were, you know. Yeah. So the water levels were lower. It has to be pre-ice age if it's before 10,000 years.

Yeah. Right. So these people had this idea of what was going on and they just kept passing it down generation to generation. Yeah. And this, how accurate is their, their, their memory of it? I don't know. I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure people are doing research on that, but you know, if the, if you look at those, those the dot drawings,

you know, there's like traditional paintings that you see that are often paintings of landscapes. Some of those have been mapped onto you know, aerial imagery and they're startlingly accurate. And so you have to wonder how did people who didn't have those aerial views get that view down on the landscape? Right. I mean – Yeah. Yeah.

Do you stitch that together by just knowing the place so well that you can kind of depict it in that way? Or is there some kind of, I mean, you can get all hippy-dippy about it and it's about astral projection or people were like taking hallucinogenics and flying across the landscape or, you know. Yeah, it's, 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. They did it looking down. They figured out from traversing, going around the circumference of a continent.

When they would do that, if they would go around the outside of a continent and mark it, and then you look at it, and it's stunningly similar to what we take today with satellite imagery, that really is amazing. It is amazing. And we spend a lot of time talking about how how advanced we are now right how what we've done with technology but we don't talk a lot about all these skills that we've lost

sure um so that's why i like going out into the landscape i love going out for a couple of days just hike you know hiking through the woods with a compass you know figuring it out leave turn the phone off leave it at home. I mean, give someone a sextant and tell them, figure your way across the ocean. Right. Yeah, good luck. Right? I mean, just looking at one of those things.

Or how about that ancient Greek computer thing? What is that called? Oh, the abacus? No, no, no. That's a counting thing. No, that's a counting thing. There's a device that they found that consists of a myriad of moving gears that took forever for them to try to understand. It's called the anti-th- I'm going to fuck up the word.

Do you know what I'm talking about, Jamie? Yeah, Jamie knows what I'm talking about. There's this thing that they found that's intensely complex. And it's thousands of years old. And they found it in a shipwreck and um they had to to try to back engineer what this fucking thing is and how it worked but astrolabe i think right astrolabe um i don't think two dimensional model of the celestial sphere that's really cool that is a different thing though

it is really cool pretty amazing the original smartphone that's funny but no it's an ancient Greek essentially it's an ancient computer just pull up ancient computer

I mean I typed in ancient Greek ocean exploration tool Essentially, it's an ancient computer. Just pull up ancient computer antith... I typed in ancient Greek ocean exploration tool. No, no, no, but it's not that. It's not an ocean exploration tool. It's actually like a computer. God damn it. I wish I wrote it down. The word is anti...

That's it. Oh, the antitherica thing. Yes. Kythera. That's it. So click on that thing thing they found that and they're like okay what in the fuck is this and this anti go so i could read it an anti kythera mechanism a 2 000 year old computer and they found this and uh they had to try to figure out what this is and see how they've kind of 3D mapped it and reimagined. Yeah.

I mean, I don't even know what they used it for. Let's click on that. What is the article to the right on Daily Express? Lots of, oh, there. Yeah. Let's see what it says. Google Doodle marks the discovery of the ancient Greek computer.

So this is... Track and calculate position of the moon and sun. Yeah. Position of the moon and sun and planets as well as predict the dates and colors of the solar... So it is a celestial device. Yeah, in some way. But it's a computer. Right? So this thing, this 2 000 year old device

was even capable of adding multiplying dividing and subtracting so they found it in may 17th 1902 and it was discovered in a roman cargo shipwreck for years they were baffled by the purpose of the mysterious object and initially assumed the mechanism was a gear or a wheel, but the archaeologists soon discovered that the device was a complex machine capable of various factions. The Antikythera

mechanism gathered interest in the 1950s, and its complexity, function, and computational powers has led it to be dubbed the first ever computer. Fucking crazy. Don't you wonder how much stuff we have lost? Oh, yeah. Or how much stuff is still in the ground?

Oh, yeah. That kind of haunts me. You could go crazy thinking about when we should start digging up everything and try and unveil these ancient mysteries. Well, you really could, particularly when you think about, I don't know if you're familiar with, you said you know about Graham Hancock. But do 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, excuse me, asteroidal or meteorological impacts. What would you say? Meteor impacts? Right. Asteroid impacts. I think once it hits the Earth, it's an asteroid. Yeah. And he is a proponent of this theory that is gaining a lot of traction that the Ice Age ended abruptly because of an impact. And it coincides with soil samples, with these samples that they've shown that show a lot of that trite is called tritonite nuclear glass yeah that trinitite trinitite thank you that from the trinity project right yeah they

they found this stuff when they do core samples somewhere in that neighborhood of 12 000 years which is the neighborhood where the ice age ended scattered all throughout Europe and the United States. And they believe that something happened, some sort of an impact, multiple impacts, around 12,000 years ago, and it ended the Ice Age abruptly and probably caused a lot of flooding. And it probably was the origin of the Epic of Gilgamesh flood story, Noah's Ark flood story, and also why there seems to be some sort of a reset of civilization. There's a pre-12,000 years ago technology, and then there's sort of a dead zone of several thousand years, and then things reignite again after that. Well, it lends credence to that kind of oral memory too, right? Like if that memory has been passed down

and what's left is this kind of kernel, right? There's something there that we're attaching stories to to make sense of it. And this is where the conspiracy theories come from too, right? Like one of the preppers that I spoke to, he's actually here in California. The first time I met him him he started talking about planet X Nibiru

it's all Zacharias Hitchin you ever read his stuff? No fascinating weirdo stuff so he told me Nibiru is hiding behind the sun and it's going to emerge and the last time it emerged was 4000 years ago and that's where the

flood story comes from because it's going to create. And the last time it emerged was 4,000 years ago. And that's where the flood story comes from because it's going to create a pole shift. So the North and South Pole are going to flip and that's what creates the tidal wave event. And so he told me that he was building his bunkers to be submerged in 200 feet of water. Well, he might be adding to the story. Well, no, I mean, but what's interesting there

is you kind of, you know, with these conspiracy theories, there's always a kernel of truth, right? There's always a kernel of something that you can hold on to, but then it just gets spinned in a slightly weird way. And I think some of it is kind of displaced anxiety, right? Because we – like these disasters have happened. We know they have happened. We know that they will happen. We don't quite want to admit it, but it's a lot easier to pin it on some kind of, you know, impossible event than just to decide that like the world is chaos and we have to deal with it. Yeah. There's many, many, many points of

chaos. It's not just aliens. Exactly. Zechariah Sitchin is fascinating. You should, I mean, I'm not saying I buy into any of his theories, but what I am saying is what he did expose that is undeniable was the rich history of illustrations from Sumer that are really fascinating. Particularly the origin of the caduceus, the origin of the double helix DNA that seems to be – when you look at that sign that symbolizes medicine, the two snakes crossing together, that originated in ancient Sumer, and it originated with a lot of these ancient clay tablets that showed what could be, it really is open to interpretation, right? But what he interpreted, the way he interpreted, and he's got a very extraordinarily unusual interpretation of the Sumerian text, and his interpretation of the Sumerian text is that it is a historical record of these beings that came from another planet and genetically manipulated human beings. And the crazy thing is when you look at these clay tablets and the illustrations, you see these strange things. Like you see these godlike creatures holding these humanoid creatures that are much smaller than them with tails.

They have tails like monkeys. You see the entire solar system. We're talking about 6,000-year-old clay tablets, right? Back then, the general consensus was that the world was flat. If you would talk to many people from many different cultures, they did not think that the solar system had a sun in the center and that there was planets that were orbiting it. Well, they had a depiction of the solar system, not just a depiction, but all of the planets in the proper order. Like pull up the image of the Sumerian solar system.

This is 6,000 years ago. Look at this picture. So these gods, look at that. The sun in the center, all the planets, no extra planets, all the planets. Is Pluto in there? I think it was. How many we got there?

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Well, they counted the moon as a planet, which is odd. And then they counted Nibiru. Nibiru is this planet that they claim, that's it right there, that's on this 3,600-year elliptical orbit. Right. Now, there's no evidence in Nibiru. There's no evidence that that's true. But who knows how much of this, you know, we're

getting from these people that are interpreting this language that's essentially a dead language. No one can even speak it. So how much fuckery is involved in that? I don't know. I mean, I'm a moron. I'm not a religious scholar. I'm not a linguist. I don't really understand this stuff. But I do know that the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is also a Sumerian tale, shares a lot of similarities with the Bible, including the similarities between the flood stories, the origin stories. You know, there's just a lot of weirdness to that stuff. But the fact that these people had this story of the Anunnaki and the Anunnaki in according to Sitchin that the literal translation

is those from heaven to earth came and that they had come here and that they had you know done some and this is his interpretation they had done and by the way there's a website called Sitchiniswrong.com and you can go there and this is another scholar of Sumerian history that refutes all of his claims. Who's right. Who's wrong. I don't know, but it's, it's really weird.

Just the stuff that you can't get away from is really weird. And that's the, the solar system. The fact that they had this detailed map of the solar system. Again, you're talking about when I say detailed, they scrawled it on clay tablets 6,000 years ago, but

clearly the center is the sun. It even looks like the sun. It's much larger than anything else. The sun's a million times larger than Earth, and it's just this big thing, and then you see all these things around it that are supposedly representative of Jupiter, Neptune,

Venus. It really does look like Mars, Earth. It really does look like this is their drawing on clay of the solar system. Like how the fuck did they do that? What were they doing? Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And I think it's certainly worth – wherever we fall on these debates, it's certainly worth talking about, right? And it's certainly worth, you know, wherever we fall on these debates, it's certainly worth talking about, right? And it's worth investigating. And when I started working with these doomsday

preppers, I took a lot of heat from some of my friends in academia. What did they say? What they're saying, well, you know, they're right-wingers, they've got disgusting political views, they're racist, they're misogynist, they're buying into conspiracy theories. Why would you give them airtime basically? Let me stop right there. Why would you generalize an entire group of weirdos like that? That's so crazy.

What do you think that is though? What is the motivation to do that? Well, it's people tribalizing, right? It's part of this partisan divide that we're experiencing. Right, academics. Particularly in this country. Yeah. Or right and left or whatever,

whatever binary you want to pick, you know, and, and for, you know, I mean, we could go over the reasons why we've ended up in this situation, but we are, you know, we're running headlong into into a very partisan age. Yeah. And, you know, I feel like the solution to that is actually, you know, it's going and spending time with people that you disagree with. Right. It's extending some empathy. Right. And it's not necessarily about giving people voice, but it is about giving people space and time. Yeah. Right. And so I have to be honest, you know, a lot of these preppers I hung out with, it was it was hard to hang out with them. A lot of these preppers I hung out with, it was hard to hang out with them. How so? One of the guys did this thing where every time we were meeting, he would rate women as they walked by.

She's a seven. She's a nine. And it was really hard not to interject and say, man, she's just grocery shopping. Leave her alone. The conspiracy theories were constant. But there's also a kind of – we can think about like people who are prepping on the everyday, like the person who just cares about taking care of themselves and their family and maybe they're interested in building community, right? But then there are the people who are selling the antidote to their fears. In the book, I call these people the dread merchants, right? The people who are going to sell you the bunker.

Jim Baker and his food. Oh, man, his survival water. How amazing are those buckets of food that you could use as the base of a table? Have you seen that whole video? I love those. And he talks about using them as port-a-johns. Yes, yes. Yeah, he sells the Bible buckets as well. Bible buckets? What's a Bible bucket?

