Welcome back to Geek Time advanced everyone. Hi Lulu, how are you doing?

Hi, Brad.

I'm ready to continue our talk about bunkers.

Now have you heard about some regular people building their own bunkers?

Only my friends.

On YouTube right now, there's a really popular guy who's building his own bunker underneath his house. in America? Yes, in America. I think there might be a few people in the UK doing it as well.

All right. Is that even legal?

Technically if you don't have permits, it's not legal, but some people actually will go out and get permits for these kind of things, but a lot of people will probably just build it without going out and getting any type of permit for their bunker.

If you're going out to get the zoning permit for your bunker to hide away from the world, wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose? Because then everybody would know you're building a bunker.

That is technically true. Everyone would know that where your bunker is, but that's only if they went and did research and went to like the government office and saw whoo this person has a bunker, we should go to their house. Most people probably wouldn't do that. But really savvy people probably would look for the bunkers from rich people, because they know they would actually have something worth stealing in their house.

That is really sad.

So you mentioned as YouTuber, like an influencer, creating his own bunker. And I'm assuming he's live streaming it.

Yeah, he's well recording it. He's not really live streaming, but he's recording and then putting the process that he's done. At first, he started with just the backyard. He had like a little bunker underneath the shed.

And the shed is a very small thing in his backyard, but the bunker as almost the entirety of the underneath of his backyard. Then “I should connect this to my house”. So he created this underground tunnel that went from that bunker to his house. And then he started building it all the way underneath this house and then under his garage and his front yard. And so basically the bunker takes up the entirety of his land.

Sounds pretty cool actually, if you don't really think about bunkers are mainly built in preparation for, like apocalypse or catastrophe. If you conveniently forget that bit, then his idea of a bunker is almost like an underground man cave.

Yeah, a lot of people they do build things like man caves, they build a basement. They don't always tell the government that they're doing that, because they don't want the government coming in and telling them what they can or can't do with their cave.

But yeah, some people will go out and get permits. And then once they get a permit, and once they've had a inspector come out, they'll just do whatever they want to do at after that point.

But yeah, there... people can build their own. It's not something that they have to go out and buy a pre-made one like the Zuckerberg’s probably are, but a lot of people in like the middle America are buying property in the middle of nowhere, and just going out and building a bunker.

Yeah, I mean I would say in the States, there are lots of those land that is in the middle of nowhere, vast land, and then you can just build your own, really.

Mhm.

I guess they don't ask for permit, zoning permit, because they don't want like a paper trail.

Right. Definitely. If you're building something, you don't want people to know where you are. If you do something like that, it's a little bit easier for you to maybe have things sticking out of the ground, it makes a little bit easier for access because you can hide something in a group of trees or something like that.

People from the ground probably would never see it unless they were right next to it. So people can have a little bit more flexibility. Whereas if you are building something in the middle of the city, you have to really make sure that it's hidden and no one can see it. Because if someone found it, they could easily get in.

It's a bit of an issue. Building bunker does require a lot of concrete. It's gonna be difficult to hide, but with a lot of work. You can do it for yourself.

But if you do build one, you do have to build a lot of storage. Because you do have to have like a lot of redundancy. If you have any type of light bulbs, you have to have a lot of spares, because you can't build a light bulb in your bunker.

Sure, you need to have vast storage space to store all of those necessities. Like what we've mentioned in the previous episode.

Actually, I keep picturing these people having also like an arsenal.

In the US yes.

In their bunker. Probably all these weapons that they can accumulate. Sounds pretty scary.

What is your personal take on this? Do you think people who are building bunkers including the super rich and, or regular folks? Do you think this is being paranoid, a bit too paranoid?

Seeing where the world is at today, I think they are being a little bit paranoid, but if you're super rich, you wanna be safe. Because you never know when something is going to happen.

When you look at the world, the French revolution, you never know when the common folk are going to go after the Zuckerberg and...

You don't know when a tide is going to turn. I see.

So let's talk about these super rich of the world. A lot of them, they do have their own bunkers or shelters of some sorts. Some of them are quite open about it. Others are... there are rumors spreading around, right?

If you notice, like we talked about, like people going to Hawaii like the Zuckerberg and building a bunker there. It doesn't necessarily matter where you build a bunker so long as you do have some way of generating power, but some other things, some other kinds of bunkers that are being built around the world are things like seed banks.

