#1515 - Dr. Bradley Garrett

Joe Rogan (0:01)

And boom, and we're live. What's up, man? How are you? Cheers.

Bradley Garrett (0:05)

Hey, cheers, brother.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Nice to meet you.

Bradley Garrett (0:07)

Good to meet you, too.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

By the way, congrats on the mustache. The mustache, lower piece combo. That's the anarchist guy with that guy that...

Who's the mask? Guy Fawkes, that's right.

Bradley Garrett (0:16)

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Perfect, right?

Bradley Garrett (0:17)

Yeah, I was going more for a kind of Doc Holliday. Val Kilmer is Doc Holliday. I'm your huckleberry.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

How good was he in that role?

Bradley Garrett (0:25)

He was fantastic.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Yeah, many people have played Doc Holliday, 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.

Bradley Garrett (0:40)

You were waiting to see the paracord bracelet.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

They always have that, right? Does that ever come up?

Bradley Garrett (0:46)

When do you ever unravel that thing?

Joe Rogan (0:49)

Yeah, that always seems to me like someone who like preps. You know, you just try a little too hard if you get the paracord bracelet.

Bradley Garrett (0:55)

No, it's a kind of virtue signaling.

Joe Rogan (0:57)

You never know though. I guess it's better to have it and not to need it, right? Than need it and not to have it.

Bradley Garrett (1:02)

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, right? As you're talking to people.

But every once in a while, I'll see someone in a grocery store or whatever. And I'm like, okay, they got the Bowie knife. They got the walkie talkie strapped to them. I'm like, wow, you are really paranoid.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

Really?

Bradley Garrett (1:22)

Yeah, I know people walk around with their radios on, because they want to be ready for action at any moment.

Joe Rogan (1:26)

You live in the mountains, wilderness type area.

Bradley Garrett (1:30)

I live in Big Bear.

Joe Rogan (1:31)

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?

Bradley Garrett (1:44)

So here's the deal.

One of the communities that I worked with while I was writing this book, Bunker, was a community in South Dakota where there's 575 sort of semi-subterranean concrete bunkers that were built during World War II. And they used to store weapons in there. So these are bunkers to protect ordinance.

Joe Rogan (2:07)

Jamie's gonna turn this towards you there.

Bradley Garrett (2:09)

Okay, cool, thanks.

Joe Rogan (2:10)

I think I've seen this before. Now they drive RVs in there and stuff. Is that the same?

Bradley Garrett (2:17)

Yeah, exactly. So now you've got 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 it ever hits the fan, come visit us. We've got space for you, you're gonna be safe, you're gonna be fine.

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.

Joe Rogan (3:09)

Good for you.

Bradley Garrett (3:10)

But all my family lives in Southern California, my immediate family.

And I started thinking about like, what is the appropriate bug out plan? And I think this is a good one. So basically, Big Bear is within an hour and a half of all my family members. And I bought a cabin out there. It's got a quarter acre. It's relatively remote.

I can store some supplies. We can also use that as a family vacation home, right? So in the meantime, we can just enjoy it. But if we ever needed to all leave together at the same time, we could go to the cabin.

Joe Rogan (3:46)

It's kind of crazy that you could be at the beach and then you could drive two hours and you're in the snow.