It's just a bucket full of Bibles, you know, just in case. Why do you need more than one Bible? I know. Maybe you've got a big family. Maybe you want to go Old Testament if shit gets really weird. Have you ever seen the Vic Berger remixes of the Jim Bates? Yes, I have. Oh, man, they are so much fun. Yes. I got really addicted to man, they are so much fun.

Yes. I got really addicted to those when I was working on this project. It was kind of my – it became almost like a mantra, you know, just having these running in the background. It's so strange that he was the guy that was attached to the Jessica Hahn controversy back in the 1980s. I mean, I – remember that? Yeah. Do you remember the Jim Baker? back in the 1980s. I mean, I, you remember that?

Yeah. Do you remember the Jim Baker? Like he had had an affair with this woman and it became, for whatever reason, this big news. And that's the same guy. He's around today. Because then we still expected people to be guided by their moral compass. You know, everyone's a hypocrite now.

Do you remember, then there was Jimmy Swagger got caught with a hooker and he was crying, I have sinned. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember that? Do you remember that then there was Jimmy Swagger got caught with a hooker, and he was crying, I have sinned. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember that? Do you remember that? That was good. Yeah, no one confesses anything anymore.

No one admits to anything anymore. Spread the word Bible bucket. Yes. I love that one. A bucket of Bibles. Why not? That's only 50 bucks? That's a pretty good deal.

How many Bibles you get? 24. Wow. I think that's what it says. Should we get a bucket of Bibles? I feel like we should have one at the studio. I don't want to feed the beast, but you should get one. If he gets 50 bucks from me, what the fuck do I do?

We need at least a table worth. Right. A table's worth of Bibles. Six buckets? How many buckets makes a table? Shouldn't we get the food? Or should we just get the Bibles? One bucket of Bibles and five buckets of food. But his fucking food...

I love watching him feed the audience from the giant trough. You can get real good freeze-dried food that'll last forever. You don't have to get his bullshit. What the fuck creamy potato soup oh my god look at that slop

and they do a big thing of rice and they mix it all together a big bucket of slop just pour it on top of it googlepeakrefuel.com this is my friend Chad has a really delicious company that they make actual I I think – is it freeze-dried?

I think his stuff is freeze-dried or dehydrated. I'm not sure. But people are doing it now. Freeze-dried. Yeah. People are doing it now where you can keep this stuff forever. This is my buddy Chad's stuff. This is really good for you.

It's actually delicious and healthy. Yeah, and he's doing Mylar bags, too. That's much better than doing buckets. Yes, and Chad is a former UFC fighter who's a great guy who's actually a hunter. He makes everything organic and really healthy. And when you reconstitute it, it actually tastes good. So you don't have to buy that Jim Baker bullshit. You can actually buy this.

Check this out. I went to a community just outside of Dallas, and they were – this is a budding prepper community. And they had built this 50-foot fountain ringed by the four horses of the apocalypse. Oh, Christ. I mean it's like in a rural county in a town with like 300 people. They bought all this land. It's like it was a square mile of land. And it had these sort of green lagoons in there that were dredged out for grazing cows at some point.

And they were going to revitalize these into these kind of like crystal blue lagoons with white beach sand. And they were going to build a bunker community in there called Trident Lakes. So the lakes are the Blue Lagoons. And he told me that their plan was to do a kind of outer perimeter wall around this that was going to be a giant berm around shipping containers. So essentially, the wall would be hollow. And he said he was going to fill it with buckets of food and whatever and i just i kept imagining you know jim baker's bible buckets just lined up down the walls of this thing you

know to keep intruders out just a fucking 12 foot high wall of bible buckets but he i i they had this this ex-navy seal working for them and uh i'm waiting to meet with the CEO. He's like, he put he's kept me there for about three days, you know, trying to trying to interview this guy. And in the meantime, they put me on the phone with this ex Navy SEAL, and he's gonna go over their security plan with me. So he tells me about the wall, and then they're going to put up a chain link fence with barbed wire, and they're going to have dogs and CCTV cameras cameras and they've got a kind of no man's land between the fence and the shipping containers, right? And he told me, as a geographer, you've got to understand you've got to control the geospace, you know?

Huh? The geospace. What's the geospace? I don't know, man. I guess it's just space, you know? You've got to have control of it. But he said- Don't you love when people use extra words? I know, man. I guess it's just space. You know, you got to have control of it. But he said. Don't you love when people use extra words?

I know. Yeah. But then he started going down this rabbit hole where he's like, you know, we did some Googling. Oh. There's Muslim groups in Texas. Oh, my goodness. And I was like, oh, OK. And he goes, and, you know, it's not just Muslim groups.

It's not just Black Lives Matter. There's white nationalists. We don't like any of those extremist views. And I'm thinking, well, this is kind of extreme, like what you guys are planning here. We don't like any extremists. We don't like white nationalists. That's hilarious. Yeah.

I met some really interesting people on this project. You know, there were people who were kind of on the deep end of things. I met one guy in Kansas. I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have run into this place, this survival condo in Kansas. No, I've never heard of it. Dude, it's awesome. Survival condo?

Survival condo. Is it actually a condo? It's a condo. One condo? This guy, listen's awesome. Survival condo? Survival condo. Is it actually a condo? It's a condo. One condo? This guy, listen to this. This guy, so there's two kinds of nuclear missile silos from the Cold War that are in the Midwest. The first kind is a kind of horizontal one where they would lift the missile up to fire it. And then the later ones they built, the Atlas F silos, are vertical.

So they're 200 feet deep and they had a nuclear-tipped ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile. Jamie found it. Yeah. Bunker home with a price tag of $2 million. Oh, my God. $2 million. So it's $1.5 million for a half floor inside this thing or $3 million for a full floor. What is this?

Dude, this guy converted the entire missile silo into a subterranean condo complex. So those are like LCD screens that make it look like you're outside? Yeah. Oh my God, that's so nuts. And you know what he told me? Wait for it. Hold on. He's got a pool.

Yeah, he's got a pool with a waterfall. Beach. Actually, it looks pretty dope. Dude, there's a rock wall. It's fantastic. It's got a theater, pool table, rock wall. We watched 007 in there. Wow. What is that? That's where they melt the bodies. That's where they're. It's fantastic. It's got a theater, pool table, rock wall. We watched 007 in there. Wow.

What is that? That's where they melt the bodies. That's where they're raising fish in there, tilapia. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, they've got an FDA-certified growing facility in there. Duncan went to one of these places. When I was telling you I did that television show where we went to the CDC, Duncan met with these people.

I don't know if it was this group, but it was real similar. Penthouse was the penthouse. That's where Drake lives, right? He's got a... Some ballers probably have some sort of crazy setup up there. So get this. The guy, he bought this... Oh, that's pretty nice. He bought this thing for $300,000.

The missile silo. Is he selling these? Yeah, and he dumped, I think, $10 million. $4.5 million? Jesus. That's the penthouse. That's fat, though. That's a fat house. Is he selling these? Yeah. And he dumped, I think, 10 million. Four and a half million. Jesus. That's the penthouse. That's fat, though. That's a fat house. Would you live there?

Yeah, totally. If you did, would you have like a velvet robe and invite people over with like a cuvasier and a snifter? Come on over. Sit there and smoke my pipe on top of my Bible book. Don't you want cigars in a place like that? You're a baller. You don't have time for a fucking cigar. Cigars you have to

or a pipe rather. Pipes you have to relight It's annoying. You're a mover and a shaker. You're in a condo that's four and a half million dollars under the ground protecting you from bombs Well so I'm down there like we're a hundred feet underground How do they get their air? And I'm inside

He's got redundant filtration systems, pulling air from the outside. Pulling air with a mechanism? He's got nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration systems. He's also got a volcanic ash scrubber. So if the caldera does blow, he can actually scrub the ash out of the air. Come on. Yeah, no, serious. So Larry Hall told me that the guy who built this, Larry Hall, told me they could stay

in there for five years. But then you're hanging out with Larry for five years, smelling his farts, listening to his stupid jokes. He does have a condo in there. Does he? So you're not going to escape that. Four and a half million bucks. And where is this again exactly?

Dude, it's in the middle of Kansas. It's in the middle of a bunch of cornfields. There's nothing out there at all. I have a buddy who lives in Iowa right now, and I'm trying to get him to move. I mean, there's issues out there, man. Yeah. I mean, one of the problems is how do you get to it, right? You're going to have to hike.

Yeah. It's going to take you weeks. But it depends on what kind of disaster you've got. Right. That's what I'm saying, hike. Yeah. He's got a – if you buy into one of his packages, he's got a like SWAT style bulletproof vehicle. Oh, great.

He'll come pick you up, you know, that. Great. Then you're hanging out with Larry in a bulletproof vehicle. You're going to have to thank him for saving your life. You know what? I asked him about the security guards, right? Because he's got these camouflaged security guards with ARs standing at the gates. And they roll the gate open when you get there and they let you through.

And I said, dude, what keeps the security guards here after the caldera blows or whatever? And I asked if they had space in the bunker and they didn't. So I mean I guess you just lose your exterior security when the event – They don't have a fucking security condo? Larry, stop being such a greedy fuck he needs someone like you around to like give him like sort of a peripheral view or an objective

view rather of the outside like hey Larry you're missing this you got a hole in your theory so in my in my previous life the security people like a shitty fucking action movie. Look at these people. That's Adam Curry in the middle.

That's our buddy Adam. Look at him. Closing on that guy in the middle with the black vest. That's fucking Adam Curry. That's Adam. Is that Adam Curry? That's the podfather. He's going to do his podcast, No Agenda, from the condo.

That's what he's doing. Some pretty sweet trucks. They are sweet. Yeah. It's not going to lie. The trucks are the real deal. Those are pretty dope. I went to another place in Utah called Plan B Supply,

and this is all they do is they build these kind of bulletproof, armored four-wheel drive, sometimes six-wheel drive trucks. They're crazy rigs. So they buy them – a lot of them they buy from the government. The government retires equipment and they'll just buy 30 Humvees or whatever and have them delivered to the shop and then they'll put bulletproof plating on them. Yeah, they tune them up. Look at that. Yeah, these guys are super cool.

How little does your dick have to be before that becomes an option? Oh, that looks dope, though. But so what they told me is they said you're never going to get to the bunker in a serious event, right? So what you need is the vehicle needs to be your bunker. That one right there. You're never going to get to the bunker? Yeah, no. They said just turn the vehicle into your bunker.

So I drove that one there. Maybe you don't want to live. You ever thought about that? Yeah. This is what I say. If there's an asteroid impact, I want it to hit me in the fucking face. I really do. I don't want to do this, man.

You know, I watched that movie. What is that movie with Viggo Mortensen, The Road? I watched that for five minutes. When he was teaching his kid how to shoot himself in the mouth, I'm like, check. I have kids. I'm not doing this. I had a couple of preppers tell me, how you prep depends on what you're prepping for.

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. Run into it. There's no point in trying to survive that. That's the move. They're thinking more about... You've got to restart evolution.

That's what it is. Whatever's underground, moles and shit, they just have to start all over again. Shrews. That's what we came from, right? Yeah, things that were underground survived previous catastrophes. That does look dope, though. You know what you'd 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'd like to do ecstasy. You'd take that to Burning Man. Hell yeah. That's a podcast vehicle. Fuck yeah. Now we're talking.

Yeah. We need one of those. You pick people up and you bug out. We need an Airstream, right? We need a dope Airstream. Pull it with a... Get a Raptor. need an Airstream, right? We need like a dope Airstream. Pull it with a – get a Raptor. Pull the Airstream. Yeah.

