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At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question now it is. Cybernetic organisms living tissue over metal and those go to Paris, so. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Fair Show. I'm going to keep my usual preamble short. I want to get to the meat and potatoes. This conversation with Steven Rinella, Instagram at Meat Eater 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 Steven Rinella at the Meat Eater dot com and then on Facebook, he is Steven Rinella. That's with a V, Steven Rinella.

All right. And 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.

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 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 is 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 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, the 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 because I did that one, I think of the threats that are fun to think about.

Right. That are exciting to think about in 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 you a few times, one time in a very pronounced way.

It was being in in a river in Alaska in October with a dry suit 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.

Hmm. 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 plenty warm place. 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, your blood vessels constrict.

That's why you might notice it. You know, as you're getting cold, your fingers are turned white, right. Your toes get cold, your fingers 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 one with the 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 think of the same way.

And as much as we can call it your body thinking everybody 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 goes out toward your skin and gives you the 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.

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 like like spooky. It's just. Such an unnerving thought, I think, to you, and I think if people die of exposure, it wasn't too long ago, not far from where I am right now, where. In ice fishermen. 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 what it's like to hold on to you, try to squeeze. It just pops out of your hand. There's no snow on the ice and he goes to 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 on to. 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 is a little ice picks you just wear around your neck.

He doesn't have a set of these. Someone finds them a couple of 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 is 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 3D thing I've heard it described in various ways, three weeks food, three days water, and then it'll be three or whatever without air, say.

But yeah, I'm familiar with the thing and I've, 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.

Yeah.

So those ice picks are common for not common. They should be way more common among ice fishermen. 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 just the thing it's like an EpiPen for getting out of the. And you can be on the slickest ice in the world.

Like you could never stand up and 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 at that pit.

When I was mentioned to you just in private conversation earlier, I was you buying your way out. I'm reminded of a thing that I'm sure 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 the Pulitzer Prize trilogy that it came out as like basin and range, whatever its annals of the former world.

So it's. Three massive books, all combined together in the 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 Onex in reach.

And I'll tell you what these two things are. Onex is a mapping service. There are many I like Onex. And just for full clarity, I also, you know, work closely with the folks on. So bear that in mind. But let me continue that. 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 Guya and a handful of the ones you can I'm not sure of Google Earth has download function quite like Onex 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 its aerial imagery with topographical line overlays and you can download maps of areas you're going to that are highly detailed, that are five miles wide and 10 miles wide and in 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 and 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 and do a little air. 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 any time you should be able if you take the early pregame 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 diphones. People lose phones, they drop my water.

I've all this kind of stuff has happened, but they destroy them in a puddle of mosquito repellent. You can do once in a pool death.

But that's why I was saying Onex in reach, because there's also a device that's, I don't know, a third the size of a phone called an enriched reach device. Some people call spot devices or entreats devices. And what it is, is it allows you to send text messages. Through satellite. So you can take an enriched 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 in reach, you can take your own reach and set it so that it's sending preprogram messages every day saying you can type your message ahead of time, hit a button that sends a message, says I'm OK, but you can also hold down a button that says S.O.S. And it's satellite driven and the batteries last for days, so in like buying your way out, there are just steps now that you can take. Two, 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 joked about 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 the 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 the 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's not loaded properly. That's how people get in trouble.

Isn't shipwrecks in 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 no one totally sort of unbeknownst to me or I should say rather, I had no preexisting awareness that you used on Hunt. I also ended up using Onex 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 Onex hunt. But that the hunting certainly is one application, but it's not a requirement. My realtor. Yeah. Yeah.

OK, 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 covid 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 also 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 it's able to overlay the property information, which is just fascinating. I've never quite experienced anything like it. So Onex, I'll second that and then the intrigue and I'm not sure if more brands make it, but I used a garment in Ritsch when I was in South America at one point. And the preprogramming with the text is, I think, 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 S.O.S situation, you want to have your contacts and messages pre-programmed.

Let me give you some hot let me give you some hot tips about that when you're down here.

Yeah, fire away. I'm done. Oh. There is a. Called, let me give you the right name. I'm looking for them, I'm actually looking for it on my phone right now. There's an iPhone app called Garmin Earth Mate. And Garmin Earth mate Pear's with your in reach device over Bluetooth, oh, god, you're about this is the solution that I didn't know. I just have at it, man. There's an important thing to remember, though, here.

Then you just have at it, then you're just you're just flying.

Then you just want it. Then you can send out Novellus. Yeah, dude, yeah. I think there's a limit. It's more than a Twitter message, but then you got to go to number two. But the 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. You're in reach. No, 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.

