July 28, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:42:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Boom. | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
| Cheers. | ||
| 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, that guy that... | ||
| Who's the mask? | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| So are you a prepper yourself? | ||
| Because you do have one of them GPS watches on. | ||
| So either you're like 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 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 not to need it than need it not to have it. | ||
| I mean it's kind of funny when I – so I've been hanging out with preppers for about three years now and inevitably you start drifting towards the culture as you're talking to people. | ||
| 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 strapped. | ||
| I'm like, wow, you are really paranoid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Walkie-talkie? | |
| 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, right? | ||
| So these are bunkers to protect ordnance. | ||
| Jamie is going to turn this towards you there. | ||
| OK, 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 they told me if – If it ever hits the fan, come visit us. | ||
| We've got space for you. | ||
| You're going to be safe. | ||
| They're going to eat you. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| So when the pandemic hit, 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 like 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 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 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 had you been thinking about living in a place like that first? | ||
| 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 tragic, unfortunate, terrible for a lot of people. | ||
| But for me, it was 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 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 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. | ||
| And... | ||
| We take my mom home and we 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. | ||
| Well, you know, the virus doesn't give a shit. | ||
| It moves wherever it wants to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| You know, you have all these people driving from L.A. up there for the weekend. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You were also saying that people are pretty cavalier up there, huh? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they certainly are. | ||
| Does it feel good to be tested? | ||
| You were tested today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you feel good? | |
| Do you feel like a weight lifted off of you? | ||
| Actually, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| It feels great. | ||
| But 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I beat 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. | ||
| Well, 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. | ||
| Just – we would figure it out. | ||
| If you were positive, we would figure it out. | ||
| We would do it in the parking lot with masks on or something. | ||
| But here's – the thing about Big Bear, right, is that when we were in lockdown in LA, in the early days of it, like – again, I'm speaking from a space of privilege here because my paychecks were still coming in or whatever. | ||
| But like I almost experienced a sense of euphoria. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, all my talks were canceled. | ||
| I canceled, like, four plane tickets. | ||
| So the pressure's relieved? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I was like, I can just hang out with my mom. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I 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... | ||
| Is that San Bernardino County? | ||
| We could go trail running again. | ||
| We could be outside and, you know... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 sunlight, like 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, way out in the middle of the national park, totally open space. | ||
| And I run up on this hiker. | ||
| And she puts her backpack on the ground and she pulls the mask out and puts the mask on. | ||
| And I'm like, the trail's 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, 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 about it for years. | ||
| Some people. | ||
| Yeah, but that's just, some people are just, they're angry. | ||
| You know, like, I had a friend who was across, my friend Bridget Phetasy, 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 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's their time to shine because this is like what they've been – 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| People were, prior to the pandemic, embarrassed to admit that they were prepping. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, you know, 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, if you... | ||
| In order to not stockpile in that way, right, 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 order your takeout or go to the grocery store and stock up. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| Imagine this scenario. | ||
| Imagine that the lethality rate on this virus was like 10%. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 is hungry. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It gets real scary. | ||
| Or cooperate with your neighbor, hopefully. | ||
| You know, I hunt, so I have a lot of meat. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a lot of meat, yeah. | ||
| It's the great thing, as long as the power stays on and I have electricity, I have frozen meat, so I can give a lot of it out. | ||
| So you got a backup generator? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| 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 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 spectacular stories that people hear, which I'm happy to verify if you want to get into those. | ||
| You know, like prepping on a practical level, like everyday prepping, it's just common sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Having enough food to last a few days. | ||
| Yeah, and thinking through what might happen in a blackout or the tap's not working or whatever. | ||
| These things do happen. | ||
| Yeah, they do happen. | ||
| But I wanted to get into the psychology of prepping because it seems to be conflated with conspiracy theorists in some way, like preppers or the tinfoil hat brigade. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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, when is the end point? | ||
| 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. | ||
| First of all, they're cracking because the economic stability is nonexistent. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| 50% of our 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that sounds right. | |
| 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 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 gonna 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 for 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 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 the lab and for examinations and all the different tests that they would run. | ||
| And so you got both those things, right? | ||
| 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 symptoms that people get from it, neurological problems, blood clotting. | ||