I like it. Anyway, those guys are doing well. They're working overtime. Are they though? Who wants to hang out with them? They're pretty cool. Actually, they're Mormons. You know what they told me?

So I asked them, what is the plan to escape the disaster when it hits in this vehicle? Like lay out the logistics for me. And they said, oh, no, you misunderstand. We're not building these vehicles to escape the disaster. We're building these vehicles to assist. And actually they've got a – they call it a disaster relief crew. And they've been going into disasters like – I think it was Hurricane Harvey. They actually drove the vehicles down and they were rescuing people from the floodwaters.

And they told me a couple of stories about, you know, people who were waiting for FEMA to show up, basically, waiting for FEMA to get their act together. And Plan B went down there with their vehicles and essentially just drove past them, as FEMA is saying, you know, you're not welcome here. We've got it under control. And they just drove past them and rescued people and got them out of there. That's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, you know, they probably have some ulterior motives there as Mormons, you know, maybe they're thinking, hey, if we're the ones that rescue these people, I mean, certainly their aid programs are aimed at conversion, right? Sure. You know, if you send all of this food i mean you know missionaries

yeah they're missionaries so so yeah i started to think of these as rescue rigs with missionary zeal you know you're building these to kind of you know you've got like mormons you could someone could come in someone who's like very influential and logical could come in and talk to Mormons and go listen. Like if the shit hits the fan and you're around a lot of Mormons, you go listen. You guys got a lot of things right. A lot of things. You're the nicest cult members ever.

Like Mormons are so nice. I lived next to a Mormon for 10 years. He was so nice. He was a great guy. But out of his fucking mind. He was out of his fucking mind you know he was out of his fucking mind he really believed that joseph smith found golden tablets that contained the lost work of jesus but like as a human wonderful they're some of the nicest 100 cult members we all believe weird shit you know but that's the weirdest shit i know it is because the problem is they got they know who

the guy was it's like l ron hubbard in scientology you know who the guy was. It's like L. Ron Hubbard in Scientology. You know who the guy is. We're not talking about like some – It's not a mythology. Right. It's not talking about like some scrolls they found in Qumran and clay jars. No, this isn't the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is a fucking book written by a liar who was 14.

It was a liar, and they caught him lying, and he's like, the angels came and took it away. That's what he said. Like when you read the Joseph Smith story and then he was murdered because he was a piece of shit. Like it's a crazy story. The Joseph Smith story is not, he had a seer stone and only he could read it. Like it is like a 14 year old's lie. And the fact that it's prevalent today

in 2020 not only that that there's literally gigantic groups of them that live in Mexico so they can still have 10 wives which is nuts and that Mitt Romney a guy who fucking ran for president his family comes from that

Mitt Romney's dad couldn't run for president because he was born in Mexico. Do you know that? No, I didn't know that. Mitt Romney's whole tribe is from the people who escaped America back in the fucking wagon train days because they told him, hey, you

can't have ten wives, asshole. They're like, well, we're going to just go over here. Because Mexico was not that different to be in Mexico or America back when there was no cars or buildings. You know what I mean? Like you have a house over there or you have a house over here. You have a house over there. You could have your eight wives.

So they stayed over there. And then the Industrial Revolution kicked in and buildings and electricity and air travel. And these motherfuckers are still stuck in Mexico. And these motherfuckers are still stuck in Mexico. Now, I'm sure you know the story about the groups of Mormons down there that had a run-in with the cartel. Yeah. And the families were murdered and the children and wives. That's what that is.

Those are the Mormons that fucking Mitt Romney came from. Well, you know, when I actually looked back at the history of Mormons in prepping because, I mean, they're the most prepared people on earth. There's no doubt about it. Dude, they have massive stockpiles. And as you say, like when I went, I mean, a lot of this, a lot of the work that I did for this book was really difficult to get access to these places. Like preppers don't want to talk about what they're doing, right? But when I went to Salt Lake City, they were like, come on in, you know, you want- They want to bring people into the fold. Oh yeah. And they wanted me to volunteer at their factories and whatever.

They're the opposite of Jews. Like Jews make it really hard to join. Mormons are like, you can join anytime you want. Come on in. Right now. We'll knock on your door. Yeah. They brought me into the factory and they were showing me all the 25-year cans of oats

and spaghetti bites and all this flour that they're producing. And they were like, you can volunteer anytime. That's why they have so many wives, the preppers. You lose one, you have eight more laying around, ready to go. I went to a conference in Salt Lake City, and there was this guy there, Dave Jones, who was giving a talk about EMPs. And he says, just out of curiosity, how many of you people have basements? 80% of the audience raises their hands.

What are EMP? That's an electrical surge? An electromagnetic pulse, right, that would wipe out electronics. That kills the power grid? Yeah. So he was doing kind of a workshop on how you could like turn your basement into a Faraday cage that would protect it from the EMP. And I swear like 80% of the audience had basements because they're Mormons and they've got food storage down there. So then I started doing research on this and it turns out that there was a guy called

Ezra Taft Benson during sort of the height of the Cold War or the beginning of the Cold War that was – he served on the quorum of the 12 apostles. So he's like – he was high up in the Mormon church. But he also worked for the Eisenhower administration. And he was advising the president on how to prepare for nuclear war. And so he was one of the people pouring honey in the president's ear about like you've got to have fallout shelters. You've got to have food preparation. Or 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. A lot of that actually came from the Mormon church. So there's a long history of them being wrapped up with the government on this. Have you ever seen the television show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? No. It's fucking hilarious. Tina Fey produced it. It's a really, really funny show that's on Netflix.

But it's based on a girl and her friends that were kidnapped into an underground bunker cult. And she lived in this cult for 15 years. And then they rescued her. And now she has to exist in modern society in New York City. It's really, really funny. All right. I'm in. But it's based on that. I mean, they're in a bunker and they think the world above them is gone. And they're living with this crazy guy who is, what the fuck's his name? Ham.

What's that guy's name? John Ham. John Ham. Yeah. He's the main guy. He's the main cult leader guy. So there's a science fiction novel by this guy Hugh Howey. Wool? Have you ever read that? No. So it's kind of a similar plot where these people are born inside of a silo that's very much like Larry Hall's silo. It actually freaked me out when I read this thing.

And they wake up in there and their whole lives exist within here. And there's a kind of social hierarchy on the mechanical levels. You've got people doing grunt work. But at the top of this silo, there's there are these screens that are showing you the outside, right? And of course, what you see is a sort of blast stricken landscape and red sand. And you know, I mean, it's impossible, you know, it's it's the post apocalyptic world out there. And of course, people after a while, start having discussions about, you know, how do we know that that's a window? Like, what if it's, you know what I mean? Like, because it's cameras that are filming from outside and they're projecting onto the window.

And when I was down there with Larry Hall in the survival condo, he, you know, 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 okay and then he says oh you know most people want to see the outside but you know i can i can show you like a beach in san francisco or whatever like he's just flipping through these feeds right that are your reality so it could be like terminator she could show you a scene from terminator you have no idea whether what you're seeing is real and so and so he flips back to yeah thank you so he flips back to that feed of the security guard standing there and i'm

thinking to myself cheers hey cheers bro he and i'm thinking to, what if that is a recording of when I got here, right? And I have no idea whether that's a live feed. So he – I mean imagine the power that this man wields with the 57 people that have space in the bunker, right? That once he shuts the blast door, he could tell them absolutely anything. That's literally the plot of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. There you go. Well, it's real. And so here's the really weird thing.

I met Hugh Howey, the guy that wrote that book, Wool. He's actually sailing around the world right now. He's a fucking awesome guy. You should have him on the podcast. Sounds good. Dude, he's really fascinating. But he was in the Sydney Harbor and I was living there. And I just sent him a message on Twitter and I'm like, hey, I'm at the library right now.

I think you're in the harbor. You want to hang out? And he goes, yeah, sure. I'll pick you up in the dinghy. Me and my girlfriend jump in there and he takes us out to his catamaran. And the first thing I asked him, I said, look, I went to this bunker in Kansas and there's a remarkable similarity between this and the fiction that you wrote. And he said, I've never heard of it. Right.

I later email Larry Hall and I said, have you ever read this book? And he said, never heard of it. It turns out, though, that Hall was building the bunker at the same time that Howie was writing the novel. Oh, it's just one of those weird kind of moments. You're like, what is it? You know, is it kind of morphic resonance? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The collective consciousness. Yeah. kind of moments you're like what is it you know is it kind of morphic resonance yeah exactly yeah

the collective consciousness yeah that's that thing where like 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 yeah and i mean it's kind of concerning in the context of prepping right because if you've got a lot of people thinking about this way thinking in this way about 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. And that comes back to your question about, well, if you spend all this time prepping, you kind of want the disaster to happen. You want to test your preps. Especially as you get older. And you want to be vindicated. Well, if you spend all this time prepping, you kind of want the disaster to happen, right? Like you want to test your preps. Especially as you get older.

And you want to be vindicated. Yeah, if you're like 70. Yeah. Like your fucking hip's gone. Yeah. Let's get this party started. Exactly. Let's hit the reset button and see what happens next.

Well, isn't that the problem with having a president who's that old too? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Isn't the likelihood of them just hitting the button and starting the fabled mutually assured destruction? Well, that's what everybody was worried about with Reagan. And we should probably be equally concerned, especially if Trump gets a second term. Absolutely. I mean – You start to become nihilistic in your old age and thinking – Plus you're on speed, right? You're on speed. to become nihilistic in your old age. Plus you're on speed, right?

You're on speed. You're nihilistic. Yeah. I mean, prepping also is something that starts to happen in middle age, right? Because you become aware of your own mortality. Yes. When you're young, you're like, I'm invincible. I can do anything.

And then at some point you're like, actually, I need a bit of armor here because I'm not able to do the things I was able to do before. And you can feel yourself declining. I think you probably have a more comprehensive audit of the variabilities or the variables, all the different things that are happening at the same time all over the world, all the different possibilities, all the different vulnerabilities that we all have. There's so many things going on. Your own body, the coronavirus pandemic, other diseases that are still here. You know, there's a new swine flu that they're concerned with. It's emanating out of China. Perfect.

All kinds of things can happen. Then China hates us now. You know, we're all, everyone's mad at each other. Iran hates us. I mean, North Korea's pretty pissed off too. There's so much shit going on simultaneously, plus natural disasters.

And it's hard to know whether there are more disasters or whether there's more awareness of disasters, right? Like, does our awareness of all these things happening all the time and our obsession with knowing about them and ingesting all of that information constantly, like, you know, again, does it start to manifest because it becomes part of our consciousness?

Like we think, yeah, the world is in constant chaos. These disasters are unfolding. And then, of course, they unfold because, you know, we're all thinking, we're all expecting them. Well, I think that's certainly the issue with social media and the interpretation of the world around us, because the only things that gain any traction are things that are bad. You know, we have in many ways, this ancient tribal mind that focuses on threats and the threats of imminent danger that are specific to where you're living are valid right if you're if you're living in a small tribe and you know that there's another tribe that's about to attack well that's very dangerous if you know there's a storm coming in

it's going to wipe out your island that's very dangerous but if you're in the middle of fucking Kansas in your multimillion dollar bunker condo and some shit's going down in North Korea, like how is that even affecting you? But if you're on Google, it's going to affect you. If you're looking at your Google News feed every day, if you're on Twitter and you're reading about the riots in Portland, you're like, oh, my God, the world's ending. But then you're like, it's like that old Bill Hicks bit. There was a Bill Hicks bit about CNN from, I mean, this is like Bill Hicks wrote this. He did this in like the early 90s. He's like AIDS, war, pit bulls, like all these different things. He goes in, you open up your window, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.

