The Bunker

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If you think taking off your shoes at airport security is a hassle, then you probably would have hated being a kid in the 1950s and 1960s. They practiced hiding under their school desks to survive a nuclear blast. They were bombarded on all sides with blandly terrifying announcements like this from the government. Here is basic information and guidance from the Office of Civil Defense, Department of Defense, Washington.

In case of nuclear attack against the United States, loss of life would be much less if people are prepared to meet the emergency. You can give yourself and your family a much better chance of survival and recovery if you understand the basic hazards of nuclear attack. When a nuclear bomb or missile explodes, four things happen.

First, an intense flash of light. Then, seconds later, the heat wave, followed quickly by a violent blast wave. And finally, if the weapon explodes at or near ground level, there will be radioactive fallout. People who happen to be close to a nuclear explosion in the area of heavy destruction probably would be killed or seriously injured by the blast or by the heat of a nuclear fireball.

People a few miles away in the fringe area of the explosion probably would also be endangered by blast and heat and by fires that might be started by the explosion. And this one. This is basic civil defense information from the Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense, Washington. If a nuclear attack ever occurs, go to a public shelter if one is nearby.

Or if you have a home shelter, use it. But if regular shelter isn't available, and even if your home has no basement, you could still improvise some limited fallout protection in a first floor hall or room, away from outer walls and windows. Use doors off their hinges, furniture and appliances, plus stacks of other shielding material, such as trunks or drawers, filled with sand or earth to make an enclosure large enough to live in for a short time.

Sounds like you'd need a whole lot of warning before that nuclear attack to get those doors off their hinges and fill your dresser drawers with dirt, doesn't it? It's an understatement to say that this was a time of fear and paranoia. By 1965, there were an estimated 200,000 fallout shelters built and supplied in the United States.

And that number is probably on the low side, since no one was really keeping track. And some of those shelters were meant to be kept secret. It was like the whole country was on edge, holding its breath, waiting and dreading the coming annihilation, dreading the moment when the blast of the warning siren wasn't the daily test, but the real thing.

Really, really, really. Weird stuff. In early summer 2013, the afternoon bell at Watkins Glen Middle School in New York rang for the last time. Built in 1929 to serve as a high school, it had huge windows, wide hallways, a classic brick facade. The kids were moving out and a developer had plans to move their grandparents in.

The building will be repurposed to create apartments for senior citizens, which is actually a beautiful circle of life sort of idea, one that became a reality in 2016. Now called the Watkins Glen School Apartments, 51 units are home to people who once ran those halls as children. The cafeteria is still there. Even some of the old metal lockers stayed behind.

The school was a school for less than 100 years, but the old building had a few secrets to spill. Secrets that weren't really meant to be secrets at all. Secrets that were more like facts that had just been forgotten. Everyone knows what that's like. Things get lost. Things slip away. What feels so vivid and important in one moment is somehow fuzzy and foggy the next.

It's a thing that happens to people and to places too. Forgetting sneaks up on us like the lights dimming so gradually that it's a surprise to look up and realize, oh, it's dark. Memory needs a keeper and sometimes no one gets tapped for the job. After the last middle schooler had trudged out of the building for the final time, the place still needed to be emptied out.

Maggie Field, the media specialist for the Watkins Glen High School Library, had spent nearly three months getting the contents of the middle school library down from the third to the first floor. It was the end of June, the building eerily quiet, the way a school always is when the students are gone, and Field needed a desk.

Most of the classrooms and offices had already been cleared, but the basement was another story, the custodian told her. Down they went, and sure enough, there was a desk, but it was a massive, heavy old thing, and the elevator was broken. No way to drag it up the steep stairs. That custodian, though, her name was Lucy Soper, and she knew that old building as well as anyone.

You know, she said, there's a room down here that used to be one of those old shelters, a fallout shelter. There were actually two fallout shelters in the bowels of that old school building, a big reason why no one had been in either in decades was how insanely inaccessible they were. First, you had to get down to the basement, find and then navigate through not one but two small rooms into the boiler room, where you'd scale a 10-foot high homemade ladder, work your way around a maze of pipes, then hunch down to squeeze yourself through a 42-inch tall door.

We have to hope that when this fallout shelter was originally built, it was a whole lot easier to get to because, hello, the flash of blinding light and the expanding mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation might cause the kind of panic that makes it hard for folks to calmly climb ladders and scramble over pipes in a dark basement.

Then, once you crammed yourself through the small opening, you'd be standing on a dirt floor with concrete walls and six-foot high ceilings. Pipes ran the length of each wall. Picture like an oversized crawlspace. And most of that space was taken up by cardboard boxes and drums piled high. Dozens and dozens of cartons and drums.

Though some of the boxes had been torn open, most were still sealed and all were labeled in large block print. Department of Civil Defense or just Civil Defense. Each box had a list of its contents and was stamped with a date. 1962 or 1963. There were stacks of boxes marked Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Biscuit. Each box was meant to provide seven people with five pounds of survival biscuit each.

Think of something dense and hard that looks like an unholy marriage between a graham cracker and a saltine. The large drums were labeled Department of Defense Sanitation Kit to supply 50 persons. Inside were rolls of Scott brand toilet paper. Because why not add to the miseries of the apocalypse with a few squares of Raspi's single ply Scott TP.

There were paper cups, plastic gloves, sanitary napkins, hand cleaner, bottles of iodine, and a cheap plastic toilet seat ring and plastic bags marked commode liners. The instructions indicated that the drum was to be emptied, lined with a plastic bag, and then the toilet seat ring fitted on top. Also, pretty weirdly, each drum included a can opener because I don't even know.

It was a treasure trove of Cold War souvenirs and librarian Maggie Field knew just what to do with it. These were teaching tools, artifacts that history teachers could use to bring the existential terrors of the early atomic age to life in the classroom. Field knew that the school had once been designated as a shelter.

The old black and yellow civil defense sign was still tacked up at the school's rear entrance. Faded by time and weather, it was hard to tell if the shelter's capacity was 295 or 395 persons. What no one knew, not even the Watkins Glen School Superintendent Tom Phillips, was that there weren't just two forgotten fallout shelters at the middle school, but three. The third was hiding under the former technology room.

Phillips said he had no idea at all that all those supplies were still there, and that it just sort of never got mentioned by the people who, once upon a time, did know. See, this is why memory needs a keeper. All of that forgotten in less than 100 years, and we're surprised that we still don't know how the pyramids got built.