| I was reading this article where they're saying that the people that have died from COVID, when they've done autopsies on them, they found blood clots in every major organ. | ||
| And they're like, this is astonishing. | ||
| Like, this is so weird. | ||
| Yeah, it does seem very unpredictable. | ||
| Lungs, 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. | ||
| Once we went to that Center for Disease Control, I started getting scared. | ||
| I saw the 2015 Bill Gates TED Talk on pandemics, about the possibility of a pandemic, and I got scared of it too. | ||
| So I would have thought it's possible. | ||
| I 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 I think we're good to go. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| I don't know if the United States is thinking that. | ||
| Well, I don't know either. | ||
| But the thing is we – 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 anxious. | ||
| Well, you've talked to them post – do they feel vindicated? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| No? | ||
| What most of them have told me is that this was a mid-level crisis. | ||
| Well, they're right about that, right? | ||
| I mean, if Yellowstone 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. | ||
| The actual fatality rate for healthy people is 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. | ||
|
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Killing everything. | |
| 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 – like this is one of the great red herrings of our time that all of these wealthy people are going to flee New Zealand and find safety there. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Why doesn't that guy 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. | ||
| It's a weird situation over there. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was going to say, it sounds like it's from Star Wars. | ||
| I think 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. | ||
| Himalaya. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a large... | ||
| It's fucking weird-looking, man. | ||
| It's this crazy, hairy-looking... | ||
| Take that picture right there. | ||
| Yeah, bam. | ||
| Go large with that. | ||
| Look at that fucking thing! | ||
|
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What? | |
| Yes! | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| 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 gonna, even though there's just like this really thriving industry where all these people's livelihood depends on this animal, These people in these rural communities, these hunting guides, all these different people that live off of these animals, 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 – 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 gotta go to 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 have 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 3D maps that are made from sticks put together, and they can tell wind and air currents, and they can read the stars with them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 tides, and the stars. | ||
| What is that word? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Scroll up. | ||
| Micronesian? | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Micronesians. | ||
| You ever heard that word? | ||
| Yeah, Micronesian. | ||
| So Micronesia is like Chook. | ||
| What are those four islands? | ||
| Truck Lagoon that's in Chook and I can't remember the other islands, but... | ||
| Look how crazy that is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, you know, 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, you know, I can make arrowheads, stone tools. | ||
| Can you really? | ||
| You do all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I spent years doing that stuff. | ||
| You know how to make an atlatl? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Can you throw one? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We threw one at UC Riverside where I was studying. | ||
| Yeah, we made this atlatl dart and then we sort of like cleared out the kind of alleyway in the experimental archaeology lab where we're working. | ||
| We were chucking this atlatl dart. | ||
| Indoors or outdoors? | ||
| We probably couldn't get away with that now. | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| Outdoors. | ||
|
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Outdoors. | |
| Now, when they taught you how to do all this stuff, when they're talking about building ancient arrowheads, is the technology behind creating those, the craftsmanship, is it theoretical? | ||
| 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 – 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 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. | ||
| With one strike. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what you halved... | ||
| The shaft too 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 a 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 and 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. | ||
| So what you see... | ||
| 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've got to get off of it before you... | ||
|
unidentified
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Chert? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never even heard of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How old do you think that is? | ||
| If you had to guess. | ||
| Seven, eight hundred years? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Check this out, man. | ||
| One of the coolest experiences I ever had. | ||
| So I did archaeology for about five years. | ||
| 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 sherds. | ||
| 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 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? | ||
|
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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. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| I mean in archaeological terms, meh. | ||
| It doesn't actually tell us that much. | ||
| We got 10,000 pieces of those pots. | ||
| But on a personal level, 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. | ||
| Boy, 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's like, oh, you want a temple? | ||
| Yeah, the temple over there. | ||
| You know, and so we're like hacking through the bushes with our, through the vines with our machetes. | ||
| And, and we come up on this temple and I was like, oh man, this is, 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 I went there and looked on the ground and there was this figurine there. | ||
| And it had eyes and like a little hat, but it was like somebody had made this thing out of clay and pressed it together. | ||
| 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, okay, 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. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| That's why I'm asking. | ||
| Yeah, and I always felt like, well, that village that's there, that's their shit. | ||
| Why are we taking it? | ||
| And obviously it's for the advancement of knowledge and maybe it brings some benefit to their village, but we don't know. | ||
| 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 Winnemum Wintu. | ||
| And they... | ||
| It's a pretty tragic story up there, man. | ||