He goes, where the fuck is all this happening? Like Ted Cruz's, or it wasn't Ted Cruz. Who's the guy who owns uh cnn ted the guy who owns the buffaloes the jane fonda's husband i know the wrong the his name man how do we not know his name oh wow no cnn his husband yeah ted turner ted turner he's like ted turner's making this up No. CNN. Jane Fonda's husband, yeah.

Ted Turner. Ted Turner. He's like, Ted Turner's making this shit up. Jane Fonda won't fuck him, and now he wants everybody to die. It was a great Hicks bit from the early, early 90s. But it's kind of the same thing. It's true, though. It's not designed to take in the threats of 7 billion people.

The idea of the internet, the idea of this rapid and instantaneous distribution of information is we get all of the bad news first because you need the bad news. If you said – if I came over your house and I said, hey, man, what's going on? You say, everything's good. I got a birthday cake. We're celebrating. We got this cool craft beer. I got some friends coming over. Oh, and there's a bunch of guys that are plotting to murder us.

Like, hey, why didn't you tell me that first? The murderers, we got to get out of here. We can't drink the craft brew and eat the cake. We got to take care of business. But the problem is that's localized, right? I mean, think about it in the context of the Cold War, right? So the nuclear threat never manifested. I mean, we had some nuclear emergencies at three mile island and chernobyl right but the nuclear threat of attack it's a perfect example because it brought the world together in an instantaneous fashion not instantaneous

but you had a couple minutes right if they launched from soviet union they launched nuclear weapons at us how much time did we have we had had a couple minutes. And so there was this threat. I mean, I'm 52. How old are you? How old am I now? You don't even know how old you are? 39. Jesus Christ, man.

When I was in high school, we were really worried. There was this constant threat of nuclear war with Russia. The Cold War was real. Yeah, I didn't really live through it. We would read stuff or we would see something on the news and go to bed. And I remember being a kid, like 12, 13 years old, thinking, oh, my God, we're going to go to war with Russia. They're going to blow us up. We would watch those videos of the fucking experiments with the atomic bombs in the ocean.

Like, we're going to die. We're going to die. We're going to go to war with Russia. And this is going to be the end of humanity as we know. We know they already did it with Chernobylobyl we know or with uh hiroshima and nagasaki that wasn't that long ago when i was in high school that was 30 years ago like that's not that long you know yeah now i get you did you ever see the the that photo of bikini atol where they they do the nuclear explosion in the ocean and the battleship is being sucked into the

mushroom cloud oh my god it's terrifying they didn't know what that was going to be like either. They thought those battleships were far enough away that they would be okay. Yeah. But, you know, imagine the collective psychological damage that did to everyone on the planet living with that fear. Yeah. And we don't know whether having that fear instilled within us prevented the nuclear war from happening, right? I mean that's the catch-22. Well, I think we're in this stage as human beings where we have this incredible ability to send and receive information,

but we haven't quite caught up yet in terms of our ability to manage that like we we we have this insane unprecedented ability to access and send information it's never existed like this before whether it's and also for everybody right you could you could make a youtube video to you could have 400 fucking youtube subscribers and make a YouTube video tonight that reaches millions of people for whatever reason you send it to me I go holy shit. I sent it to Jamie Jamie sends to his friends I put it up on Twitter some famous person puts it up on their Twitter Twitter and boom boom boom boom boom Next thing you know, it's it's gigantic. It reaches the whole world, but we we don't have an But we don't have an equivalent ability to manage that type of information.

So it's this new thing, but we don't have the tools in terms of the understanding and the psychological preparedness. We don't have the ability to go, okay, but let's look at this in terms of of let's have a perspective that's honest to our environment. Let's have an objective view of this. Let's have a balanced version of this information. Let's look at it in terms of like how we communicate with each other. Instead of going into full-blown panic, let's treat each individual person as a friend and a neighbor, and collectively let's manage this. Because that's what's not happening today. When you look at the riots in Portland or Seattle or any of these things like that,

what's not happening is the one-on-one communication of people who care about each other. What's instead happening is this massive tribal outburst. One tribe wants to take down the government and defund the police and 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. There's a lot of screaming and shouting and a lot of tribal behavior. But there's very little one-. It's a lot of screaming and shouting and a lot of tribal behavior, but there's very little one-on-one recognition of each other's humanity. No, I think you're right. And I think it's because we're all living with dread.

Yeah. You know, that we're like, we're just saturated with dread. You know, it's, I was thinking a lot in this book about the differences between dread and anxiety, right? Like if you're anxious about something, it's specific, right? You're anxious about a particular thing, right? But if you feel dread, it's more of, rather than like an emotion, it's more of an affect, right?

It's just kind of a sense of unease that you live with. And I think we're dreadful about so much right now that it's, you know, we're experiencing a sort of collective psychotic break. And so the inevitable result of that is tribalization. You're like I need to find my community that I can hang with that's going to protect me and we're going to come up with answers to solve this problem. So the preppers are one manifestation of that. come up with answers to solve this problem. So the preppers are one manifestation of that, right? They're like, we're all going to move into our bunker community and we've got our guns,

we've got our supplies and, you know, we're going to ride this thing out. And then these rioters are another community. They're like, we're going to burn this shit down. We're going to start over, you know? And so that tribalization is extremely problematic because as you know, you're right. The conversation we need to be having is a collective conversation about like, what are the threats and how do we address them? And there seems to be a breakdown in our ability to have those conversations. And I have a theory here that I'll try out on you. Okay. I think this actually goes back to the Cold War. Prior to the Cold War, we always had a sense that our government was there to protect us, that our government would protect us.

But once we developed nuclear weapons, I mean it was impossible to shelter everyone from this disaster. I mean I think the early estimates that were given to the Truman administration was that it would be like the GDP of the country for an entire year to build blast shelters for everyone. So instead of doing that, what we know now, and this was a conspiracy theory in the past, what we know now is that the government built bunkers for themselves, but not for us. And a lot of the, you know, if there's a through line there, that if you move from the Cold War into like the age of survivalists, right? Like the 80s when you had Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, right? In his cabin, he's kind of like – he stands as a kind of symbol of this like lone wolf survivalist, right? It's kind of –

Sort of. But anti-government, right? I mean there are other examples. Bo Greitz, the guy who ran for president on the, I think it was on the Libertarian ticket, he built a community called Almost Heaven, where they were, you know, he called it a constitutional community where, like, they were going to stop paying taxes and go off grid. They were going to become self-sustaining, whatever. What you can see with a lot of those survivalists is a sense of betrayal that's manifesting in them wanting to break away from the government and build a new

tribe, right? Because they're like, if you can't protect us, we'll protect ourselves, right? And so now we get to today and we've got 3.7 million Americans identify as preppers now. 7.7 million Americans identify as preppers now. What? They self-identify as preppers, right? And what you hear from a lot of them is this kind of – what we now interpret as a kind of libertarian narrative. It's like, well, I'm just going to take care of myself and my family. You know, it's like I'm just going it on my own.

I don't trust the government. Is that 1%? It's basically in the neighborhood of 1%. It's 1%, yeah. Yeah. I mean it's? I don't care. That's basically in the neighborhood of 1%. It's 1%, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a significant amount of people. I hung out with probably – I went to half a dozen countries. I interviewed maybe 100 people and I was just – I mean I just got to the tip of this thing. Do we have the most?

Oh, for sure. Without a doubt, without a doubt, but countries number two. Okay. But look, if you, if you contrast this to Switzerland, for instance, where they, they did build the bunkers for the entire population, right. For 110% of the population, just in case visitors are in town, the whole country can go underground. Right now? Right now. Still functional? Yeah, totally. Well, you know, I don't know.

Isn't it funny that they're neutral? And they're like, I don't trust anybody. Let's fucking. But that's, I mean, you know, but once you've prepared yourself, you've built your defenses, you're able to do that because you're like, yeah, go ahead and attack. Good luck. Yeah, we should have known from their knives

that they're preparing for things. For sure. You can make a knife with scissors on it and a screwdriver. What are you planning. Yeah. We should have known from their knives that they're preparing for things. For sure. They make a knife with scissors on it and a screwdriver. What are you planning? Yeah. But North Korea is another example. I mean that country is essentially underground. They have fleets of aircraft inside mountains.

I mean they got like – it would actually be incredibly difficult to attack that country because after the Korean War, it was essentially flattened. Right. And they learned from that experience like we've got to go underground if we're going to survive the next war. Do we have an accurate account of what they have? No, not at all. Really? But there's a lot of there's a 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? And it's kind of fun to dig through their website. Because most of it was constructed pre-satellite.

Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah. But there are telltale signs of a bunker. Can you go Google Earth over North Korea? Parts of it, I think. Huh. That's interesting.

Yeah, I think parts of it you can look at. Ultimately, the entire surface of the Earth is going to be mapped out, right? Yeah. I've actually got a friend who's been – he gave a paper at a conference I hosted where he was talking about measuring gravity from space. And basically you could measure the mass or the density of subterranean infrastructures and essentially you could see inside the earth. Whoa. And so he was actually developing a theory for spoofing the gravity measurements. So like you could build a bunker to look like a subterranean river, right? So you look at it from space and you're like, oh, no, that's a geological structure.

Yeah, formation. Because obviously a bunker is pretty obvious if you see a giant square hole. Would it be possible to spoof it by doing something that would offset whatever signal that's giving off? Definitely. Yeah. I think he had three theories for spoofing and that was another one. I don't remember the third one. But, dude, the earth is already Swiss cheese.

There's so much stuff underground. I mean before I worked with Preppers, my previous project was working with urban explorers. I spent 10 years in London breaking into abandoned buildings, construction sites, and subterranean infrastructure. And we started – so we started by opening manholes and getting into the London sewer system, which is quite cool. It's 250 years old. You open a manhole and you climb down a ladder and then you're suddenly in this Victorian infrastructure where there's, I think, 318 million hand-laid bricks, right?

And these beautiful tunnels that stretch down. They're gravity-fed and that's how they're cleaned as well. And they're a combined system. So it's freshwater and sewage. How old are they? These are 1850s. So we went down there because a lot of these used to be subterranean rivers. And we were curious, like what the hell happened to the rivers? Well, they were all turned into sewers. So I know, but the sewers are actually, they're not as bad as they sound. What does that mean?

They're beautiful. They're beautiful. They're beautiful poop streams. I've got photos on my Flickr page and Instagram, whatever. You can go see the sewers in London. That's my photo actually. So that is a sewer in London? How's it smell down there?

That's actually, that's a sewer in Paris. Oh. But that is my photo. Wow, that's it smell down there? That's actually a sewer in Paris. Oh. But that is my photo. Wow, that's you? There's me climbing a crane. Dude, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? I'm climbing a construction crane.

That's terrifying. Do you have a harness on or anything? No. Fuck, bro. Don't die. Dude, this thing. So look at this thing right here. This is a, you know, remember the Concorde jets?

Uh-huh. This is a Concorde jet engine testing facility. And we found this giant abandoned factory where they're producing the Concorde engines and snuck in there. And they later turned that into a set for Stargate. We found like the gate for the Stargate. Really? It slid open. Yeah.

Oh, wow. So that's London. That's a London sewer, but that's a newer one. That's a sewer? Yeah. How does that smell? That's London. That's a London sewer, but that's a newer one. That's a sewer? Yeah. How does that smell? That's fine. What does that mean?

