The Tim Ferriss Show - #482: Steven Rinella — A Short Introduction to True Wilderness Skills and Survival

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Starting point is 00:06:23 This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my usual preamble short. I want to get to the meat and potatoes of this conversation with Steven Rinella, Instagram at meateater, at Steven Rinella. He is the host of the Netflix original series, Meat Eater and the Meat Eater Podcast. He's also the author of seven books dealing with wildlife conservation, hunting, fishing, and wild foods, including The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, which is his newest, and you can find it now on the web. You can find all things Stephen Rinella at themeateater.com, and then on Facebook, he

Starting point is 00:06:58 is Stephen Rinella. That's with a V. Stephen Rinella, R-I-N-E-L-L-A, Meat Eater. Steve, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it, man. I have so many questions for you in part because you are not just an expert in survival, wilderness skills, but you actually practice and showcase this on a regular basis. So you're not describing in your books or on television some type of fetishized, romanticized version of survival, which I think is highly, highly common these days. reality. I'll leave it broad on purpose, but where should we start in terms of discussing the common misconceptions of survival or portrayals of survival versus the realities?

Starting point is 00:07:54 Yeah, I think you set it up as a sort of a dichotomy or like two mindsets. One is the impulse to run away from the woods, that it's this bad place that you found yourself stuck in and you need to get out as quickly as possible before something terrible happens to you the other is and it's sort of my mindset and it kind of captures the ethos of our new book is that it's a place worth running toward the outdoors nature wilderness is a place we want to be it's fun to be there and a few skill set and knowledge base helps you do it fairly risk-free or at least having a good sense of what the actual risks are do it safely risk-free enjoy it for you enjoy it for your family so you might imagine like a lot of survival materials is kind of like you said it's like this Do it safely, risk-free, enjoy it for you, enjoy it for your family.

Starting point is 00:08:50 So you might imagine like a lot of survival materials is kind of like you said, it's like this fantasy thing. There's this fixation on drinking your piss, which is really, really like it's nonsense. It doesn't do you any good to drink your own urine. And, you know, these like cockamamie ways in which you would kill large animals that would never in a million years work unless you trained and studied those approaches every day for your entire life, which you'd be prevented from doing because of the regulatory structures that govern such practices. It's just hogwash. And then there's people who, through passion, through professional discipline, through wanderlust, want to be out in the woods. They want to be up in the mountains. They want to be smart. They want to be able to stay a long time. And that's the information I try to provide, and that's the people I want to speak to.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Let's just jump into some of the recommendations that you might have. And we can weave to this in a more indirect fashion. But as we were discussing possible points to touch upon in our conversation beforehand you record, you mentioned a number of things. You mentioned technology and how you can buy your way out of trouble relatively easily in certain respects. You referred to something known as paradoxical undressing, which aside from being the name of my forthcoming memoir is unbeknownst to me. We talked about odds, in other words, perceived threats versus real threats and much more let's begin just yeah

Starting point is 00:10:26 that one i think of the threats that are fun to think about right that are exciting to think about and the ones that are just real that no one likes to think about the first blood threats like carry a serrated machete into the wilderness yeah versus other let's begin with paradoxical undressing what is paradoxical undressing just to scratch my own itch because it's stuck in my head yeah i first wrote about and got to thinking about hypothermia i've come up close to feeling like oh wow i'm like in the initial stages of hypothermia i've had that happen to me a few times one time in a very pronounced way it was being in a in a river in alaska in october with a dry suit on that had a ruptured seam and like my dry suit was full of water and some of the things that happened in those and it was kind of this over the course of 45 minutes to an hour intense thirst

Starting point is 00:11:26 like just this intense desire to quench my thirst and being disoriented realizing that i was very cold realizing that i didn't have the ambition to remedy that situation trying to talk myself into doing the things that would be required to get warm again and then oddly the sensation that the cold had passed though there was no plausible explanation for why i would all of a sudden not be cold anymore and in researching this i got to reading a fair bit about hypothermia. And in addition to some interesting things, like the number one state for hypothermia deaths is Alaska. Number three is New Mexico, which caught me by surprise. Number two, I think, bounces between Wyoming and Montana, but then jumps down south to New Mexico, which many people have in their head as being like a

Starting point is 00:12:22 plenty warm place. Yeah, that's surprising. So your body, when in terms of the paradoxical undressing, as you're getting cold, your body starts to restrict blood flow to your extremities. The blood vessels constrict. That's why you might notice that, you know, as you're getting cold, your fingers will turn white, right? Your toes get cold. Your fingers will turn white right your toes get cold your fingers will turn white your body doesn't want to be pushing all that blood out to places where it's getting cooled i want to add anything here to talk about like a lot of animals use the movement of blood into thin parts of the body as a way to shed heat so if you look at an an African elephant, an African elephant has these giant

Starting point is 00:13:06 ears, right? Compare that to a woolly mammoth, an ice age animal, the woolly mammoth, very small ears. Woolly mammoths lived in these very cold climates. They didn't want to have that blood out in their ears because the heat gets sapped out of it. An African elephant, very hot place, puts a lot of blood into its ears to try to cool that blood off. It's like running it into a radiator, so to speak. So your body thinking the same way, in as much as we can call it your body thinking. Your body doesn't want to send blood out to the extremities where it's getting cold. It tries to keep things in your core and keep your internal organs warm.

Starting point is 00:13:42 That requires a lot of energy. So there's this thing that happens to hypothermia victims where they'll find someone who's died of exposure, died of hypothermia, and their clothes will be laying all around them because it requires all that energy to constrict the blood vessels. Eventually, they tire. You run out of the energy to restrain it.

Starting point is 00:14:02 And all of a sudden, your body allows all that blood back out into those places because it's difficult to keep it in as your energy fades. So that hot blood goes out to these cold fingers and goes out toward your skin and gives you this sensation of burning up. Some people paradoxically undress to the point where they start discarding jewelry. You'll find victims of hypothermia with a shoe and a sock off a wedding ring off clothes scattered about but then lying there dead

Starting point is 00:14:32 the paradoxical undressing so it starts to make sense is like you're dying of being cold but you're discarding your clothing it's kind of heroin like like spooky it's just such a unnerving thought i think too i think of people dying of exposure it wasn't too long ago not far from where i am right now where an ice fisherman fell through the ice and just speaking of spooky scenes an ice fisherman falls through the ice and there's no snow on the ice. And imagine how slick wet ice is. Like imagine trying to pick an ice cube up out of a drink, right? When ice is wet, what it's like to hold on to.

Starting point is 00:15:13 You try to squeeze it, it just pops out of your hand. There's no snow on the ice and he goes through the ice. And because he's punched through the ice and he's splashing around, water is getting up on the ice. So there's nothing to grab onto you had mentioned like you can buy your way out of a lot of bad situations through preparation but you know they make a device for this he's a little ice pick she just wear around your neck he doesn't have a set of these someone finds him a couple days later frozen to death up to his armpits in a hole in the ice,

Starting point is 00:15:46 with one of his boots laid up on the ice, just perched there. Dying of cold, man, is a real thing. Dying of exposure is a real thing, and just the mental images that come up from it are kind of more ghastly than some of the more fantastical ways that we imagine ourselves getting injured in the woods being like fixated on grizzly bears and mountain lions and such let's talk about exposure for a second i remember i was told many years ago this i'm sure is just a convenient mnemonic device, but someone said to me, you can go three weeks without food,

Starting point is 00:16:28 three days without water, three hours without some type of protection in really extreme conditions, environmentally speaking, right? Something like that. Yeah, that threes thing, I've heard it described in various ways. Three weeks food, three days water,

Starting point is 00:16:44 and then it'll be three whatever without air say but yeah i'm familiar with the thing and i and i've and i've heard it used a handful of ways what are some of the ways that you can buy your way into some margin of safety maybe you don't eliminate risk entirely but what are some of the easy purchases that would go into a basic kit of some type doesn't have to be even basic but just some of the specific purchases that are easy ways to remove a lot or mitigate a lot of risk like you mentioned the ice picks that hang around the neck yeah for someone who's doing a lot or mitigate a lot of risk like you mentioned the ice picks that hang around the neck yeah for someone who's doing a lot on ice right yeah so those ice picks are common for not common they

Starting point is 00:17:30 should be way more common among ice fishermen but ice fishermen are the ones who use them and they're made they're generally manufactured by companies that make fishing equipment if that speaks to who it is but it's like these little imagine an ice pick inside a retractable sleeve so that there's nothing sharp sticking out but the minute you jab it down you know the sleeve retracts on a spring and the ice pick goes into the ground or into the ice and it's just a thing it's like an epi pen for getting out of yeah exactly and you can be on the slickest ice in the world ice you could never stand up on you could take the slickest ice in the world. Ice you could never stand up on. You could take the slickest ice in the world, put water on it,

Starting point is 00:18:08 lay down, take that pick, and just drag yourself all over the place with that pick. When I was mentioning to you, just in private conversation earlier, I was mentioning to you buying your way out. I'm reminded of a thing that, I don't know if you're familiar with John McPhee, who wrote that Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy.