| They had been there for thousands of years, and we Americans decided that they were going to build a giant dam so they could have a reservoir up there, and they inundated all of their ancestral homelands, 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 maritime archaeology. | ||
| I'd been diving shipwrecks all over the world. | ||
| I went up there and I said, let me dive in the reservoir. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 months. | ||
| And I'm getting nervous. | ||
| I'm like, I have to write my thesis. | ||
| I have no... | ||
| I don't have my data. | ||
| And during these months, you're hanging out with these people? | ||
| Yeah, I'm just hanging out there. | ||
| Are you eating dinner with them? | ||
| Just chilling? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How do you have all this time? | ||
| Yeah, we actually went... | ||
| Well, it's the degree, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And their culture is documented in what way? | ||
| How are they maintaining their historical records? | ||
| Well, this was actually one of my first academic articles. | ||
| I wrote about how a lot of their religious ceremonies... | ||
| So in one case, there was a rock that young women went to as part of a puberty ceremony, and it used to be above water, and they had that ceremony in the spring, but now that's when the The waters are high, right? | ||
| So now they do it in sort of drought season so that they can still get to the rock. | ||
| And so they had changed the whole kind of – their cultural fabric had been altered by that inundation event. | ||
| And basically the point that she was trying to get across to me was like that didn't break us. | ||
| We're still us, even though these things have had to change. | ||
| It was an education for me as an archaeologist because when you go into a place with that very data-driven, empirical mindset, you want hard facts that make sense, that you can write up clearly. | ||
| What she was telling me was something that was a little bit more It was more nuanced. | ||
| It was difficult to pin down. | ||
| It was more qualitative. | ||
| And so I had to grapple with that. | ||
| And 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 are 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So the water levels are a little lower. | ||
| It has to be pre-ice age 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. | ||
| How accurate is their memory of it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean I'm sure people are doing research on that. | ||
| But if you look at those – the dot drawings, those like traditional paintings that you see. | ||
| That are often paintings of landscapes. | ||
| Some of those have been mapped onto aerial imagery and they're startlingly accurate, right? | ||
| And so you have to wonder, like, how did people who didn't have those aerial views get that view down on the landscape, right? | ||
| 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 taking hallucinogenics and flying across the landscape. | ||
| Yeah, when you look at ancient maps that are really accurate, it really is kind of amazing that they did all this stuff from a land level. | ||
| 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 and it's stunningly similar to what we take today with satellite imagery, that really is It is amazing. | ||
| How advanced we are now, right? | ||
| What we've done with technology. | ||
| But we don't talk a lot about all these skills that we've lost. | ||
| So that's why I like going out into the landscape. | ||
| I love going out for a couple of days, just hiking through the woods with a compass, figuring it out, turn the phone off, leave it at home. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That... | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm going to fuck up the word. | ||
| 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 they had to try to back-engineer what this fucking thing is and how it worked. | ||
| Astrolabe, I think, right? | ||
| Astrolabe. | ||
| 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 antith... | ||
| I mean, I typed in an 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. | ||
| It's an... | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| I wish I wrote it down. | ||
| It's... | ||
| The word is anti... | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Oh, the anti-therica thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Kythera. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So click on that thing. | ||
| They found that, and they're like, okay, what in the fuck is this? | ||
| And this anti-Kythera mechanism, a 2,000-year-old computer. | ||
| And they found this, and they had to try to figure out what this is and see how they've kind of 3D mapped it and reimagined. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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 colors. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dude, 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. | ||
| You know, particularly when you think about, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with, you said you know about Graham Hancock, but you know about Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, the two of them sort of combined their data and their research, and Randall Carlson is an expert in astrological or, 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 tritonite, nuclear glass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Trinitite. | ||
| Trinitite, thank you. | ||
| From the Trinity Project, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| Well, it lends credence to that kind of oral memory too, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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? | ||
| One of the preppers that I spoke to, he's actually here in California. | ||
| The first time I met him, he started talking about Planet X, Nibiru. | ||
| Nibiru, yeah. | ||
| It's all Zacharias Hitchin. | ||
| You ever read his stuff? | ||
| No. | ||
| Fascinating, weirdo stuff. | ||
| Well, so he told me, you know, Nibiru is hiding behind the sun and it's going to emerge. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, he might be adding to the story. | |
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| But what's interesting there is you kind of – 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 impossible event than just to decide that 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. | ||
| Zacharias Hitchin is fascinating. | ||
| 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 it, 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 in the illustrations, you see these strange things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Well, they counted the moon as a planet, which is odd, and then they counted Nibiru. | ||
| Nibiru is this planet that they claim, that's it right there, that's on this 3,600-year elliptical orbit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's worth investigating. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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, particularly in this country. | ||
| Or right and left or whatever binary you want to pick. | ||
| I mean, we could go over the reasons why we've ended up in this situation, but we are running headlong into a very partisan age. | ||
| And I feel like the solution to that is... | ||
| Actually, 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, right? | ||
| And so I have to be honest, 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. | ||