You need to know they're in Ritsch address. So we 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 messes up because you could go like this. So 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 each 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 the other day, I was trying to I could see a person.

And I'm trying to send him an enraged message, but instead I'm in reaching his wife to see if she can and she's like, Oh, is everybody OK?

I'm like, yeah, I'm looking at your husband is fine. I just want to send him a message.

So you got to do a little bit of, you know, take five minutes to make sure that everybody's communicating.

Everybody's. In each address, in the process of separating more fact from fiction or really just pointing out essentials versus nonessentials, 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, shit, I forgot the batteries in my headlamp and then I die or something stupid.

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What are some of the essentials that you routinely use that listeners may not? Find lobbyists 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 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 I spend 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 OAH 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 back country organizer.

And it's a it'd be like a slightly flattened, pretty big coffee mug size. It's this little bag has 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 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 meet to my office, but if my fam we go to for instance, we go to buy 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, OK, various medications I bring, I have like one or two things, a DayQuil and Nyquil in their antihistamine, things like single serving packs, very, very small. And there are also keep to twenty five foot length dayanim accords that are very thin or like three or four mil cords that I keep Nyima cords or like it's like a mature cord. 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 uses 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, a 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 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 turn, a kit. Other items like that, I keep a Chewton, 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 Chewton is because one Vaseline is also helpful for chapped lips. Chave 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 not incendiary. What's the word I'm looking for, Tim?

Like 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 cotton a cotton ball rubbed with Vaseline burns. It's a great fire starter. It can get wet, it doesn't mess it up, and TSA guys never steal it, so it is always in your bag. I keep a small multitool.

I have a multi 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, too, small lighters, Tate, med tape, when I say that it's adaptable, as I say, I'm spending some time up in southeast Alaska.

There are places in southeast Alaska that get. 13 feet of precipitation annually. OK, where I'm staying, where I am right now is 20 inches of precipitation.

And yeah, let me just put this in perspective for a second. I just just. 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 sort of 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. 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 going to be in an environment like this and fashion of fire drill like a little fireball and start a fire or you're going to take like a flint and steel and start a fire or you're going to take a hatchet in Iraq 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. All 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 ninety nine point nine 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. 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, OK? 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 prearranged 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 back country Canada and back country 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 Airstrip's to be picked up. And the one thing, no matter where you are, an 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 of engines relit and they land, but they grounded aircraft for a long time. I had a friend who 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.

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, Canada, Frank Church in Idaho? I don't know, like a remote area and you're flying in anyone that does any amount of homework, you 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 OK, in our risk assessment, what's the real problem that might occur? I would say high on my list of 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 know, and 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 appreciate the sentiment and understand Zombo.

Yep, 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 car. 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 bar 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 suit.

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 beaudreau 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 gardening.

It's 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 drills, you know, because they do it recreationally.

They track, 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 same water container you might take with you that's smaller than a Nalgene bottle. Right. So this is we're not talking about a lot of inconvenience here is the owner, backcountry organizer, just the container or does it come preloaded with a lot of these items?

No, man, it's just the container I have in there. There are other ones. There are other companies that make similar products.

And the difference tends to be weight and durability. You know, they're susceptible to tear the seams, give out, but it's lightweight. There are other companies that make, you know, Fefe make certain organiser's that are pretty heavy duty, that are great. That one is just a very lightweight one.

What is your preferred multitool? Do you remember what you carry? Yeah, 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, like a regular blade. And, you 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'd 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 knife on a multitool is a good backup to also having you know, I carry like a very high quality, very lightweight pocket knife called a bugout, but I have a bug deal 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 leather man I like one that has a saw on it, like wood saw. Saw. I like one that has a serrated blade for doing work that would very quickly double 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 mentioned something being the size of your the end of your thumb. This is like a couple of thumbnails. It's like a sliver remover, 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 a needle nose pliers for all kinds of stuff.

We use needle nose pliers for everything from like pulling porcupine quills out of dogs, fixing ingrown toenails, repairing clothes, fixing firearms so I can do anything with of needle nose man. I like that to be on there. And then a number to Phillips bit. A flat head 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 I didn't return to my point, but I 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 adaptive, 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, 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, I am and I really want to have a multi-tool, but I just use a multitool in living my life.

That's why I like a big part of the title. I think that in struggling with it would be like the Guide to Survival, like, OK, Hit My Head just goes to fantasy land.

Wilderness skills and survival will 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 tool by someone who kind of understands how to do things. I always have a multitool 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 steeliness sons of bitches on the planet. God. Oh my God. Do they take some multi tools? I understand. Like, it can't go on a plane with 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 down to the other one, not the other one is so that it's actually like standing in line.

