Dr. Bradley Garrett explores how prepping—from $3M Kansas bunkers to a Hudson River boat built with a 7-Eleven cup—blends practical survivalism with psychological tribalism, questioning whether governments weaponize threats like pandemics or AI while dismissing fringe warnings as misogynistic or racist. His legal battles over London’s abandoned underground stations, including a £2,000 fine for trespassing research, reveal the risks of uncovering unsettling truths, from off-world vehicle claims to lost Indigenous knowledge. Ultimately, prepping exposes society’s fractured response to existential risks, where paranoia and preparation collide amid systemic failures and ideological silos. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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, you know, 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.
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.
You feel relatively safe when you're in a place like Big Bear because it's woods and just like by the time the virus gets up here and how's it going to get to you?
But here's the thing about Big Bear, right, is that when we were in lockdown in LA, in the early days of it, like, again, I'm speaking from a space of privilege here, you know, because my paychecks were still coming in, 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.
But 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 if you're thinking about locking yourself in a bunker, 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.
It's like, you know, 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 there was a study done that shows that it dies almost instantly in sunlight.
So when you're outside at the beach, there's probably very little chance 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 UV, artificial sunlight, like simulated sunlight, also kills it.
Actually, I forgot my, I usually have my camel back that I run with and I forgot it.
So I just, I stocked up on water.
And anyway, I was slamming water.
But I was on the trail, like, I mean, way out, way out in the middle of the national park, right?
Totally open space.
And I, and I run up on this hiker, and she, like, you know, puts her backpack on the ground, and she pulls the mask out and puts the mask on, whatever.
But I just wonder if we're going to reach a saturation point on the topic where people are like, I'm not touching a book that has anything to do with the pandemic, you know, after thinking about it for years.
Well, it's also people's anxiety and insecurity and people that are emotionally and mentally unstable.
now's their time to shine.
Because this is like, this is like what they've been, what people, like preppers, I would imagine.
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.
And so one of the things that happened during the pandemic when it hit, I had a lot of people come over and I gave them meat because I have three commercial freezers here at the studio.
You know, if you shoot an elk, an elk's 400 pounds of meat.
But I'm not a prepper, you know, 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 multi-million dollar bunker or whatever, whatever spectacular stories that people hear, which, you know, I'm happy to verify if you want to get into those.
But, you know, like prepping on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just common sense.
But I wanted to get into the psychology of prepping because it seems to be conflated with conspiracy theorists in some way.
Like preppers or it's the tinfoil hat brigade.
It's like those type of folks, folks who think 5G is causing COVID.
You 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.
You know, going camping every once in a while just to get a sense of what it's like to be outdoors and pop your tent and pull your water out of a river.
And, you know, it's great to have those practical skills.
Well, so, I mean, and this is the thing about disaster, right?
Is that if it has an end point, 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, 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 end point there.
We have to make it to day 14.
And that's why people were able to psychologically cope with it.
Whereas, you know, the situation we're in right now, like, when is the end point?
Like, that's why people are cracking because they can't see the end of it.
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 terrible.
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?
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 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.
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 sci-fi 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's 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 the lab and for examinations and all the different tests that they would run.
And so you got both those things, right?
You have 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.
We were talking about all the different symptoms that people get from it, neurological problems, blood clotting.
I was reading this article where they were saying that the people that have died from COVID, when they've done autopsies on them, they've found blood clots in every major organ.
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 virus was at crippling capitalist economies.
Because the thing is, we created COVID's pathways, right?
I mean, it's international flights, it's international trade, it's people moving around.
It's 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 that governments around the world, probably including the United States, are thinking, well, how could we weaponize this potentially?
But the thing is, the threats, existential threats that we face now have been multiplied exponentially, right?
In the past, 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 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 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 anxious.
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.
It's a hunter's paradise, apparently, because, well, sort of.
It's really, it depends on your philosophy, but most hunters that are, I would say, that if you if you look at like 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.
Like 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.
Well, one of the best, first of all, it's a delicious animal.
And they are in New Zealand.
And they're very difficult to hunt because they live in these like really high altitude, rocky areas that are very difficult to traverse.
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 like 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.
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.
Yeah, dude, we threw one at UC Riverside where I was studying.
Yeah, we made this at-lattle dart and then we sort of like, you know, cleared out the kind of alleyway in the experimental archaeology lab where we're working.
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, 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, 13,000 years ago.
So it's essentially, 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 hammerstone 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.
I excavated in Mexico, in 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're, you know, 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, you know?
And so we'd find these huge pits that are just full of pottery shirts.