| It was really hard not to interject and say, man, this is 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 – The person who just cares about taking care of themselves and their family and maybe they're interested in building community. | ||
| But then there are the people who are selling the antidote to their fears. | ||
| In the book, I call these people the dread merchants. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, 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? | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| Oh man, they are so much fun. | ||
| I got really addicted to those when I was working on this project. | ||
| It became almost like a mantra, 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, 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 it's the same guy. | ||
| He's around today. | ||
| Because then we still expected people to be guided by their moral compass. | ||
| Everyone's a hypocrite now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| Then there was Jimmy Swagger got caught with a hooker, and he was crying, I have sinned. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| That was good. | ||
| Yeah, no one confesses anything anymore. | ||
| No one admits anything anymore. | ||
| Spread the word Bible bucket. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 do you get? | ||
| 24. Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think that's what it says. | |
| Should we get a bucket of Bibles? | ||
| I feel like we should have one at the studio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get one. | |
| Get one. | ||
| I feel like we should have one at the studio. | ||
| I don't want to feed the beast, but you should get one. | ||
| God, if he gets 50 bucks from me, what the fuck? | ||
| 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 we should just get the Bibles? | ||
| One bucket of Bibles and five buckets of food. | ||
| I love watching him feed the audience from the giant trough. | ||
| You can get real good freeze-dried food that'll last forever. | ||
| Hell yeah, you can. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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 is poured on top of it. | ||
| Google peakrefuel.com. | ||
| This is my friend Chad Mendez has a really delicious company that they make actual... | ||
| Is it freeze dry? | ||
| I think his stuff is freeze dry or dehydrated. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| People are doing it now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's doing mylar bags too. | ||
| That's much better than doing buckets. | ||
| Chad is a former UFC fighter who's a great guy who's actually a hunter. | ||
| Everything's organic and really healthy. | ||
| 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 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 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 kept imagining Jim Baker's Bible buckets just lined up down the walls of this thing. | ||
| To keep intruders out. | ||
| Just a fucking 12-foot high wall of Bible buckets. | ||
| But they had this ex-Navy SEAL working for them. | ||
| And I'm waiting to meet with the CEO of... | ||
| He's kept me there for about three days trying to interview this guy. | ||
| In the meantime, they put me on the phone with this ex-Navy SEAL and he's going to go over their security plan with me. | ||
| So he tells me about the wall and then they're going to put up a chain link fence with barbed wire and they're going to have dogs and CCTV cameras and they've got a kind of no man's land between the fence and the shipping containers, right? | ||
| And he told me, as a geographer, you've got to understand you've got to control the geospace. | ||
| The geospace. | ||
| What's the geospace? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I guess it's just space. | ||
| You've got to have control of it. | ||
| Don't you love when people use extra words? | ||
| I know. | ||
| But then he started going down this rabbit hole where he's like, you know… We did some Googling. | ||
| There's Muslim groups in Texas. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| And I was like, oh, okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I met some really interesting people on this project. | ||
| 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, a 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? | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Oh my god, that's so nuts. | ||
| And nobody told me... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, wait for it. | |
| Hold on. | ||
| He's got a pool. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a pool. | ||
| With a waterfall. | ||
|
unidentified
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Beach. | |
| Actually, it's 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 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? | ||
| Some ballers probably have some sort of crazy setup up there. | ||
| So get this. | ||
| The guy, 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. | ||
| 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 bucket. | ||
|
unidentified
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Cigars! | |
| 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. | ||
| This is true. | ||
| You're a mover and a shaker. | ||
| You're in a condo that's $4.5 million under the ground protecting you from bombs. | ||
| Well, so I'm down there. | ||
| Like, we're 100 feet underground. | ||
| How'd 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 hang out with Larry for five years, smelling his farts, listening to his stupid jokes. | ||
| He does have a condo in there. | ||
| Does he? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's got a – if you buy into one of his packages, he's got a like SWAT-style bulletproof vehicle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, great. | |
| He'll kind of pick you up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I said, dude, what keeps the security guards here? | ||
| After the caldera blows or whatever. | ||
| I asked if they had space in the bunker and they didn't. | ||
| So, I mean, I guess you just lose your exterior security. | ||
| 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 previous life... | ||
| Look at all those security people. | ||
| They're 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's the podfather. | ||
| He's gonna 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 gonna lie, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, you know, how you prep depends on what you're prepping for, right? | ||
| And a lot of them told me if we're talking about an extinction level event, the caldera, nuclear war, whatever, they just would run into it. | ||
| Run into it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's no point in trying to survive that. | ||
| Yeah, that's the move. | ||
| Yeah, they're thinking more about, you know. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| Hell yeah! | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 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 them 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, 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. | ||
| If you send all of this food... | ||
| Missionaries. | ||
| Yeah, they're missionaries. | ||
| So yeah, I started to think of these as rescue rigs with missionary zeal. | ||
| You're building these to kind of... | ||