Now, we actually like like if I'm with, you know, bodies of mine or guys I work with, it's like a common thing. You know, you'd be like, oh, you got your passport.

I'd be like, dude, knives, knives, knives, you know, right next to the sinking feeling you tried to.

I haven't looked into it, but somehow they auction or sell of the confiscated items like Buck you buy like on by the bucket. I don't know. I want to look into it.

I think they like somehow they all go somewhere near the 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 inch double bladed dagger coming out of it, so which makes me feel a lot better about the multitudes 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.

Presumably, that gentleman maybe was 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 that, like they would like perforate your skin for you is 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. You think about that. I 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 chapter's 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 is going to use a day for intake, meaning to make food.

You know, if you're using Freeze-Dried food on camping trips or outings, work outings, whatever, to make food and drink.

So what's the quantity of water that will actually go into your body? And then there is 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 a garden hose, load in your camper, load your truck, and that's where you are. You just live off of jug water, which is great, dude, all the time. Car camp and water. But then the chatter would go through like worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, and then and kind of on a 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 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 know, shit with, you have nothing. You got to figure everything out, including a container.

But for real world use, I spent 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 you doesn't need to be Nalgene know we use Nalgae now. It's like a brand name. They make scientific containers and equipment and beakers and stuff, but they become a real dominant force.

And like screwtop bottles, the great bottles are very durable. You can freeze stuff in them. It doesn't crack them. The great hunter companies that make them a Nalgene bottle. And then we use the thing we call a drum or a dromedary, which is a collapsible water bottle. You can get various things like leader to leader, maybe one point five leader. And when they're empty, it's nothing. It's like imagine an empty duty, somewhat heavy duty, a little shopping bag.

And you put in the bomb your package and you know it's there, but when it's full, it's great, it's a good source water. So carry Nalgene, carry a drum kit. In my kit that I mentioned earlier, I always carry. Water purification tablets in single serving packs with these little foil packs and those foil packs is one or two tablets in it. You put those towels and one iodine or what is.

Yeah, there's iodine. There's some 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 and different tablets and then they might argue amongst themselves about which has the worse or better aftertaste. There are also neutralises you can add, like if you if you hate that taste, it 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 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 stari pen. With great results, I love them, it's a UV light wand. Imagine a light saber that's maybe five inches long. It runs on a S.R. one twenty three 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 of complications with this is like if the water's too turbid, so if it's like an incredibly muddy water, you would need to double dose that or triple dose that 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 get a little bit of water on your palm. It can be an arduous task. I usually carry a small plastic cup with me anyways for drinking coffee and stuff. In the morning, you can use the Camp Cup as a little bit flexible.

So you can force this thing in the little 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 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 fall and then wond it with a stari pen to purify it, where you might have a problem is if everything's frozen, you can't stari pen. Ice, but when you're using snow melt, 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 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 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 was keeping the bomber pack, you can fill that at a source and carry it with you and purify it as you use it. You can get to filles and dump it into your bottle, purify it with a stari pen.

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 can 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 I think, oh, it must be fine, because this is the source when in fact, if they walk 10 yards uphill, they'd find like a L'Etoile or.

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 and mountain lions, waterborne pathogens are a bitch. Do you also carry a smaller. Purification device that is pumped, something like Katahdin, I don't know if that's not directly, 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, stuff, or you just, you know, like you just have water because you're floating down the damn river. Right. You know, you're going to 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 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 it's a good device, but the pumps no, 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 are using it.

You're going to want a purification system that also can handle viruses. If you were in the US, if you're hanging out in the US out doing like camping type activities and you're not and like you're not around a lot of human contamination, but you're out in like, you know, in the woods, in the mountains or whatever, like somewhat like halfway pristine environments.

You don't need to worry about viruses. You're mostly talking about really big things, Gardea cryptosporidium, 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 to you in the book. But human waste in the water you need you're going to practice a different purification system and you might even do something like a dual purification system where you have things like, again, from human contamination.

But the primary focus here that I'm talking about is like is classic, like backpacking, 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 people get themselves into trouble and 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, 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 proper land. And I'll point out that I'm in my car and at home I'm a sort of unintentional or accidental prop. 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 analysis, 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 too, because I bought it. For one thing in mind.

It also serves the purpose of having a freeze dried food to keep my family up and running for quite a long time and freeze dried food. We have all kinds of, you know, we can't last. 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 proper, 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 treaded 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. All 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 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 one fifty. The backseats lift up and put all kinds of stuff under there. I have a DECT toolbox in the back of my truck so I can keep various things around. But I keep a spotlight, battery powered spotlight. I have a battery powered air pump. I have a patch kit. Keep an extra headlamp might sound funny, but I keep a toothbrush, toothpaste in there, I keep glowsticks in the glove box that those brake glowsticks that ravers use, just that use them.