Starting point is 00:18:26 Coming into the country. No, no his geology oh yeah so he wrote the pulitzer prize trilogy that came out as like basin and range whatever it's annals of the former world so it's three massive books all combined together into annals of the former world and i remember that within annals of the former world. And I remember that within Annals of the Former World, John McPhee says, if I was going to sum this book up in one sentence, it would be that, I'm trying to capture what he says without, this is not an exact quote. He says, if I was going to sum this book up in one sentence, it would be that the peak of Mount Everest is marine limestone. If I was going to sum up the wilderness skills and survival book that we just finished, I would say on X in reach. And I'll tell you what these two things are. On X is a mapping service. There are many, I like onX, and just for full clarity, I also work closely with the folks at OnX. So bear that in mind, but let me continue. There's a reason I do that. It's a mapping device

Starting point is 00:19:33 that you use on your phone, and there are other ones. There's like Gaia and a handful of other ones. I'm not sure if Google Earth has download function quite like OnXx does but it's a mapping service that you can download maps on your phone you can download aerial imagery topographical maps and hybrid maps so it's aerial imagery with topographical line overlays and you can download maps of areas you're going to that are highly detailed that are you know five wide and 10 miles wide, and then lower detail, lower resolution maps that are 100 miles wide. What it does is your phone has a built-in GPS function that does not require a cell signal. So if you're using an iPhone and you're going into, you're going to some area, for whatever reason, you're going there for work, you're going there for pleasure, you're going back country skiing, you're going on a hike with your family in Yellowstone National

Starting point is 00:20:35 Park, you're whatever, whatever you're doing, you're on a rafting trip, you're doing a afternoon hike and do a little area you've never been into before. You can go online and download a map. And then even when you have no cell signal, all you need to do is turn on your phone, put it on airplane mode. You now have two or three days worth of battery because you're on airplane mode. And there's a blue dot that shows you where you are when you aim your phone in any direction and hit a button it shows you what direction your phone is pointing relative to your map so at any time you should be able if you take the early pre-game preparation the idea of getting lost is almost becoming an obsolete notion or you have to almost self-select to be lost by not taking preparations of course things can happen to

Starting point is 00:21:34 phones people lose phones they drop my water i've all this kind of stuff has happened but they they destroy them in a puddle of mosquito repellent you can saw you do once in a pool of deep but that's why i was saying on x in reach because there's also a device that's i don't know a third the size of a phone called an in-reach device some people call them spot devices or in-reach devices and what it is is it allows you to send text messages through satellite. So you can take an inReach device and no matter where you are, you know, on the face of the earth, if you have a line of sight to the sky, you can save addresses in your inReach.

Starting point is 00:22:26 You can take your inReach and set it so that it's sending pre-programmed messages every day, saying you can your message ahead of time hit a button it sends a message says i'm okay but you can also hold down a button that says sos and it's satellite driven and the batteries last for days so in talking about like buying your way out there are just steps now that you can take to, if you're the kind of person who takes preparation seriously, there are steps you can take that really reduce a lot of the risk. There are still things that can happen to you, right? You can still, I joked about it earlier, but yeah, man, you could get mauled by a bear. The bear doesn't give a shit about the fact that you have any of these technological devices but if you're still able to crawl around it's pretty nice to be able to hold a button down and get help and so these are all things that i spent a great deal of time on in the book because it's not trying to treat

Starting point is 00:23:22 survival like you've survived a plane crash and you have a large bowie knife and you're stuck on an island. It doesn't start with that mentality. It starts with the mentality. It starts with the reality that the vast majority of trouble that people get in outdoors is somewhat willful. We do things. We go places. We take drives during inclement weather. We decide to go on a route through the hills when we're driving that we've never been on,

Starting point is 00:23:51 and we don't know the road conditions, and your car gets stuck. And then you wait there two days and no one comes and you're like, screw this, I'm walking out of here. But you don't quite know what to do or your car is not loaded properly. That's how people get in trouble. It isn't shipwrecks and plane crashes, though those things do happen, but pondering those and fantasizing about those throws off people's ability to actually think and behave properly. And these little technological preparations are just things you can do that just make you breathe easy and allow you to go into wild places and do what it was that you intended to do.

Starting point is 00:24:31 Just to be successful and be impactful and pursue whatever goals you have, whether it's finding a mushroom or bagging a peak, without feeling as though you've entered a survival situation. I just want to comment on a few things that you've said. So number one, totally unbeknownst to me, or I should say rather, I had no pre-existing awareness that you used Onyx Hunt. I also ended up using Onyx and have for the last five months. And I should just mention to people that if you search for it on the app store, I think it will show up as OnX Hunt, but the hunting certainly is one application, but it's not a requirement. My realtor uses OnX. Yeah. Okay. So this is related to my point. So I was exploring the wilderness in New England during COVID lockdown, and I wanted to know a number of things.

Starting point is 00:25:29 I wanted to be able to track my own movement so that I could retrace my steps, which Onyx allows you to do. I wanted the offline maps, which you mentioned. I also wanted the ability to know where property boundaries were so that I wouldn't end up wandering right up to somebody's house or into someone's property that would get me into trouble. So I was able to overlay the property information, which is just fascinating. I've never quite experienced anything like it. So Onyx, I'll second that. And then the inReach, I'm not sure if more brands make it, but I used a Garmin inReach when I was in

Starting point is 00:26:05 South America at one point. And the pre-programming with the texts is, I think, a key step pre-departure because they can be a little unwieldy for actually typing out messages. So if you are in an SOS situation, you want to have your contacts and messages pre-programmed. Let me give you some hot tips about that when you're done here. Yeah. Fire away. I'm done. Oh,

Starting point is 00:26:29 there is a iPhone app called, I want to give you the right name. So I'm looking for it. I'm actually looking for it on my phone right now. There's an iPhone app called Garmin Earthmate. And Garmin Earthmate pairs with your inReach device over Bluetooth. Oh, God. This is the solution that I didn't know I needed.

Starting point is 00:26:54 You just have at it, man. There's an important thing to remember, though, here. Then you just have at it. Then you're just flying. Then you can send out novellas. Dude, yeah. I a there's a limit it's more than a twitter message but then you got to go to number two but the other thing to keep in mind when you're using it you're using satellite you can text someone who has cell service someone with cell service can text you at your in-reach number. But if you're in a remote area using your in-reach address, trying to contact, say, your buddy who's two miles away at camp, wife and I know that she's at home and has cell service. I can text her directly to her number that she can then reply, but she's replying to my in-reach number, which is independent from my normal phone number.

Starting point is 00:27:53 A lot of people mess this up because you could go like, let's say you go down to South America. No one's got cell service. If you don't communicate with your travel mates, like, hey man, what is your crazy ass sounding in-reach address? You can't send each other messages so you have to build an address book ahead of time or else you are in a situation of texting someone back in the u.s who has cell service and they're like texting around we were doing this our day i was trying to i could see a person and i'm trying to send him an in-reach message, but instead I'm in-reaching his wife. And she's like, well, is everybody okay?