| I feel like Mormons, 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. | ||
| He really believed that Joseph Smith found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus. | ||
| But as a human, wonderful. | ||
| They're some of the nicest cult members. | ||
| We all believe weird shit. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| But that's the weirdest shit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It is pretty weird. | ||
| Because the problem is they know who the guy was. | ||
| It's like L. Ron Hubbard in Scientology. | ||
| You know who the guy is. | ||
| We're not talking about- It's not a mythology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| It's not talking about 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 nuts. | ||
| 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 could 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 me, 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 can 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. | ||
| Now, I'm sure you know the story about the groups of Mormons down there that had a run-in with the cartel, and the families are murdered, and children and wives. | ||
| 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 and prepping, 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 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! | ||
| They want to bring people into the fold. | ||
| And they wanted me to volunteer at their factories. | ||
| They're the opposite of Jews. | ||
| Jews make it really hard to join. | ||
| Mormons are like, you can join anytime you want. | ||
| Come on in. | ||
| We'll knock on your door. | ||
| They brought me to the factory and they were showing me all the 25-year cans of oats and spaghetti bites and all the flour that they're producing. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And like 80% of the audience raises their hands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are EMPs? | |
| That's an electrical surge? | ||
| An electromagnetic pulse, right? | ||
| That would wipe out electronics. | ||
| Right, 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. | ||
| And during – at sort of the height of the Cold War or the beginning of the Cold War, that was – he served on the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So all of those Cold War shelters, you think back to the Civil Defense Administration and the construction of all of those shelters and stocking them with those disgusting biscuits and stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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 is his name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ham. | |
| What's that guy's name? | ||
| 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 they – their whole lives exist within here and there's a kind of social hierarchy like on the mechanical levels. | ||
| You've got people doing grunt work. | ||
| But at the top of this silo, there are these screens that are showing you the outside, right? | ||
| And of course what you see is this sort of blast-stricken landscape and red sand and – I mean it's impossible. | ||
| It's the post-apocalyptic world out there. | ||
| And of course people after a while start having discussions about 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 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, OK. And then he says, oh, you know, most people want to see the outside, but, you know, I can show you, like, a beach in San Francisco or whatever. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dude, you have no idea whether what you're seeing is real. | ||
| And so he flips back to... | ||
| You want some more of this? | ||
| 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, Brent. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself... | ||
| 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 was – like 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 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 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. | ||
| I later emailed 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 where you're like, what? | ||
| Is it kind of... | ||
| Morphic resonance. | ||
| It's in the air. | ||
| Yeah, the collective consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, that's that thing where if a rat learns a maze on one side of the planet, other rats on the other side of the planet can learn it quicker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, 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 You kind of want the disaster to happen, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You want to test your preps. | ||
| Especially as you get older. | ||
| And you want to be vindicated. | ||
| Yeah, if you're like 70, and your fucking hip's gone, you're probably like, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 – 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. | ||
| There's a new swine flu that they're concerned with that's emanating out of China. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| All kinds of things can happen. | ||
| Then China hates us now. | ||
| 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 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 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 that 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, 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, pitbulls, 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, or it wasn't Ted Cruz. | ||
| Who's the guy who owns CNN? Ted Cruz. | ||
| The guy who owns the buffaloes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jane Fonda's husband. | |
| The fuck's his name, man? | ||
| How do we not know his name? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| No. | ||
| CNN. 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. | ||
| We're not designed to take in the threats of seven 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. | ||
| Like, hey, why didn't you tell me that first? | ||
| The murderous – 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. | ||
| 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 is a perfect example because it brought the world together in an instantaneous fashion. | ||
| Not instantaneous, but a couple minutes. | ||
| If they launched – From Soviet Union. | ||
| They launched nuclear weapons at us. | ||
| How much time did we have? | ||
| We 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 gonna die. | ||
| We're gonna die. | ||
| We're gonna go to war with Russia, and this is gonna be the end of humanity as we know. | ||
| We know they already did it with Chernobyl, or with 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. | ||
| No, I get you. | ||
| Did you ever see that photo of Bikini Atoll where they do the nuclear explosion? | ||
| In the ocean? | ||
| And the battleship is being sucked into the mushroom cloud. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's a terrifying thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 have this insane, unprecedented Ability to access and send information. | ||
| It's never existed like this before. | ||
| And also for everybody, right? | ||
| You could make a YouTube video. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