In that atomic time capsule in Watkins Glen, they also found a civil defense survival guide in amongst the survival biscuits and single-plied toilet paper. There was a cheerful little vocabulary lesson. Know your bomb. Is it an A-bomb or an H-bomb? Understand what megaton means. And it included a description of a fireball, even though the name itself does seem to cover it.

Face these facts. A 20-megaton explosion on the surface of the earth can kill most people and destroy most buildings within a 5-mile radius of ground zero. A total of about 80 square miles. So, uh, hiding under our desks at school? No good if it's that close. Got it. The heat rays and initial radiation are followed by a blast wave, which starts at more than 2,000 miles an hour, but loses much of its damaging force by about 10 miles out.

With the blast wave comes a violent wind, which picks up loose objects and bears them outward. In the illustration here, the weapon has burst at ground level, leaving a crater about a half a mile across and 200 feet deep. Um, and an old dresser filled with dirt? Is all that's protecting us from that? Got it. As the brilliant fireball rises in the sky, it draws up a vast amount of earth that is melted or vaporized and contaminated by the radioactive residue of the explosion.

A little later, this material, condensing in the cold upper air like rain or snow, starts falling back to earth because, like ash from a fire, it is heavier than air. It is called fallout because it falls out of the sky wherever the winds may blow it. The guide urges you to find a public shelter or a tall public building. There are illustrated instructions on how to dig a shelter in your own backyard. There are instructions for those who have a plan, but no time. And it's not exactly reassuring. If you are outside, run into a building and assume the same curled up position. If possible, face a corner. Then there's a bit for those who have time, but no plan. If your house has Venetian blinds, lower and shut them to bar flying glass and screen out some of the blast's fierce heat.

Fill buckets, sinks, a bathtub and other containers with water. Now, if you are a person with no plan and no time, civil defense politely look the other way and refrain from yelling, Darwinism right in your face. In the nuclear age, nobody can guarantee you so many minutes, hours or days of warning time. An enemy ultimatum might set a deadline. Enemy bombers could be tracked while hours away, but enemy missiles could arrive unannounced. However, even the briefest warning you might get by radio or sirens would give you the precious lifesaving time to act.

And speaking of radio, civil defense bombard at the airwaves with messages like this. This is basic civil defense information from the Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense, Washington. Wherever you go, whatever you do, it's always wise to keep an eye open for the black and yellow public fallout shelter signs.

Each one marks a place that's been thoroughly checked for proper shielding against radioactive fallout and in many cases already stocked with emergency food rations, water and basic survival equipment. Knowing where the nearest one is could save you crucial minutes in time of emergency. If your local government has instructed you to go to a specific public shelter in event of nuclear attack, find out exactly where it's located and the best way to reach it promptly. Check on whether there's a shelter in or near your child's school, and if not, find out what other actions would be taken by the school authorities to protect him in emergency. In short, take time now to make a family emergency plan and then make sure every member of your family knows it. One reason it's so weird to see some older Americans gushing over Vladimir Putin and the Russians is that they grew up in this nightmare with this threat of nuclear extinction shadowing their every hour. And now they're over on Twitter offering to toss Vlad's salad. Make that make sense, please. Maybe that's what happens when you grow up waiting to hear this.

After being told that, obviously, we would be only deceiving ourselves if we were to expound the idea that all persons could survive a nuclear attack. Many would be killed by the blast and thermal effects of the weapons, but many others, most Americans, would survive if they had made certain preparations after accepting their personal responsibilities in national security.

Oh, and also, the minute you climb up from your hole or out from behind your dresser to see the world you've known reduced to a smoking, poisoned wasteland, we're gonna need you to get straight back to work. This nation ain't gonna rebuild itself, slackers. Let us face without panic the reality of our times. The fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities.

The truth is, even the best plans they could come up with for surviving a nuclear attack weren't great. The proof of that can be found in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on the grounds of one of the most famous and storied resort hotels in America. It's hosted 28 U.S. presidents. It served as a military hospital during World War II. It was the setting for a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. And in the late 1950s, it was chosen as the place to preserve the American government in the event of a nuclear holocaust. They called it Project Greek Island, a massive nuclear bunker hidden beneath the Greenbrier Hotel.

The land from sea to shining sea might become a hellscape of smoldering toxic craters, but the United States government planned to stay in business by God. They called the program Continuity of Government. In the event of a nuclear attack, the plan was to evacuate the Congress and Senate to a secure location. It was a given that Washington, D.C. would be a prime target in any nuclear strike, right? The Greenbrier was about a four to five hour drive from the Capitol.

Far enough, it was thought, to be out of the initial blast zone. A secret agreement was negotiated with the owners of the hotel that if the worst ever came, the entire resort would be converted to an emergency location for the legislative branch of the federal government. And that meant building a bunker, not like the humble fallout shelters tucked into schools and banks and office buildings. This bunker would be where we would make our last glorious stand in the fight for truth and justice in the American way. Well, not we. We would almost likely be incinerated instantly or die wretched deaths from radiation poisoning. We, in this case, meant them, our elected officials, politicians, and a handful of their aides. Construction began almost immediately. The plan was to build the bunker in plain sight, calling it an expansion of the resort. The West Virginia Wing was the name. Parts of the bunker would even be used by the resort, effectively hiding it in plain sight. The problem was expanding a hotel calls for one kind of construction and building a doomsday facility for an entire government calls for another. And people aren't stupid.

A man named Randy Wickline worked as a plant manager for the Superior Supply Company. His job was to haul concrete to the Greenbrier Hotel. An enormous hole, an unthinkably cavernous hole was waiting beside the elegant old building. Wickline took one look and apparently knew better than to ask what the hell was going on. He spent the next two and a half years dumping concrete into that hole, more than 50,000 tons of concrete. The company had to buy more concrete mixers to get it done. Wickline told a reporter in 1992 that he was always being yelled at to speed up. He also said that money was never an issue. There was an urgency to the whole project that made him nervous.

All that concrete eventually took the shape of a mammoth underground structure. Room after room after room, long corridors, all with two foot thick walls that had been reinforced with steel. The four entrance doors for this, whatever it was, were made of steel, 19 and a half inches thick, impossibly large and heavy, set into place by cranes. Workers were told that the space was designed to house sensitive equipment. Once construction was completed, the whole thing was covered with 20 feet of dirt. Guards were stationed at each of the four entrances.

Again, people aren't stupid. The workers on Project Greek Island lived in the world. They watched the news on TV. Their kids were doing duck and cover drills at school. They had a pretty good idea of just what they were building. This is from the Washington Post. One former government official says he was told that so many people in the White Sulphur Springs area knew about the facility that the government dispatched two men who had not been briefed on the project to mingle with the locals, posing as hunters, to learn just how much was known and what was being said. According to the official, the two returned to Washington a few days later with so many details about the facility that they had to be given top secret clearance.

