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99designs.com tim this podcast is brought to you by the ready state virtual mobility coach what on earth is that well let me back up the first person i personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is dr kelly starrett at the ready state i've known kelly for more than a decade i was introduced to him
for a bunch of reasons i've seen him perform near miracles on me and many others he's a good friend but he's also a mobility and movement coach for olympic gold medalists world champions and pro athletes you might recognize the name because kelly was in the four-hour body he was in tools of titans he's been on this podcast he also nursed and coached me through
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and use codetim10 when you sign up to get 10 off for the life of your membership after your 14 day free trial ends the readystate.com tim at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i answer your personal question now with [Music] i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoscopy hello boys and girls ladies and germs
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 stephen ranella instagram meateater stephen ranella 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 vanella at themeateater.com and then on facebook he is stephen ranella that's with a v steven ranella 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 uh common these days so perhaps we could start with just survival fantasy versus survival 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 yeah i think you set it up as a
sort of a dichotomy or like a 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 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 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 and 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 is unbeknownst to me we talked about odds in other words perceived threats versus real threats and much more let's begin just yeah
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 versus other let's begin with paradoxical undressing what is paradoxical addressing 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 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 made people have in their head as being like a 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 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 african elephant an african elephant has these giant ears right compare that to a woolly mammoth an ice age animal the woe of the mammoth very small ears willie mammoth 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 you know running it into a radiator so to speak so your body thinking the same way and as much as we can call it your body thinking but 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 you know your internal organs warm 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 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 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 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 they're dead 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 hair like like spooky it's just such a unnerving thought i think too when 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 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 to 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 these little ice picks you 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 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 it's just a convenient mnemonic device but someone said to me you can go three weeks without food 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 and then it'll be three whatever without air say [Laughter] but yeah i i i'm familiar with the thing 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 these 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 on ice right yeah so those ice picks are common for not common they 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 a ice pick inside a retractable sleeve so 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 epipen for getting out of yeah exactly and you can be on the slickest ice in the world lice you could never stand up on you could take the slickest ice in the world put water on it 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 you buying your way out i'm reminded of a thing that if you're familiar with john mcphee who wrote that pulitzer prize-winning trilogy coming into the country no no his geology his geology oh yeah so he wrote
this pulitzer prize trilogy that it 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 now remember that within annals of the former world john mcphee says if i was gonna 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 gonna sum this book up in one sentence it would be that the peak of mount everest is marine limestone if i was gonna 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 on
x and and just for full clarity i also you know work closely with the folks at onyx so bear that in mind but let me continue there's a reason i do that it's a mapping device that you use on your phone and there are other ones there's like gaia and a handful other ones um you can i'm not sure if google earth has download function quite like onx 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 miles 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 sell 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 park your whatever whatever you're doing you're on a rafting trip you're doing a afternoon hike into a little area you've never been into before you can go online and download a map and then even when you have no sell 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 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 phones people lose phones they drop in water i have all this kind of stuff has happened but they they destroy them in a puddle of mosquito repellent you can you can do once in a pool of deep but that's why i was saying onyx 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 come spot devices or in reach devices 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 you can take your inreach and set it so that it's sending pre-programmed messages every day saying you can type your message ahead of time hit a button that 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 still i joked about it earlier but yeah man you could get mauled by a bear the bear doesn't give a
about the fact that you have any of these technological devices but if you're still able to crawl around is 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 survival like you've survived a plane crash and you have a large bowie knife
you know 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 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 like 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 just to be like 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 sort of 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 hev 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 on x hunt but the hunting certainly is one application but it's not a requirement my realtor uses yeah yeah okay so this is this is this is actually this is related to my point so i was exploring the wilderness in new england and