| 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, and let's look at it in terms of 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 to break into the courthouse and prove that they won and the other tribe wants law and order and they're macing each other and fucking launching bombs and spray painting things and it's like There's very little real communication. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I think you're right. | ||
| I think it's because we're all living with dread. | ||
| We're just saturated with dread. | ||
| I was thinking a lot in this book about the differences between dread and anxiety. | ||
| If you're anxious about something, it's specific. | ||
| You're anxious about a particular thing. | ||
| But if you feel dread, it's more of – rather than like an emotion, it's more of an affect. | ||
| 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 – 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, 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 in other communities. | ||
| They're like, we're going to burn this shit down. | ||
| We're going to start over. | ||
| And so that tribalization is extremely problematic because 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
| 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 there's a through line there, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's kind of – Sort of. | ||
| But anti-government, right? | ||
| I mean there are other examples. | ||
| Beau Grites, the guy who ran for president on the – I think it was on the Libertarian ticket. | ||
| He built a community called Almost Heaven. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like I'm just going in on my own. | ||
| I don't trust the government. | ||
| Is that 1%? | ||
| It's basically in the neighborhood of 1%. | ||
| It's 1%, yeah. | ||
| I mean it's a significant amount of people. | ||
| I hung out with – 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. | ||
| What country is number two? | ||
| OK. But look, if you contrast this to Switzerland for instance where they did build the bunkers for the entire population. | ||
| Really? | ||
| For 110 percent of the population just in case visitors are in town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Dude, the whole country can go underground. | ||
| Right now? | ||
| Right now. | ||
| Still functional? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Well, yeah, you know, I don't know. | ||
| Isn't it funny that they're neutral? | ||
| And they're like, 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. | ||
| But North Korea is another example. | ||
| I mean that country is essentially underground. | ||
| They have fleets of aircraft inside mountains. | ||
| I mean, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| But there's a place here in California, an institute called the Nautilus Institute, and they do a lot of that research where they're just like, Scrolling around on Google Earth and trying to figure out, you know, is that a vent shaft to a bunker and can we estimate the size of that thing? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think he had three theories for spoofing and that was another one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 fresh water and sewage. | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
|
unidentified
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What does that mean? | |
| They're beautiful. | ||
| They're beautiful poop streams. | ||
| I've got photos on my Flickr page and Instagram, whatever. | ||
| You can go see the sewer in London. | ||
| That's my photo, actually. | ||
| So that's a sewer in London? | ||
| How'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? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-huh. | |
| What? | ||
| We found, like, the gate for the Stargate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| That they 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's that smell? | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Do you have a t-shirt on that says, Do Epic Shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's over Chicago. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You took some cool photography. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| What are you using for these photographs? | ||
| At the time, I was shooting on a Canon 5D Mark III. Basically, I had a big DSLR. Now I've got a mirrorless camera, but they're all tripod shots. | ||
| That's the Queen Mary. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| These are crazy pictures. | ||
| Is this in one of those books that 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, where we were sneaking into all of these places. | ||
| We 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, right? | ||
| Like We're good to go. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| When you flush your toilet, where does it go? | ||
| 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? | ||
| So underneath the sewers, you had... | ||
| Utility tunnels. | ||
| So gas, electricity, telecommunications. | ||
| What is happening there? | ||
| Water. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It made me feel like I was being lied to. | ||
| The threat 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 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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-sized event today, we would be fucked. | ||
| It would burn out all of our transformers. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Like we are creating our own vulnerabilities and this is something that we've always done. | ||
| 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've got to make it cheaper. | ||
| We've 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. | ||
| 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 there's something happens and we can't get a hold of anybody that's on the other side of the ocean, we need medicine. | ||
| 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, 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... | ||
| Coltan, 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. | ||
| Vice has covered that. | ||
| Coltrane, right? | ||
| Isn't that what it's called? | ||
| That shit, they're literally pulling... | ||
| Yeah, I've seen those lines of miners going down into the pits and passing buckets up. | ||
| Dude, what's fucked is they're doing it with sticks in a lot of places. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 these kids like, oh my god, you have the iPhone 12? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| The new Zoom, the nighttime feature. | ||
| And like 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 shit in 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've 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 there's a – on this one street, there's a whole bunch of warehouses that are sort of back-to-back where people are getting all this stuff, TVs, cell phones, whatever, and they're taking it all apart and trying to get those minerals out of them, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Paddling? | ||
| Didn't 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. | ||
| I went with him for the last week of the thing and it was fucking hilarious. | ||
| He was just constantly sinking. | ||
| At first we were trying to bail out his boat because I was in the safety boat and we're going alongside him and I'm trying to bail out his boat with a cup because everything that we were using had to be found. | ||
| So I found this broken big gulp cup from 7-Eleven and I was trying to bail his boat out. | ||
| How come they couldn't seal it properly? | ||