And, you know, after a while, you just become totally desensitized to it.
You're just chucking them in a bag.
And oh, here's where I found 10 more, 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, yeah, suddenly I've traveled through time, right?
I've gone back 1,200 years, and I'm sitting there with, you know, sitting there with this person in their house with their thumbprint pressed into this thing.
Well, okay, so I became really uncomfortable with the idea that, you know, because I had a degree, I had some kind of authority over other people's culture.
Yeah, but I'm supposed to be doing research and writing a thesis, you know?
And so after a while, I press her.
I'm like, look, I've got to 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 all that stuff that's underwater out there?
Why do you need that?
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 thinking about people's relationships with places and landscapes.
Well, that's what, this was actually 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 one case, there was a rock that young women went to as part of a puberty ceremony, and it used to be above water, and they had that ceremony in the spring, but now when the, that's when the waters are high, right?
So now they do it in sort of drought seasons so that they can still get to the rock.
And so 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 was like, that didn't break us.
Like, we're still us, 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 go into a place with that very kind of like data-driven, empirical mindset, you know, you want hard facts that make sense, you know, that you can write up clearly.
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.
Yeah, you know, 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.
I was talking to an Aboriginal clan out there, and they were telling me that in the Sydney harbor, they can actually tell, like, they can draw you a map of what is underwater in the Sydney harbor because they have a cultural memory of when that wasn't underwater that goes back tens of thousands of years.
I mean, I'm sure people are doing research on that.
But, you know, if you look at those, those dot drawings, you know, those 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.
Right.
And so you have to wonder, how did people who didn't have those aerial views get that view down on the landscape?
I mean, yeah, do you stitch that together by just knowing the place so well that you can kind of depict it in that way?
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 what, 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.
You know, 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.
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 anti-Kythera mechanism gathered interest in the 1950s.
Its complexity, function, and computational powers has led it to be dubbed the first ever computer.
Particularly when you think about, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with, you said you know about Randall Carl Graham Hancock, but you know about Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson.
The two of them sort of combined their data and their research.
And Randall Carlson is an expert in astrological or excuse me, asteroidal or meteorological impacts.
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 United States.
And they believe that something happened, some sort of an impact, multiple impacts around 12,000 years ago.
It ended the Ice Age abruptly and probably caused a lot of flooding and probably was the origin of the Epic of Gilgamesh flood story, 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.
But what's interesting there is you kind of, you know, there's a, 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, right?
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.
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, you know, 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 Sumerian texts 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 had talked 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.
But who knows how much of this 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, according to Sitchin, 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 really weird.
Just the stuff that you can't get away from is really weird.
And that's 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.
It's part of this partisan divide that we're experiencing, particularly academics.
Particularly in this country.
Yeah.
Or right and left or whatever binary you want to pick.
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 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.
Well, one of the guys, you know, did this thing where every time we were meeting, he would rate women as they walked by.
She was 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.
You know, 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, you know, for Jim Baker and his food.
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.
You know, the government retires equipment.
And they'll just buy, you know, 30 Humvees or whatever and have them delivered to the shop.
You know what you like to do if you ever got divorced and you just were like seven years old and you had some money in the bank and you like to do ecstasy, you take that to Burning Man.
You know, you're building these to kind of, you know, I feel 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 can 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.
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.
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.
He 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 could run for president because he was born in Mexico.
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 10 wives, asshole.
And they're like, well, we're going to just go over here because Mexico was not, it 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, 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.
You know, I'm sure you know the story about those the groups of Mormons down there that had a run-in with the cartel and the families are murdered and the children and wives.
That's what that is.
Those are the Mormons that fucking Mitt Romney came from.
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 at sort of the height of the Cold War or the beginning of the Cold War that was, he served on the Quorum of the 12 Apostles.
So 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.
So all of those Cold War shelters, you know, 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.
But he was in the Sydney harbor and I was living there.
And I actually, I just sent him a message on Twitter and I'm like, hey, I'm at the library right now.
I think you're in the harbor.
You know, 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.
It's just one of those weird kind of moments.
you're like, what is it kind of-Morphic resonance.
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 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, you know, 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, right?
Well, that's what everybody was worried about with Reagan, you know, and we should probably be equally concerned, especially if Trump gets a second term.
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 that's emanating out of China.
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 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 that's going to wipe out your island, that's very dangerous.
But if you're in the middle of fucking Kansas in your multi-million dollar bunker condo and some shit's going down in North Korea, 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 is made, or it was, it wasn't Ted Cruz.
It was a great Hicks bit from the early, early 90s.