Starting point is 00:28:30 I'm like, yeah, I'm looking at your husband. He's fine. I just want to send him a message. So you got to do a little bit of, you know know take five minutes to make sure that everybody's communicating everybody's in reach address in the process of separating more fact from fiction or really just pointing out essentials versus non-essentials as you mentioned little things can be really costly right and a lot of the mistakes that end up in disaster are not of the outdoor thriller action movie variety. They would make the most boring television show in the world, right? It's

Starting point is 00:29:10 like, oh shit, I forgot the batteries in my headlamp and then I die, right? Or something stupid. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut

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Starting point is 00:30:39 routine is a great option for additional immune support. So make an investment in your health today and try the ultimate all-in-one wellness bundle. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D for free with your first subscription purchase. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash tim. What are some of the essentials that you routinely use that listeners may not find obvious or may not grok the subtleties of? You mentioned the Bowie knife. I think a lot of unseasoned outdoors men or women are inclined to get these big hon you know jump off a ravine and kill a grizzly in an action movie knives as one example but what are some of the essential pieces of gear that you would have in your kit yeah i'd like to talk for a minute just about like the kit you know which is something spent a lot of time on the book explaining how to assemble and how to make it adaptable and versatile.

Starting point is 00:31:47 To get a sense, a somewhat widely available product, there's a thing called an OR back country organizer. Various companies make different ones that are various heavy duty fabrics, but I've long been a fan of a thing called the OR back country organizer. And it'd be like a slightly flattened pretty big coffee mug size okay it's this little bag it's got a bunch of zippered pouches in it and me the folks i hang out with we all have like a kit that we call it a kit like it's like your essentials and a lot of us assemble ours in one of these, in one of these little bags.

Starting point is 00:32:25 I put that thing, I take it virtually everywhere I go. I don't mean to my office, but if my fam, we go to, for instance, we go to Baja every year for winter vacation to go spearfishing and just messing around, spending family time together. I always pack it because in it, I have like all the things that I know I might need, regardless of the situation. If I had a kit and I go on a day hike, if I'm just going, you know, for an hour hike up a hill with the dog and the kids, I bring my kit. Now, when I say my kit, I would say a survival kit. I would say a first aid kit. But it's all of those things and more. In it, I keep several single-sized ibuprofen tablets, acetaminophen tablets, Benadryl, various medications. I have one or two things, a day quill and nyquil in there

Starting point is 00:33:25 antihistamine things like single serving packs very very small in there i also keep two 25 foot length dyneema cords that are very thin they're like three or four mil cords that i keep in dyneema cords are like it's like a it's a material cord yeah it's like a souped up it's a it's a souped up strong lightweight paracord there's nothing wrong a paracord like paracord like 660 cord like 600 pound cord stuff's great man i use it all the time but for my things i like to keep it very small as small as possible i use that stuff i keep a small thing of dental floss and tape to it is a heavy duty needle that can be used to sew up clothing and stuff. I keep that in there at all times.

Starting point is 00:34:11 I have a small sharpener. There's a small knife in there. There's a small backup headlamp in there that's about the size of the end of your thumb that burns on a coin battery and has a retractable little head strap. I also put my primary flashlight in there as well. I have a basic first aid kit assembled inside a plastic envelope that includes a variety of bandages, alcohol swabs, antibiotic ointment a very small tourniquet other items like that i keep a chew tin a tobacco tin full of cotton balls that have been rubbed in like thoroughly rubbed in with petroleum jelly or vaseline which are phenomenal fire starters. The reason I use Vaseline rubbed into cotton balls stuffed inside a chew tin is because, one, Vaseline is also helpful for chapped lips, chafed skin, can be helpful for alleviating pain from blisters.

Starting point is 00:35:19 The primary reason is that the TSA agents at the airport, I travel a lot, they will pull fire-starting devices, like incendiary devices, or not incendiary, what's the word I'm looking for, Tim? Accelerants, fire accelerants. Accelerants, yeah. They will pull accelerants from your bag and find you. There's no problem with having some Vaseline in your bag and find you there's no problem with having some vaseline in your bag now a cotton a cotton ball rubbed with vaseline burns it's a great fire starter uh it can get wet it doesn't

Starting point is 00:35:54 mess it up and tsa guys never steal it so it's just always in your bag i keep a small multi-tool i have a multi-tool that allows for a certain bit adapter. So I'm able to keep some basic screwdriver bits that fit various things that I own and use in there. I hunt a lot. So I have archery stuff, firearm stuff, little screws and bits that I like to have on hand. I keep those in my organizer. And it's filled out like that two small lighters tape med tape when i say that it's adaptable let's say i'm spending some time up in southeast

Starting point is 00:36:33 alaska there are places in southeast alaska that get 13 feet of precipitation annually okay where i'm staying where i am right now gets 20 inches of precipitation annually. Yeah. Let me just put this in perspective for a second for folks. 169 inches. Yeah. Let me just put this in perspective for folks. So yesterday, I was looking at historic ski reports and precipitation for Taos, New Mexico. This is a place famous for skiing. And I was looking at end of November to mid-December, and it was an average of something like 0.8 to one and a half ski days per week. That's not a lot of snow. And this is a place that ultimately is well-known for

Starting point is 00:37:17 skiing. So then you imagine the amount of precipitation you're describing that is a ton of precipitation yeah oftentimes here's here's a survival like a survival trope is that you know that you're gonna be in an environment like this and fashion a fire drill like a little fire bow and start a fire or you're gonna take like a flint and steel and start a fire or or that you're going to take like a Flint and steel and start a fire, or you're going to take a hatchet and a rock and start a fire. There are people on the planet, including like the native Alaskans who lived in that place and, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:58 grew up there feeling as though they had excellent equipment and they used equipment that their grandfathers had used and their fathers and mothers before them. And, and it was just like a part of life and they knew how to use it. Right. There are people on the planet who can do that, but I'm going to say that when I'm talking to you, I'm talking to the collective you out there. You are not going to go to a place that gets 13 feet of rain a year and start a fire just the 99.9 of you are not going to go there and start a fire using anything other than matches or a lighter you're just not it is so hard it's so hard so hard it's so hard yeah so when i'm going to a place like this i will have

Starting point is 00:38:47 i have a drawer in my garage full of kits that go within my kit okay and i have my super hard to start a fireplace bag that goes into my kit. I have other little envelopes that I will stick in there. I have a little envelope that has some survival snares and some very basic fishing equipment. If I was going to an area, like an extremely remote area in Alaska,

Starting point is 00:39:21 I might, for peace of mind, grab that little like enhanced food acquisition envelope just to give me peace of mind that in the event of there being a grounding of aircraft or something else that prevented a timely pickup a timely pre-arranged pickup that i would have extra stuff and in in those situations, my kit might blossom. Now you might think like, what are the odds of that? Well, after September 11th, so on September 11th, there were people in back country Canada and back country Alaska who had arranged to be picked up at airstrips.

Starting point is 00:39:57 People out hunting could be that they're out prospecting, gold mining, whatever the hell they're doing. We're waiting at airstrips to be picked up. And the one thing, no matter where you are in Alaska, man, most days, sometimes all day, you hear aircraft. Aircraft is their car in Bush, Alaska.

Starting point is 00:40:16 You wake up one day, you don't have news, you don't know what's going on, but you know that the skies are quiet. Nothing flies. You're supposed to be getting picked up. No one shows up. It's as though the world ended and you don't know what happened. There was another occurrence in Alaska. I believe this occurred in the 80s where there was a big volcanic eruption that put a lot of ash in the air, and they resumed flying shortly after. But a jet's coming in, and this ash gets picked up in the engines and turns to a sort of glassy-like substance and blinks out all four engines.

Starting point is 00:40:59 Eventually, this stuff shatters out somehow, and they're able to get a couple engines relit and they land but they grounded aircraft for a long time i had a friend he was out at a remote wilderness camp taking care of some horses and he got stuck for weeks no supplies nothing flying had no idea what was going on he ran out of food and had a salt lick for a horse, like a salt block. He would eat porcupines and go out with a pocket knife and scrape salt off a salt block in order to get some salt to put on the porcupine meat. That sounds terrible. And it's like a thing.

