#482: Steven Rinella — A Short Introduction to True Wilderness Skills and Survival

Steven Rinella (@MeatEater https://www.instagram.com/meateater/, @StevenRinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/) is the host of the Netflix Originals series MeatEater https://www.netflix.com/title/80126646 and The MeatEater Podcast https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater. He’s also the author of seven books dealing with wildlife, conservation, hunting, fishing, and wild foods, including his newest, The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival https://www.amazon.com/MeatEater-Guide-Wilderness-Skills-Survival/dp/0593129695/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. * This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. 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Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid-prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs http://99designs.com/tim. You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas or hire the perfect designer for your project based on their style and industry specialization. It’s simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you’ll end up with a design that you’re happy with. Click this link and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade http://99designs.com/tim. * This podcast is also brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach http://thereadystate.com/tim. The first person I call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State http://thereadystate.com/tim. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  Most recently, I've been working with a designer at 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts for all of my downloadable ebooks. I've developed a really great working relationship with the designer who goes by the username Spoonlancer, and I intend to continue working with him to bring ideas to life, one project at a time. I've also used 99designs for all sorts of high-end illustration for different books, like The Tao of Seneca. You can see a bunch of examples on my Instagram that I've put up, and they've turned out better than I possibly could have hoped. So, from logos, to websites, to packaging, to books, 99designs is the go-to creative resource to build your brand on any budget. So check them out. Right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can get $20 off, plus a free $99 upgrade

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04Tim Ferriss?

  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 the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was The Tim Ferriss Experiment.

• 2:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I made it through those 13 episodes because of Kelly. Would not have survived. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos, walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. There are a lot of things you can do with this program and you've got to check it out. It's encyclopedic, but simultaneously really easy to navigate. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief.

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of pre and post exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually. So those will help you warm up before your workout so you can run faster, jump higher, lift heavier, all with a lower risk of injury. And if you're not in pain or working out, Virtual Mobility Coach also has a library of daily maintenance videos. Great way to speed up recovery on your off days, which also helps a lot with sleep, much of that stuff. And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get the Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk free for two weeks without paying a penny. It is a two-week Free trial, so you should try it out. Kelly is super legit.

• 4:16Tim Ferriss?

  He is literally the person I text and call with the most sophisticated slash esoteric questions about recovery and injuries I've inflicted upon myself. He knows what he's doing and his stuff really, really works. Try it completely free for two weeks and if you decide to continue, you can get 10% off for life using promo code TIM10. That's T I M one zero. Simply visit thereadystate.com/tim to check everything out and use code TIM10 at checkout. Again, that's thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM10 when you sign up to get 10% off for the life of your membership after your 14 day free trial ends. thereadystate.com/tim.

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate time.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  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 Steven Rinella, Instagram, @meateater, @stevenrinella. 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 themeateater.com, and then on Facebook, he is Steven Rinella, that's with a V, Steven Rinella, R-I-N-E-L-L-A, Meat Eater. Steve, welcome back to the show.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it, man.

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 7:50Tim Ferriss?

  survival or portrayals of survival versus the realities?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you've 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've 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,

• 8:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:40Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just jump into some of the recommendations that you might have. And we can weave to this in a more indirect fashion, but as we were discussing possible points to touch upon in our conversation beforehand, you 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.

• 10:16Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 10:27Speaker 03

  That one, I think of the threats that are fun to think about.

• 10:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  That are exciting to think about and the ones that are just real, that no one likes to think about.

• 10:37Tim Ferriss?

  The first blood threats like carry a serrated machete into the wilderness.

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Number two, I think bounces between Wyoming and Montana, but then jumps down south to New Mexico, which may people have in their head as being like a plenty warm place.

• 12:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's surprising.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  So your body, when, in terms of the paradoxical undressing, as you're getting cold, your body starts to.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  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 in a thing 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 woolly mammoth, very small ears. Woolly mammoths lived in these very cold climates.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  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, in as much as we can call it your body thinking. Your body doesn't want to send blood out to the extremities where it's getting cold. It tries to keep things in your core and keep, 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, and their clothes will be laying all around them. Because it requires all that energy to constrict the blood vessels, eventually they tire.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  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 this sensation of burning up. Some people paradoxically undress to the point where they start discarding jewelry. You'll find victims of hypothermia with a shoe and a sock off, a wedding ring off, clothes scattered about, but then lying there dead. 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 harrowing, like spooky.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  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 through the ice and he's splashing around, water is getting up on the ice. So there's nothing to grab on to.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  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 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

• 16:11Speaker 03

  getting injured in the woods, being like fixated on grizzly bears and mountain lions and such.