If you're if your vehicle is stopped along side of the road, you can put out glowsticks so that in a snowstorm or dark conditions, people could see it. I keep a military tool like a folding. What does a folding shovel like a military folding shovel. Not all E tools are created equal. I got I got mine from a. A serviceman who was like, no, dude, you have to have the right to. And he went and got me the right tool, a very heavy duty tool to folding 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 the D handle and the back of my truck. I have to insulated ponchos. So they're basically like sleeping bags with a hole that you can put over inside of young kids. So I keep my insulated ponchos in my truck.

I have a food stash in my DECT system, like one of the boxes is just full of granola bars and stuff, which I use for my kids all the time. Because if anyone has kids, they know that they're always like whining about wanting food and I just feed them out of that box. In the summer months. I keep water 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 do, repairs. I keep some garbage bags and things and their 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 of fossil fuel, isopropyl, whatever, 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, everyone will realize 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 seven dollar alcohol stove and a little pint bottle full of alcohol and heat, a car, a T-shirt, warmth with an alcohol stove. And you don't 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 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 Wal-Mart or whatever and buy like a plastic tote of an appropriate size. Put all this stuff we have lists in the book of all is like what's minimum maximum like 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 visit relatives for the Christmas holiday, though, the ticket in the back in that tote is all the shit you would ever need to be more than comfortable.

People might laugh you all your little goofy, all your proper was as Mad Max is 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, you know, glowed with pride upon hearing that the even the sense of the sense of ease and comfort that my kid got here, 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 shit figured out. Our systems dialed. Yeah, and it'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, 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 significant amount of potable water because I want to say a year and a half ago, two years ago in Austin, Texas, is this first world, incredibly developed city, incredible medical support and facilities.

This is a top tier city within the U.S. 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 boil warning for the entire city and all human fecal matter into the municipal water supply. That's right. So that's 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. Yeah, I like that.

You're pointing that out. It's an interesting thing is like no one thinks you're a whacked out prop.. So you have a fire extinguisher. Or to have a first aid kit or to have homeowner's insurance, you know, it's like all of you in some kind of, you know, right wing, right?

But it's like, yeah, it's just I just view it as a thing, you know, it's like a peace of mind issue, if nothing else. What I used to have when I was in Seattle, I get so much rain. I bought a I use this for my garden, but I loved it where I bought it. Two hundred and fifty gallon. Tank that sat under the I had a roof deck on top my house, and it came down this downspout and it rains all the damn time, you know, in summer or in the winter.

And I just rigged this two hundred and fifty 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, that's like, dude, it's like a, you know, bulletproof man as long as it rains.

You mentioned the dried, freeze dried food. There is the good, the bad and the ugly 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 fruit.

I tell people real quick, I'll explain. Freeze dried food to folks. It's an interesting process.

I wrote a piece 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 dried, Oregon freeze dried is they do all kinds of military contracting.

They do like NASA contracting it. Oregon freeze dried. They 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 at Costco. You see these square buckets or individual things of Mountain House, and that's a consumer brand by a by a major player in the freeze dried food business. What they do is they make.

In this process, you produce you produce table ready food. OK, so let's say you're making spaghetti with meat sauce and you're going to freeze dried. 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 and these big, huge sheet trays, they just spread it out about an inch thick and a giant mega giant cookie sheet with inch thick spaghetti and meat sauce on it.

It goes into a freezer. And they freeze it in like 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. The sublimation chambers bring to mind a sudden amazing name. Yes, sublimation chamber it looking at it, it looks like the end of a submarine sticking out of a wall.

And the sublimation chamber is a vacuum chamber. So you put all these sheets of frozen food so you could do the up till now, you could do it at your home. Right. They put these sheets of frozen food into the sublimation chamber and they pull a vacuum on it, OK? 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 in 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-Dried Food shelf life of, you know, what, 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 hate for Freeze-Dried. The convenience is unbelievable. And there are now many more freeze-dried companies entering the space. And they're all kind of, you know, whittling away at Mountain House.

You know how there's a company have this choice. It doesn't freeze, dries off peak refuel. We eat a lot of that, those 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 fruit if you're, like, super preppy. Yeah, a few thousand bucks. I was just camping with a guy whose body has his own sublimation chamber now. And this dude, like, whenever he makes dinner, he like Freeze-Dried some to is a arrival.

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 or the freeze dried.