Starting point is 00:41:39 Then you enter the fantastic, but think about the people I'm talking about. These people aren't people that fell out of an airplane. They're people that went willfully into a situation where if you do a good risk assessment and you think about what are the problems that would actually happen, to go into a very remote area of Alaska or Canada or whatever, Frank Church in Idaho, I don't know, like a remote area, and you're flying in, anyone that does any amount of homework can realize now and then you simply don't get picked up because of weather, because of a terror attack on the east coast of the United States, because of a volcano on the Alaska Peninsula or the Aleutians. So that's the thing that we're thinking about often is, okay, in our risk assessment, what's the real problem that might occur? I would say high on my list of

Starting point is 00:42:32 shit that might occur would be that we're going to sit here for three or four days. Yeah. And are we prepared for that? Because that could be a little miserable. And I want to also emphasize for folks who are listening that I consider you, I know in Bats 1000, but I consider you an expert in risk mitigation with simple and elegant insurance countermeasures, if that makes any sense. It's a very wordy way to put it. I understand. I appreciate the sentiment and I understand what you're talking about. Yeah, because there are a lot of, let's just say, we're in the perfect era right now with COVID, sort of Mad Max scenario planning, where people are thinking where it's going to be on the road by Cork McCarthy and people are going to be trying to eat my kids and I'm going to stockpile silver coins and shave off gold bars to get tampons with

Starting point is 00:43:31 the guy in the back of the 7-Eleven. And it comes down to probabilities, historical likelihood, and the cost of the intervention. So I've never had a significant fire of any type in my kitchen. Nonetheless, I have a, let's call it $20 or $30 fire extinguisher that sits there gathering dust because it's cheap, it's easy to use, and if you need it, you want to have it. Yeah. On the other hand, you might have, let's just say, using a bow drill to start a fire, which I've practiced doing. And I have got to the point where I could do it very infrequently successfully. And that took a lot of work.

Starting point is 00:44:12 But to rely on that, to get to the point where I would feel comfortable relying on that, that becomes my new sport. That's like learning tennis. That's kind of what I'm saying. People that can start a fire with a bow drill are people that start fires with bow drills. Because they do it recreationally. They practice. They live with it and practice it. Backcountry organizer. And that, I would just, again, to perhaps restate the obvious, is taking something that is half the size of the, say,

Starting point is 00:44:51 water container you might take with you on a hike. It's smaller than an algin bottle. Right. So we're not talking about a lot of inconvenience here. Is the OR backcountry organizer just the container, or does it come preloaded with a lot of these items? No, man. It's just the container.

Starting point is 00:45:11 I have, and there are other ones. There are other companies that make similar products, and the difference tends to be weight and durability. They're susceptible to tear. The seams give out, but it's lightweight. There are other companies that make. FH, F F H F makes certain organizers that are pretty heavy duty. They're great.

Starting point is 00:45:29 That one is just a very lightweight one. What is your preferred multi-tool? Do you remember what you carry? Yeah. I, I, I use a leather man. I like the wave a lot. It's heavy. I got friends that really don't like them.

Starting point is 00:45:43 I'll tell you what I like on them. I like a regular blade. And we've been joking about big ass Rambo knives and Bowie knives and stuff. I've done a lot of everything that you would need to do with a knife. And there are cases where it would be great if you had some giant machete type knife. But generally, for the kinds of things we're talking about like keeping yourself out of trouble handling basic repairs the the knife on a multi-tool is a good backup to also having you know i carry like a very high quality very lightweight pocket knife called a bug out but i have a multi-tool with me yeah it's very lightweight very sharp you get in a variety of

Starting point is 00:46:23 ways you don't even know it's there. It's a good knife. So the Leatherman, I like one that has a saw on it, like a wood saw, bone saw. I like one that has a serrated blade for doing work that would very quickly dull your normal blade. I like it to have a normal blade, you know, two or three inch blade on it. And I really like it to have a pair of needle nose pliers i use those things all the time in the book we provide lists of all this kind of equipment but in my kit i carry this little a little sliver remover it's like nothing it's you know it's earlier i mentioned something being the size of your the end of your thumb this is

Starting point is 00:47:01 like a couple thumbnails it's like a sliver remover paired tweezers which is invaluable especially in areas of the south and southwest for just the annoyance of getting junk stuck in your skin which can drive you crazy but i also use the needle nose pliers for all kinds of stuff we've used needle nose pliers for everything from like pulling porcupine quills out of dogs fixing fixing ingrown toenails, repairing clothes, fixing firearms. It's like I can do anything with a pair of needle nose, man. I like that to be on there. And then a number two Phillips bit,

Starting point is 00:47:33 a flathead screwdriver of a fairly universal size. If I actually wound up in some situation where I was stuck out in the woods for a week and tell, listen, I'm going to return to my point, but I just want to make something clear. For a the woods for a week and tell you, listen, I'm going to return

Starting point is 00:47:45 to my point, but I just want to make something clear for a living for a long time. I travel to the remotest places out there. I did it as a writer. I've done it for a decade doing television magazine work and such. Like I go to really remote places. I go to the places where people imagine troubling occurred. And I travel with a crew of highly adept, very skilled individuals. Someone might say like, but you've never had to like live out for a month with no food or anything. I'm like, that's kind of the point. They have done the things that we've done and figured out the ways in which we

Starting point is 00:48:27 like avoid trouble avoid disaster get what we need to get done done that's the survival i'm talking about and if i knew i was gonna be stranded out somewhere like oh man i really want to have a multi-tool but i just use a multi-tool in living my life that's why like a big part of the title i think that in struggling with it would be like the guide to survival i'm like okay my head just goes to fantasy land wilderness skills and survival be like wilderness skills is just like the doing how to be out and do things and yeah man i have seen everything from outboard engines to generators, to cars, to human beings repaired with a multi-tool by someone who kind of understands how to do things. I always have a multi-tool in the car. I will, since we invoked the name of the TSA earlier,

Starting point is 00:49:21 I will just mention to folks that I've had to sacrifice quite a few multi-tools and those are sad moments the multi-tool stealing his sons of bitches on the planet god bless my god do they take some multi-tools i understand like that brutal can't go on a plane with a with a knife and it's like now and then you're standing there and you're in line and all of a sudden they pull your bag and you're just like oh god another one not another one this is so bad it's the worst like standing in line now we actually like like if i'm with you know buddies of mine or guys i work with it's like a common thing you know you'd be like oh you got your passport you'd be like dude knives knives knives you know right got it thanks oh it's a sinking feeling you can like i haven't looked into it

Starting point is 00:50:07 but somehow they auction or sell oh the confiscated items like bucket i think you buy like them by the bucket i don't know i i want to look into but i think they like somehow you know they all go somewhere the catch can airport in alaska this is one of my favorite things on the planet, is in Ketchikan, as you're waiting in line for security, they have a display case of things that have been confiscated at the Ketchikan Airport. In this display case is a brass knuckles dagger. So it's brass knuckles with an eight- double bladed dagger coming out of it so which makes me feel a lot better about the multi-tools i've lost because someone who thought that that would be a thing to pack along on a trip i just would love to have been able to have a brief interview with with presumably that gentleman maybe it was a

Starting point is 00:51:05 woman but presumably the gentleman who had the brass knuckles dagger at the catch can airport and lost it and they're like the kind of brass knuckles that has the pointy knuckles like that like oh yeah they would like perforate your skin for you it's the greatest let's talk about water what are your recommendations for how to think about procuring or purifying water? That could be an extension of kit and then we back into finding and filtering. But how would you suggest people think about that? Would love to. So in laying out, like in a lot of the chapters in the book, we lay out like the food chapter,

Starting point is 00:51:48 the water chapter is laid out this way. Navigation is laid out this way. It starts out, the chapters always start out like perfect world, right? So in water, it'd be like perfect world. Here's how many gallons a person's going to use a day for intake, meaning to make food. If you're using freeze-dried food, whatever, on camping trips or outings, work outings, whatever to make food and drink. So what's the quantity of water that'll actually go into your body. And then there's the quantity of water per day with some climatic variations, depending on where you are in the world that with intake so physical intake and then basic cleaning and then water for if you're doing some amount of bathing and like all these water quantities that you'd bring with you in jugs right

Starting point is 00:52:31 so you fill a jug off a garden hose load it in your camper load in your truck and that's where you are you just live off of jugged water which is great do it all the time car camping water but then the chapter would go through like worse worse worse worse worse worse and then end kind of on oh shit so starting out with that idea of water moving into the idea of sourcing water so sourcing water where you have the proper equipment to do so and then it moves into sourcing water where you do not have the proper equipment to do so and then basically down to sourcing water you have you don't have shit with you. You have nothing.

