The Underground City of 1 Million Beneath Beijing 

This could become a cool movie, imagine the city is nuked without any warning and only the young and poor people survive underground

This guy sure does make good use of his stock footage subscription.

Half as interesting cracks more jokes then talk show hosts nowadays

That Russia joke sure aged well

My fridge might not save me but at least I'll have some snacks while waiting to die.

HAI: Casually suggests an impending nuclear holocaust Everyone in 2020 : Yeah that might as well happen

It's not just Beijing. Virtually every middle sized city in China has expansive underground shopping malls, many of which used to be bomb shelters.

Everyone like to laugh at duck and cover drills, but they were in fact useful and could save lives. Especially back when nuclear weapons were comparatively small. But the main point is not to survive a nuke being dropped on your school, obviously that’s not going to help. But if you’re far enough away to not be incinerated, you might still be close enough to be thrown back by the shock wave, and also hit by flying glass and other debris. Teaching people to take cover rather than stare at the big fire (a thing humans are prone to do) does have safety benefits.

Anyone else gonna talk about the stock footage of someone literally grilling cheese?

1:00 “Don’t look directly at the explosion” *shows someone looking directly at the explosion*

And you thought your upstairs neighbour was noisy, imagine having millions of people walking above you.

"They're almost like college dorm rooms if college dorm rooms were big and affordable" MY SIDES

1:25 fwiw, duck and cover actually was pretty damn effective. It came directly from studies of the Hiromisha and Nagasaki blasts, which found that basically *any* shielding from debris was a huge boost to the chance of survival. Obviously it wouldn't help if your school was ground zero . . . but that's unlikely to be the case

*This city sounds like the basis of a new dystopian series...*

Wait it’s all intro? Always has been.

“Following total atomic annihilation, the rebuilding of this great nation of ours may fall to you... That’s why we at *Vault Tec* -uh, I mean *Wendover Productions* have prepared these educational materials for you!”

_"you can use skillshare to learn how to use skillshare"_ *confused screaming*

0:29 Uhh... You always make the best intros Sam

wait I am confused. The "President" of china wanted to commercialize the bunkers, but they're illegal to live in? *Edit because I am getting a lot of responses from people that clearly don't understand: The bunkers are owned by the government. The government said it's illegal to live in the bunkers. The government then rents out the bunkers to the citizens. How does that work? *Edit #2: There are 76 replies to this comment with 76 different explanations. Surely none of you are just talking out of your ass, right?

80% - bad jokes, 10% - promotions, 10% - useful information.

"Ineffectual surviving tips" those tips would have saved a lot of people from glass cuts in Beirut...

We only need to find Lilith to build a full underground city.

I can start that nuclear thing if you want, I think we can all agree that we’ve had enough of 2020

Remember that time when Planes were in a video. Oh wait wrong channel.

That intro was a blast!

It's impressive that Half as Interesting couldn't find even one video clip of an actual underground Beijing apartment.

0:27 Sam: I say we're well overdue for an exchange of nuclear warheads thing. Me(knowing about the Indo-China conflict going on): (softly) don't 2020: that.... is an excellent Idea.

This intro aged well...

That's aged poorly 0:30

_Sure that this isnt actually my basement?_

I hope they don't... ehm... store certain chemicals next to that grain storage like a certain other country.

The deepest parts of the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems are also secret bomb shelters... that look like imperial palaces... with trains.

Listing all the events of 2020 Misses Beirut explosion Talks about large explosions anyway

so theres 1million people living under people in beijing and they dont know

It is a very common misconception that "Duck and Cover" was purely for scaring kids. Kids were drilled that if they suddenly see a huge, bright flash to "Duck and cover". Why was this important? Well, if you're in the blast zone of a nuke it is game over for you. If you are outside the blast zone however do you know what causes 70% of all injuries? Glass. People see a bright flash and instinctively look at it. The flash is followed by a shockwave that sends glass into your face at the speed of sound. But if you were taught in school to look away and get under cover you were saved from this.

Congrats on making a video that doesn't show a single picture of the thing your video is about.

Duck and cover is actually extremely efficient survival technique. People are forgetting that most people are not in the fireball region, but further away. With any bomb most people will be in the region where pressure wave and heat radiation are the killers. Duck will dramatically help with the first and cover with the latter. Ie compare how many people are within ~1km radius vs those between 1-20km from epicenter.

August 6th, a good day to talk about nukes...

"He did what Google did to our browser histories and ordered them to be commercialized." Yeah, I'm surprised Google employees haven't shot themselves after seeing my browser history

No one understands how hard it is to edit until they start doing it lol. I learned that a week ago. It takes hours just for a couple minutes of footage

Ah, the irony of using a Christian cross to signify the death of Mao

The russian comment has NOT aged well... 😨☠

3:48 "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

I grow up in very center of Beijing and live there for 20+ years, Never saw or heard of any underground shelters.... Only the metro is underground...