during covet lockdown and i wanted to know a number of things 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 on x 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 south america at one point and the pre-programming with the texts is i
think like a key step pre-departure because they are 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 okay let me give you some hot let me give you some hot tips about that when you're done here yeah fire away i'm done oh there is a
iphone app called i'm gonna 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 earth mate and garmin earth mate pairs with your inreach device over bluetooth oh god you're about to this is the solution that i didn't know anything you just have at it man there's an important
thing to remember though here then you just have ad then you're just you're just flying it then you this one then you can send out novellas yeah dude yeah and i think you're you know there's a there's a limit it's more than a twitter message but and then you gotta 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 inreach number but if you're in a remote area using your inreach address trying to contact say your buddy who's two miles away at camp you need to know their in-reach address so it can communicate like let's say i go to text my 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 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 us who has cell service and they're like texting around we were doing this year 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 does she if she can and she's like was everybody okay i'm like yeah i'm looking at your husband he's fine i just want to send him a message [Laughter] so you gotta do a little bit of you 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
like oh i forgot the batteries in my headlamp and then i die 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
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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 tim what are some of the essentials that you routinely use that listeners may not find obvious or may not grok the subtleties of right you mentioned like the bowie knife i think a lot of unseasoned outdoors
men or women are inclined to get these big honkin you know jump off a ravine and kill a grizzly uh 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 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 to get a sense a somewhat widely available product there's a there's a thing called a or backcountry 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 backcountry organizer and it's a
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 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 it's 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 okay various medications i bring i have like one or two things a day quill and
nyquil in there 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 chords that i keep in dyneema chords are like it's like it's a material chord yeah it's like a souped up it's a it's a souped-up strong lightweight paracord
there's nothing wrong with 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
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 chaff skin can be helpful for alleviating pain from blisters 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 fires or uh not incendiary what's the word i'm looking for tim like um accelerants fire
accelerant accelerants yeah they will pull accelerants from your bag and find you there's no problem with having some vaseline in your bag now a a cotton a cotton ball rubbed with vaseline burns it's a great fire starter uh it can get wet it doesn't 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 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 as let's
say i'm spending some time up in southeast alaska there are places in southeast alaska that get 13 feet of precipitation annually okay where i'm staying where i am right now it gets 20 inches of precipitation and yeah let me just put this perspective for a second 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 the end of november to mid december and it was an average of something like point eight 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 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 that you're gonna take like a flint and steel and start a fire or you're gonna take a
hatch into rock and start a fire there are people on the planet including like the native alaskans who lived in that place and you know 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 gonna 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 the 99.9 percent 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 so hard yeah so when i'm going to a place like this i will have 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 a you know 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 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 those situations my kit might blossom now you might think like what are the odds of that well after september 11th so on september 11 there were people in backcountry canada and backcountry alaska who had arranged to be picked up at airstrips 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 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 eventually this stuff like shatters out somehow and they're able to get a couple engines re-lit 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 it's like a thing then you're 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 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 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 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 no one bats a thousand 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 i appreciate the sentiment 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 cory mccarthy and people are going to be trying to eat my kids and i'm going to stockpile silver coins and like shave off gold bars to get tampons with the guy in the back of the 7-eleven and it comes down to probabilities sort of historical likelihood and the cost of the intervention right 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 dollar 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 but to rely on that to get to the point where i would feel comfortable relying on that that becomes my new sport like that's like learning that's kind of what i'm saying is like people that can start a fire with a bow drill are people that start fires with bow
drills [Music] because they they do it recreationally they practice right they live with it and practice it yeah just to dig into the backcountry organizer and that i would just again to perhaps restate the obvious is taking something that is half the size of the say water container you might take with you it's smaller than that it's smaller than an