Starting point is 00:53:07 You got to figure everything out, including a container. But for real world use, I spend most of my time when I'm out with equipment, sourcing water on site with some basic equipment that enables me to do so. And I feel that like a good universal water kit for any kind of overnighting trips or trips that could turn into overnighting. Use a Nalgene bottle. It doesn't need to be Nalgene. We use Nalgene now, but it's like a brand name. They make scientific containers and equipment and beakers and stuff, but they've become a real dominant force in like screw top bottles. They're great bottles.

Starting point is 00:53:49 They're very durable. You can freeze stuff in them. It doesn't crack them. They're great. There's a hundred companies that make them. Nalgene bottle. And then we use a thing we call a drom or a dromedary, which is a collapsible water bottle. You can get various things like liter, two liter, maybe 1.5 liter.

Starting point is 00:54:10 And when they're empty, it's nothing. It's like, imagine an empty duty, somewhat heavy duty, little shopping bag. And you put it in the bottom of your pack. You don't even know it's there, but when it's full, it's, it's great. It's a good source of water. So carry an algae, carry a drum in my kit that I mentioned earlier, I always carry water purification tablets in single serving packs. So it's these little

Starting point is 00:54:31 foil packs and each of those foil packs has one or two tablets in it. You put those tablets in water. Is that iodine or what is it? Yeah, there's iodine. There's some different ones that have different active ingredients, but yeah, iodine tablets. There's other, I get into the other compounds, but there's, it's all iodine like, but there are some different active ingredients in different tablets.

Starting point is 00:54:51 Got it. And they might argue amongst themselves about which has the worst or better aftertaste. There are also neutralizers you can add. Like if you, if you hate that taste that comes from water purification tablets, there are neutralizing tablets that diminish that taste. And you can get them in single-serving packs. So I keep those in my kit no matter what. No matter where I go, I have those in my kit.

Starting point is 00:55:10 So I have those with me. And I also lately, well, not even lately, for years now, I have used what's called a SteriPen with great results. I love them. It's a UV light wand. Imagine a lightsaber that's maybe five inches long. It runs on a CR123 battery. You put it in there,

Starting point is 00:55:39 and it can purify a quart of water in 90 seconds using a uv light wand that you just swirl around in the water a couple complications with this is like if the water is too turbid so if it's like an incredibly muddy water you would need to double dose it or triple dose it because of light penetration through the water a problem you might encounter, this is all stuff we cover, like a problem you might encounter is that scooping water up can be hard. Like if you're just trying to get water out of wet moss, you know, and you can press a hand down and like get a little bit of water in your palm, it can be an arduous task. I usually carry a small plastic camp cup with me anyways for drinking coffee and stuff in the morning. You can in the camp cup as a little bit flexible so you can force this thing into little

Starting point is 00:56:31 crevices like if you have a cliff face with some water just sort of like running down it and that's the only water you can find you can kind of mash this cup up against the cliff face and slowly get dripping water into the cup and use that to fill that rigid mouthed Nalgene and eventually get that thing full and then wand it with a SteriPen to purify it. Where you might have a problem is if everything's frozen, you can't SteriPen ice. But when you're using snow melt, all you need is a small stove and you can run off snow melt. It's exhaustive on fuel and that's

Starting point is 00:57:06 something we get into as well as like the yield on snow is surprisingly low it takes a lot of energy fire fuel whatever it takes a lot of energy to melt snow in the water but it's like a thing we cover but if you get that basic thing down and again this is like standard operating procedure of water bottle dromedary and the dromedary bag i carry a two liter dromedary bag i just keep it at the bottom of my pack you can fill that at a source and then carry it with you and purify it as you use it you can get two fills and dump it into your bottle purify it with a sterip. And you're pretty bulletproof, man, with that setup. As long as you can find some source of surface water. And we explain a lot of tricks of the trade and how to locate surface water when you don't have the obvious locations of creeks and ponds and stuff.

Starting point is 00:58:01 But I'll point out here, a real, real risk. And this is not a fun risk, but a real, real risk. Waterborne pathogens are a problem. I have been sick several times from waterborne pathogens. It is miserable. You can get so sick that it's debilitating. It can just be bad or it can be bad, bad. So you cannot afford to be careless drinking surface water. And people make a lot of mistakes of seeing some water they feel is like coming out of some little seep.

Starting point is 00:58:36 And they think, oh, it must be fine because this is the source. When in fact, if they walk 10 yards uphill, they'd find like an elk wallow where they're shitting and pissing and rolling around in the mud and it's not adequately filtered from having passed through that mucky ground and you can get sick waterborne pathogens they're like part of this whole suite of the little things that kill and that is the thing with water more than bears more than mountain lions waterborne pathogens are are a bitch do you also carry a smaller purification device that is pumped something like katadyn i don't know if that's i'm pronouncing that correctly i do not anymore i personally a lot of people like them i personally had a lot of trouble

Starting point is 00:59:25 with things with ceramic filters and other filters where it's wet from use and it freezes they get plugged up i've just had a lot of hassle on river trips on river like rafting canoe trips and stuff where you just you know like you just have water because you're floating down the damn river right you know you're gonna have plenty of water around. We will use those gravity-fed drip bags that hold a few gallons of water. You just scoop it up in the river and you hang it from a tree limb, and there's a gravity-fed filter on there. We will use those if we know that conditions are going to be good, like summertime conditions where it's not going to be freezing

Starting point is 01:00:05 at night, crippling your filter. You're going to have a pretty good source of water that's not going to be overly muddy. And it's just kind of like when times are good, it's a good device. But the pumps, no, I don't like them on glacial rivers with the glacial till. It's just a lot of headache. I'm sure there are people that know what they're talking about and they like them. on glacial rivers with the glacial till. It's just a lot of headache. I'm sure there are people that know what they're talking about, and they like them.

Starting point is 01:00:32 And there might be people who dislike UV light pens for various reasons because if you're traveling overseas, like if you're traveling in Africa, you need to have a purification system, and you always need to check to make sure what you're using and how you're using it. You're going to want a purification system that also can handle viruses. If you were in the U.S., if you're hanging out in the u.s out doing like camping type activities and you're not in like um you're not around a lot of human contamination but you're out and like you know in the woods in the mountains whatever like somewhat like halfway pristine environments

Starting point is 01:01:02 you don't need to worry about viruses. You're mostly talking about really big things, giardia, cryptosporidia, large things that are easy to filter out. So if you're going on a backpacking trip in the developing world somewhere and you're going to be dealing with areas that have human, potentially human waste in the water, we explain all this stuff too in the book, but human waste in the water, you're going to practice a different purification system. And you might even do something like a dual purification system where you have things, again, from human contamination. But the primary focus here that I'm talking about is classic backpacking, hiking hiking wilderness outings what are some items that people should have in their cars i'm wondering if there's anything that people might not have thought of and i'd

Starting point is 01:01:54 love to hear your opinion on what some people call space blankets or mylar blankets these emergency blankets are they is their helpfulness overestimated, underestimated, but generally things that people might want to consider in their car, right? Because I have, people get themselves into trouble in all sorts of places, including spots where they might not expect to get into trouble, like north of, say, San Francisco, going to Tahoe and underestimating the amount of snowfall and realizing that they don't have chains. Sure. But perhaps they've driven already three hours in traffic and they're like, fuck it, YOLO. I'm going skiing. And then lo and behold, uh-oh. I mean, that's mistake number one.