You have a t-shirt on that says, do epic shit? Yeah. That's over Chicago. Wow. You take some cool photography. Thanks. What are you using for these photographs? At the time, I was shooting on a Canon 5 5d mark 3 but you know yeah basically i had

a big dslr now i've got a mirrorless camera but they're all they're all tripod shots that's the queen mary that's amazing these are crazy pictures is this um in one of those books that you get you gave me yeah so i gave you two books i gave you subterranean london and london rising and basically that's a span of 10 years from like 2008 to 2018 something like that um where we were sneaking into all of these places we were trespassing and taking photos that was like so these urban explorers uh they're interested in like they see the city as kind of like an operating system, right? Like it's supposed to function in a certain way. And they were interested in disrupting that operating system and trying to sort of like get to the code behind the city. Like we want to see the wires. We want to see the tunnels.

Right. We want to see the construction sites. We want to see how all this shit is functioning. How does the sewage work? Yeah, exactly. When you flush your toilet, where does it go? Right. And we figured it out.

Yeah, exactly. When you flush your toilet, where does it go? Right. And we figured it out. I went underneath my own house and followed the pipe that came from my house into a sewer that went to an interceptor sewer that went to a pumping station. I walked the whole thing. It was super fascinating to actually figure out how it functioned, right? So after 10 years of doing this, I now have this map of London in my head that is in three dimensions, right? I now have this map of London in my head that is in three dimensions, right?

So underneath the sewers, you had utility tunnels. So gas, electricity, telecommunications. What is happening there? Water. You're coming from a bar? That's me coming out of a manhole into an electricity tunnel. Oh. Yeah. That's the electricity tunnel under London?

Yeah. Well, there's tons of them. So you could just get in there and just fucking chop at those wires if you wanted to? Oh, well. You could do some damage. Isn't that weird? It's really weird. Like someone could just leave a bomb there.

Yeah. Right? And what occurred to me over and over again as we were sneaking into these places is that it was really easy. over and over again as we were sneaking into these places is that it was really easy. And so, 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. And then, you know, we're going out like, you know, a bunch of 20-year-olds with some keys that we bought on Amazon and just opening everything up and going into it. Right. And I don't know, it just it made me feel like I was being lied to.

When you're talking to all that wasn't what was promised. When you talk to all these prepper folks, how concerned are they about the power grid and how many of them believe that the future is going to be being autonomous, having some sort of autonomous power supply, whether it's wind or solar? to be being autonomous, having some sort of autonomous power supply, whether it's wind or solar? Well, that's a strong narrative, right? That the way we prep now, we couldn't have prepped 10 years ago because technology is facilitating it, right? We've got solar panels.

We've got battery backup systems. We've got ways of going off-grid, becoming self-sufficient that we didn't have before. off-grid, becoming self-sufficient that we didn't have before. A lot of preppers that I talk to are really concerned about a CME, a coronal mass ejection, a plasma burp from the sun. Which happens. It happens all the time. Yeah.

The northern lights, the aurora borealis, is coming from the sun. It's hitting the magnetic field around the earth and it's creating those lights. So in 1898, there was an event called the Carrington event where there was a massive solar burp. And this CME burned out telegraph lines in Canada and people in the Caribbean were seeing the Borealis. Whoa. Yeah. In New York City, apparently people were reading the newspaper in the middle of the night by the lights that were in the sky. So what the preppers were telling me and actually what I end up reading later in both Ted Koppel's book, Lights Out, and also in this book by

Toby Ord at the University of Oxford called The Precipice, is that if we had a Carrington size event today, we'd be fucked. It would burn out all of our transformers, right? We could lose electricity, gas pumps, ATMs, refrigeration, medical equipment, and our vehicles. I mean there's a long list of things that could get totally torched by one of these things. And the most concerning of that list are the transformers because they take a couple of years to build. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, they're really complicated.

And of course, like everything else, we've offshored their production. So, you know, when we get hit with that CME and all the transformers are burned out and then we call China on what? We telegraph them or whatever. However we get in touch and we say, hey, we're going to need 20,000 transformers. And they say, well, actually, we kind of like you being in the dark ages over there. We might just not ship those. Well, that's also medical supplies as well. When we found out how much of our medicine is actually being produced in China, that was terrifying.

Yeah. Because a lot of it you couldn't get in the beginning of the pandemic because of a supply chain problem. But that's what I was talking about with, you know, we created COVID's pathways. Right. Right. Like we are creating our own vulnerabilities. And this is something that we've always done since the advent of nuclear weapons. Right. Like we're creating these threats for ourselves. And it's usually in the name of economics. It's like, well, we have to make this more efficient. We got to make it cheaper. We got to offshore it. And we need to go the other way. And I think this is,

it's strangely one of the few things that Trump and Biden both agree on, right? Yeah, the resistance of it is the worry that people are going to be xenophobic, right? That's the resistance. The resistance is, hey, we should trade with these other communities and these other cultures and countries. But the reality is if something happens and we can't get a hold of anybody that's on the other side of the ocean, we need medicine. We need a lot of electronic supplies. Like how about the fact that we all have phones?

Everyone in this country has a phone. None of them are made here. That is crazy. It is crazy. I mean, we obviously have a good supply of them here. I mean, crazy it is crazy it's great i mean we obviously have a good supply of them here i mean if the shit hit the fan we'd probably hold up for a year or two but how long would it take before we can manufacture our own cell phone here in the united states and be self-sustaining do we even have the minerals do we even have the the essential minerals that you need to lithium ion all the shit that you need to make cell phones i mean all the

the different uh coltan all the all the all the different things that they need to make a lot of the electronics that we find essential for our daily lives do we have those here can we get that we can't even get them out of the ground it's of the things that we're doing in Afghanistan is extracting lithium and many valuable minerals. It's one of the things they're doing in the Congo right now as well. Vice has covered that. Coltrane, right? Isn't that what it's called? That shit, they're literally –

Yeah, I've seen those lines of miners going down into the pits and passing buckets up. What's fucked is they're doing it with sticks in a lot of places. So you're going from sticks, digging into the ground, pulling out these minerals, pulling out these elements. And then it goes into the most complicated electronics the world's ever known. You're carrying these things around in your pocket. And if you could trace it back that would be a fascinating documentary like if someone even a short one like a 10 minute documentary from the moment a stick goes into the ground breaks off the mineral where

the mineral goes you're taking these guys in africa that essentially they're not slaves but they don't have a lot of other options i mean mean, they're kind of in a slavery-like situation that those minerals go. Eventually they go to China. They get brought to these places like Foxconn where they're manufactured into this, put into these cell phones in these buildings where these people are working 16, 17 hours a day, living in dormitories where the system is so fucked up, they have nets around the building to keep people from committing suicide because it's so common. And then it goes from there to Tim Cook, and he's doing this presentation, smiling, and then it goes to Palo Alto with these kids like, oh my god, you have the iPhone 12? It's amazing.

The new Zoom, the nighttime feature. And this is where we are. What is that? Oh, there is a documentary. Blood in the Mobile. There you go. Blood in the Mobile. 74% like this movie.

The other 26% were shitting their pants. Filmmaker directly connects cell phone purchases to the Civil War in the Congo through conflict minerals. Conflict minerals. Oh, my God. It's 10 years old. It's on YouTube, too. It's on YouTube, too. It's from Denmark.

Blood in the mobile. Well, there you go. A lot of my ideas suck. They're not bad ideas, but they're already been done. Let's go to the other end of it. Have you ever been to 35th Street in Manhattan? Yes. Where they're breaking down all the electronics?

So 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, TV, cell phones, whatever. And they're taking it all apart and trying to get those minerals out of them, right? So it's like a kind of not recycling but reuse of some of these things. Deconstruction. Yeah. I met this amazing artist, James Bothorp, a couple of years back. And he had this crazy idea. He said, I want to go to 35th Street and just gather shit from the street and build a boat from it.

Like whatever he could just cull, you know. Like whatever he could just cull, you know. And then he wanted to take it to the source of the Hudson at Lake Tier of the Clouds and paddle the boat back to 35th Street and then put it in a dumpster and fly back to England. That dude needs a better hobby. He did it. Why would he do that? He did it, dude. It seems like a waste of time. Well, you know.

Paddling? Does he know about engines? It was a commentary on reuse and recycling and waste. But why would he put it in a dumpster after he's done? He had a perfectly good boat. It's true, yeah. Go fishing with that thing. Just left it there.

But I went with him for the last week of the thing, and it was fucking hilarious. He was just constantly sinking. Like, at first we were trying to bail out his boat because we had, like, I was in the safety boat, and we're going alongside him going alongside him and I'm trying to like bail out his boat with a cup because everything that we were using had to be found. So I'd like found this like broken big gulp cup from 7-Eleven and I was like trying to bail his boat out. How come they couldn't seal it properly?

Well he tried but it just he got tired you know he was paddling all day and then he would get out at night and then he had to find the shit to fix the boat. So he had to go find some kind of sealant or find a piece of styrofoam to keep it floating or whatever. That's it right there? Oh, no, that's not it.

Not it? That's a – I think that was – Setting off his homemade boat from Red Hook. I think that was a previous iteration of the project and then he was kind of refined it. That's a weird project, man. Yeah, it was a previous iteration of the project, and then he was kind of refined it. That's a weird project, man. Yeah, it was a really weird project. And what's even weirder is he decided to do it in the middle of winter. So in the beginning, he was like breaking through the ice at the source of the Hudson to get this homemade boat through the thing. But we had some hairy moments in that week.

What's going on in that guy's personal life? Like we had some hairy moments in that week. What's going on in that guy's personal life? Well, now he has a kid and his partner is like, you're never doing anything like that again. Yeah, that seems like there's probably a distraction element there in his actions. Yeah. He's probably distracting himself from some other things. But I really admire his, you know, ability to take on that notion of kind of reuse and waste and what should be done with all these materials.

Yeah, well, we certainly have an issue with that. I mean, we certainly have an issue with landfills. Our solution is stuff those things into the ground. And the real problem with landfills is we talk about the release of greenhouse gases into the environment and the negative effect it has. One of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases is landfills. I mean, they're finding when they did this, they did sort of a survey of the, 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 see okay what where are these gases coming from and what's the the primary source of these gases and they thought there would be they thought it would be uh cattle ranches you know that these cattle were giving off methane and they found out, no, it doesn't even compare to landfills. Like landfills are just a disaster because it's all this biodegradable shit that's stacked on top of each other and it's just rotting. So it's rotting in this one area concentrated and it just goes up up into the sky yeah we've got a family member that actually works he does environmental monitoring for landfills and he yeah he was telling me that um uh they got a call at some point in this one landfill that that there was a

it was it was smoking and so he drives over the landfill and sure enough like all of the 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. Yeah. And so he had to inject something into the landfill to basically put out this subterranean fire, right? And if there's any better indication of how we fucked everything up, it's a subterranean fire of waste. Yeah. Well, waste is a great method of destruction. And it actually, you can take that back to the Native Americans.

They would do buffalo jumps, you know, buffalo jumps. And when they would corral these buffalo and chase them off the side yeah buffalo jumps yeah and when they would they would corral these buffalo and chase them off the side of a cliff and when they would land in these great big piles they would rot and then they would they would combust they would just burst into flames it's i don't understand the 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 and they would burst into flames. And so a lot of these cliff sides where these buffalo jumps are scarred and charred

with just blackened soot and everything from these buffalo just eventually catching on fire because they have no preservation back then other than drying it. And when you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of buffalo, really there's not much they can do to preserve all the meat. So there's a tremendous amount of waste involved in this method of hunting. It's definitely a myth that Native Americans were at one with their environment. It's definitely a myth that Native Americans were at one with their environment. They weren't having – I mean they were – when you need to eat, you're going to drive 100 buffalo off a cliff.