algae bottle right so this is we're not talking about a lot of inconvenience here is the or backcountry organizer just the container or does it come pre-loaded with a lot of these items no man it's just a container i have and there are there are other ones there are other companies that make similar products under you know the
difference tends to be weight and durability you know they're susceptible to tear the seams give out but it's it's lightweight there are other companies that make you know fhf make certain organizers that are pretty heavy duty they're great that one is just a very lightweight one what is your preferred multi-tool do you remember what you carry
yeah i i use a leather man i like the wave a lot it's heavy i got friends that really don't like them i'll tell you what i like on them i like a regular blade and we know we've been joking about big ass you know 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 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 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 ingrown toenails repairing clothes fixing firearms it's like i can do anything with a pair of needle nose man um i like that to be on there and then a number two phillips bit 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 let's
i'm going to return 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 to have done the things that we've done and figured out the ways in which we 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 fantasyland 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 since we invoked the name of the tsa earlier 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 on the planet god bless my god do they take some multi-tools i understand yeah 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 also they pull your
bag and you're just like oh that's another one not another one this is so bad we actually 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 that's a sinking feeling
i haven't looked into it but somehow they auction or sell oh the confiscated items like buck i think you buy like them by the bucket i don't know i i i i want to look into it i think they like somehow you know they all go somewhere the cash can airport in alaska this is one of my favorite things on the on the planet is in 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 8-inch 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 vanilla have a brief interview with with presumably that gentleman maybe as a woman but presumably the gentleman who had the brass knuckles dagger at the ketchikan airport and lost it and they're like the kind of brass knuckles that has the pointy knuckles like the 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 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 the water chapters laid out this way navigation is laid out this way it starts out like the chapters always start out like perfect world right so in water be like perfect world here's how many gallons a person's gonna use a day for intake meaning to make food um you know if you're using freeze-dried food
whatever on on camping trips or outings work outings whatever to make food and drinks so how 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 you know 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 bring with you in jugs right so you fill a jug off of garden hose loading your camper loading 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 chat would go through like
worse worse worse worse worse worse and then end kind of on oh 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 have with you have nothing 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 or it doesn't need to be nalgene we use analogy now 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 the gray bottles are very durable you can freeze stuff in them it doesn't crack them they're great there's
a hundred companies that make them a nalgene bottle and then we use a thing we call a drum or a dromedary which is a collapsible water bottle you can get various things like liter two liter maybe 1.5 liter and when they're empty it's nothing it's like imagine an empty duty somewhat heavy duty little shopping bag and you put in the bottom of your pack
you don't even know it's there but when it's full it's great it's a good source of water so carry an algine carry a drum in my kit that i mentioned earlier i always carry water purification tablets okay in single serving packs so it's these little foil packs in each of those foil packs there's one or two tablets in it you put those towels in water iodine or
what is yeah there's iodine there's some diff 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 um and then 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 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 um it runs on a cr123 battery you put it in there 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 use uh and the camp cup is a little bit flexible so you can force this thing into little
crevices like if you have a cliff face with some water just sort of like running down 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 mouth 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 steer your pen ice but when you're using snowmelt all you need is a small stove and you can run off snowmelt it's exhaustive on fuel and that's something we get into as well is 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 on 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 in the bottom of a 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 steripen 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
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 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 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 mountain lions waterborne pathogens are are a do you also carry a smaller purification device that is pumped something like catadyne i don't know if that's not correctly i do not
anymore i personally a lot of people like them i personally had a lot of trouble 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 you're it's not going to be freezing 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 just kind of like when times are good it's a it's a good device but the pumps know i've not 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 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 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 okay if you're hanging out in the us out doing like camping type activities and you're not like um you're not around a lot of human contamination but you're out in like you know in the woods in the mountains whatever like somewhat like halfway pristine environments 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 um 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 need you're gonna 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 like is classic like backpack and 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 love to hear your opinion on what some people call space blankets or mylar blankets these emergency blankets are they is there helpfulness overestimated underestimated but generally things that people might want to consider in their car right because i have