• 16:17Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  But yeah, no, I'm familiar with the thing and I've heard it used a handful of ways.

• 16:55Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the ways that you can buy your way into some margin of safety? Maybe you don't eliminate risk entirely, but what are some of the easy purchases that would go into a basic kit of some type? Doesn't have to be even basic, but just some of the specific purchases that are easy ways to remove a lot or mitigate a lot of risk. Like you mentioned, the ice picks that hang around the neck.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:25Tim Ferriss?

  For someone who's doing a lot on ice.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  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 an ice pick inside a retractable sleeve so that there's nothing sharp sticking out, but the minute you jab it down, you know, the sleeve retracts on a spring and the ice pick goes into the ground or into the ice and it's just a thing.

• 17:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's like an EpiPen for getting out of.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And you can be on the slickest ice in the world, ice you could never stand up on. You could take the slickest ice in the world, 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, I don't know if you're familiar with John McPhee, who wrote that Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy.

• 18:24Tim Ferriss?

  Coming into the country.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  No, no, his geology, his geology book. So he wrote this Pulitzer Prize trilogy that was, 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 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,

• 19:11Speaker 03

  I would say OnX inReach. And I'll tell you what these two things are. OnX is a mapping service. There are many. I like OnX and just for full clarity, I also, you know, work closely with the folks at OnX. So bear that in mind, but let me continue. There's a reason I do that. It's a mapping device that you use on your phone. And there are other ones. There's like Gaia and a handful of other ones. 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.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  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, then 10 miles wide, and then lower detail, lower resolution maps that are 100 miles wide. What it does is, your phone has a built-in GPS function that does not require a cell signal. So if you're using an iPhone and you're going into, you're going to some area for whatever reason, you're going there for work, you're going there for pleasure, you're going backcountry skiing, you're going on a hike with your family in Yellowstone National Park, you're whatever,

• 20:38Speaker 03

  whatever you're doing, you're on a rafting trip, you're doing an afternoon hike and do a little area you've never been into before, you can go online and download a map. And then even when you have no cell signal, all you need to do is turn on your phone, put it on airplane mode, you now have two or three days worth of battery because you're on airplane mode. And there's a blue dot that shows you where you are. When you aim your phone in any direction and hit a button, it shows you what direction your phone is pointing relative to your map.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  So at any time, you should be able, if you take the early pre-game preparation, the idea of getting lost is almost becoming an obsolete notion, or you have to almost self-select to be lost by not taking preparations. Of course, things can happen to phones. People lose phones. They drop them in water. All this kind of stuff has happened, but-

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  They destroy them in a puddle of mosquito repellent.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  You can destroy them in a pool of deep.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  But that's why I was saying Onyx InReach, because there's also a device that's, I don't know, a third the size of a phone called an InReach device. Some people call them spot devices or InReach devices. And what it is, is it allows you to send text messages through satellite. So you can take an InReach device and no matter where you are, you know, on the face of the earth, if you have a line of sight to the sky, you can save addresses in your InReach. 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, it sends a message that says, "I'm okay",

• 22:29Speaker 03

  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'd still, I joked about it earlier, but yeah, man, you could get mauled by a bear. The bear doesn't give a shit about the fact that you have any of these technological devices, but-

• 23:06Speaker 03

  If you're still able to crawl around, it's pretty nice to be able to hold a button down and get help. And so these are all things that I spent a great deal of time on in the book, because it's not trying to treat 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

• 23:50Speaker 03

  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. Like 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

• 24:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  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 OnX Hunt. I also ended up using OnX and have for the last five months. And I should just mention to people that if you search for it on the App Store, I think it will show up as OnX Hunt, but the hunting certainly is one application, but it's not a requirement.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  My realtor uses OnX.

• 25:16Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  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 OnX 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 OnX, 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

• 26:09Tim Ferriss?

  with the texts 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 SOS situation, you want to have your contacts and messages pre-programmed.