Those locals knew that a job as good as this one was scarce in that part of West Virginia, which is why they kept quiet. Not that they didn't ask the occasional question, like the contractor who wondered aloud why an exhibit hall would need 110 urinals installed. What exactly, he asked? Y'all planning to exhibit in here? Ha ha. If we told you, we'd have to kill you, as the joke goes. Plant manager Randy Wickline told this to the Post reporter Ted Gopp. Nobody came out and said it was a bomb shelter, but you could pretty well look and see the way they were setting it up.

They weren't building it to keep the rain off of them. I mean, a fool would have known. There would have been enough room to get a few dignitaries in there, but us poor folks would be left standing outside. It kind of made me think about it, the bomb, and hope it never happens. Meanwhile, the Feds created a fake company called Forsythe Associates and staffed it with government employees who pretended to be Greenbrier hotel workers. The story was that Forsythe Associates was on site to maintain the hotel's 1,100 televisions. Installed as a manager was a Pentagon guy with a top-secret security clearance, and the part about this giant nuclear bunker hiding in plain sight, the four entrances to the bunker with their enormous steel blast doors, were concealed behind fake walls.

Not hard to do, since the wheel-shaped handles for each were only on the inside. That made it difficult to enter, but super easy to lock from the inside. Plus, putting the handles on the inside also protected them from being damaged in a blast. The biggest room in this Continuity of Government center isn't hidden at all. They call it the exhibit hall. The ceiling soars to almost 20 feet. There are entrances for vehicles to deliver their truckloads of displays and gear right onto the exhibit floor, which according to a brochure advertising their convention facilities, is designed to support unlimited weight. GM even did a car show there. That's how vast this space is. There's a pair of smaller auditoriums off the main exhibit space, and both of those can also be booked by the public. One of them seats about 470 people. That's where the House of Representatives was meant to meet during the apocalypse. The other is a good bit smaller, with a seating capacity of 130. That was designed to serve as an emergency senate chamber. A joint session of Congress would flow into the exhibit hall, and if you're observant and nosy, or as I enthusiastically curious, then you might notice an oversized door with bolts locking it at both floor and ceiling. If you can get it open, you'll find yourself in a corridor that dead ends at another door. That one has a sign with big red letters screaming danger high voltage.

You got lucky to get this far, but this is where it ends. You're not getting through that door, not without an escort who has a very special key. So what was hiding behind that door? A decontamination chamber for starters. Lawmakers would strip, shower, change into army fatigues. Their own clothing would be burned. Each would receive a bar of soap, and a toothbrush, and a tube of vitalis. Can't let the end of the world interfere with your grooming.

There were 18 dormitories, each designed to accommodate 60 people. Row upon row of bunk beds, 1,080 in total. Enough for every member of Congress and the Senate, and one aide for each. There was no room for spouses or families. They were as on their own as the rest of America. There's a cafeteria that seats 400 people, stocked with enough food to feed 1,000 people for 60 days.

Food that was rotated out and restocked every six months for 30 years. The cafeteria even had false windows, you know, to cheer people up with a peek at the now lost world. There was a hospital complete with operating room, and a pharmacy that was heavily stocked with antidepressants. There was a small jail, and even a small pile of straitjackets. Thoughtful planning, considering the circumstances. Who could be blamed for losing their mind? There was even something called a pathological waste incinerator, which is a politely technical way of saying crematorium. My favorite part, though, is the broadcast studio. State of the late 1950s, early 1960s art. This was set up so that members of Congress could keep whatever was left of the There were interchangeable backdrops of Washington DC to reflect the seasons, and a broadcast tower outside on the manicured grounds, tall enough to beam a signal far and wide. This is the one thing in the Greenbrier bunker that really hits me in the feels.

That broadcast studio, in all its dated retro fabulousness, feels like such a symbol of innocence, of optimism. First, that it would even be possible to transmit a TV signal after a nuclear attack. Second, that it will be possible to receive a TV signal after a nuclear attack. Did they really imagine that the power grid would somehow survive? And what about the electromagnetic pulse or EMP that accompanies a nuclear blast? Other than your wild eyed survivalist cousin, who in the world has their TV hooked up to a bicycle powered homemade generator and locked up in a Faraday cage? And finally, the idea that even if the ragged and irradiated survivors could get TV, they would somehow be comforted if the grim news from the remnants of their government was delivered against a backdrop of Washington's famous cherry trees in bloom.

I could cry for that America. The one that believed that we, the people, could somehow pull together and survive even the end of the world. Construction had just been completed on the Greenbrier bunker in 1962, just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those 13 days in October 1962 were the closest the world ever came to a full scale nuclear war. It was a global game of whose is bigger? Russia was like, we've got nukes in Cuba right off your coast, and we ain't scared to use them.

And America was like, Oh, yeah, we've got nukes in Turkey and Italy. And you best finish up your before we turn you to ash. Meanwhile, little kids in the heartland were hiding under their desks while their parents tried to rig up a fallout shelter in the basement. Can you even imagine what it was like to live through that? To be sitting in front of the TV that October night, when President Kennedy addressed the nation, we have in the past made strenuous efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. We have proposed the elimination of all arms and military bases in a fair and effective disarmament treaty.

We are prepared to discuss new proposals for the removal of tensions on both sides, including the possibilities of a genuinely independent Cuba, free to determine its own destiny. We have no wish to war with the Soviet Union, but we are a peaceful people who desire to live in peace with all other peoples. But it is difficult to settle or even discuss these problems in an atmosphere of intimidation. The American people staring down extinction didn't know that there was at least a plan in place to keep their government going, except it maybe wasn't a good plan. Maybe a little more thought should have gone into the logistics of it all. The Speaker of the House at that time was Tip O'Neill, one of the few members of Congress who'd been briefed about the bunker. He was pretty skeptical from the start. The whole evacuation plan struck him as unlikely to succeed. It would take hours just to herd all of the legislators the 250 miles to that property in West Virginia, hours that they might not have.

There were all kinds of practical considerations, traffic on the roads, weather. Sure, they could fly. Part of the bunker's construction plan included building a runway at the nearby Greenbrier Valley Airport that could accommodate larger planes. But what if planes couldn't even take off? What if? What if? What if? What if? The bunker was just too damn inconvenient in so many ways. And Tip O'Neill also pointed out that he had no intention of going underground without his wife. Get out of here. He had plenty of agreement from other lawmakers and members of the Cabinet.