I‘m not joking, RU-vid crashed right at“We’ve already done the plag...” in the beginning. Scared the crap outta me

Kinda bad timing on the explosion and grain warehouse jokes when Beirut just blew up with their national grain storage completely destroyed. But hey that is 2020 for ya.

I've actually been to dorms in Beijing. 8 students living in a space of maybe 6m2. It was insane.

1:18 Duck-and-Cover provides non-trivial protection from (first generation) nuclear weapons, and blast waves from non-nuclear explosions alike. "Within a considerable radius from the surface of the nuclear fireball, 0-3 kilometers...ducking and covering would offer negligible protection against...a nuclear explosion. Beyond that range...the main hazard is not from ionizing radiation but from blast injuries and...flash burns to unprotected skin...The explosion's blast wave would take...7 to 10 seconds to reach a person standing 3 km from the surface of the nuclear fireball...thus at the distances that the advice would be most effective, there would be...time to...'duck and cover' against the blast's direct effects and flying debris." "To highlight the effect that being indoors, and especially below ground can make...Akiko Takakura survived the effects of the 16 kt atomic bomb at a distance of 300 meters from ground zero, sustaining only minor injuries...in the lobby of the Bank of Japan, a reinforced concrete building, at the time of the nuclear explosion...Eizo Nomura survived the same blast at Hiroshima at a distance of 170 meters from ground zero...in the basement of...a reinforced concrete building [and] lived into his early 80s." - Wikipedia Not arguing that the literature proliferated during the cold war _wasn't_ propaganda designed to promote fear of Communism. But there are contemporary international sources that corroborate Duck-and-Cover as a legitimate defense from dangerous flying debris following an explosion, and to a lesser extent, flash burns. Obviously a lot of things have to go right for this to do you any good in the case of a nuclear attack. But say you find yourself viewing a mushroom cloud billowing up from a port in Beirut through glass windows? Now would be an excellent time to get under something. I say this not to be funny or insensitive, but to encourage others to take this advice seriously; it actually can save your life.

This is literally the real life equivalent of the SCP "Unlondon" except it's "Unbeijing"

@1:20 duck and cover seems funny, but actually is surprisingly a huge boost to survivability of a bombing. Obviously it's useful for the explosion part (as years of conventional bombs tell us), but also for the nuclear part too. Look at the postwar research done to interview the survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - turns out getting something keep a roof from collapsing on you is the most predictive factor of survivors

When I young & I visited China in 1979 on a tour they allowed us to visit that underground shelter. I need to dig through the albums to see if I have photos of that place.

I love your videos and channel! You make quarantine so much easier!

Sam, i love your channels, for a few years now. Love the topics, style and your growth in writing and presentation. If you'd like feedback, I can only say that I am starting to find myself impatient with the number of jokes per second, compared with learning per second, if that makes sense. Similarly, Im starting to feel less and less confident about what IS a joke and isnt, which is concerning. best of luck to your future!

Another RU-vidr thinking they’re some politically scientist with the authority to denounce the Trolls World Tour

“7 months into 2020” August: “Am I a joke to you?”

Nuclear war. *starts* Me on skillshare “How to survive a nuclear bomb”. *no results found*

not the best time to talk about explosions and grain storage but still a good video non the less

Nice video, but the ramblings and jokes at the beginning of each video in order to extend watch time has been getting to be too much recently.

0:35 looks like they went with a more direct approach

This reminds me a story my father told me, Beijing has many bunker so some people from the military converted these bunker as a casino (this was 20 years ago) the inside is very cool and the doors were green, every room is full of people playing majian.

"we are well overdue for a nuclear thing" you fucking called it

Last time I was that early Half as Interesting had Half a million subscribers . Congrats for 1.5 M subs.

Neat info about this exotic area. Thanks for uploading!

Who knew I'd actually be needing this in 2022

0:27 Ouch that aged poorly

Now I get it. This is why you are called Half as Interesting. You spend the first half time in trolling yourself and everything else and trying to figure out your humor rhythm. Then the next half, well the first half of that half's half, you spend in defining the topic and the second half of that that half's half you spend on the topic itself. And then the last half of the second half, you talk about skill share or whoever is sponsoring you for the day. Awesome.

For 6,000,000 people to pass through 90 doors within 10 minutes, they would need the capacity to allow over 110 people per second per door to enter. Those better be some damn big doors, otherwise what’s the point of all that underground space if only a portion of the populace can get inside in time?

Nice, you should make one about the underground tunnels in other places too, I hear they are pretty interesting.