• 26:23Speaker 03

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

• 26:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, fire away. I'm done.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Oh, there is a iPhone app called, I want to give you the right name, so I'm looking for it. I'm actually looking for it on my phone right now. There's an iPhone app called Garmin Earthmate. And Garmin Earthmate pairs with your inReach device over Bluetooth.

• 26:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God, you're about, this is the solution that I didn't know I needed.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  And then you just have at it, man. There's an important thing to remember, though, here. Then you just have at it. Then you're just, you're just flying.

• 27:01Tim Ferriss?

  Then you can send out novellas.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Dude, yeah. And I think you're, you know, there's a, there's a limit. It's more than a Twitter message, but then you got to go to number two. But the other thing to keep in mind, when you're using it, you're using satellite. You can text someone who has cell service. Someone with cell service can text you at your 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 inReach address.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  So it could 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 the other day, I was trying to, I could see a

• 28:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  So you gotta do a little bit of, you know, take five minutes and make sure that everybody's communicating everybody's in-reach address.

• 28:50Tim Ferriss?

  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 shit, I forgot the batteries in my headlamp and then I die, right? Or something stupid.

• 29:19Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in The Four Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard pressed to A more nutrient dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multi-mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases.

• 30:04Tim Ferriss?

  If I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient dense meals to begin with. That's the basis, but Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available from travel packets. I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. And right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience, that's you guys, a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So particularly in the winter months, adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. So make an investment in your health today and try the ultimate all in one wellness bundle.

• 30:46Tim Ferriss?

  Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/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.

• 31:03Tim Ferriss?

  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 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?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd like to talk for a minute just about like the kit, you know, which is something I 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 and 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.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  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. Okay, various medications I bring, I have like one or two things, a Dayquil 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 cords. That I keep in there. Dyneema cords are like very thin paracord.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  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 taped 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.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Is because one, Vaseline is also helpful for chapped lips, chafed 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 accelerants. 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.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  It can get wet, it doesn't mess it up and TSA guys never steal it. So it's just always in your bag.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  I keep a small multi-tool. I have a multi-tool. That allows for a certain bit adapter. So I'm able to keep some basic screwdriver bits. That fit various things that I own and use in there. I hunt a lot. So I have archery stuff, firearm stuff. Little screws and bits that I like to have on hand. I keep those in my organizer. And it's filled out like that, two small lighters, tape, med tape. When I say that it's adaptable, let's say I'm spending some time up in Southeast Alaska. There are places in Southeast Alaska that get 13 feet of precipitation annually.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Okay. Where I'm stay, where I am right now gets 20 inches of precipitation annually.

• 36:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Let me just put this perspective for a second.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  169 inches.

• 36:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Let me just put this in perspective for folks. So yesterday I was looking at historic ski reports and precipitation for Taos, New Mexico. This is a place famous for skiing and I was looking at end of November to mid-December and it was an average of something like 0.8 to one and a half ski days per week. That's not a lot of snow and this is a place that ultimately is well-known for skiing. So you imagine the amount of precipitation you're describing. That is a ton of precipitation.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oftentimes, here's a, here's a survival, like a survival trope is that, you know, that you're gonna be in an environment like this in fashion of 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 hatchet and a rock and start a fire. There are people on the planet, including like the native Alaskans who lived in that place and, you know, 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

• 38:08Speaker 03

  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 99.9% of you are not going to go there and start a fire using anything other than matches or a lighter. You're just not.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  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. Okay. And I have my super hard to start a fireplace

• 39:01Speaker 03

  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

• 39:42Speaker 03

  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 11th, 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, 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.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  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 eighties 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.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 41:34Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds terrible.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  And 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 a good risk assessment

• 41:53Speaker 03

  and you think about what are the problems that would actually happen to go into a very remote area of Alaska or Canada, wherever you 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 shit that might occur would be that we're going to sit here for three or four days.

• 42:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And are we prepared for that? Cause that could be a little miserable.

• 42:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to also emphasize for folks who are listening that I consider you, I know 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.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  I understand. I appreciate the sentiment and I understand what you're talking about.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 Cora 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

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  or $30 fire extinguisher that sits there gathering dust because it's cheap, it's easy to use, and if you need it, you want to have it.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:59Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Because they do it recreationally.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  They practice, they live with it and practice it.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  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 on a hike.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  It's smaller than an Algen bottle.