Even knowing that Washington, D.C. would be ground zero in any nuclear scenario, they simply would not leave their families behind. Tip O'Neill told the Washington Post. And it strikes me that here, before my eyes, the Greenbrier secret lesson is the same one my generation learned so well. How to compartmentalize our lives. How to contain our fear just below the surface, secure and controlled, daily denying its existence.

While above ground, we manicured our lawns, concentrated on recreation and consumption, and turned up the music as loud as it would go. So too it has been with the Greenbrier. For 30 years, its guests have come to play golf, to be massaged, to bathe in the restorative waters of the mineral baths, while some of the men who repaired their televisions and brought them movies made all things ready for a darker world after this world. A darker world after this world.

One that some people have never stopped preparing for. There are more and more news stories now popping up about how the so-called elites are building elaborate bunkers in places like Hawaii and New Zealand. Elaborate and fortified bunkers. Their doomsday scenarios range from natural disasters to dirty bombs to disease. Good old regular nuclear conflict is still on the menu, along with some newer innovations like EMP attacks. Douglas Rushkoff is a writer and media theorist.

He's the guy that coined terms like social currency and digital native and viral media. He's written 10 books on technology, media, and culture. He's the guy, the expert everyone turns to when it comes to our new and troubling digital reality. In May 2024, he described being invited to address this very high-flying exclusive group of tech executives. The whole thing wasn't at all what Rushkoff expected. Instead of addressing a large group, he found himself alone with five men who really only had one question for him. How do we best prepare for the apocalypse?

An apocalypse, Rushkoff said, of their own making. This is from an interview Douglas Rushkoff gave to Vice. The billionaires understand that they're playing a dangerous game. They are running out of room to externalize the damage of the way their companies operate. Eventually, there's going to be social unrest that leads to your undoing. The most powerful people in the world see themselves as utterly incapable of actually creating a future in which everything's gonna be okay. These guys had big ideas, Rushkoff said. Ideas that included hiring mercenaries and former Navy SEALs to guard their bunker compounds. But in a worst-case scenario where money no longer means anything, why would those guards stay loyal? That was just one of the questions they had for Rushkoff. The president of a company in Virginia that specializes in building fortified homes and bunkers says that one of the biggest concerns their clients have is a breakdown of law and order. One where the masses run wild. Translation, it's us. It's us they're afraid of.

Afraid that one day we'll look up from jobs that don't pay the bills. From the crushing debt of medical costs that insurance refuses to cover. From the soul crushing grind of running as fast as you can only to fall further and further behind. That's what they fear. The walls they're building are to keep us out. The ammo they're amassing, those bullets are for us.

And just like back in the day at the Greenbrier Hotel when a massive underground nuclear bunker was built right in plain sight, all of these new bunkers are in plain sight too. Oh, what's Mark Zuckerberg up to in Hawaii? Did you hear that Peter Thiel applied for a New Zealand passport? Is it true that Kim Kardashian has a bunker behind her designer purse closet?

Your grandparents feared a blinding flash of light, an invisible rain of poison falling down all around them. The new bunker builders, yeah, they're worried about that, sure. But even more so about something else. As one told Douglas Rushkoff, it's not an armed group of hostiles he feared. No, his mercenaries would have no problem with that. But a mother holding a baby, standing at the end of his driveway and asking for food, that's what scares him.

Dum, deedle, dum, dum, deedle, dum, dum, deedle, dum, dum. There was a turtle by the name of Burt. And the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He ducked and covered. Ducked and covered. He did what we all must learn to do. You and you and you and you. Ducked and covered.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, have you ever been so hungry that you can't even think straight? Now imagine feeling like that every minute of your life, never ever being satisfied, never feeling full, being so hungry all the time that you could and did eat just about anything unhinge your jaw and get ready to meet the man with the bottomless stomach. That's the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Lamar Richardson, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. So Sherry, you know, the thing about this is this isn't something that's so long ago that we haven't seen evidence of it. I don't ever remember in school having duck and cover drills. I just don't remember any of that. But I do remember when I was a kid.

So I grew up in a community where there was a library that had a fallout shelter. And I can remember that was the place we were supposed to go. Now, the library was only but so big. I don't know how many people that could have handled, but there's no way it would have handled all the people in that community. So but I do remember it was like, I don't know who told it to me. But it was burned in my mind that that's where we were to go. And if you looked around and you see this on old pictures, they still are signs on buildings from old pictures with a fallout shelter, like this was the place to go. Because you did live with that fear all the time of what's going to happen. Well, I want to dedicate this entire episode of True Weird Stuff to my brother, Mark, my big brother, who did duck and cover drills in school. And if life had dealt him just one or two different cards, he'd probably be working for the Atomic Energy Commission, because you have never known a person who from childhood knew more about nuclear war and its aftermath than my brother. And he would tell me these horrific stories. He was so traumatized, like a whole generation of children was so traumatized by this. I mean, I can walk you through nuclear winter. Here's the thing about the fallout shelters. And because of my brother and my childhood bedtime stories about the coming Armageddon, he infected me with his curiosity and interest in this. And so when I'm out about in the world, I'm looking for those signs and I see them. The city where my youngest goes to school, there's a beautiful old building that has apartments on top and businesses on the bottom, and a fallout shelter, giant civil defense signs that they've kept up. And right this way, take the elevator down and you're in the fallout shelter. If you are looking for it, you'll see it everywhere. And I bet people after listening to this will suddenly go, Oh, wait, that's a fallout shelter. In some cases, the signs have been bleached by the sun and they're a little bit rusty and faded. But they're so distinctive.

Now, here's what I need to tell you, my sweet summer children about America's civil defense plan during the Cold War. We were all going to die one way or the other. There were not enough shelters. There were not enough adequate shelters. And the amount of time that you would stay in that shelter was not sufficient to save you from the nightmare waiting for you when you went back outside. So I want you to think about the fallout shelters that they unearthed in the Watkins Glen Middle School. And I find it troubling that those have been forgotten in such a short amount of time.

Are you not slightly troubled by that? This is why when people say, Oh, well, I'll tell you about the pyramids. Buddy, you can't tell me shit about the pyramids because you don't remember that there's a fallout shelter two doors down from your office where you work, right? Somebody has to be the of this knowledge and information in a lot of places around the country. Nobody got tagged.