And you might only use three of them. There's two ways of looking at that though. You could say, oh, it's very wasteful. But also animals have to eat too. Coyotes have to eat. Bacteria has to eat. Nothing really goes to waste. Yeah, you think if coyotes couldn't figure out how to how to corral those buffalo off the cliff they wouldn't do it they certainly would

but they the thing is that it is wasteful in terms of the human being killing the animal do they use all that animal no they don't but i think native americans looked at it very differently than we did i think they had a greater understanding of this whole cycle of life. And even if you leave, if they shot a buffalo and they took whatever meat that they could carry and left the rest of it there, hundreds of pounds of meat, that meat would feed so many different animals, so many bacteria. It would eventually go into the ground and feed the soil. Some bacteria, it would eventually go into the ground and feed the soil. It's only wasteful in terms of the direct relationship between the person that killed the buffalo and did they consume that buffalo. But any animal that gets killed in the wild does not go to waste.

If someone shoots a deer and maybe they hit it and it only hits one lung and this deer can go a mile and then dies and they can't find it. Well, they wasted that deer. Well, the person who shot that deer does not get to eat that deer. That is a problem, but it's not a problem in terms of the wild. The wild will consume that deer 100%. There is no question whatsoever. There is no waste. It will find a way to not only the soil will absorb it, animals will find it, crows will circle. And that's one of the ways people find carcasses is like birds circling

over carcasses. You know, that's how you felt like if someone's looking for someone that like went missing, that's one of the things they look for. They look for buzzards or crows or birds flying in the air. So these American Indians that did this, in our eyes, they wasted all those animals. But in their eyes, probably not. They probably looked at it like we're staying alive and the great earth has a use for all this. It's going to figure out a way to make all this. It's going to feed something. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. I think we just have this idea that, like, if you shoot an animal, you should eat that whole animal, and you definitely should. But their idea was this. I mean, we have to think. I mean, I got really, really obsessed with Native Americans over the last, like, year. And I read seven or eight books on them. seven or eight books on them.

And what the world was like before the European settlers came was this spectacular but incredibly brutal environment. These tribes, what they did to each other was fucking horrific. And there was no quarter given. There was no surrender. No one ever surrendered. That's the thing about the tribes, Indians, that the Europeans couldn't understand. They fought to the death because they knew that if they were captured in their world, if a tribe was captured, they were tortured to death in the most horrific way. So they knew that that was coming. And they wanted, they gave no quarter and asked for

no quarter. They fought to the death. And it was something that the early American pioneers and soldiers found incredibly remarkable. They're like, these people, there's no, there's no give up in them at all. Like they thought of these encounters as a fight to the death always. Either they retreated or they fought to the death. There was never surrender. There was no white flags. They didn't even understand the concept of it.

Cannibalism was rampant. I mean it was multiple tribes, different tribes all across the country. I mean there's different tribes. The Nez, whether it was, I mean, there's different tribes. The Nez Perce had a history of this. A bunch of different tribes who ate each other. They would kill other tribes and eat them. I mean, it wasn't what they primarily ate, but it wasn't uncommon.

Yeah, because there was a sense that if you ingested somebody's body, you would also ingest some of their power, right? Yeah, there's a lot of craziness to that. There was one story about this guy who was in love with this woman. And he killed her husband and ate her and then married or killed her husband, ate him and then married her. Wow. I mean, it's interesting to think about like here's a thought experiment, right? If we know that we know that that that war wasn't won by soldierly techniques, right? It was won by disease. Some of it was. But but they I mean, the up until the Comanches, it was it was catastrophic for Native Americans, right? The disease that ravaged all these

communities. I mean, you can actually see it. There was something on the BBC recently that you can actually see a change in the climate based on how many people were exterminated, mostly by disease, when Europeans arrived in North America. Like 90%. Yeah, 90% of the population.

So, I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would have happened if the disease wasn't a factor, right? Would that war have just raged on for, you know, forever? Perhaps. Would they have carved out? I mean, but I don't know. What really changed it, though, was the Colt revolver and then the repeating rifle. than the repeating rifle.

Those two things changed it incredibly because the barrier between Western settlers and conquering the West was the Comanche because they were the first tribe that really understood warfare on horseback, which is kind of ironic because they didn't, like the horses were introduced into North America by the Europeans, but they used to be native to North America. Horses were introduced into North America by the Europeans, but they used to be native to North America.

Horses were actually – they originated in North America and then – But they were exterminated here, right? Yes. They were – we don't know why. We don't know what happened. And this is part of the hypothesis that goes along with the extinction event that happens somewhere around where these core samples indicate that there's asteroidal impacts. It's really fascinating stuff. And there's a great – well, there's a bunch of great books on it.

But there's a guy named Dan Flores who wrote about all these different – he wrote a great book about the coyotes too called Coyote America. He wrote a great book about the coyotes, too, called Coyote America. But he wrote about how all these Native American horses were eventually – they found their way to Europe. They found their way to Asia. And so like all the Mongols, the steppe tribes, all the ones that – the road horseback, those horses originated from Native America. But then they were exterminated here some way. They don't exactly know how. But then reintroduced by the Europeans. here some way. They don't exactly know how, but then reintroduced by the Europeans. Then the Native Americans started taking over the horses and figuring out how to do combat on horses.

And they figured out how to do it far better than the Europeans and independent of the Europeans, independent of even the Asians. Like the Mongols in the 1200s had spectacular horse riding abilities and the ability to fight off horseback. But Native Americans appear to have figured out how to do it independently. Because the people who introduced the horses here, the Europeans didn't know how to do it. So they didn't know how to fight off horses, they would get off their horse to shoot their musket. And the Native Americans would run up on them and fill them full of arrows, because they figured out how to shoot literally an arrow a second. They had this spectacular technique of holding their arrows in their fingers.

So they would have their left hand where they were holding the bow, and they would hold their arrows in their fingers, and just one after the other. They had like a fistful of arrows. And just go one arrow, two arrows, three arrows, four arrows. And they would just shoot like an arrow a second, while these poor bastards from 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. It's really crazy shit. God, can you imagine the panic as you're trying to stuff the powder and stuff the ball? And then you know they're going to scalp you too. So they killed, they literally, they couldn't get past the Comanches because the Comanches were the ones who figured out how to do this. And they were a nomadic, really primitive tribe with very little artwork, no songs, no stories. They only ate meat.

They lived off of buffalo, and they took over a giant chunk of the West all through Texas, Oklahoma. That was all the Comanche. And everyone was terrified of them. What's really crazy is Mexico set up the settlers. There's a fantastic book about it called Empire of the Summer Moon. But Mexico set up the settlers. They said, hey, my friend, come live over here. We'll give you plenty of land. They wanted a buffer between them and the Comanche. So they allowed all these people to think it was okay to build these settlements. And they built these settlements and the Comanche slaughtered everybody. And then they had to figure it out.

Like, holy fuck, this is a dangerous goddamn place. Because they were used to these East Coast agrarian Native Americans. These ones who like they had set up agriculture and they didn't ride on horseback. They didn't do battle on horseback. They did everything on foot. And the Comanche were doing everything off of horseback and they had thousands of horses and all of their wealth was determined by how many horses you had. And so they were this incredibly warlike tribe that everyone was terrified of. All the other tribes are terrified of them. And they dominated this one chunk of the country and no one can get past them. They

literally couldn't get through them. It's amazing history. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible to think about what we never really perceive are all of the political factions, right? And the nuances and all the difficulties, because we tend to think about it in these kind of, again, these binary terms, right? It's like, oh, the settlers are coming in and they have opposition from Native Americans. But of course, they were all at war with each other and they had different alliances and,

you know, things were shifting. I mean, I think that's where the archaeological record is really interesting because it starts to reveal these things. But it also reveals more mystery, right? Like there are things that we dig up that we can't explain, right? And there's no oral history for it. There are things that we dig up that we can't explain, right? Like what?

There's no oral history for it. Well, I'm thinking of – I went to this site in the Yucatan, Tulum. Have you been there? I've been to Yucatan. Yeah. I've been to Chichen Itza. Oh, cool. Fuck.

So Tulum is on the coast, like just over from Chichen Itza. And what you find are these like incredibly elaborate structures that are built there. But then just at the end of this, whatever this place was in this Maya settlement, they started building this really janky wall around the thing. You know, and it's like it doesn't conform to everything else that's happening on that site. And we don't know. And these people disappeared. We don't know. And these people disappeared. We don't know what happened to them, right? But one of the theories that I heard is that it was a virus, right? That the – it was disease, right?

And if you don't know what it is, what do you do? You're like, well, something is attacking us. We're building a wall. These people showed up and we're not – and so that's one interpretation. But I thought about this with the bunker builders too, right? That like all of these factions and nuances and people with different ideas about how to combat the dread that we're all feeling right now. And then if you were like, if you were an archaeologist in 100 years, and you excavated some of these bunker sites, you would find these, I mean, incredibly different sites, you know, places where people are growing, where they're building

kind of off-grid communities, places with sniper posts, and then you would find these subterranean condominiums, and then you would find, you know, the shipping containers filled with Bible buckets, whatever, right? You'd have all these different iterations of people responding to the current situation. And I guess that's like I always kind of held this in my mind as I was touring all of these doomsday communities, right? Is that there's like there's a future interpretation of these that I'm elucidating now, right? Because a lot of these communities don't like let people in, you know, they don't want people telling these stories, right? So it did feel like I was writing

through a historical moment. And that's before the pandemic, right? Like I started this book in 2017. By the time the pandemic hit, I mean, some of the quotes in the book were utterly prophetic. I mean, actually disturbing. I had – I interviewed this guy in West Virginia at a place called Fortitude Ranch, Drew Miller. He's got a PhD from Harvard, super smart guy. And his plan is that he's going to build a kind of a bunch of retreats around the country. And so you buy into the idea of Fortitude Ranch, like a timeshare. And then if a crisis hits, you can retreat to any of his sort of campuses, you know.

And I sat down with him to have lunch at one point. And he said to me, you know, what people don't understand is that we're overdue for a pandemic. And when I was editing the book, I had forgotten this quote, right? And I saw it again. I went, holy shit. And then I met this other woman in Tennessee that runs a survivalist store out there. And they've got like space in the in Smoky Mountains National Park, that they would retreat to where they're, they're planting secret groves in the forests out there so they can like retreat to their fruit trees if things go wrong. Not so secret now. Well, yeah.

And she told me – I know all the park rangers are going to be out there. Where the hell is that orange tree? But she told me at one point she said, you know, 2020 is going to be a wild ride. Buckle up. You know what I kept reading these quotes as I was editing the book. I was like, God, this is so weird. It feels like I've never, I've studied history. I've studied archeology. I've never had a sense of living through a historical moment quite in this way. Right. A lot of this are experiencing this in the midst of the pandemic. Like we know people are going to be, I mean, if we still exist in a hundred years, we're going to be writing about this and thinking about this and interpreting it.

In more ways than one, right? Yeah. But I mean, just civil unrest. Oh yeah. There's so much going on. And then the Pentagon saying they've recovered UFOs. Oh God. Do you read all that?

That's terrifying. They've recovered crafts, in quotes, not of this world. Yep. What? Yeah. Which is fucking bonkers. That's where we're going next.