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  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 preloaded with a lot of these items?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  No, man. It's just the container. I have, and 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, FHF makes certain organizers that are pretty heavy duty. They're great. That one is just a very lightweight one.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  What is your preferred multi-tool? Do you remember what you carry?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. I use a Leatherman. 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, 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 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 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 Bugout.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  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

• 47:01Speaker 03

  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, listen,

• 47:44Speaker 03

  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

• 48:27Speaker 03

  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 going to 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, it'd be like the guide to survival. I'm like, okay, my head just goes to fantasy land. Wilderness skills and survival be like wilderness skills is just like the doing, how to be out and do things. And yeah, man, I have seen everything from outboard engines to generators to cars to human beings repaired with a multi-tool by someone who kind of understands how to do things.

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  The multi-tool stealingest sons of bitches on the planet. God bless them. My God, do they take some multi-tools? I understand. Like, 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 all of a sudden they pull your bag and you're just like, oh, ah, another one. Not another one.

• 49:46Tim Ferriss?

  This is so bad. It's the worst.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Like, standing in line now, we actually like, like if I'm with, you know, buddies of mine or guys I work with, it's like a common thing. You know, you'd be like, oh, you got your passport. You'd be like, dude, knives, knives, knives. You know? Right. Got it. Thanks. Oh, it's a sinking feeling. You can like, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they auction or sell.

• 50:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the confiscated items.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Bucket, like bucket. I think you buy like, um, buy the bucket. I don't know. I, I, I want to look into it, but I think they like somehow, you know, they all go somewhere. The Ketchikan Airport in Alaska, this is one of my, 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 eight 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.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  I just would love to have, Benel, to have a brief interview with, with presumably that gentleman, maybe it 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 the, like, they would like perforate your skin for you. It's, it's the greatest.

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  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, how would you suggest people think about that?

• 51:37Speaker 03

  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 is 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, it'd be like perfect world. Here's how many gallons a person's going to use a day for intake, meaning to make food. Um, you know, if you're using freeze dried food, whatever on, on camping trips or outings, work outings, whatever, to make food and drink. 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

• 52:19Speaker 03

  on where you are in the world, that with intake, so physical intake and then basic cleaning and then water for if you're doing some amount of bathing and like all these water quantities that you'd bring with you in jugs, right? So you fill a jug off a garden hose, load it in your camper, load it in your truck, and that's where you are. You just live off of jugged water, which is great. Do it all the time. Car camp in water. But then the chapter would go through like worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, and then end kind of on, oh shit. So, starting out with that idea of water, moving into the idea of sourcing water. So sourcing water where you have the proper equipment to do so, and then it moves into sourcing water where you do not have the proper equipment to do so.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  And then basically down to sourcing water, you have, you don't have shit with you, you have nothing. You gotta 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.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  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 an Algae bottle. Or it doesn't need to be Algae. We use Algae now, but it's like a brand name. They make scientific containers and equipment and beakers and stuff, but they've become a real dominant force in like screw top bottles. They're great bottles. They're very durable. You can freeze stuff in them. It doesn't crack them. They're great. But there's a hundred companies that make them. An Algae bottle. And then we use a thing we call a Dram or a Dramadairy, which is a collapsible water

• 54:02Speaker 03

  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 it in the bottom of your pack. You don't even know it's there, but when it's full, it's, it's great. So a good source of water. So carry an Algae, carry a Dram.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  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 and each of those foil packs is one or two tablets in it. You put those tablets in water. Iodine or what is? Yeah, there's iodine. There's some different, 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 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

• 55:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Um, it runs on a CR123 battery.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  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. 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 it or triple dose it because of light penetration through the water.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  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 a, 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 it and that's the only water you can find. You can kind of mash this cup up against the cliff face and slowly get dripping water into the cup.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  And use that to fill that rigid mouthed nalgene and eventually get that thing full and then wand it with a stary pen to purify it. Where you might have a problem is if everything's frozen, you can't stary 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 in the water, but it's like a thing we cover. But if you get that basic thing down, and again, this is like standard operating procedure

• 57:23Speaker 03

  of water bottle, dramadary, and the dramadary bag, I carry a two liter dramadary bag. I just keep it in the bottom of my pack. You can fill that at a source and then carry it with you and purify it as you use it. You can get two fills and dump it into your bottle, purify it with a stary 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.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  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 a elk wallow. Where they're shitting and pissing and rolling around in the mud. And it's not adequately filtered from having passed through that mucky ground. And you can get sick. Waterborne pathogens. They're like part of this whole suite of the little things that kill. And that is the thing with water, more than bears, more than mountain lions. Waterborne pathogens are a bitch.