But it's kind of the same thing.
We're 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.
You know, 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.
You know, 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.
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 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 make a YouTube video tonight.
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 send it to Jamie.
Jamie sends it to his friends.
I put it up on Twitter.
Some famous person puts it up on their Twitter and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Next thing you know, it's gigantic.
It reaches the whole world.
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 like this, the understanding and the psychological preparedness.
We don't have the ability to go, okay, but let's look at this in terms of let's have let's have a perspective that is uh that's honest to our environment.
Let's have an objective view of this.
Let's have a balanced version of this information.
And 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-on-one recognition of each other's humanity.
But if you, if you, 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, you know?
And so the inevitable result of that is tribalization, right?
You're like, I need to find my community that I can hang with that's going to protect me, you know, and we're going to 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 and we've got our supplies and we're going to ride this thing out.
And then these rioters are another community that are like, we're going to burn this shit down.
We're going to start over.
And so that tribalization is extremely problematic because as you're right, the conversation we need to be having is a collective conversation about 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.
Prior to the Cold War, we always had a sense that our government was there to protect us, that our government would protect us, right?
But once we developed nuclear weapons, I mean it was impossible to shelter everyone from this disaster, right?
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, right?
So instead of doing that, what we know now, and this was a conspiracy theory in the past, right?
What we know now is that the government built bunkers for themselves, but not for us, right?
And a lot of the, you know, if you, 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, you know, 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?
That's kind of sort of.
Well, but, you know, 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 to, 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?
But that's, I mean, you know, but once you've, 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.
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.
But there's a lot of, 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.
Yeah, I think he had three theories for spoofing, and that was another one.
I don't know 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.
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, It's, you know, 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 handlaid 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 fresh water 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.
The sewers are actually, they're not as bad as they sound.
Dude, this thing, so look at this thing right here.
This is a, you know, remember the Concorde jets?
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.
And basically, that's a span of 10 years from like 2008 to 2018, something like that, where we were sneaking into all of these places.
were trespassing and taking photos that was like so these urban explorers they're interested in like they see the city as kind of like an operating system 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.
You know, like 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?
So underneath the sewers, you had utility tunnels.
And what occurred to me over and over again as we were sneaking into these places is that it was really easy.
And so we're all, again, we're all saturated by these narratives about terrorism and people are out to get us and they're all in our cities and there's sleeper cells and we're all in danger.
And then we're going out like a bunch of 20-year-olds with some keys that we bought on Amazon and just opening everything up and going into it, right?
And I don't know.
It made me feel like I was being lied to.
When you talk about 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?
Well, that's a – I mean 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 creating, of going 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.
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 Coppel'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.
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 what, you know, 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.
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 essential minerals that you need?
Lithium ion, all the shit that you need to make cell phones.
I mean, all the different coal tan, 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 them?
We can't even get them out of the ground.
One 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.
What's fucked is they're doing it with sticks in a lot of places.
See, I mean, 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, 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 like Palo Alto with his kids like, oh my God, you have the iPhone 12.
So there's a, on this one street, there's a whole bunch of warehouses that are sort of back-to-back where people are getting all this, all this stuff, TVs, 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.
Yeah, I met this amazing artist, James Bothorpe, 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 call, you know.
And then he wanted to take it to the source of the Hudson at Lake Tear of the Clouds and paddle the boat back to 35th Street and then put it in a dumpster and fly back to England.
I went with him for the last week of the thing, and it was fucking hilarious.
He was just constantly sinking.
Like at first, 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, and I'm trying to bail out his boat with a cup because everything that we were using had to be found.
So I'd like found this broken big gulp cup from 7-Eleven.
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, you know, 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 like sort of a survey of the, like, I forget how they did it, but they did it with, I believe it was a satellite, where they looked at the earth from the sky and tried to see, okay, where are these gases coming from and what's the primary source of these gases?
And they thought they would be, they thought it would be cattle ranches, you know, that these cattle were giving off methane.
And they found out, no, it doesn't even compare to landfills.
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 into the sky.
Yeah, we've got a family member that actually works.
He does environmental monitoring for landfills.
And he's, yeah, he was telling me that they got a call at some point on this one landfill that there was a, it was, it was smoking.
And so he drives over to 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, 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 of a cliff, and when they would land in these great big piles, they would rot and then they would combust.
They would just burst into flames.
I don't understand the whole mechanism behind it, but it's really common that they would find these buffalo jumps.
And because of the fact they were all rotting together in this great big pile, something would ignite and they would burst into flames.
And so a lot of these cliffsides 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, 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.