Starting point is 01:02:38 People die every year. People die every year in stranded vehicles in this country. Talking about cars, we start getting into, we're talking about like you know like prepper land and i'll point out that i'm a in my car and at home i'm a sort of unintentional or accidental prepper where i do a lot of camping so i have like a lot of freeze-dried food i buy a lot of it i keep it in bins in my garage so that when I'm going somewhere, I have a lot of it. And I also just like also take us just, I like to have it on hand. I'm going to use it anyways. It's in my garage. So I have enough freeze dried food to, because I bought it for one thing in mind, it also serves the purpose where I have enough freeze dried food

Starting point is 01:03:21 to keep my family up and running for quite a long time on freeze-dried food. We have all kinds of, you know, we camp lots. We have all kinds of camp stoves, alternate fuel sources, water purification equipment that I own through camping. I'm a firearm owner. I keep, you know, for that purpose, I keep quite a bit of ammunition on hand. The one thing I do, like the one thing I do that's like totally prepper-like, and this came from time I spent living in Seattle where you have, you're in a very seismic,

Starting point is 01:03:49 seismically active area and also you have volcanic activity and things. We kept treated water in a closet. So in my crawl space, I do keep a bunch of jugs of water that I put

Starting point is 01:04:02 long-term treatment, like a chlorine type substance that you can put in there for long-term treatment. That's the one thing I do that doesn't have camping ramifications that I'll point out. I own those big ass jugs because we use them for water transport while camping. I extend the same kind of mentality to my personal vehicle because we do a lot of adventuring. I live in the Northern Rockies. Climate here can be crazy. Road conditions can be crazy. So I'm going to give you like a pretty extreme version of like the kinds of things I keep in my car. I keep a patch kit. I drive a truck. I have an F-150. The back seats lift up. You can put all kinds of stuff under there.

Starting point is 01:04:40 I have a decked toolbox in the back of my truck so I just can keep various things around. But I keep a battery-powered spotlight. I have a battery-powered air pump. I have a patch kit. I keep an extra headlamp. It might sound funny, but I keep toothbrush and toothpaste in there. I keep glow sticks in the glove box, those brake glow sticks that ravers use. Just that you'd use them if your vehicle is stopped

Starting point is 01:05:08 along the side of the road, you can put out glow sticks so that in a snowstorm or dark conditions, people could see it. I keep a military E-tool, like a folding. What is that? A folding shovel, like a military folding shovel. Not all E-tools are created equal. I got mine from a serviceman who

Starting point is 01:05:27 was like, no, dude, you have to have the right e-tool. And he went and got me the right e-tool, a very heavy duty e-tool. It's a folding saw. I'm sorry, a folding shovel. When there's snow on the ground, I put it in a big aluminum scoop shovel with a D handle in the back of my truck. I have two insulated ponchos. So they're basically like sleeping bags with a hole that you can put over them because I have young kids. So I keep my insulated ponchos in my truck. I have a food stash in my deck system. Like one of the boxes is just full of granola bars and stuff, which I also use for my kids all the time. Because if anyone has kids, they know that they're always whining about wanting food and I just feed them out of that

Starting point is 01:06:04 box. In the summer months, I keep water in there, but it freezes and breaks the containers in the winter, so I pull them out. And then I have a basic toolkit, so things I need to do repairs. I keep some garbage bags and things in there. candles are great because if you are in a car in the winter and for whatever reason you're stranded and you're running a camp stove say in your car you can kill yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning you do not want to burn fossil fuels in a car it is a very quick way especially if there's a risk of you falling asleep. It's a death sentence, man. If you fall asleep in a car burning a fossil fuel, isopropyl, whatever, gasoline, white gas, you're in trouble, man. You will kill yourself.

Starting point is 01:06:54 So candles, you can bring up the mean temperature in a car by several degrees, beyond several, to a substantial level of warmth by burning candles in your car. Never would have realized that. Oh, yeah. And then even like an alcohol stove that people use on sailboats. People use alcohol stoves on small sailboats for the same thing so that you can run it without getting carbon monoxide poisoning. You could have a small $7 alcohol stove and a little pint bottle full of alcohol and heat a car to T-shirt warmth with an alcohol stove and you

Starting point is 01:07:26 don't need to worry about killing yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning there's still a fire risk but you can sit in your car and hang out it doesn't need to be running you can be out of gas you can have a dead engine and keep warm and then finally i also keep a thick wool blanket that i just roll up and put a strap on i know a lot of guys will just have a tote, you know, like just you go to Walmart, whatever, and buy like a plastic tote of an appropriate size. Put all this stuff. We have lists in the book of all this,

Starting point is 01:07:56 like what's minimum, maximum, like, you know, best recommendations. Make a tote. And if you're just around town going back and forth to work, don't worry about it. If you go drive in three hours to go, you know, visit relatives for the Christmas holiday, throw the tote in the back. And in that tote is all the shit you would ever need to be more than comfortable. People might laugh, you know, oh, you're a little goofy. Oh, you're a prepper. Was this Mad Max? It's like, I like to just feel at ease and prepared.

Starting point is 01:08:26 The other day we were coming back from a hunting trip my kid pointed out he's 10 years old and he pointed out the thing i like about our truck is that we have all the stuff we need and i was like uh glow you know glowed with pride upon hearing that um that even the sense of the sense of ease and comfort that my kid got. No, he had whatever, a headache, and I gave him something for it. Anyways, a sense of ease and comfort that he got of feeling like we're on top of it. You know? We're not. We're our own people.

Starting point is 01:08:56 We got our shit figured out. Our system's dialed. Yeah. And it's also a different breed of preparation compared to putting on a ghillie suit every Saturday and climbing into a spider hole in your backyard. Yes. Right. This is just, I mean, a lot of these things, particularly, I want to underscore the water supplies, the backup water supplies, for me is cheap, cheap insurance that is kind of one and done. I mean, perhaps you

Starting point is 01:09:31 replace it every once in a while, but I'll give an example here. I have a garage with significant amount of potable water because I want to say a year and a half ago, two years ago in Austin, Texas, this is first world, incredibly developed city, incredible medical support and facilities. This is a top tier city within the US as far as livability and everything else. And at one point they had flooding. This happened. So there was an incredible torrential downpour for a day or two and it overwhelmed the municipal water treatment plants and there was a a boil warning for the entire city all like a human fecal matter into the municipal water supply that's right so you could not drink you could not drink water out of your faucet. Yeah, you're like, because there's poop in it.

Starting point is 01:10:26 Because there's poop in it. And within, I don't know, 12 hours, 24 hours, all bottled water in the city, gone. Like there was nothing available. And that was a huge pain in the ass and a massive hassle. And for a few hundred bucks, if you think of all of the things you waste money on or spend money on, it's very inexpensive insurance for an event like that, which is demonstrably not, has a non-zero chance of happening. And I remember that with Hurricane Sandy back in the day, also in New York. And and i mean these things do happen uh maybe they happen

Starting point is 01:11:06 as infrequently as a kitchen fire or a head-on collision but you still have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen you still wear your seat belt when you drive um yeah i like it that you're pointing that out it's an interesting thing is like no one thinks you're a whacked out prepper to have a fire extinguisher or to have a first aid kit or to have a homeowner's insurance you know it's like what do you some kind of you know right wing right but it's like yeah it's just i just view it as a a thing you know it's like a peace of mind issue, if nothing else. What I used to have when I, in Seattle gets so much rain, I bought a, I use this for my garden,

Starting point is 01:11:53 but I loved it where I bought a 250 gallon tank that sat under the, I had a roof deck on top of my house and it came down this downspout and it rains all the damn time, you know, in the summer or sorry, in the winter. And I just rigged this 250 gallon tank under my downspout.