• 59:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you also carry a smaller?

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  Purification device that is pumped, something like Katadine? I don't know if that's.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  I do not. I do not anymore. I personally, a lot of people like them. I personally have had a lot of trouble.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  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 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, 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.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  And it's just kinda like when times are good, it's a, 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, how you're using it. You're going to want a purification system that also can handle viruses. If you were in the US, okay? If you're hanging out in the US, out doing like camping type activities, and you're not in like, um, you're not around a lot of human contamination,

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  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, we explain all this stuff too in the book, but human waste in the water, you need to, 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.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  But the primary focus here that I'm talking about is like, is classic like backpacking, hiking, wilderness outings.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  What are some items that people should have in their cars? Um, 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 their 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.

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  But perhaps they've driven already three hours in traffic and they're like, Fuck it, YOLO. I'm going skiing and then low and behold, uh oh. I mean, that's mistake number one.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  People die every year. People die every year in stranded vehicles in this country. Talking about cars, we're starting getting into, we're talking about like, you know, like prepper land. And I'll point out that I'm a, in my car and at home, I'm a sort of unintentional or accidental prepper. Where I do a lot of camping, so I have like a lot of freeze dried food. I buy a lot of it. I keep it in bins in my garage. So that when I'm going somewhere, I have a lot of it. And 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.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  On freeze dry 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.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  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 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 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 deck. Toolbox in the back of my truck, so I just 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.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  I keep an extra headlamp. Might sound funny, but I keep toothbrush and toothpaste in there. I keep glow sticks. In the glove box, they could, you know, those break glow sticks that ravers use. Just that you'd use them if your, if your vehicle is stopped alongside 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 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 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.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  When there's snow on the ground, I put it in a big aluminum scoop shovel with a D handle. In the back of my truck. I have two insulated ponchos. So they're basically like sleeping bags with a hole that you can put over them because I have young kids. So I keep my insulated ponchos in my truck. I have a food stash. In my deck system, like one of the boxes is just full of granola bars and stuff. Which I also use for my kids all the time. Cause if anybody 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 in there, but it freezes and breaks the containers in the winter. So I pull them out. And then I have like a basic toolkit. So things I need to. To do repairs. I keep some garbage bags and things in there.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  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. Never would have realized that. Oh, yeah. And then even like an alcohol stove that people use on sailboats. People use alcohol stoves on small sailboats for the same thing. So you can run it without getting carbon monoxide poisoning. You could have a small $7 alcohol stove and a little pint bottle full of alcohol and heat a car to T-shirt warmth

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  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'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

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Christmas holiday, fill the tote in the back. And in that tote is all the shit you would ever need to be more than comfortable. People might laugh, you know, all your little goofy, oh, you're a prepper. Was this Mad Max? It's like, I like to just feel at ease and prepared.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  The other day we were coming back from a hunting trip. My kid pointed out, he's 10 years old and he pointed out, the thing I like about our truck is that we have all the stuff we need. And I was like, uh, glow, you know, glowed with pride upon hearing that, um, that even the sense of the sense of ease and comfort that my kid got, no, he had whatever 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 system's dialed.

• 1:09:00Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  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, this is first world, incredibly developed city, incredible medical support and facilities. This is a top tier city within the US as far as livability and everything else. And

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  at one point, they had flooding. This happened. 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.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  Oh, like it put human fecal matter into the municipal water supply.

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. So you could not drink, you could not drink water out of your faucet.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're like, because there's, there's poop in it.

• 1:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  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 was nothing available. And that was a huge pain in the ass and a massive hassle. And for a few hundred bucks, if you think of all of the things you waste money on or spend money on, it's very inexpensive insurance for an event like that, which is demonstrably not, has a non-zero chance of happening. And I remember that with Hurricane Sandy back in the day, also in New York.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  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 a homeowner's insurance, you know? It's like, oh, do you 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, you know, Seattle gets so much rain. I bought a, I use this for my garden, but I, I loved it.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Where I bought a 250 gallon tank that sat under the, I had a roof deck on top of my house. And it came down this downspout and it rains all the damn time, you know, in the summer. Or sorry, in the winter. And I just rigged this 250 gallon tank under my downspout. 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.