Ducking and covering is actually a very good idea. First, it keeps you away from windows. Nuclear blasts emit a brief, tremendous burst of radiation. Not talking about the radioactive fallout that causes long-term damage and birth defects. I'm talking about light and heat, (gamma and x-rays too, maybe?) and lots of it. You don't want to be in its path. But also, a nuclear blast has a huge blast radius that falls off with distance. Which means that there's a huge area _outside_ of the epicenter where you're not close enough to get turned into dust, but you are close enough that a bunch of crap can fall on top of you, just like an Earthquake. I mean, if you've got a bunker, go to the bunker. But if you don't, duck and cover. What's the alternative? Standing naked on the roof? That's for tsunamis!

Why does everyone keep asking half as interesting to make a brick video?

The missiles come flying, the people already living in the underground city lock the doors "fuck off, we're full!"

5:10 Is this dude just burning cheese directly onto a griddle

nobody: stock clip at 5:10: puts cheese directly on the grill

I didn't know Levi was Chinese.

This video could not have seen the future better

You forgot the Beirut explosion thing in the intro

Lmao😂 I’ve been living in Beijing for my entire life and lemme tell y’all : I’m sorry, the “underground city” isn’t big enough to contain millions and NO ONE lives down there anymore. And not a lot of people even know its existence, not to mention to hide down there in minutes after nuke alerts🤷‍♂️

"there's part's of history that don't include the United States" So, non war related history right? Jk btw

Fun fact: Plague is actually just part of the natural cycle in Colorado each summer they start tracking cases in animal populations then warn people to stay away from said animals and take other small precautions like flea protection. If a human gets it they isolate the case and contact trace. The human is then cured with antibiotics. It kind of sucks sometimes because they close off areas.

This video raises more questions for me than it answers. Now I must go learn about this underground city.

0:29 Erhmmmmmmmmmmmmm about thatttttttttttttt...............

I think the intro of this video around 0:28 didn't age well.

I'm actually pretty sure duck and cover would be useful. That atomic bombs have an area where they're dangerous by shrapnel from the subsonic shockwave much, much larger than the area where the fireball vaporizes you or the overpressure crushes you. Get out without any severed arteries from bits of flying window and you might just survive.

The grain warehouses go well with the mushroom cultivation, which goes well with figuring out future video topics.

Sneak 100: the city

Talking about Russia in the beginning of the video feels a bit odd nowadays tbh. Kinda like a weird foreshadowing.

so I'm Chinese and in the microdistict I live in when I was a child in beijing there is a underground parking lot, and my parents always told me it was originally a hideout for when missile strike and there is also evidence on the entrance that suggest that but that's not the thing this video talks about (or is it?) oh yeah and I remembered this that the place where you pay for your heating is also underground and I think that is what this video is talking about because it is designed just as the same as what you would expect on ground and guys if you want to see what does it really look like follow this link of a baidu search about beijing underground (www.baidu.com/sf/vsearch?pd=image_content&word=%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%9C%B0%E4%B8%8B%E5%AE%A4 ) (it might take a while to load since it's server is in China)

Oh my god that was so true about the college dorm rooms, it still baffles me how colleges get away with that.

The intro joke is already out of date 😶

the intro was dated even before it went live #beirut

I had to watch Duck and Cover with Bert the Turtle in middle school history class...

Not gonna lie, that missile scare was terrifying. Lots of my friends had a swim meet that morning when it happened pure chaos and fear :(

In my opinion, I think the jokes should be toned down a little. It's fine to crack a few here and there, but truthfully, a lot of the recent videos have just been tiring to watch and I think it's really distracting from the topic. I appreciate the effort you guys put into this series, and I know that Wendover Productions is usually for more seriously presented videos, but I think the value of HAI is decreased when a large chunk of the video is trying to crack jokes rather than present information.

0:30 Well that's aged poorly :)

@5:01 - excellent segway into your advert. You got me on that one.

Thanks for making me remember that false missile scare.

Listening to this in March 2022 is uhhhh. Hm. Not as great

This channel literally got half as interesting. 1:45 minutes just to get to the point of the video...

Bruh this video is so polarised my compass is pointing south

ok here's some correction to this video: so there's this new law which here's a snippets from the news source I got my information from: (translation after the original text) ...... 《规范》明确，禁止擅自将规划用途为非居住用途的地下空间用于居住；地下二层及以下，禁止设置居住场所。 It is clearly stated that it is not permitted to change the usage of non residential underground area to residential, and if it is under ground 2nd floor or lower, no residential is allowed. (this is my translation) so there is residential underground area to live in that is legal the new law also makes it that bunk bed is disallowed etc and this law is a statement not a opinion so you can not worry about the media influence