So things were forgotten. But let me tell you about and civil defense knew this. They did know this. Scientists, nuclear physicists, they all knew that you could dig a bunker in your backyard. You could barricade your door with a dresser filled with dirt. You could face a corner, all the other things. You could go into the fallout shelter at the middle school where you would huddle with 50 other people surviving on civil defense biscuits and doing your business in a barrel with a toilet seat on a ring on top. But when you came out, as you inevitably would have to, because those things were not stocked to last the years that you would need, what you emerged into was absolute hell. The air was poisoned. The ground and water were poisoned. All of the debris kicked up by the nuclear explosions. It would throw so much soil and matter into the atmosphere that it would block the sun, reduce the temperature.

Nothing would grow. There would be massive amounts of famine, starvation. If there's no food to graze on, don't tell me, buddy, you're going to go out and shoot a deer in the nuclear wasteland. No, you're not because the deer have nothing to eat and they're dead and suffering from radiation sickness. We were all going to die. Some people were going to die right away and then some people were going to suffer untold and unbelievable anguish and then die. And there were small pockets of places around the country and around the world where you had your best chance of survival. But I invite you to just take a moment and imagine what that survival was going to look like and ask yourself if you might not have been better off getting taken out in the very beginning.

I know how pessimistic and terrible that sounds. But nothing fascinates me more than somebody who has uncovered one of these backyard bomb shelters that has stayed sealed for all these years. Nothing fascinates me more than them opening it up and finding what was in there. We have some experience with this. The radio station that we originally worked in was built in the 1950s. And in fact, the studio where we were had lead in the walls. And we knew this because before we had Wi-Fi in the building, you could not get a cell signal in there, if you remember, because of the lead that was in the walls. And we had a building manager. We had a building manager who'd been there, I don't know, like 50 years and he retired. And when the new building manager took over, they went down and all of a sudden were bringing out all of these munitions, the food in those containers, those metal containers, those crackers you were talking about, and lead suits and whatnot. And all that stuff was waiting for a nuclear disaster that had been down there for I don't know how many years at that point.

Decades. And the chief engineer knew of the existence of that fallout shelter because that was a building that housed a television station and radio stations. And so, media had its own set of protocols for what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, even though, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, the EMP that accompanies a nuclear blast, your car isn't going to start, the power grid is down, you're not going to be watching TV.

So, it didn't matter that media had these protocols and that the government was building a broadcast studio in the Greenbrier Hotel's basement. None of that was going to matter. Some of that was understood pretty clearly, but a lot of it wasn't. It was a different, different time. Now, as soon as the Greenbrier bunker was, as soon as that secret was spilled in 1992, the government immediately shut it down and declassified it. And now you can go, you can go on a little tour. You can go to the Greenbrier and you can, if you're staying there, I'm assuming you got some money because it's expensive, you can hit some golf balls and get a facial and then go tour the nuclear bunker. I have no doubt that the United States government immediately put into play a new plan for the continuity of the government. And that's nice for them. There will not be many of us left to be governed in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

We did get a hint of that at 9-11. If you remember, they took George Bush to some location where he was going to go underground. And then I think at some point he said, no, I'm going back to Washington because he was doing whatever they told him to do. And then he said, no, I'm going back to Washington. But they do have some system in place, some kind of something, but it's not going to be whatever this monstrosity was at the Greenbrier.

Well, it was funny, you talked about it at the end, that these tech billionaires all have built not the nuclear thing, but the uprising of the masses. I had written this down when you first did this tech billionaire bunkers, because I always make notes as you're going along. So it's so funny that when you got to the end of it, that is something that you did talk about.

There's more talk about bunkers today than there has been at any point in my adult life. Oh, same, same. We're kind of living in history at this moment, and we don't have any fragment of a shared reality where we all kind of collectively agree that this is the news of the day, and these are the facts, and this is what's happening. Everything has been really fragmented and scattered. And depending on where you get your information, you have a picture of world that looks very different than the person sitting next to you who's getting their information from another place. The billionaire bunkers are not a secret. They are not a secret. The only thing that might be a little bit secret, and even that's not much of a secret, is why they're building the bunkers. And Douglas Rushkoff, who was brought in by five of these people to consult them, could not have been more clear. They're building them because they know that everything they've done to acquire their wealth and power has been at the expense of you and me and your children and grandchildren. They know that. And they know that at some point, who knows when, we're all going to put the cheese doodles down and go, wait a minute, we're fighting the wrong enemy here. And I tell you that when I finished writing this episode, I was so haunted by what Douglas Rushkoff said where we ended it, that this billionaire's biggest fear isn't somebody with a gun, it's a mother with a baby asking for food. I can't imagine what sort of soulless skin suit you would have to be to have that be how you're thinking. But we're watching it play out every day now in real time. It's happening right now as we speak. And so many of us are not aware.

A soulless skin suit like that is not troubled by all kinds of the moralities that we're concerned with. So that probably aided them in acquiring the wealth. One of the things I think about when I think about this terror of the red menace and Russia's going to drop the bombs and China's going to drop the bombs and all this stuff was, I felt very prepared for this because I was attending parochial schools. And I was attending a school with nuns who were in full habits with clickers in their hand. We lived in such fear of them. There's nothing the Russians could throw at me that would instill more fear in me than the nuns with the clickers going down the hall.

And if you've been in Catholic school at that time, I don't know if they issued them to all the nuns, but they were like party clickers or something. And it meant, oh, you're out of line. Oh, they're coming. I think sometimes that people who listen to this and hear us talk about our school experiences, I'm sure they don't believe that these things really happened, but we were terrified. We were terrified of them. And here's the deal, Max, as a little boy, a beating from a nun, that was something real that you had seen and maybe experienced a blinding flash of light in a mushroom cloud. That was kind of abstract, wasn't it? Right. I mean, I would see guys get their hands hit with rulers or, you know, spanked and all this sort of stuff that was going on at the school. Yeah, that was something that was a real fear, not to mention the fear I have and have to face my mother when I went home, you know. So whatever was going on with the rest of this stuff, it was kind of background noise. Well, I don't you know, I don't want to I don't want to scare anyone. But something to think about is at the time that they were planning to continue the United States government at the Greenbrier Hotel and, you know, Pawpaw was digging a hole in the backyard for a fallout shelter. What we were talking about were two superpowers engaged in mutually assured destruction. If the Russians fire their intercontinental ballistic nukes, we're going to fire ours. And in a matter of moments, you know, maybe a third or more of the population is gone. Now, we're talking about rogue nation states with an atomic weapon, right terrorist groups with a dirty bomb. I guess what I'm saying is, as in everything lately in life, I feel like your grandparents or maybe great grandparents lived in the best of times, because they lived in a different, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have the fracturing of reality that we have. They didn't have the surveillance state that we're we're constantly being followed and tracked digitally, they didn't have any of that. And if nuclear annihilation came, here's the blast of light, there's the mushroom cloud, everybody's dead. We, we that's clean, that's crisp and clean and humane compared to what we are looking at somebody firing a dirty bomb at Chicago. Yeah, the the devastation, the loss of life, the catastrophe that that would be.