• 1:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned the, the dried, freeze dried food. There is sort of the good, the bad and the ugly in freeze dried food. Do you have any particular favorites?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Man, it used to be simple, like in the old days, it was like you had a company and this company is the pioneer of freeze dried food. I want to tell people real quick, I want to explain freeze dried food to folks. 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 Dry. And Oregon Freeze Dry is, they do all kinds of military contracting. They do like NASA contracting. It was Oregon Freeze Dry that sent all kinds of products into outer space. Their consumer brand is Mountain House. And so Mountain House is pretty ubiquitous.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Like you walk into any sporting goods store, whatever you'll see, I think it even turns up in Costco, you'll see these square buckets or individual things of, 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. 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.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  They just spread it out about an inch thick on a giant, imagine a giant cookie sheet with inch-thick spaghetti and meat sauce on it. It goes into a freezer and they freeze it. And like the, 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. It'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 submarine. 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.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  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 then 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 in melting goes directly to gas and collects on coils.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  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 mashed up, crumbled up and put into a bag. That's freeze dried 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 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.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  You know, Heather's, there's a company Heather's Choice that does some freeze dried stuff. Peak Refuel, we eat a lot of that, does freeze dried food. There are a bunch of them out there. And now you can buy your own sublimation chambers, I think for like three or 4,000 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 dries some too. 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 dried.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  Most anybody can hack a day or two of freeze dried. 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.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  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 that you haven't gotten properly rehydrated can tear you to pieces. Freeze dried rehydrates pretty quickly. I got a friend that does a lot of backcountry travel and he's a minimalist. He's a lightweight fanatic. He doesn't carry a camp stove with him. He takes freeze 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 dried. If you put hot water in there, the shit's ready in eight minutes.

• 1:18:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  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 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 and 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.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  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, wilderness preparedness food, it is the best thing going. There's nothing that even approaches it.

• 1:19:39Tim Ferriss?

  Shelf life, I'm looking online between 25 to 30 years.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  It was one freeze dried company when I was working on my article, one freeze dried 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. They're like, we switched to this style of bag 30 years ago. It's all still fine. This, that we're not making a recommendation. I don't know how they handle the recommendation part of it, but they're like, we know that it's at least this, but that's all the longer we've had it laying here.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  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 all, 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.

• 1:20:29Tim Ferriss?

  They hand you down.

• 1:20:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God. And a note on freeze drying for folks who just want to play with something. The freezer in your home is at least for a lot of 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 steak.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:12Tim Ferriss?

  My yard reaction when searing. So that's a, that's a trick that people can also use.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  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 Salta, Argentina to visit those Incan children that they're, there's kind of a famous story of these three Incan children that were put in a little rock shelter.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  At very high elevation, so perfectly preserved that you could still see coca leaves on one of the kids lips. It looks like they could just wake up from a nap and walk away. But they think that those children are from the 1490s.

• 1:22:22Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Perfectly preserved. Like they basically like naturally freeze dried at high elevation. Um, they, they display one of these children at a time in Salta, Argentina. One of them was struck by, at some point in time, one of them was struck by lightning. And their hair was burned, but they have beautiful feathers, beautiful clothing, all perfectly preserved. It's incredible.

• 1:22:49Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. I'm looking at images right now. This is creepy.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's like something out of the horror movie, The Ring. Wow.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:23:19Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder why, I guess the, uh, related to some mythology or superstition or belief system of the indigenous, I suppose.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  When they looked at the, they, they did some work there. And when they look at the stable, you know, you, you can tell people about, about people's historic diet. It seems as though those children, if I'm remembering correctly, it seems as though those children spent most of their lives eating primarily potatoes, had a very poor diet for most of their lives. But in the year or so leading up to their death, they had 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,

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  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 appeared to just have been drunk. They were drunk on a, some kind of fermented drink.

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  And maybe just passed out and left, except for one of them, they had to give a knock to the head.

• 1:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  It's a wild story. Anyways, freeze dried, freeze dried food.

• 1:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Freeze dried children. Don't eat them. Mummies of Juja Jaco with the double L's. I'm saying it with the J since it's Argentine, but the children of Juja Jaco, which I'll link to in the show notes. That's incredible.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  No, it was, I would like to, in a perfect world, I'd go back two more times to see the other, see the other children.

• 1:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I feel like we can't end on this particular story.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  Oh, that was a real digression, but go ahead and pick something different.