uh people have 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 it yolo
i'm going skiing and then lo and behold uh oh i mean that's mistake number one 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 uh 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 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 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 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 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 you know we do a lot of adventuring i live in the northern rockies climate here can be crazy road conditioning is gonna be crazy so i'm gonna give you like a pretty extreme version of like the kinds of things i keep in my car i keep a patch kit i also i drive a truck i have an f-150 the back seats lift up you can put all
kinds of stuff under there i have a decked toolbox in the back of my truck so i just can keep various things around but i keep a spot battery powered spotlight i have a battery powered air pump i have a patch kit i keep an extra head lamp might sound funny but i keep toothbrush and toothpaste in there i keep uh glow sticks in the glove box that could you know
those brake glow sticks that ravers use just you use them if you're if your vehicle is stopped 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 it's a folding shovel like a military folding shovel not all etools are created equal i got i got
mine from uh a serviceman who 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 a folding saw i'm sorry a folding shovel when there's snow on the ground i put 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 they're always like whining about
wanting food and i just feed them out of that box in the summer months i keep watering there but it freezes and breaks the containers in the winter so i pull them out and then i have like a basic tool kit so things i need to 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 you know gasoline
white gas you're in trouble man you will kill yourself 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 um never realize that oh yeah and then even like an alcohol stove that people use on sale bowls people use alcohol stoves on small
sailboats for the same thing so you can run it without getting carbon monoxide poisoning you could have a small seven dollar alcohol stove and a little pint bottle full of alcohol and heat a car to t-shirt warmth with an alcohol stove and you 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 like what 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 driving 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
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 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 glo you know glowed with pride upon hearing that um the 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 we got our
figured out our system's dialed yeah and it's there's it's also a different breed of preparation compared to like putting on a ghillie suit every saturday and climbing into a spider hole in your backyard yeah right it's this is 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 replace it every once in a while but i'll give an example here i have a garage with a significant amount of potable water because i want to say a year and a half ago two years ago and austin texas is this 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 uh a boil warning for the entire city all like 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 because there's there's poop in it because there's poop in it and within i don't i don't know 12 hours 24 hours all bottled water in the city gone like there's 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 yeah and i mean these things do happen maybe they happen 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 seatbelt when you drive um yeah i like it that you're pointing that out it's an interesting thing it's 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 uh homeowners insurance you know
it's like why do you use 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 a peace of mind issue if nothing else what i used to have when i in you know seattle gets so much rain i bought a i use this for my garden but i 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 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 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 bulletproof man as long as it rains [Laughter] you mentioned the the dried uh freeze-dried food uh there is sort of the good the bad and the ugly increased 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 this company is the pioneer of freeze-dried food i wanna tell people
real quick i wanna explain freeze-dried food to folks 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 uh 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 drive that sent all kinds of products into outer space their consumer brand is mountain house and so mount house is pretty ubiquitous like you walk into any sporting goods store or whatever
you'll see i i think it even turns up in costco you'll see these square buckets or individual things of of mountain house and that's a consumer brand by a by a major player in the freeze dry food business what they do is they make in this process you produce you produce table ready food okay so let's say you're making spaghetti with
meat sauce and you're gonna freeze dry it they actually make spaghetti and meat sauce so it looks like you could sit down and eat it it's ready to like 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 thick and 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 the speed at which it freezes is proprietary there's a lot of magic and 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 um these sublimation chambers bring to mind a 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 till now you can do it at your home right
they put these sheets of frozen food into the sublimation chamber and they pull a vacuum on it okay and once they got it once they pull the 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 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 you know mashed up crumbled up and put into a bag that's freeze dry food shelf life of you know with the right packaging these like these like laminated bags the right packaging on these products you know the shelf life of 30 years 40 years i think that they don't quite know the shelf life because no one's had any sitting around long
enough you know with the right packaging to figure it out there's a love and a hate for freeze drive the convenience is unbelievable and there are now many more freeze dry companies entering the space and they're all kind of you know whittling away at mountain house uh you know uh heather's does the company have his choice it does some freeze-dried stuff peak refuel we eat a