But it wouldn't take everyone out, which means it would leave in its wake, untold human suffering. And now you can channel your your great grandpa who's been dead for a while saying, you know, in my day, we all died at once. And it was instant and painless. And then we were in heaven. Sorry, Papa, we're gonna we're not going to get to go that way. All you guys got to the greatest generation and the baby boomers, you guys got all the good stuff. We're stuck with this.

So you have to think about, you have to think about that the world that those kids were, you know, engaged in doing duck and cover drills. That's a different world than the one you're waking up in every day. And it's almost like I could just sit and cry for the, like I said, in the episode, the innocence and the optimism and the can do spirit. Yeah, we're gonna we are responsible as civil defense pointed out to us. We are responsible for our own survival. Did that jump out at you? Yeah, it did. It's like we can't protect you. Yeah. Better better be digging that hole in your backyard. We as Americans are responsible for our own survivor survival in a nuclear conflagration. So let's get that shovel and let's put some sweat into it. And let's build ourselves a bunker that we're not even that anymore. Like we are not those people anymore.

And and I don't know about you. Everyone listening. Did you grow up in a town that did a daily siren test twice a day? Did you? Civil Defense? I don't remember that we did it I believe that they did it monthly. Well, my grandparents, when they moved out of some my pop up was in the Navy, he was career Navy. When they moved out of the city, they're both couple of Philly Street kids. When they moved out of the city, they bought a house in the suburbs, just over the Delaware on the New Jersey side of the river. And the Philadelphia Naval Yard was a very big strategic target during the Cold War. And so it was understood that if the Russians launched their nukes, Philadelphia was going to get hit. And so in the towns all around there, there were these civil defense sirens, and they tested them twice a day because of the shipyards, because of the shipyard and, and the naval base, there was a huge naval base in Philadelphia, huge Naval Hospital, we actually did when we did the episode on the Philadelphia experiment, we talked about, that's right, what a strategic how strategically important Philadelphia was for the military and the Navy, and American defense full stop. So when I was like nine, my parents put me on a plane, and they flew me from Wyoming to spend the summer with my grandparents. Oh my gosh, it was the best adventure ever. And my grandparents lived in a town with a civil defense siren. And I remember vividly, twice a day in the morning in the afternoon, and it's a very distinctive sound and asking my grandma what that was. And she said, Oh, they're just testing it. If there's ever an emergency, it'll, it'll go off for real. And then the government will tell us what to do. It is a grandmother, unlike my unlike my brother did not fill my head with nuclear winter and radiation sickness. It is a haunting whale.

I mean, it really is. Oh, well, you heard it. You know, you heard it. Yeah. In this episode. Um, so in a in a weird way, in the same way that this bunker that was going to preserve the United States government in the event of a nuclear holocaust, in the same way that that was in plain sight, all of the civil defense infrastructure was also in plain sight.

And neither one of us are old enough to know what it felt like to live with that. And even my brother who did duck and cover, he was on he was on the very tail end. He was just a little boy hiding under his desk, like first grade, second grade, little, little boy, just a little guy, little dude, hiding under his desk and hoping that this wasn't the real thing, that he wasn't about to be incinerated by a nuclear weapon. I cannot fathom what that was like to live with how scary that had to be. And how you just had to make your peace with the existential dread of pending annihilation.

Wow. Pull back and think about that. I, I, I do think that people compartmentalize because it's difficult to live in that all the time. If you live in that all the time, there is there's no way you can continue on. And so I think that people just went, OK, fine, I'm going to put this in this box and I'm not going to worry about it.

And I'm going to try to have a life with whatever little piece of ground is in front of me. Do you know what I think may have helped this? People had this is pre Vietnam War, pre Watergate, pre energy crisis. People have faith in their government and their institutions in a way they don't anymore. People believed that the United States government would somehow find a way to protect them and prevail in nuclear annihilation. What do you think?

Well, I think if you come out of World War Two, you felt like, well, as a country, we all pulled with the government and we made this happen. And we ended up with protection for our country and and defeated all of the bad guys in the world and that the government would would be able to protect us because it worked in that occasion. So there's no reason to think that it wouldn't continue working. But it wasn't I mean, it's not reality to think that that's going to continue happening. Well, we've already like, you know, our faith in in government and institutions is so fractured and in some cases, annihilated, right? That if the government, if, you know, the president or whatever, the Speaker of the House, your local senator got on TV tonight and said to you, my fellow Americans, you need to go fill your dresser drawers with dirt and hide in a would they? No, probably a whole bunch wouldn't believe it. Yeah, a whole bunch wouldn't wouldn't even believe it. And and there's something else that I think about as the secondhand product of my poor brother's nuclear atomic age trauma. So there's something else I think about. You know, people complain, they rant and rave. Oh, this these kids, everybody gets a trophy.

Okay, well, the parents of those children were the duck and cover kids. And sometimes I think those kids who were hiding under their desks waiting to be turned into ash by Russian nuclear weapons. Sometimes I think that as those kids got older, maybe they didn't carry that memory so consciously. But it shaped them. You know, I think about my brother who grew up to be a husband and a father, and the coach of his kids softball teams. You know, he was a hockey dad. And I think that those grown up duck and cover kids maybe handed out some trophies. Because at some deep and maybe unconscious level, they were like, well, screw this, let these kids be kids.

Now that might just be like me being like, you know, a naive and idealistic, romantic, pumpkin headed, you know, social worker. Did you have to add pumpkin headed in there? Well, you know, I'm pumpkin headed, you know, I got a big old pumpkin head that's filled with ideas. But sometimes I look at my brother and the way he was with his children, the way he is with his children. And all those years that he and his wife, my sister in law, worked all day, took care of five freaking kids, and then coach teams and did award banquets and drove to hockey practice. Sometimes I wonder like, maybe we should give those parents a break and stop ranting at them about everybody getting a trophy and pause and consider what shaped them.