That is where we're going next. I wonder why they're saying that to us. I wonder if they're preparing us for some inevitable encounter and they want to give us a slow drip of information to get us accustomed to the idea so that we don't go into full shock. Because obviously this pandemic has thrown us into a lot of shock. George Floyd's murder brought us into a higher level of shock, it appears, because of civil unrest and this demand for a change in our culture and the way we communicate with each other and the way law enforcement works and the way government works. There's so much chaos right

now and there's so much division. Then, boom, aliens. I mean, it just seems like the nuttiest fucking year of all time. Yeah. I mean, we were all sort of preparing for the election before this happened. Popular Mechanics. Pentagon has off-world vehicles not made on this earth. That is a quote from the Pentagon. That is fucking bananas. I spoke to Commander Fravor on this podcast, who was the – is he an Air Force pilot? Air Force or Navy? I think it's Air Force pilot.

Fighter pilot who chased this Tic Tac UFO. Oh, the one that was moving erratically? It went from 60,000 feet to one feet above the surface of the ocean in a second. They have no idea what the fuck it is. U.S. Navy pilot. He came on the podcast and described it. This rock solid individual, military man, lifelong, totally trustworthy, has no other history of crazy stories. This was this is they tracked it on their weapon systems.

They found this thing doing things that defied the laws of physics and their understanding of propulsion systems they're like what is this and then the people in the navy were saying we've been seeing these things like every couple weeks we don't know what they are so when they scrambled this jet and these these other jets came back to support him they were all trying to decipher this they're like what is this like what are what are we dealing with? And this was, what is it, 2007 when that happened? 2004? So he's been, you know, holding on to this information, trying to figure it out for 16 years.

And, you know, people kind of laughed and made fun of him, but there was no other stories like this from him. And then there was some stories from the East Coast. And then a couple of years ago, the New York Times released a story about these things, these credible accounts of UFOs. And now finally, the Pentagon's like, yep, I don't know what to tell you. Well, check this out. Larry Hall, the guy that was building that underground condo in Kansas, he's now building a second one, by the way. I asked him how he made the decision to dump $10 million into this thing.

Is that just a business plan? Did he model that out? And he said, oh, no. It turns out he used to be a contractor for the Department of Defense, and he was working on projects for them. And he said, I saw some things when I was working there that made me very uncomfortable, and that's why I'm building the bunker. And I heard that from more than one prepper.

I mean, there were a lot of people that I encountered who had worked for the government, either directly or as contractors, who had seen things that disturbed them, that caused them to start prepping. And so I did want, I mean, at the beginning of this project, it was like, you know, it seemed like it just seemed interesting culturally. Like they're kind of kooky and weird and fun. And, you know, I want to get to know these people and know

what makes them tick. And by the end of it, I was severely disturbed., because they, they, they do seem credible to me, you know, and it makes, it forces you to reinterpret what they're doing as, as rational, right. And like, these are, I kept saying to people, these are, these are rational people responding to an irrational world. Like the problem is not them and what they're doing. The problem is the context in which is driving them to. Well, the problem is our interpretation of them, right? The problem is this knee jerk reaction where we want to generalize and put people in this category. Oh, you're a prepper. Oh, I know what you are. Well, you're not just a human being. You're not nuanced. You're not a unique individual with your own ideas and life experiences. No, you're a prepper. Put you in that box. Oh, you're a prepper. Put you in that box.

Oh, you're a Trump supporter. Put you in that box. Oh, you think Biden should be president no matter what? Let me put you in that box. There's things that we do with people because it's too hard to really have an open mind and not take into account all the various possibilities of behavior and ideas that you could expect from a person. So it's this really normal thing that we do when we generalize. And we like to do that. It makes the world simpler for us.

We like things binary, one or zero. We like good or bad. We like that. Prepper, oh, look at this dummy. Meanwhile, they write about a lot of shit. And if that guy really did work for the Department of Defense and really did see some things We like that. Prepper, oh, look at this dummy. Meanwhile, they write about a lot of shit. And if that guy really did work for the Department of Defense and really did see some things when it comes to UFOs, like Bob Lazar, who's another guy who's been on this podcast, he's the guy that in 1989 did this story with George Norrie in Las Vegas where it was an investigative report where he said, listen, I work for Area S4. I was back engineering UFOs. I was a nuclear physicist for Los Alamos Labs,

and they hired me to go to Nevada. They flew me out to the middle of the fucking desert to work on something that's not from this planet. And they were like, oh, you're so crazy. That's so crazy. That's so ridiculous. Meanwhile, 30 years later, Bob Lazar just put up a post on his Instagram. Go to United Nuclear Bob, his Instagram.

This guy has been dealing with this story and this ridicule of the story for 30 plus years. And people said he's crazy. Like the government does not have UFOs. They don't have something that came from another planet. That's crazy. How would you keep that a secret? But this guy's been talking about it forever. There he is right there.

Finally, after waiting 30 years, the government admits to possessing alien craft. Time will tell what happens next. Personally, I doubt they will disclose much more. And wouldn't be surprised if they issue a correction and say their statement was an error. In any case, I never thought I'd see this day. Thanks so much to all of you that supported me throughout these years.

On another note, this is the only social media account I have. No Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. There are apparently lots of imposters out there. So he's UnitedNuclearBob on Instagram. And I went to dinner with him, and then I had him on my podcast. I talked to him for three hours, and I found him eerily credible. His story has never changed over 30 years. He's been telling the exact same story.

I can't say that. I know things that have happened for true, that 100% no lies at all that i was a part of that i can't tell you 30 years ago i can't i'm not good at i mean i'll fuck it up oh yeah mike said that oh oh yeah i forgot that happened first i would fuck up the order of events he's been insanely consistent and he's legitimately really intelligent like when you talk to him he's he's a absolute comprehensive understanding of science and of elements. And one of the things he talked about in 1989 was this thing called element 115 that back then was really only theoretical. They didn't even know element

113 or 115 rather was real until 2013. 2013, a particle collider detected it. So they proved that it's an actual real thing. He was talking about a stable version of Element 115 that they use to bend gravity and propel these vehicles. He described how the Tic Tac UFO that Fravor saw in 2014 worked. He said it would turn sideways and then jut off at insane rates of speed. That's exactly what Fravor said. They have video of these things doing this. They have the tracking systems of these fighter jets trying to explain what these things are and why they move the way they move. Well, this guy's been talking about it since 1989. It's bonkers, man.

It is bonkers. 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. That was their statement. Like maybe they're fucking with us. Maybe they said that because they want to influence the election. Maybe they said that because they want to take our attention. Maybe like, hey, what's the best way to stop all this fucking chaos and all this global unrest, all this civil unrest that you're seeing with people trying to burn down courthouses? How about we tell them the aliens are coming?

Yeah, that's classic Orwell, right? Like you create the other over here and then everyone consolidates to confront that thing. I would be lying if I said I understood any of how they operate or how they disseminate information or why they do it and why they do it in the order they do it. But if I was in charge, if I was Trump, I'd make a fucking press conference about the aliens. I'd tell everybody, please settle down. They're coming, baby. I mean, he did a thing with his son. It's really weird. It's like one of those weird interview shows

it's clunky it's clunky in a few ways his son interviewed him on YouTube and it's clunky because his son's not that good at it and it's clunky because they have this strange relationship where you know his dad's the president

and he clearly has a great reverence and respect for his dad. So there's not a balanced conversation. But when they're talking about UFOs, he says, I've seen some very interesting things, but he wouldn't talk about it. Have you ever read The Black Swan? No. It's a great book by – I think his name is Taleb. This is a great book by – I think his name is Taleb.

I mean basically his theory is that human beings spend all of our time justifying things that have already happened and sort of explaining them away. But those things before they happened were totally unexpected. So he calls them black swan events. Is this Nassim Taleb? Yeah, that's right. OK. Yeah. Yeah, I know who that guy is. Yeah. this Nassim Taleb? Yeah, that's right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know who that guy is. Yeah. So. Mathematician, right?

Yeah. He's a mathematician. Yeah. Yeah. So he has this theory that, you know, we kind of, unexpected events are inevitable, right? When they happen, we're all shocked by them. Cue the pandemic, for instance, right? And then afterwards we say, actually, we knew this was coming. We can totally explain this. And then we always make the mistake of preparing for the disaster that's already happened. I mean, that's just human nature, right? As you think, well, how do we fix the thing we just dealt with, right?

Rather than thinking about how do we prepare for the impossible thing that's coming next? I don't know how we get people to do that collectively or even push the government in that direction, you know, to think about the possibility of an EMP and these transformers being burned out or to think about like what the social, political, economic, you know, fallout is from alien contact. I mean, how do you even start to work through those things? I mean, how do you even start to work through those things? And when you do, inevitably, people say, you're a conspiracy theorist. You're crazy. You can't talk about it. You can't go down that road, right? But what's the harm in just running the thought experiment?

The harm is ridicule. And just modeling it out. Well, people are scared of ridicule because it can be devastating to your career. I mean, if you're not self-sustaining, if you're not autonomous, right? If you have some real connection to an institution and your reputation relies on the respect and trust of your peers and you say something that's really outside the norm and you can just – if there's some sort of a conflict, an additional conflict regarding your work, they can just dismiss you based on that. It's very dangerous. It's very dangerous to say things. If you have any other, if you have a job where maybe you work for a university but you don't have tenure,

if you write for a newspaper and there's a lot of woke people that also write for that newspaper. And they're very critical of the way you dismiss certain things that are taken into just part of the cultural zeitgeist today. It's real dangerous because in this day and age, everybody's fucking scared. And people will turn on you. And if they turn on you, it can be devastating to your career. You know, and sometimes people will say certain things that are controversial. And that would be the end. That would be the end of all their hard work. And there's other people that relish in that.

They relish in dismissing you by one particular misstep or one controversial perspective, whether it's about aliens or viruses or masks or the immune system or politics or anything or the fake news, whatever the fuck it is. It's like people are always looking to step on the other person that's climbing up. It's crabs in a bucket. Instead of uniting and sort of working it out together and embracing the ethic of community and of understanding and of compassion and companionship and the fact that we're all – we really – we should be very rarely attacking and almost always trying to understand each individual perspective.

And we don't do that right now. We're scared. There's just social media has put us into this weird position where it's so easy to attack, so easy to be attacked, and so attractive to pile on. And one of the reasons why people pile on is because you want to identify yourself as the tribe that's in the good on the right side. And therefore, you stand up and jump in, jump into the fray when you see anybody stepping out of line. Even if they're stepping out of line with something that will, in history and in the future, point to an actual perspective that's pretty reasonable.

In the time, it's not. In the time, reasonable perspectives right now are very dangerous if they are not in the norm. If they're not what we consider to be this conglomeration of opinions that you have to have and you have to project. And so there's a lot of people right now that are terrified. Because of these newfound tools and this newfound, like this is the real downside of cancel culture, right? There's a lot of people that will secretly talk to you and they'll say, look, I can't say this publicly but I completely agree with you. And you're very brave telling the truth. But I have to protect myself.

I have a family. I have this. I have that. My job at this and that. And once I'm free, then I'm going to be honest. But right now I can't jump in. We're dealing with a lot of that right now. No, you're absolutely right.

And I mean I'm an academic. I deal with this. I'm based at University College Dublin. You know, I have to be careful about what I say. But at the same time, because I do ethnographic research, because, you know, from the Greek, I'm a culture writer, right? Like I'm writing about other people's perspectives, fundamentally. And that does act as an effective shield, to be able to, you know, spend time with people to be empathetic to their views. You know, anthropologists have a long history of this, of hanging out with people that are committing infanticide, or murder, or cannibalism, or whatever, and saying, look,

this is their culture. This is what's happening. You know, if you don't agree with it, that's fine. But, you know, I'm just I'm passing on. I'm documenting and I'm passing on the information and we can we can debate it in a different forum. You know, the work that I've done in the past, particularly with the urban explorers, has got me into a lot of trouble. I mean I got arrested. All of the people that I worked with ended up getting arrested because the police got my fucking notes. And I mean it was a terrible –

How did the police get your notes? It was a terrible situation. Well, I – so we – I was going out with these urban explorers into all of this subterranean infrastructure underneath London. And after we went into those sewer systems, then we got into electricity tunnels. Then we started getting into bunkers. How illegal is this stuff? These are like layers under the city. So imagine there's like five layers under the city, right?