lot of that does 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 whenever he makes dinner he like freeze-dried 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 drive 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 [Laughter] 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
misconfuse freeze-dried food with dehydrated food dehydrated food can take a lot longer to rehydrate it can be that you do it you don't get it fully rehydrated like dehydrated beans you want to talk about something messing your gut up dehydrated beans you haven't gotten properly rehydrated can tear you to pieces freeze dryer hydrates pretty quickly i
got a friend that does a lot of backcountry travel and he's a he's a light he's a minimalist he's a lightweight fanatic he doesn't carry a camp stove with him he takes freeze-dried food and around noon he'll pour cold water under freeze-dried food and then just carried 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 drive if you put hot water in here that shit's ready in eight minutes yeah seven or eight minutes and like i said you just can't argue with the shelf 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-dried 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 was 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 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 drive 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 drag 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 laying here so who knows right it's 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 oh you don't need to check it you keep mice out of there
you don't need to check it you your kids will have emergency food [Laughter] oh my god and uh 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 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 my yard reaction when searing so that's a that's a trick that people can also use it seems that there's evidence of the incans 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 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 11 000 feet and i don't know if you've ever i went to saul to argentina to visit
those incan children that they're there's kind of a famous story 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 oh they think that those children are from the 1490s
wow perfectly preserved like they basically like naturally freeze dried at high elevation um they they display one of these children at a time in salt to 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 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 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 their lives but in the year or so leading up to their death they had like a phenomenally diverse diet and they had with them gifts and trinkets from all over the incan empire 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 a 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 freeze dried freeze-dried food free freeze-dried children don't eat them mummies of jujiako with the double l's i'm saying it with the since it's argentine but the children of zhu zhaiko which i'll link to in the show notes that's incredible no it was i would like to
in in a perfect world i'd go back two more times to see the other see the other children so i feel like we can't end on this particular story oh that was a real digression but go ahead pick something yeah yeah we uh well let's uh 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 uh 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 and some of the ways described in the book i'm just thinking to your story about your son with the truck but what what do you hope or expect the 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 a you know maybe a vague sense of
foreboding about something happening or feeling that you're in over your skis or as we'd like to say in over your waders that when approaching a frozen pond 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 comprehendable 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 things 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 tool kit 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 a friend of mine calls you 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 it just frees you up so i just want people to be have 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 should 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 varnella that that your friends or companions in the wilderness make fun of you for uh man i'm going to approach in a slightly different way and this is this is brand new fresh information i have a friend who's a very avid 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 aggressive like nothing like a golf cleat like steel or aluminum spikes that are used for extru like they're used for ice climbing extreme mountaineering okay i know he's 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 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'd give you too much swagger and you'd
wind up doing that you should not do and so i was with him and i finally brought a set of crampons and i came away from it like holy because even just on a steep pitch where there's some wet snow i used to take for granted that you walked along side hilling along a steep pitch with wet snow i used to take for granted that you just ate right every other step
this is just like how it goes you know and it'd be like five steps whoop five steps whoop and putting those on i became a believer so quickly in like moving around on wet grass icy stuff 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 and now i'll be like if i see that dude i'm gonna be like yeah bro right on i get you i gotcha [Laughter] what adventure have you up to this point left unrequited like
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 the makushi a tribe called the makushi 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 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 you've been up but you gotta have about three you know it's three week trip to get up because you gotta portage around all these waterfalls i don't have a concrete plan yet 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 i won't go up that river so damn bad like i think about it all the time [Laughter] to the other end to the bitter end like i said to where it comes out of a rock and like that's my thing that i want to do and these guys live off fish when
they're traveling too and i like fish that's a win-win 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 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 at the top of mount everest it's marine limestone that's it thank you very much tim got i got enough yeah you covered it
all right stephen vanella folks the meateater.com at meateater on instagram at stephenranella with a v stephen r-i-n-e-l-l-a the new book is the mediator 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 until next time thanks for tuning in hey guys this is tim again just a few
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