| Well, he tried, but he got tired. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Setting off his homemade boat from Red Hook. | ||
| Maybe he nailed it this time. | ||
| I think that was a previous iteration of the project, and then he kind of refined it. | ||
| It'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? | ||
| Well, now he has a kid and his partner's 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, 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 say, 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... | ||
| Yeah, we've got a family member that actually works. | ||
| He does environmental monitoring for landfills. | ||
| Yeah, he was telling me that they got a call at some point in this one landfill that it was smoking. | ||
| And so he drives over to the landfill and sure enough, like, all of the crap at the bottom of the landfill that had been compressed and compressed over time had turned into a liquid and then had turned into a gas and it sort of ignited somehow. | ||
| And so he had to... | ||
| Inject something into the landfill to basically put out this subterranean fire, right? | ||
| I mean 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Buffalo jumps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 cliff sides where these buffalo jumps are are scarred and charred with just blackened soot and everything from these buffalo just eventually catching on fire because, you know, they have no preservation back then other than drying it. | ||
| And, you know, when you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of buffalo, there's really not much they can do to preserve all the meat. | ||
| So there's a tremendous amount of waste involved in this method of hunting. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's definitely a myth that, you know, Native Americans were at one with their environment. | ||
| When you need to eat, you're going to drive 100 buffalo off a cliff. | ||
| 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 corral all of those buffaloes. | ||
| They wouldn't do it. | ||
| They certainly would. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
| It would feed so many different animals, 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 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. | ||
| If someone's looking for someone that went missing, it'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 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, because there was a sense that if you ingested somebody's body, you would also ingest some of their power, right? | ||
| Yeah, there was 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 percent. | ||
| Yeah, 90 percent of the population. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 forever? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| 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, 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 – well, 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 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... | ||
| 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 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 they had like a fistful of arrows and just go one arrow, two hours, three hours, four hours, and they would just shoot like an arrow a second while these poor bastards from, you know, Spain or France were trying to pump their muskets and put a lead ball in there and they just fill them up full of arrows. | ||
| It's really crazy shit. | ||
| 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 – 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 only ate – they lived off a 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 were 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
| It's like it doesn't conform to everything else that's happening on that site. | ||
| We don't know – 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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 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 – It's 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 interviewed this guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 2020 is going to be a wild ride. | ||
| Buckle up. | ||
| 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 us 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. | ||
| In more ways than one, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But imagine the remains. | ||
| Civil unrest. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| And then the Pentagon saying they've recovered UFOs. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Did you read all that? | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| They've recovered crafts, in quotes, not of this world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is fucking bonkers. | ||
| That's where we're going next. | ||
| That is what 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 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 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. | ||
| Look at that quote. | ||
| 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 Air Force pilot. | ||
| Air Force or Navy? | ||
| I think he's an Air Force pilot. | ||
| A 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. | ||
| 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 other jets came back to support him, they were all trying to decipher this. | ||
| They're like, what is this? | ||
| Like, what are we dealing with? | ||
| And this was, what is it, 2007 when that happened? | ||
| 2004? | ||
| 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 few – 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 – it seemed like – it just seemed interesting culturally. | ||
| They're kind of kooky and weird and fun. | ||
| 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 do seem credible to me. | ||
| And it makes... | ||
| It forces you to reinterpret what they're doing as rational, right? | ||
| I kept saying to people, these are rational people responding to an irrational world. | ||
| The problem is not them and what they're doing. | ||
| The problem is the context in which it's 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 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'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... | ||
| 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 UnitedNuclearBob, 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 in 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, etc. | ||
| 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'll fuck it up. | ||
| I'll go, oh yeah, Mike said that. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot that happened first. | ||
| I go and 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 115 was real until 2013. In 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 used 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| Have you ever read The Black Swan? | ||
| No. | ||
| This is a great book by, I think his name's Taleb. | ||
| And basically his theory is that human beings spend all of our time justifying things that have already happened and sort of explaining them away. | ||
| But those things before they happened were totally unexpected. | ||
| So he calls them Black Swan events. | ||
| Is this Nassim Taleb? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I know who that guy is. | ||
| He's a mathematician, right? | ||
| Yeah, he's a mathematician, yeah. | ||
