This is the biggest forklift I've ever been on.
You want to be able to drive an Abrams tank on top of it. In this video, you'll learn how Atlas
Survival Shelters build their structures. We plan to follow it up with two more videos: one
on how to bury a container into a hillside and another on how to bury a container completely
underground. Yeah, it's not quite that simple. If you're interested in underground
bunkers or potentially burying a sea can, join me in soaking up as much information
as I can from the expert Ron himself. So Ron, tell us, what does Atlas Survival Shelters
do? "I build bomb shelters, luxury bomb shelters. Sometimes they're for the rich and famous, but not
always. Nobody wants to be caught above ground if things hit the fan, so they call me. Any shelter
is better than no shelter, and one of these things costs about $44,000. A shelter the same size, made
by me with the stairs and the hatch and everything inside, turn-key, is about $80,000. Okay, so you
can buy this for $4,000, buy the air system for about $8,800, get the door for about $4,500, do
it yourself, and be in the shelter. You could be in everything for around $20-$25,000 and have
a DIY shelter. There's nothing wrong with that. Interesting story: Ron's friends with my first
cousin and hunts on his farmland up here in Saskatchewan. He popped by our container yard
before flying out of Saskatoon for only about an hour, so I miked him up and asked a ton
of questions to share his wisdom with you, our audience. I actually have new lines of
bunkers coming out that are for the regular guy, starting at $20,000. Until then, I was doing some pretty pimped-out bomb shelters for some
pretty famous people like the Kardashians, the Tate brothers, Facebook, and
Bitcoin, and yeah, all of them. Cool. Yeah, you'll have to tell us that at
the end of the video here, but for now, we're going to tour around our container
yard here, show you what we do here at The Container Guy, and then maybe some ideas
that we have. That's cool. Let's do it. So Ron, tell us about the unique features of your
guys' shelter. Well, I know you make containers, so what I do is I build a metal box with
an exoskeleton that can hold the weight of the Earth on top of it. You know, a shipping
container is made to where you can stack them, and all the weight could go on the four
corners. So to make a square shelter that can be buried underground, it's got to have
I-beams on the ceilings, I-beams under the floor. It's got to have channels going from
one I-beam down to the other so it transfers the weight down to the bottom I-beam so it
doesn't want to crush the box. Then we have to run horizontal channels side to side. So as
you're looking at one of my bunkers right here, you can see how structurally strong it is.
That's because I'm burying some of my bunkers 10 feet underground, and I want them to
have a blast rating that they can take the pressure. I've been doing it a long time
before there were any role models to follow. So if somebody would have been around like me
and had a YouTube channel 13 or 14 years ago... It's been 84 years... I would have watched all
their videos and learned from their mistakes. But so what I do is I now make the mistakes and
I teach people what to do and not what to do. So when I started making shelters, originally,
all I did was round galvanized covert shelters. The thing is, I came out with a shelter called the
Safe Cellar that's kind of square like this and it feels like part of the house. So we put them
in the ground, and then the stairs lead up to a hidden hatch that's in the floor behind a fake
wall with a bookshelf that opens up when you say 'Open Sesame,' the wall opens, and then there's
the stairwell that leads down to the bunker. So when you come in the bunker, it's either a wine
cellar, a gun room, a bomb shelter, a man cave, a fire shelter, a tour, you know, whatever it may
be. But they're just cool, and they're catching on, and that's why my factory is so busy because
people like that recreational value of them too. I'm curious myself, if you were to build
a new shelter for yourself tomorrow, what unique features would you include in it? I
have this new shelter called the Fat Boy. It's got 10-foot ceilings with a sunken living room with
handrails that go all the way around the deck, and it feels like more of being in a New
York apartment or a yacht because it's so wide. It's 14 feet wide, 50 feet long, with
such high ceilings that it's really cool. So I'm putting one in for Bitcoin right now, and
they're going to use it as their command and control center. So we're putting all the monitors
on the walls. But bunkers are just cool. You know, I'm a big fan of people building their own
shelters. As I said, I can't make enough bunkers. I'm just one person. Imagine if there's
just one guy that made pizza, okay? He couldn't do it. You've got to have pizza makers everywhere
to supply enough pizza to the people in the world. So I try to be that guy that supplies the air
systems, the doors, technology, drawings, advice, air pipes, and everything you need to survive.