But no, it's definitely a myth that Native Americans were at one with their environment.
They weren't having, I mean, they were, you know, when you need to eat, you're going to drive 100 buffalo off a cliff, you know, and you might only use three of them.
But 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.
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.
Like 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 that the soil will absorb it, animals will find it, crows will circle.
That's one of the ways people find carcasses is like birds circling over carcasses.
You know, that's how you find if someone's looking for someone that 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.
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 year.
And I read 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 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 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, 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.
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.
I mean, it's interesting to think about, like, here's a thought experiment, right?
If we know that, we know that that war wasn't won by soldierly techniques, right?
It was won by disease.
Some of it was.
But they, I mean, the up until the Comanches.
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.
What really changed it, though, was the cult revolver and then 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.
And this is part of the hypothesis that goes along with the extinction event that happened somewhere around where these core samples indicate that there's asteroidal impacts.
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.
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 rode 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.
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 European, 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 fist full of arrows and just go one arrow, two hours, three hours, four hours.
And they would just shoot like an arrow a second while these poor bastards from 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.
So Tulum is on the coast, like just over from Chichen Itsa.
And what you find are these 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.
And it's like it doesn't conform to everything else that's happening on that site.
We don't know.
And these people disappeared.
We don't know what happened to them.
But one of the theories that I heard is that it was a virus, right?
It was disease, right?
And if you don't know what it is, what do you do?
You're like, well, it's something's attacking us.
We're building a wall.
These people showed up and we're not, you know.
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 that, 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, 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 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 and 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 Smoky Mountains National Park that they would retreat to, where 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.
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 archaeology.
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 100 years, we're going to be writing about this and thinking about this and interpreting it.
I wonder if they're preparing us for some inevitable encounter and they want to give us like a slow drip of information to get us accustomed to the idea so that we don't go into full shock.
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.
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.
Like, what, you know, is that just a business plan?
You know, 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, you know, caused them to start prepping.
And so, you know, I did want, I mean, at the beginning of this project, it was like, you know, it seemed like, it just seemed interesting.
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 Trump supporter.
Put you in that box.
You know, oh, you're, oh, you think Biden should be president no matter what?
Let me put you in that box.
Like, 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're right 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 a 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 this story for 30 plus years.
And people said he's crazy.
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 United Nuclear Bob 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'm not good at, I'll fuck it up.
I'll go, oh yeah, Mike said that.
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot that happened first.
Like, 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 an 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.
Well, 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 Fraver saw in 2014 worked.
He said it would turn sideways and then jut off at insane rates of speed.
That's exactly what Fraver said.
That's what 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.
And that the Pentagon comes out in 2020 and tells us that this is real, that they really have crafts that they've recovered that are not of this world.
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 or people trying to burn down courthouses?
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 his dad is 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.
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.
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 what the social, political, economic, you know, fallout is from alien contact.
I mean, how do you even, you know, 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?
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 of the norm and you can just, and 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.
And sometimes people will say certain things that are controversial or 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 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 like an actual perspective that's pretty reasonable.
And 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.
And 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.
But at the same time, because I do ethnographic research, because from the Greek, I'm a culture writer.
I'm writing about other people's perspectives fundamentally.
And that does act as an effective shield to be able to spend time with people, to be empathetic to their views.
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.
If you don't agree with it, that's fine.
But I'm documenting it.
I'm passing on the information and we can debate it in a different forum.
The work that I've done in the past, particularly with the Urban Explorers, has gotten 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.
Dude, we wiggled through, 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 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.
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 two 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, 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, 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.
We're 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 like the windows narrowing.
And we get towards the end of the 14 stations.
And we're starting to think, you know, like the cops are surely watching what we're doing, right?
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 stopped 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 ghost in here.
It's a haunted station or whatever.
But we did it.
We never got caught.
So for me, this is the end of the research project.
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.
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 terrorist on the plane.
Like, who 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 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 charge 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 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 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, we, for years, were dragged through the British legal system.
And I got trapped in the UK for three years.
Wow.
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 came, 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.
Yeah, but they spent 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, they confiscated my computers, my hard drives, my notebooks.
And that was the central component of the evidence that was used to prosecute everyone.
So essentially, I just made a deal with them.
I was like, look, I'll take a hit, you know, if you just, 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.
I know.
Sliding open a window.
Oh, that was aiding and abetting.
So I had opened a window for someone to crawl through.
I mean, it was just like a list of ridiculous things, but they didn't care because they just, they needed their win, you know, so I gave them that.
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, you know?
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.
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.