Most anybody can hack a day or two or 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, 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 that you do it, you don't get it fully rehydrated like dehydrated beans, you want to talk about something in your gut up dehydrated beans you haven't gotten properly rehydrated can tear you to pieces. Freeze-Dried hydrates pretty quickly, I got a friend that does a lot of backcountry travel, and he's he's a he's a minimalist, he's a lightweight fanatic.

He doesn't carry a camp stove with them. 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 rehydrate and he'll just eat cold.

Freeze-Dried, if you put hot water, is just 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 troops in Vietnam, long range reconnaissance patrollers, those kind of like the pioneering days of freeze dried food.

And then it had big ramifications for, you know, Naslund military use and such. When I was at the Oregon freeze dried company years ago is fornix.

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, 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 dried. But it is unparalleled as an emergency food, backpacking, food, Roldan's 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 freeze dried company when I was working on my article one freeze dried company, I suppose the shelf life. And they said, we switch to this style of bag. I remember what it was like. We switch to this style a bag thirty years ago. It's all still fine 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 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 all. You don't need to check it. You keep mice out of there. You don't need to check it.

Your kids will have emergency food, but they have a 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 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.

I'll get that Myard reaction when searing.

That's a that's a trick that people can also use.

It seems that there is 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, ten thousand feet. And preserved through freeze drying, and they would also do an equivalent. Of they would sometimes put human remains. Ten, eleven thousand feet. And I know if I went to school, to Argentina to visit.

Those Inken children that there's kind of a famous story of these three Inken 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 kid's lips, it looks like they could just wake up from a nap and walk away.

They think that those children are from the 14 Nagy's. While perfectly preserved, like they basically like naturally freeze dried at high elevation, they display one of these children at a time, Insull 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 don't out of 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 wonder why, I guess the related to some mythology or superstition or belief system of the indigenous suppos 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. 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 ink and empire.

And perhaps they were on a sort of two were 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 walking story anyway.

Freeze dried, freeze dried fruit, free, freeze dried children don't eat them.

Mummies of Georgia with the double L's. I'm saying it with Georgia since it's Argentina. But the children of Georgia, which I'll link to in the show, notes. That's incredible. Never know it was. I would like to, in a perfect world, out 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 is a real digression, but go ahead, fix.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's 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 Meat Eater 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. Just thinking to your story about your son with the truck.

But 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 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 do go near, you would look at it as a thing that's comprehendible, 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 to 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 ownership things that can befall a person happen to you outdoors and eat, 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 tool kit at times. You wind up feeling better and once you feel better and you get that cockiness, you give it, 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 it just frees you up? So I just want people to be. Have that liberated, swaggering feeling. Outside dig it can 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 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 particularly Steve Rinella, that that your friends or companions in the wilderness make fun of you for man 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. OK. I had always shied away.

Could you describe describe what those are? Yeah, crampons are like a thing. You lock onto your boots, strap on your boot. It's cleats like very, very like nothing like a golf cleat, like steel or aluminum. Spikes that are used for like that are used for ice climbing, extreme mountaineering, and 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, you know, some basic repelling skills are good to have.

Right. And 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 you're like, oh, and you use to get out. And I thought crampons were potentially trouble making that it would give you it would give you the wilderness swagger I mentioned. It gives you too much swagger and you don't to do 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, what are some wet snow I used to take for granted that you walked alongside Hillin along a steep pitch, 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 up. Five steps up.

And putting those on, I became a believer so quickly in like moving around on wet grass, icy stuff, how that allow 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 back and other people at the trailhead being like, what is this idiot doing?

The same way a month ago, if I saw someone crampons, I'd be like, oh, come on, come on, really? Really. And now I'll be like, if I see that do, I'm going to be like Yarbro. Right, I guess I got you. 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 Makushi, a tribe called the McCuistion. 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 have seen shit. Keep it up, but you have about three three week trip. To get up because you got to portage around all these waterfalls, I don't have a concrete plan yet, but at whatever point in life 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'll go up that river so damn bad, like I think about it all the time 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. Well, it's a win win, Steve. Always fun, always a good time, and you make me want to get out into the wilderness ASAP and actually to do a fair amount of prep beforehand. So not just yet another idiot wandering out with with no plan, no contingencies, no nothing and 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?

Complaint's comments, requests for the audience, closing inspirational quotes and 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, Jim. I got I got you covered.

All right. Steven Rinella, folks, the meat eater dotcom at Meat Eater on Instagram at Steven Rinella with a V, Steven r.i and Elmaleh. The new book is The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival. I will also link to everything we've discussed in the show. Notes teamed up Log Forward Slash podcast. Until next time. Thanks, UNITAID.

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