Starting point is 01:12:13 And you could get, you know, 10 minutes of rain off that rooftop and fill that thing up. And I used to love that thing because I was like, I was like, dude, it's like a, you know,

Starting point is 01:12:23 bulletproof man, as long as it rains. You mentioned the dried, freeze-dried food. There is sort of the good, the bad, and the ugly in freeze-dried food. Do you have any particular favorites? Man, it used to be simple. Like in the old days, it was like you had a company and this company is the pioneer of freeze-dried food i want to tell people real quick i want to explain freeze-dried food to folks

Starting point is 01:12:50 it's an interesting process i wrote a p i wrote a piece for outside magazine years ago about the freeze-dried food industry and freeze-dried food and i revisited that article and working on this book just to get some of it back straight again. But during it, I visited, when I was working on this article, I visited Oregon Freeze Dry. And Oregon Freeze Dry is they do all kinds of military contracting. They do like NASA contracting. It was Oregon Freeze Dry

Starting point is 01:13:16 that sent all kinds of products into outer space. Their consumer brand is Mountain House. And so Mountain House is pretty ubiquitous. Like you walk into any sporting goods store, whatever you'll see. I think it even turns up in Costco. You'll see these square buckets or individual things of Mountain House. And that's a consumer brand by a major player in the freeze-dry food business.

Starting point is 01:13:37 What they do is they make, in this process, you produce table-ready food. Okay. So let's say you're making spaghetti with meat sauce and you're going to freeze dry it. They actually make spaghetti and meat sauce. It looks like you could sit down and eat it. It's ready to put in your bowl and serve at the dinner table. They then spread this out into about an inch layer on these big, huge sheet trays. They just spread it out about an inch layer on these big, huge sheet trays.

Starting point is 01:14:05 They just spread it out about an inch thick on a giant, imagine a giant cookie sheet with inch thick spaghetti and meat sauce on it. It goes into a freezer and they freeze it. And like the speed at which it freezes is proprietary. There's a lot of magic in like how quickly you freeze it because you're trying to get a certain size ice crystal that's optimal for freeze drying. But they freeze the sheet, and then it goes into a sublimation chamber. These sublimation chambers bring to mind a submarine.

Starting point is 01:14:36 What an amazing name. Yeah. Sublimation chamber. Looking at it, it looks like the end of a submarine sticking out of a wall. Okay. And the sublimation chamber is a vacuum chamber. So you put all these sheets of frozen food. So you could do, up until now, you could do it at your home, right?

Starting point is 01:14:52 They put these sheets of frozen food into the sublimation chamber. And then they pull a vacuum on it. Okay. And once they pull a strong vacuum on it, they start to slowly warm up. There's like heating coils start to warm the food up. Sublimation means that it's going from a frozen, that the water goes from a frozen to gaseous state under vacuum with the right pressure so that it skips the water phase. The ice and melting goes directly to gas and collects on coils. When you pull it out, you now have, it doesn't look any different.

Starting point is 01:15:32 If you pulled it out of the sublimation chamber, it would look like just how it went in, except you'd be able to pick it up and break it like a sheet of glass. It's then mashed up, crumbled up, and put into a bag. That's freeze-dry food. Shelf life with the right packaging, these laminated bags, the right packaging on these products, shelf life of 30 years, 40 years. I think that they don't quite know the shelf life

Starting point is 01:15:57 because no one's had any sitting around long enough with the right packaging to figure it out. There's a love and a hate for freeze-dry. The convenience is unbelievable. And there are now many more freeze-dried companies entering the space, and they're all kind of whittling away at Mountain House. There's a company, Heather's Choice,

Starting point is 01:16:16 that does some freeze-dried stuff. Peak Refuel, we eat a lot of that, does freeze-dried food. There are a bunch of them out there. And now you can buy your own sublimation chambers i think for like three or four thousand bucks and get a sublimation chamber at your house and make your own freeze-dried food if you're like super prepper yeah a few thousand bucks i was just camping with a guy whose buddy has his own sublimation chamber now and this dude like

Starting point is 01:16:38 whenever he makes dinner he like freeze-dries some too uh it's a riot but a lot of people report and i've experienced those a lot of people report that there's nothing harder on a person's gut than three or four days where the freeze dry most anybody can hack a day or two a freeze dry but you get it to a point where just something different is going on in the old stomach i don't know what it is i've had people tell me that it's not true it's just true um it's just true i can't tell you why it's true but it's true some people thrive on it i do quite well on it some people it just tears them up the problem though is that you cannot confuse freeze-dried food with dehydrated food dehydrated food can take a lot longer to rehydrate it can be be that you do it and you don't get it fully rehydrated.

Starting point is 01:17:46 Like dehydrated beans, you want to talk about something messing your gut up, dehydrated beans that you haven't gotten properly rehydrated can tear you to pieces. Freeze-dry rehydrates pretty quickly. I got a friend that does a lot of backcountry travel and he's a minimalist. He's a lightweight fanatic. He doesn't carry a camp stove with him he takes freeze-dry food and around noon he'll pour cold water under freeze-dry food and then just carry it around strapped to his backpack knowing that about by six or seven hours it'll have fully rehydrated and he'll just eat cold freeze-dry if you put hot water in there it's just ready in eight minutes yeah seven or eight minutes and like i said you just can't argue with the shelf

Starting point is 01:18:32 life the stuff came into widespread use with the lerps in vietnam long-range reconnaissance patrollers that was kind of like the pioneering days of freeze dry food and then it had big ramifications for you know nasa and military use and such when i was at the oregon freeze-dry company years ago it's funny because i was with one of the guys a lab technician he's like a cook or a chef you know executive chef whatever there and we go into this room he goes name it was like their lab room where they have everything on the planet freeze-dried and he's like name something to see if i have it in here and i'm like i don't know uh capers he's like got it you know they freeze dry everything experimenting with it they make freeze-dried shrimp cocktail i'm not kidding man cans of freeze-dried shrimp and freeze-dried

Starting point is 01:19:18 cocktail sauce i don't think that that's i don't know if that's available to the public but i have a fascination and a deep love hate with freeze dry but it is unparalleled as an emergency food backpacking food wilderness preparedness food it is the best thing going there's nothing that even approaches it shelf life i'm looking online between 25 to 30 years so it was one freeze dry company when i was working on my article one freeze dry company i said what's the shelf life and they said we switched to this style of bag i can't remember what it was so like we switched to this style of bag 30 years ago it's all still fine uh this that we're not making a recommendation i don't know how they handle the recommendation part of it but they're like we know that it's at least this But that's all the longer we've had it laying here

Starting point is 01:20:05 So Who knows right It's really really great stuff It's expensive but It just you know Fill up a tote with that and put it in your garage And it's just like you Don't need to check it

Starting point is 01:20:21 You keep mice out of there You don't need to check it Your kids will have emergency food. They hand me down. After your debt. Oh, my God. And a note on freeze drying for folks who just want to play with something. The freezer in your home is, at least for a lot of

Starting point is 01:20:46 folks, will be the driest place in your home, which is counterintuitive for a lot of folks. So you can take, if you want to get a really good sear on a steak, you can actually put it on a drying tray or rack of some type in your freezer for, say, 30 minutes. 30 might be too long like 15 20 minutes before you cook to to dry off the surface of the steaks oh yeah that maillard reaction when searing so that's a that's a trick that people can also use it seems that there's evidence of the inkens doing something similar to freeze drying with potatoes. I don't remember the details on it, but they would store potatoes or there are instances where potatoes were stashed or stored,

Starting point is 01:21:34 you know, 10,000 feet and preserved through freeze drying. And they would also do an equivalent of, they would sometimes put human remains up 10,000, 11,000 feet. And I don't know if you've ever, I went to Salta, Argentina to visit those Incan children. There's kind of a famous story of these three Incan children that were put in a little rock shelter at very high elevation so perfectly preserved that you could still see coca leaves on one of the kids lips it looks like they could just wake up from a nap and walk away but they think that those children are from the 1490s wow perfectly preserved like they basically like naturally freeze dried at

Starting point is 01:22:28 high elevation um they display one of these children at a time in salta argentina one of them was struck by at some point in time one of them was struck by lightning and their hair was burned but they have beautiful feathers beautiful clothing all perfectly preserved it's incredible wow i'm looking at images right now this is creepy yeah it's like something out of the horror movie the ring wow yeah there was an issue that they don't out of a out of an agreement with the indigenous peoples they will not display all three at once and so i believe they rotate the display unless that's changed when i went there to see one of these children you could only see one i wonder why i guess the uh related to some mythology or superstition or belief system of the indigenous

Starting point is 01:23:25 i suppose when they looked at the they did some work there and when they look at the stable you know you can tell people about people's historic diet it seems as though those children if i'm remembering correctly it seems as though those children spent most their lives eating primarily potatoes had a very poor diet for most of their lives eating primarily potatoes, had a very poor diet for most of their lives. But in the year or so leading up to their death, they had a phenomenally diverse diet. And they had with them gifts and trinkets from all over the Incan Empire.