So we go from those sewers to the electricity tunnels to the infrastructural systems to the bunkers. And then we started getting into what are called deep level systems, right? And they're very similar to the bunkers that the US government is building here that they called DUMs, deep underground military bases, right? We started getting into like serious critical infrastructure. Like, at some point... How easy was it to get into those? It took us years. It took us years. It was quite a lot of research.

But I mean, at some point we got into what are called the BT deep level tunnels, British telecommunications deep level tunnels. And we were like inside the telecommunications trunk for all of the United Kingdom, you know. And at this point we're like, you know, 100 feet underground, 120 feet underground. We were actually, we were walking through this tunnel about, you know, about 100 feet underground. And one of the explorers I was with is like, there's a manhole above us.

I was like, what do you mean there's a manhole above us? We're in the deepest level right now. And we pop this manhole and a camera swivels and stares at us. Like, oh, God. And then we realized we were into some critical shit. What was it? It was just telecommunication hubs, right? So what was it?

It was just telecommunication hubs, right? It's just like the trunk of all of the infrastructure for fiber optics and phone lines. And they just have an exposed manhole cover and a tunnel that you can get to. Dude, we wiggled through like – we wiggled from tunnel to tunnel like through tiny crevices. We were getting into like the deep underbelly of the city. I mean it was not easy to get to. But here's the city. I mean, it was not easy to get to. But here's the thing. At the same time, we had been cracking all of the abandoned tube stations, metro stations in London, right?

So we took a map of the tube from 1932. And we set a map from 2008 on top of it. And what you see are a bunch of stations that are no longer on the map, right? That's your first clue. So there were like 40 some. Then we started doing research and we figured out that there's got to be at least 14 stations that still have like ticket offices or platforms. Like there's something there that you could find. So we started sneaking into the tube to go and find these places. Like we would wait till the train stopped at 2 in the morning and then we would like climb up a bridge and get onto the tracks and we'd run through the tunnels. And we were finding these stations one after another. Incredible time capsules, you know, where there were artifacts left behind, posters. Like we'd find tickets on the ground that were 40 years old, you know.

I mean really cool stuff. A lot of these stations were bombed out during World War II. But finding these is like, again, this kind of like, here's the archaeologists in me, right? Like we were having this visceral connection to history. We were finding this stuff that was giving us like a real sense of being inside history in material terms. So we're posting every time we crack one of these stations, we post it on our blogs like, oh, we've, you know, we've cracked Mark Lane, we've cracked down street, we've cracked whatever.

And we're all excited about it. And, and like the windows narrowing and we've, we get, 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? The British Transport Police. And kind of know where we're going to go next because there's only a few stations left. So we stop posting stuff. And on Christmas of 2012, we cracked the last station underneath the British museum, which like there's all sorts of cool stories about like there was a, there was a ghost in here.

It's a haunted station and whatever, but we did it and we never got caught. So for me, this is the end of the research project. Is there a fear of being like retroactively prosecuted for this stuff? We'll get there. Oh. So I'm done with my research project.

I've written my PhD. I published my first book, Explore Everything, about all of our – or I hadn't published the book yet actually. And I fly to Cambodia to work on a totally different research project, right? Like I'm switching gears. I'm going to go do something else. a totally different research project, right? Like I'm switching gears. I'm going to go do something else.

And I fly back from Cambodia via Singapore, and the plane lands at Heathrow. And, you know, the thing goes off, ding, and you stand up and you get your bags, and then nothing's happening. And they say, can everyone please sit down again? I sit down, I look out the plane, and there's cop cars everywhere. And I'm like, oh, shit. You know, I came from Singapore. Someone brought drugs. I don't know. There's a look out the plane, and there's cop cars everywhere. And I'm like, oh, shit. You know, I came from Singapore. Someone brought drugs.

I don't know. There's a terrorist in the plane. Like, I have no idea what's going on. And the cops get on the plane, and they're like, 42K, 42K, Dr. Garrett? Yeah? You're coming with us. Okay. So they cuff me.

They have me, like, retrieve my bag from the baggage claim and they take me through passport control in handcuffs. And obviously the UK government's like, yeah, we'll go ahead and keep that passport. Thank you. So they eventually charged me with conspiracy to commit criminal damage. Now, what's weird about England is that trespass isn't a criminal offense. So you can't, you can't charge people with trespass unless you're in very specific circumstances. So they tried out this charge of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, because it's, it's about intention. It's a thought crime. Like, if I text you, and I'm like, Hey, dude, you know, the bar is closed right now because of COVID. You want to break in and just like pour ourselves a beer?

And you're like, yeah, let's do it. Like we've committed conspiracy to commit criminal damage. Like we've committed to the crime. So anyway, for years, we're dragged through the British legal system. And I got trapped in the UK for three years. They kept my passport, dude. I was trapped in the UK for three years. Whoa. They kept my passport, dude. I was trapped there. And here's where it gets really weird is that when the plane landed at Singapore, there was a journalist from GQ who was supposed to meet us because we were going to take him into some of this subterranean infrastructure and show him all these spaces. And he's like, you know, by the time I got out of jail, like 48 hours later, I had all these messages from like, you asshole.

I showed up at the airport and you weren't there and whatever, you know. And I finally find this guy, Matthew Power. And he's like, are you serious? Like you got – because we had timed it to land at the same time. And he's like, you serious? You got arrested at that moment? And he said, what about your house? I said, I have no idea.

So we go to my house and we unlock the door with these keys that the police had given me because they took down my door with a battering ram, right? And then, you know, like put some padlocks on there that they drilled into the door in the doorframe. And I open it up and my apartment has just been ravaged, right? Like stuff everywhere. The mattress is flipped over. All the cupboards are torn apart.

There's like pieces of the door all over the floor. And underneath all of it, there was a job contract from the University of Oxford to do a postdoc after I – because I had just finished my PhD. And the journalist from GQ is like, dude, I can go home right now. I've got this story. I don't need to explore anything. I'm done. And how did it resolve? Well, the, um, by the time we got to court, I mean, the, the, the prosecution was just in shambles. I mean, it was a total debacle because there was no evidence that we had broken anything, you know, because of their laws,

you had just trespassed, which isn't a law. We just trespassed. Yeah. But they spent, you know, 300,000 pounds, I don't know, $400,000 of taxpayer money to run this prosecution. So they were going to see it to the end. And essentially, you know, they confiscated my computers, my hard drives, my notebooks. And that was a central component of the evidence that was used to prosecute everyone. So essentially, like, I just made a deal with them. I was like, look, I'll take a hit, you know, if you – like, if everyone else can just get off, you know, I'll take the hit for it. So I pled guilty to – I think it was four counts of criminal damage, which included damage to a screw from a board that I had

taken off and put back on to a vent shaft. Ooh. I know. Sliding open a window. Oh, that was aiding and abetting. So I had opened a window for someone to crawl through. And it was just like a list of ridiculous things. But they didn't care because they just, they needed their.

They needed a win. They needed a win, you know. So I gave them that. But now I've got this criminal record in England. So when you land, do you get pulled aside if you go to England? I used to. I actually filed a complaint with the government, and they would like severely harass me. And then when I moved to Australia, I had the same problem.

Like they had put flags on my passport. And you filed a complaint, and did it go through? And I filed a complaint, and they fixed it. They took the flags off the passport. Yeah. Essentially saying like, you know, I did my thing,

you know? Yeah. Like, why do I have to keep paying for this over and over again? So, but it was really funny when I tried, when they, when they originally gave me my passport back.

So like I go to court and then they're, you know, the judge is like, Dr. Garrett, you're very naughty or whatever, you know, here's here,

take your passport back. Do they have wigs on? Yes. Really? Yeah, the wigs are fantastic. Really? Yeah. They still do that?

Yeah, they still do that. They're really good. Wow, that's real. Yeah. Yeah, the barristers all have their wigs. Holy shit. They carry them around like a cat. And then they have to put it on when they're doing that fucking bonkers but so i so they give me my passport back and i and

the next day i was supposed to fly to sydney to go speak at the the festival of dangerous ideas i was the obvious speaker right and i go to the airport and the the guy swipes it and he's like oh yeah you don't want to use this i was like what what does it say what does the screen say and he said I can't relay that but you should probably go and gives me my passport back you should probably leave the country no like you should not get on a plane with this like you're going to have a problem on the other side

you know whatever he said well how else can you travel so then I missed my flight and I had to go back I had to go to the U.S. embassy. And I'm like, you know, I've just tried to fly with my passport and it doesn't work. And the guy at the embassy swipes it and he says, oh, wow. And then he gets out a hole puncher and he goes, thunk, thunk, thunk, right through my passport.

And he says, you shouldn't use that. And then like three hours later, they gave me another passport and I flew out the next day. And the passport's good. The new one's good. It was fine. Wow. But then I started getting stopped again. So they like, I don't know, tacked the flags on there later.

God damn. I mean, it was a real ordeal. But the thing, I mean, it was traumatic for me, of course. I was like stuck in a foreign country and, you know, like you get worried about your income. I was worried about being, they did try to deport me at some point. Because once you have a criminal offense, they can try and deport you. So anyway, I beat that down. Did they fine you?

Like what was the ultimate judgment? Yeah, I think it was 2,000 pounds, about $3,000 I got fined. Not too bad. It's not a big deal. I'm sure you made some money off the book. If not, you're going to make some now you know what dude I made all the money that I made on my first book Explore Everything

went to my lawyers who I have to say were phenomenal like they did a great job but it was like every time I get a royalty check I just sign it over to them and it did seem like karma it was like well I broke into all this shit and then I wrote a book

and then the money went to the lawyers and the lawyers got me off and it all kind of worked out. Well, tell everybody again the names of the books. Let's sell some books for you here. Sweet. Because the book really has some amazing imagery, particularly the underground shit. Yeah, okay. So the first book that is all about my time with the urban explorers and our trespasses into the underground and also into skyscrapers and abandoned buildings.

That was called explore everything. I wrote that in, uh, that was published in 2013 and that's got, it is for everything. That's got the whole story of the court case. Bradley Garrett, not to be confused with the giant person from everybody loves Raymond.

I will topple his Google rankings someday, I promise. You're getting me closer. Subterranean London, that's your second book? Yeah, Subterranean London is the second book. So those are all of our photographs over 10 years. Amazing photographs, too, by the way. Of the subterranean layers of London. Just spectacular shit.

And then London Rising is the third book. Oh, actually, scroll up there. Scroll up in the image. See at the top there? That's us climbing into an abandoned tube station. Up left? This one right here. That one? Yeah, that's climbing into the new crossrail.

It's just so weird that all that stuff is open. It's not. It's not anymore? It kind of is. Kind of? Did they do anything to tighten it down after your books? They try. Okay. We got really good at breaking into things. I mean, you know, this is a skill you build.

Bradley, thank you very much, man. This was a lot of fun. We just went through three hours, if you can believe it. Are you serious? Yeah. It's 340. Wow. It's a time warp in here, right? It's crazy. People always say that like what the fuck that is so weird Yeah was a fascinating conversation man. Very thrilling. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. That was a lot of fun Thanks for being here man. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. Have a great invitation. Bye everybody everybody.