• 1:25:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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 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 in some of the ways described in the book. 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?

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  if none of the oh shit 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 toolkit and a physical toolkit at times, you wind up feeling better. And once you feel better and you get that cockiness, you get what a friend of mine calls your wilderness swagger, everything goes more smoothly

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Outside.

• 1:28:29Tim Ferriss?

  Dig it. Okay, last, last or maybe second to last question, and this could be a dead end. But if you were a cyborg just executing on commands, you'd have a certain kit, a certain approach, be super methodical, all highly rational. Is there anything peculiar you take with you on some of your trips or anything absurd that you feel compelled to do that would not be in the textbook instruction manual related to skills and survival? Anything particularly Steve Vernella that, that your friends or companions in the wilderness make fun of you for?

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Uh, man, I'm approaching it 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.

• 1:29:28Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe, describe what those are for folks?

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, crampons are like a thing you, you lock onto your boot strap onto your boot and it's cleats, like very, very great, like nothing like a golf cleat, like steel or aluminum spikes that are used for extreme, 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, 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.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  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 use to get out. And I thought crampons were potentially troublemaking, that it would give you, it would give, you know, the wilderness swagger I mentioned? It gives you too much swagger and you'd wind up doing shit that you should not do. And so I was with them and I finally brought a set of crampons and I came away from it like, holy shit, because. Even just on a steep pitch where there's some wet snow. I used to take for granted that you walked alongside hill and along a steep pitch of 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?

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  And now I'll be like, if I see that dude, I'm gonna be like, yeah, bro. Right on.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  I get you. I get you. What adventure have you up to this point left unrequited? Like you've, 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?

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Oh, that's an easy one. There's a, there's a river in South America that I've done two river trips on. And I was able to do these river trips with a group called the Makushi, a tribe called the Makushi. And they have a few villages along this river. It's a long, long river. And they talk about the head of this river. There's a couple of them that have been there. Most of the guys haven't been there. And they talk about the head of this river as being like what they regard as like, kind of like the most magical place on the planet.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  And the lower end of this river where I've been blows my mind. And they have this attitude like, you haven't seen shit till you've been up this river. But you gotta have about three, you know, it's three week trip. To get up because you got to 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.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  To the 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.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it'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?

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  At the top of Mount Everest, it's marine limestone. That's it. Thank you very much, Tim. I got, I got nothing. You covered it.

• 1:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Steven Rinella, folks, the meat eater.com, at meat eater on Instagram, at Steven Rinella with a V, Steven R I N E L L A. 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 at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

• 1:34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:35:39Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. 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.

• 1:36:21Tim Ferriss?

  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 the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was The Tim Ferriss Experiment. And I made it through those 13 episodes because of Kelly. Would not have survived. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos, walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to

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• 1:37:48Tim Ferriss?

  Great way to speed up recovery in your off days, which also helps a lot with sleep and much of that stuff. And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get the Kelly Starrett in your pocket totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. It is a two-week free trial. So you should try it out. Kelly is super legit. He is literally the person I text and call with the most sophisticated slash esoteric questions about recovery and injuries I've inflicted upon myself. He knows what he's doing and his stuff really, really works. Try it completely free for two weeks and if you decide to continue, you can get 10% off for life using promo code TIM10.

• 1:38:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's T-I-M-1-0. Simply visit thereadystate.com/tim to check everything out and use code TIM10 at checkout. Again, that's thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM10 when you sign up to get 10% off for the life of your membership after your 14-day free trial ends. thereadystate.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find and work with amazing graphic designers online. Longtime listeners of this podcast know how much attention I pay to detail, how obsessively I approach nearly all elements of my work, because the small things often end up being the big thing. So whether it's your logo, your business cards, website design,

• 1:39:16Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:39:56Tim Ferriss?

  I've also used 99designs for all sorts of high-end illustration for different books, like The Tao of Seneca. You can see a bunch of examples on my Instagram that I've put up, and they've turned out better than I possibly could have hoped. So, from logos, to websites, to packaging, to books, 99designs is the go-to creative resource to build your brand on any budget. So check them out. Right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can get $20 off, plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. Contest is a great way to get started and find the right designer for long-term work. You can also book a free design consultation with a brand expert at 99designs to receive personalized branding advice over the phone. Their hands-on team has helped thousands of business owners at this point.

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