Starting point is 01:23:59 And perhaps they were on a sort of tour being honored across the empire, festivals and being fed and honored across the empire before being brought up and killed on that hilltop. The oldest one had been given a blow to the head with a hatchet, but the other ones, they appear to just have been drunk. They were drunk on some kind of fermented drink and maybe just passed out and left. Except for one of them, they had to give a knock to the head. It's a wild story. Anyways, freeze-dried food. Freeze-dried children. Don't eat them.

Starting point is 01:24:38 Mummies of Jujayzaco with double Ls. I'm saying it with a J since it's Argentine, but the children of Jujay Jaco, which I'll link to in the show notes. That's incredible. Never heard of this before. No, I would like to, in a perfect world, I would go back two more times to see the other children.

Starting point is 01:24:59 So I feel like we can't end on this particular story. Oh, that was a real digression, but go ahead. Pick something different. Well, let's talk about what you, or let's not let us, let you, tell me about what you hope and feel the psychological benefits will be from those or for those who read the new book, The Mediator Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, and actually take steps to practice some of what's in the book, to equip themselves in some of the ways described in the book.

Starting point is 01:25:41 Just thinking to your story about your son with the truck, but what do you hope or expect the benefits would be psychologically for people who do this? Yeah, I hope and expect and anticipate that people who spend time with the book will come away feeling more comfortable, feeling comfortable and prepared in wild places and better able to go with friends, loved ones, colleagues, children, what have you, into nature, into the wilderness, and not have maybe a vague sense of foreboding about something happening or feeling that you're in over your skis or, as we like to say, in over your waders, that when approaching a frozen pond,

Starting point is 01:26:37 they, instead of looking at it like this unknown, super dangerous thing that you doesn't go near, you would look at it as a thing that's comprehensible, that there are some simple things you can do to determine, is this safe for me to be on? If I do make a mistake and go there and something happens, I know what to do. I know how to do proper risk assessment, that when you're out camping, you're not having baseless fears of getting mauled by a mountain lion. You're not running around with concepts in your head about how to deter animal attacks that are one, unwarranted, or two, the opposite of what you ought to do if you were in that situation. Because I think that even if none of the bad things, if none of the oh shit things

Starting point is 01:27:22 that can befall a person happen to you outdoors, and even if I can come and tell you statistically they won't, they still live in your head. There's still an anxiety that people suffer around nature and around the unexplored, around the unusual. And once you arm yourself with a mental toolkit and a physical toolkit at times you wind up feeling better and once you feel better and you get that cockiness you get what a friend of mine calls your wilderness swagger everything goes more smoothly for you. You're able to do and focus on the things that you came there to do and focus on. So by being prepared, you do away with the nagging sense in the back of your head of what would I do if.

Starting point is 01:28:19 It just frees you up. So I just want people to have that that liberated swaggering feeling outside dig it okay last last or maybe second to last question and this could be a dead end but if you were a cyborg just executing on commands you'd have a certain kit, a certain approach, be super methodical, all highly rational. Is there anything peculiar you take with you on some of your trips or anything absurd that you feel compelled to do that would not be in the textbook instruction manual related to skills and survival anything uh particularly steve vernella that uh that your friends or companions in the wilderness make fun of you for uh man i'm gonna approach it a slightly different way and this is this is brand new fresh information i have a friend who's a very avid

Starting point is 01:29:19 alpine hunter and he uses and likes crampons okay i had always shied away could you describe what describe what those are for folks yeah crampons are like a thing you you lock onto your boot strap onto your boot it's cleats like very very great like nothing like a golf cleat like steel or aluminum spikes that are used for extreme like that are used for ice climbing extreme mountaineering okay i've always always been a fan of crampons i'd always been under the feeling that i didn't use crampons in the mountains typically because i thought that crampons are things people use more to get themselves into trouble than to get themselves out of trouble meaning uh you know some basic repelling skills are good to have right that's something we cover but i don't advise for just

Starting point is 01:30:12 normal people like normal use outside of mountaineering i don't advise using that to get somewhere i would advise using that to like you got somewhere and now you're like oh and you used to get out and i thought crampons were potentially troublemaking that it would give you it would give you know the wilderness swagger i mentioned it gives you too much swagger and you'd wind up doing shit that you should not do and so i was with them and i finally brought a set of crampons and i came away from it like holy shit because even just on a steep pitch where there's some wet snow I used to take for granted that you walked along side hill

Starting point is 01:30:49 along a steep pitch with wet snow I used to take for granted that you just ate shit right every other step this is like how it goes you know and it'd be like five steps five steps and putting those on I became a believer so quickly in in moving around on wet grass, icy stuff,

Starting point is 01:31:12 how that allowed you to just grease through areas that I used to view as being hard to get through. So I could see now being a guy at the trailhead with a set of crampons strapped to my pack and other people at the trailhead being like, what is this idiot doing? The same way a month ago, if I saw someone with crampons, I'd be like, oh, come on. Come on. Really? Really?

Starting point is 01:31:41 And now I'll be like, if I see that dude, I'm going to be like, yeah, bro. Right on. I get you. I get you. What adventure have you up to this point left unrequited? You've had so many trips, so many adventures, so much travel, so much outdoor wilderness time. What is still on the bucket list for you oh that's an easy one there's a there's a river in south america that i've done two river trips on and i was able to do these river trips with a group called the makushi a tribe called the makushi and they have a few villages along this river it's a long long river and they talk about the head of this river there's a couple of them that have been there most of the guys haven't been there and they talk about the head

Starting point is 01:32:42 of this river as being like what they regard as like kind of like the most magical place on the planet and the lower end of this river where i've been blows my mind and they have this attitude like you haven't seen shit so you've been up this river but you gotta have about three you know it's three week trip to get up because you got a portage around all these waterfalls i don't have a concrete plan, but at whatever point in life that you sort of like approach retirement, but you still have your physical capabilities. I want to go up that damn river until it's a trickle. Like ideally I'd go with my brothers.

Starting point is 01:33:23 I won't go up that river so damn bad. I think about it all the time. To the end. To the bitter end. Like I said, to where it comes out of a rock. That's my thing that I want to do. These guys live off fish when they're traveling, too, and I like fish. That's a win-win.

Starting point is 01:33:46 Steve, always fun, always a good time. And you're making me want to get out into the wilderness ASAP and actually to do a fair amount of prep beforehand so I'm not just yet another idiot wandering out with no plan, no contingencies, no nothing. And I'm excited about the book. I'm really thrilled that you were able to carve out some time today. Is there anything else that you would like to say, complaints, comments, requests for the audience, closing inspirational quotes, anything at all, before we bring this to a close?

Starting point is 01:34:22 At the top of Mount Everest, it's marine limestone. That's it. Thank you very much, Tim. I got enough. You covered it. All right. Steven Rinella, folks, themeateater.com, at meateater on Instagram, at Steven Rinella with a V. Steven, R-I-N-E-L-L-A. The new book is The Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival. I will also link to everything we've discussed in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Starting point is 01:34:57 Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #482: Steven Rinella — A Short Introduction to True Wilderness Skills and Survival

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