And while I'm on this subject, which is something that drives me crazy, do not look at millennials and yell at them for participation trophies. Those children did not drive to the sporting goods store, buy a trophy and give it to themselves at the banquet. You did that. Stop yelling at millennials for everybody gets a trophy. They were the children on the receiving end of you giving everybody a trophy. And maybe it's okay that you did that. Because you were so shaped in early childhood by fear of extinction, that maybe you want to be a little softer with your own kids. What do you think, Max? Yeah, I think that that certainly influences how you treat your children. Because you're saying, this is what happened to me, I want to try to rectify this mistake. I think that generally, that's what people try to do. This is something I think a lot about. Because again, you take the girl out of the cultural anthropology, but you can't get that out of the girl. It's something I think about a lot about how we're so shaped by the things that are happening to us. And like I think about the millennial kids who were in school when the attacks on the World Trade Center happened on September 11, 2001.

And everything that's happened to that generation since. Of course, you're shaped by it. Of course, it dramatically sculpts your view of the world and your understanding of your place in it. Right? How could it not? How could it not? But I think that those attacks really shook Americans to their core, because we hadn't experienced anything like that in our lifetimes.

We always felt like we lived under this blanket of we're being protected. And, you know, there's no way in a free society that you can be protected at all times. There's just no way. Well, that's the conundrum. You can't have freedom and guarantees of safety. And one of the things that happened in America after the September 11 attacks, people were tripping over themselves to trade their liberty for the illusion of safety, which is an illusion. It's all an illusion. And by the way, none of us are immortal. Like here you are. And you are you are talking meat. You're very fragile. You're talking meat. Meat is not you are not made of titanium. You are made of meat. Meat is not super strong.

If you want to have a fun thing to do on the Internet, go to Atlas Survival Shelters dot com. We they're not they're not sponsoring us. Trust me. Trust. But you can go and see the different kinds of shelters and all kinds of stuff that goes with it, because this is really still a thing. I used to when I was a little girl and my brother would talk to me about I'm telling you, the man could have worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in like fifth grade. The thing my brother's one of those people, if he's interested in it, he goes deep all the way down and then he moves sideways. And then he's like a freaking expert. He was like an expert in junior high middle school at nuclear annihilation.

And I as a little girl, I was so scared that I was determined that, you know, I was going to have I was going to find a shelter and I was going to do everything that it took, everything that it took. I don't feel that way now. I do not feel that way. What was that movie that came out? I want to say it was the mid 1980s, but I could have my decade wrong. It was a made for TV movie like the day after. Yeah. And it was what happened after a nuclear attack on America. It was a it was a big at the time. I mean, it was everybody was talking about that movie. Everybody was talking about it.

It's one of the scariest things I'd ever seen. And I was primed for this movie, thanks to Mark, my brother. Yeah. I didn't have I wasn't confused about what was happening in this movie. And once I've seen this movie once, who can watch it twice, once. And there's a scene in it that has haunted me for my entire life. And here it is.

It's a family in a house in the suburbs, just like where you live or I live or anybody. Right. And they're dying of radiation sickness. And there's no food. And everything is terrible. And the mom is so sick. And she's standing in the kitchen. And she's scraping the last little bit of peanut butter out of a jar. Okay, I do not want to climb into a hole in my backyard and emerge into an irradiated wasteland. I want to go in the first wave of the blast.

I know how that sounds. But when you understand what surviving that would look like, I am too soft. I'm not. You and I both. You you never got a chance to see me just go off the side here for a second. You know, the radio station we work for was built in the 50s. You never went to the transmitter site for that radio station for those radios or one of the radio stations. There was a transmitter site and at the transmitter site was all of the stuff they would need to broadcast from that area should there be a nuclear blast in case something happened to the other place. There is a studio there that is sealed in time that is from the 1950s with the 1950s board and microphone and everything else that's just sitting there waiting for someone to make announcements about nuclear holocaust from it. And I mean, it's you see real, real history there. And they had like bathrooms and all kinds of stuff there. Should that be our last line of defense for being able to broadcast what was going on? And it's it's just it's fascinating to see. It's like a museum. I badgered the engineers to take me there because I was dying to see it.

I mean, clearly. And I think I don't think they took me seriously like it. It didn't make any sense to them. Why is this girl constantly hounding us about fallout shelters? But I knew that there was a an emergency air studio there. But I also knew thanks to my brother that we weren't going to be broadcasting. And even if we were broadcasting, how were you going to hear it?

It would take now that now the human spirit is indomitable and the people who would survive or could survive that would eventually find a way because that's what people do. We're so good at finding a way. The thought was you were more likely to hear radio because there would be there were radios with batteries. And so there would be an opportunity that there would be somebody there to receive the transmission, even if they had radiation poisoning or whatever their situation was that, you know, that that was a possibility. Let me let me tell you a little something something about the year 2025. 68% of American homes don't have a radio. We know that for a fact.

We do because we we participate in this tech research every year as a show. 68% of American homes don't have a radio. Oh, but Sherry, I'll just go out to the car and turn it on. No, you won't because the EMP your car will be just a useless hunk of metal. Well, what about my phone? No, your phone. Dude, dude. Our cell phone service goes down from solar flares. Did you somehow think Verizon was going to stand up to nuclear annihilation? It's not right. Well, then the internet No, there won't be an internet there. None of that will exist. And maybe listening to this episode makes you want to get online and order yourself a hand crank or battery powered radio just to have in your emergency box. I don't know. I have one in my hand. I have a hand a hand crank radio not only is that but it has a solar panel on the top of it. And it's a flashlight. It's a radio and you could you can hook your cell phone up to it and you can get enough of a charge to be able to get a call out. Well, I'm really excited for you. And so is Tony Garcia. Because as the bombs are dropping, he's going to be like, Sure, Max has a hand crank radio, we got to get a show out. The affiliates are expecting a show today. But listen, keep it light. Keep it light because you know, we don't do bad news on our show.

But I mean, but I this was this I asked for this for Christmas a couple years ago. Because So what do you want? I said, I want this. Why do you want that? And I said, you don't know, there could be an emergency, you know. And they're, you know, whether, like we have emergencies that don't take out the entire power grid and communications infrastructure. We do have other kinds. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just, this is a tough one.

People will survive. Like, in a scenario like this, you're not going to get everybody, there will be people who survive, there will be pockets of survivors. We when we talked to Seth show stack, you remember, when we talked to him, he talked a little bit about this. He is, we talked to him about UFOs. But he's also like this all round really brilliant guy. And he said, Well, even if all the bombs are dropped, it still would only wipe out, you know, half the population or whatever he said, which gave me some hope.