Our audience is a huge amount of DIYers, so I've got some ideas on how to reduce some of the
welding and a lot of the laser cutting and folding techniques that we have and the engineering team
that we have. So I've been watching your channel for about 6 months, and every time I see it, I'm
like, 'Cause everything we do, we always say, 'How do we get rid of traditional steel, like
HSS?' I'll always continue to use I-beam, but I don't think that there's a place on this planet
anymore for C-channel or potentially even hollow sections unless you need something secure into
there and not go through the other side. Yeah, we could laser cut bolt holes, even for alignment,
and then welding. Or I would say weldless would be the only way that this would work. One thing
that's interesting is if you cut with nitrogen, it reseals the edge really. I think another issue
potentially is your floor would kind of half sag, but maybe we could mitigate that through the
beams that are over here. But anyhow, he's got the bunker bug, doesn't he? There's nothing wrong
with making a prototype and failing and learning from that - why it worked or why it didn't work or
why it was not cost-effective or why it was a pain in the butt. But then you're with a prototype, so
you've got to find somebody to buy your prototype. You know, the good thing about bunkers is
you can always sell your prototypes. Yeah, there's somebody willing to take it. Yeah, we've
engineered a lot of cool above-ground solutions, but naturally now we're getting a lot of inquiries
to bury a container underground. So how do we go about that? What you've got to do is you've got
to develop a stair system or a ladder system. Older people do not like ladders; they like
stairs. I'm getting to that age where I just want to be in a bunker if I need a bunker.
But if I'm going to use it for recreation, I'm going to use it for gun storage, wine storage,
a tornado shelter, a fire shelter. You've got to keep in mind there are so many uses you can use
this for. Okay, in America, on the west coast, California, we have wildfires, and then you
worry about doomsday. You go to Oklahoma; you have tornado shelters, and you worry about
doomsday. You go to Texas; you worry about tornado shelters and doomsday. You go to Florida; it's
hurricanes. But if you go to other areas, they're worried about Mount St. Helens or Yellowstone
erupting. So everybody should at least have an insurance plan, and that should be in the form
of some sort of personal shelter for their family if they feel this world is going in the wrong
direction. And most of us who watch this stuff do. The one shipping container I actually did two,
but the one shipping container that I did, I turned it upside down because the floors on
a shipping container, you know, they're wood, and they were just basically open. So if you put
it in the ground, and the water rises, it's just going to come right through the floor. So I
shipped it, I put it upside down, took the doors off the end, welded a plate on with the door
on, welded it solid, with the intention of putting this galvanized corrugated tin, covering it with
concrete over the top and the side. I figured if I could have done that, I could have controlled the
water along with the sump pump. But unfortunately, the guy I sent it to didn't listen to my
direction. Since he put it in the ground, covered it with Earth, as the water drained
through the Earth, it seeped in. It went around, and it completely destroyed that 20-foot shipping
container shelter that I made like 10 years ago. So I stopped doing them. Then now I'm not saying
you can't do them, but it's basically you've got to create like a concrete bathtub, put them in
there, backfill them with concrete or engineered rock, then cover them, and make sure that
they're waterproof. Otherwise, they'll leak, and they'll just flood. I've had it happen to
me. I've been doing these bunkers for like, um, what, 12, 13 years. I've seen bunkers get water
in them, and it's sickening to see that happen. That's why you change and you adapt, and you
listen, and you learn, and you don't do things. And that's why I put all my experiences, both good
and bad, on YouTube so I can help people when they do it themselves. I travel all over the world;
I'm doing bunkers in Europe, Australia, Asia, and I mean just all over the place. Bunkers are
really a hot item right now. People are preparing for the [ __ ] to hit the fan, I'm telling you.
I'll tell you the story: So I get a call from a TV producer that says they're Keeping Up with
the Kardashians and that Kim and Khloe or the Kardashians want a bunker and they want to film an
episode inside it. So we did our first meeting via Zoom. Okay. And the first thing I said to them was
like, 'Y'all are looking good. Let's go out and party. How y'all doing? Good. How are you? Great.
Y'all are looking good. You're looking good, Ron.' In person, let's go hang out and party.
Yeah, in a bunker. So it's funny; in the video, they're sitting there, like, pampering themselves,
and it's like, so we got completely never even talked about bunkers; we talked about everything
but bunkers. So finally, we had to break down after about 45 minutes, I made a bunker, and
then I shipped it out to California. So Chloe and Kim go inside and do their episode; it was
called 'New Friends in the Bunker' on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the very last season.
But they were totally cool with me. I mean, I was never a Kardashian fan. I really still am
not. The funny thing was I was wearing an Obama shirt and a MAGA hat because I was trying to be
funny. Okay. Well, turns out Kanye West is running for president at the time, so the producer asked
me to take off the MAGA hat, and I got stuck with an Obama shirt. I look like an idiot, but I caught
hell for that. So I had to do a YouTube short about how they made me take off the MAGA hat. You
know, that's on my channel. But they were cool. They were cool. Yeah, so that's my Kim Kardashian
story. Thank you for telling it; that's awesome. So I hope you guys enjoyed that. All of this
expertise and experience and wisdom is just so beneficial to me and my audience, and I'm
very thankful for you coming here today, and I know my audience is as well. So
where can my audience find you? Well, they can watch me on my own YouTube channel,
Atlas Survival Shelters. I usually film the actual bunkers that I install. I've got over
100 million views and almost a half subs, so it's gotten quite popular. Even myself,
I'm not kidding; I've been following Ron for about 6 months. I'm a subscriber. If you
guys do him a favor, jump over there and hit that subscribe button as well. That's
pretty cool. Thank you very much. Okay."