| So he has this theory that 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, to think about the possibility of an EMP and these transformers being burned out or to think about like what the social, political, economic fallout is from alien contact. political, economic fallout is from alien contact. | ||
| I mean how do you even start to work through those things? | ||
| But 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 – 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 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 a job where maybe you work for a university but you don't have tenure, if you write for a newspaper, and there's a lot of woke people that also write for that newspaper, and they're very critical of the way you dismiss certain things that are taken into part of the cultural zeitgeist today. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 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... | ||
| 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 a this. | ||
| I have a 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 my – 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 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 just – I'm passing on – 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 got me into a lot of trouble. | ||
| I mean I got arrested. | ||
| My – 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 situation. | ||
| How did the police get your notes? | ||
| It was a terrible situation. | ||
| Well, 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 DUMBs, Deep Underground Military Bases, right? | ||
| We started getting into like serious critical infrastructure. | ||
|
unidentified
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At some point … Trevor Burrus 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. | ||
| And at this point we're like 100 feet underground, 120 feet underground. | ||
| We were actually – we were walking through – I've seen this tunnel about 100 feet underground and one of the explorers I was with is like, there's a manhole above us. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| We would wait until the train stopped at 2 in the morning and then we would climb up a bridge and get onto the tracks and we'd run through the tunnels. | ||
| 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 – 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, you know, we've cracked Mark Lane. | ||
| We've cracked Downstreet. | ||
| We've cracked whatever. | ||
| And we're all excited about it and like the window is 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 stop posting stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And on Christmas of 2012, we cracked the last station underneath the British Museum, which, like, there's all sorts of cool stories about, like, there was a ghost in here, it's a haunted station, whatever. | ||
| But we did it. | ||
| We never got caught. | ||
| So for me, this is the end of the research project. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Is there a fear of being like retroactively prosecuted for this stuff? | ||
| We'll get there. | ||
| Trevor Burrus 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. | ||
| And I fly back from Cambodia via Singapore and the plane lands at Heathrow and the thing goes off ding and you stand up and you get your bags and then nothing is happening. | ||
| 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 in the plane. | ||
| 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 cuffed 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 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. | ||
| We've committed conspiracy to commit criminal damage. | ||
| 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 there. | ||
| And here's where it gets really weird is that when the plane landed at Singapore... | ||
| 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, 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? | ||
| Because we had timed it to land at the same time. | ||
| And he's like, are 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 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 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, by the time we got to court, I mean, the prosecution was just in shambles. | ||
| I mean, it was a total debacle because there was no evidence that we had broken anything. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| If everyone else can just get off, 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, because 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 … Trevor Burrus They needed a win. | ||
| They needed a win. | ||
| So I gave them that. | ||
| But now I've got this criminal record in England. | ||
| Trevor Burrus 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? | ||
| Like, why do I have to keep paying for this over and over again? | ||
| But it was really funny when they originally gave me my passport back. | ||
| So, like, I go to court and then, you know... | ||
| The judge is like, Dr. Garrett, you're very naughty or whatever. | ||
| Take your passport back. | ||
| Do they have wigs on? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, the barristers all have their wigs and they carry them around like a cat, you know? | ||
| And then they have to put it on when they're doing that fucking bonkers. | ||
| So they give me my passport back and the next day I was supposed to fly to Sydney to go speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. | ||
| I was the obvious speaker, right? | ||
| And I go to the airport and the guy swipes it and he's like, oh yeah, you don't want to use this. | ||
| I was like, what does it say? | ||
| What does the screen say? | ||
| And he's like, I can't relay that but you should probably go. | ||
| He gives me my passport back and then I … Trevor Burrus 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. | ||
| Whatever he saw … Trevor Burrus Well, how else can you travel? | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| So then I missed my flight and I had to go back – I had to go to the US embassy and I'm like – I've just tried to fly with my passport and it doesn't work. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| But then I started getting stopped again. | ||
| So they, like, I don't know, tacked the flags on there later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God damn. | |
| I mean, it was a real ordeal. | ||
| But, you know, 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. | ||
| Like, I was worried about being... | ||
| They did try to deport me. | ||
| At some point. | ||
| Because once you have a criminal offense, they keep trying to deport. | ||
| So anyway, I beat that down. | ||
| Did they fine you? | ||
| What was the ultimate judgment? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was 2,000 pounds, about $3,000 I got fined. | ||
| Not too bad. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Tell everybody, again, the names, 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... | ||
| That was published in 2013. There it is. | ||
| Explore 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? | ||
| Do they do anything to tighten it down after your books? | ||
| They try. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They try. | |
| Okay, let's keep it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It 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. | ||
| What a great invitation. | ||
| Thank you. |
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