What are seed banks?

It's where they store seeds to repopulate the world.

Hang on, repopulate the world. Are we talking about seed? Actual seed for planting? Or are we talking about human seeds.

Yes, seeds for replanting trees, fruits, vegetables, any type of plant, species of plant. They try to get some seeds and they put it into a seed bank. So those can be saved in the case of an emergency. But also, these seeds can be used in the case where maybe people need to go to an underground bunker and have their own farms.

So these are... so seed bank it literally means a bank of seeds.

Right. Just literally bank of seeds.

I see. I thought you were talking about human seeds that threw me off a bit.

Let's bring the topic back to Hawaii, so why Hawaii? Because most people think about Hawaii, they think of beautiful scenery, nice holiday destination. Why is it a great place to build a bunker?

Hawaii is an island, and so it's far away from any large amounts of land where there would be large populations. Hawaii does have a rather large population because it is a chain of islands that's fairly large, but it's a limited population. And so you don't have to have a lot of people that you are fighting against.

But also, place like Hawaii does have an active volcanoes, which means you have heat, you have geothermal power. I think it has to do more with the location just being so far from everything else.

From secluded...

If anyone wants to come to you, they have to use a boat, they might use an airplane, but that's so far out there that a lot of smaller planes wouldn't be able to go there very easily without a larger amount of fuel.

But if you're gonna be in a bunker for so long, you might as well be somewhere that's a little bit more secluded.

Secluded, yes.

If you're in a place like Hawaii where you could probably get away with putting things out for solar power, because you're not gonna have so many people coming after you. You could probably, it's in the mountains, especially you could probably hide where the solar panel cables are going to, cause you could probably put the panel like the cables underground as well. Yeah, so it'd be more difficult for them to find.

And you could also hope for all of your surface neighbors to die out. And then you can just do pretty much whatever you want on the islands. Yeah, I know it's a dark thought, but that might not be that far away from the truth.

Now, we've talked about all these necessities like power sources, electricity, food, all of these, let's say, supplies. But even after you have all of that, if this sort of catastrophe or apocalypse, climatic or otherwise does happen. If you are stuck in a bunker, I think sanity or insanity is a big issue, isn't it? I mean you get cabin fever.

A lot of the studies have shown that any long term isolation in a bunker or something like that, even just a year starts to drive people crazy. It will take us, if we say we want to go to Mars, people would have to be in a spaceship, in close proximity to each other for could be up to 2 years depending upon the length of the flight.

So they wanted to do studies to see if people could live in a bunker-like situation for that long. And oftentimes people start to lose it after about a year.

Yeah, I think this is, I can't even imagine it. If I think about it, I think I'm going insane. Just look back at the 3 years of Covid, that is with internet connection. Still, people found it very difficult, that wasn't complete seclusion, right? You could still somewhat make social contact, but still, a lot of people developed some form of psychological issues, mental health issues. Bunker might not be the saving grace after all.

If you did have a small group of people, the more people you have, the more space you have to have. But if you have a group of people, that means you have more people to talk to, more people to make relationships with. And so it makes it...So it's not so bad if you are in a situation like that.

You do have to worry about people fighting over resources, but as long as the resources can be maintained, as long as you can keep everyone happy with, making sure that they have enough to do and enough people to talk to, that social isolation isn't so bad.

But it has to be something that can be maintained for several decades in the case of a nuclear fallout. Because...

Yeah. Otherwise, you're looking at Battle Royale, you're looking at Hunger Games.

So it just it'd be crazy, like, I think, if you look at fallout in the game, oftentimes, all the bunkers start going crazy and people start killing each other.

Exactly.

So many movies, TV shows, art works are about that.

So, I don't know. It's one of those things I don't think any of us who are living right now will really figure out.

We're gonna wrap up here, leave us a comment in the comment section, share with us what you feel about bunkers. If you had money, would you build one? Or would you be interested in visiting other people's bunkers?

All right. And also, you can leave us a comment requesting any of the topics that you want Brad and I to talk about in this segment. Thank you, Brad for coming to the show.

No problem. Thanks Lulu. Have a good day.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye, everyone.