Seth show stack is an astronomer and a scientist. And he he's with the SETI Institute, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And he was, as a young scientist, he was there the night the Wow, the legendary Wow signal came in. And if so, if you haven't heard that episode, and you're into that, you might enjoy listening to that. Yes, I half half from a little half the population will survive. That's just where the fun begins. Because what have you survived to walk into, you have come into a world of pain and hunger and deprivation. And all of the things that hold civilization and society together, the rule of law, sort of the agreement that we have to slap each other and run over each other's kids and dogs. That's going to be gone.

Because there's not going to be enough resources to go around. And people are going to do what they have to to survive. And it's going to be terrible. And I can't I can't cut it in that world. I don't have what it takes. And I've known that since I was about seven years old. When my brother first introduced me to the exciting and fast paced world of mutually assured destruction, I don't have what it takes. I don't end this on a cheery note. Well, we are going to end it on a cheery note. We're going to remember that not that long ago in this country, the people of America stared down their own extinction. And it was so real that the Cuban Missile Crisis Oh, yeah, it was so real.

People, maybe your parents, maybe your grandparents, depending on how old you are, they sat with their hearts on their throat watching the TV news. And they tucked their kids into bed at night, not knowing if tonight was the last night. And they they did. They did what they felt they had to do to improve their chances of surviving this. We were those people not that long ago. Not that long ago. And I believe we could be those people again.

But standing between us and that dreamy day is this situation we find ourselves in now where we can't even agree on what's real. In order to survive as one, we have to agree on some basic fundamental points of reality. And I don't know what it's going to take to get there. I don't know. You got any guesses? Sherry, I don't have a guess at all.

I mean, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I think we can do it. I have such at this, like, I think that people are absolutely vile and terrible, but also amazing and wonderful. And it's that combination that it makes us like beautiful is that we're capable of the best and the worst. I think we could once again, be a people with a shared vision of what survival and what thriving might look like. But we're going to need to share some reality together.

And if my brother were here right now, do you know what he would say? The dark doom speaker of nuclear annihilation. My brother would say, well, Sherry, you know what that's going to take? We got to tear everything down. We got to bring it down to baseline. And the people who survive that, those are the people that will come together.

And they'll have a shared reality and a shared impetus to go forward. But in order to get there, we got to break this whole thing. And I'm also not interested in that because that sounds really, really unpleasant. I'm too soft for that, too. Please. I get upset. I get upset by spotty Wi-Fi. I was I was talking to someone and they were asking me questions about the podcast.

So what is your podcast? You're at stuff about and I said, well, every story has is true. Um, and it has to have a weird or a bizarre or a trippy twist. And she said, Oh, I don't know. I'm just uncomfortable with weird things. Well, it's in the name. It's in the name. But everything's true. Like this, this whole episode is a very recent chapter in your country's history that has shaped and defined who we all are. And it doesn't help you to hide from that in any way. Like when it comes to our own history, we can't do duck and cover.

We've got to stand up and look at it. Because that's the lessons we can take from that are the very things we need to survive going forward. I can look at it, but I can't live in it. You know, I just I'm not trying to put my head in the sand. I mean, I know what the reality of the situation is, but there's an awful lot I just simply can't control. And I accept the fact I can't control that and just say, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're not, um, you're not a person who's walking around, like, completely frickin clueless about what is happening around you. No, I'm not.

We, when we lost our shared reality, we, we marooned some people on islands of low information. And you need to know because if you're going to survive and like my brother is going to survive, my brother is going to be met from the time he was a little boy, he was going to be Mad Max, he was not going down, there weren't going to be nukes, or one eyed mutant radioactive scavengers, like nothing was coming for him. He was going to survive. And he believed and planted it in my head, that survival begins with knowledge, you must understand where you come from, if you have a prayer in hell of figuring out where you're going. And that's why I'm such a history nerd. I just don't understand why everybody isn't like, fascinated like your grandparents were digging fallout shelters, you should ask them about it sometime. And be very glad now listen up, be very glad. I want you to imagine you're in middle school. Is there a more awkward stage of your whole life where you're more self conscious and more horrified than middle school? Well, most of adulthood for me, Sherry. But yeah, it's a terrible time. Art Max, you're in seventh grade. Who's a girl you had a crush on first name in seventh grade? Who's that girl? Her name was Teresa. Okay, that's perfect for Catholic school. Of course.

Because we didn't have enough, you know, Maggie's Siobhan. No, Mary. They were all Irish or Italian. My brother went to school with a girl named concetta. And I always felt like she won the derby of Italian Catholic schoolgirl names. So listen, listen, that you're in school, you're doing social studies. And the siren goes off. And you see your teacher, because it's not a drill, something is really happening. And your teacher, because we ask way too much of teachers, your teacher, her own family is somewhere else. But she is going to take you children and she's going to shepherd you out of your desk down the hall, stay in an orderly line, no talking, please, down the basement around and through the pipes and up the ladder and in and now you're in a dirt floored crawlspace. And you're going to be there for 50 days. And you are going to have to sit on an empty barrel to do your boom booms. While your crush Teresa looks on in mortification.

Now tell me again that you don't want to just go out in that first blast. Yeah, got the first blast. Yeah. Yeah. See, that was the other thing. Nobody really stopped and talked about or thought about. All right, we built the bunker. There's the Scott toilet paper in the biscuits. Now what? I know you, buddy. You are not sitting on that barrel.

No, I'd rather be dead. Hell, I'd rather be dead sometimes now. But no, I'd rather be dead. You wanted to end on a happy note, right? Oh, yeah. Thank you. Oh, wow. I feel so much better. I'm super optimistic that the survival or mutual survival is the most important thing. I mean, I'm sorry that I'm optimistic that way. But I believe in people, even though they're mostly terrible. I believe that they're also mostly beautiful. Yeah, I believe in people. I'm just saying, listen, whatever happens, I have no interest in being in Mad Max. Like, I am not cut out for that world. You don't want me coming into your town with a machine gun, wearing a confederate flag bikini and a strata tank. I'm not your girl for that. That is not what I need to be doing. No, but I love the cars in Mad Max.

Oh, okay. I'm super excited about next week's episode. It is the true story of a man. And we don't really know. Doctors during his life were never able to really tell us what was up with this dude. But he just couldn't eat enough. And he wasn't a big guy. He had a metabolism like a blast furnace or something and a bunch of other afflictions.

He could not ever get enough food to be satisfied. And when you're a person like that, life offers you a handful of options and none of them are good. And this guy did the best he could, you know, join the military, figure in three hots and a cot, right? He joined the circus, like he did what he could. It is an absolutely incredible story. And this guy, I mean, the appetite. That's the name of the episode. And that's next week's true weird stuff.

Okay. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website, true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sleuton. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash.

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