Cody Lundin, a 26-year survival expert, debunks "survivalist" stereotypes while critiquing reality TV’s exploitation—like Discovery’s Dual Survival scandal and fraudulent claims by Dave Canterbury. His Arizona passive solar earth home thrives at 68–75°F year-round, and he stresses sanitation (e.g., The Humane Handbook) over fear-mongering, warning urban grid-down scenarios could mirror France’s 2015 blackout deaths from heat. Lundin insists practical self-reliance—community ties, adaptable "go bags," and physiological basics—trumps gear obsession, urging listeners to think like ancestors rather than modern preppers. [Automatically generated summary]
The first, we're calling the Yellowstone Story, although it is not strictly, really, exactly a Yellowstone story.
It's adjacent to close.
However, there are videos and still photographs of what appears to be a gigantic gash in the ground.
Now, when I say gash, I mean, you know, it's kind of like you went up to an earthquake fault somewhere and just stared at the water, you know, down a long distance as the earth has separated from itself.
And that's what it looks like.
It's like it was ripped apart.
Now, there are some who say, oh no, it was water coming down from a bluff.
You make up your own mind.
You take a look and tell me.
Now, there was no associated earthquake that was recorded in that specific area.
And you will see in the video that the gentleman points that out.
We also have a second photograph I want you to look at.
And this is sent to us by a listener who also was a drone operator, I would presume, or a friend of his.
And it's a drone photograph of a lake.
But, oh, baby, when they take this drone up over the lake and look down on it, it's like you're looking at a lake circle, like a crop circle, except it's a lake circle.
It's like a petrograph.
You take a look.
You let me know what you think it is, but it was caught by accident by somebody with a drone.
As you know, the FCC is moving to make life not much fun for us, drone owners.
There was a very interesting article on theanomalous.com.
I usually do find one there.
And this concerns a very long study done on the controversial status of precognition and other anomalous effects, simply known as PSI.
I know precognition.
Personally, I know it's real.
And I would love to learn more about it.
And I'm sure we'll find a guest on precognition, perhaps somebody in the scientific field who can tell us what they think is going on.
I mean, there's no question about it.
We're going to be talking to, I can't help myself, Cody Lodine in a few minutes.
And this is probably worth a discussion with him.
Whatever you want to call it, this precognition, it's an instinct, I think, in human beings.
I'm not sure about that, but that is my best guess.
It's like an instinct, you know, a feeling you have that something is right or wrong, a feeling that somebody is good or bad when you meet them instantly, that kind of thing, but extended.
I've had one experience in my life of precognition, so I, you know, that's enough.
I know it's real.
Everybody else might not.
I do.
And they are studying it scientifically, and it certainly is worth finding out more about.
Mystery and confusion surrounding the final moments of that Russian jetliner that went down.
Now, they've been talking all day about the possibility of a missile or a bomb as at least a possibility.
It could have been a failures, you know, at near 30,000 feet at cruise altitude or very unlikely.
You know, airplanes just coming apart.
Yes, the tail had been worked on.
I know all about that.
But still, unlikely.
Could have been a bomb.
And by the way, ISIS is claiming credit for the downing of that plane.
Now, the experts, they trot out on CNN, seem to think that they couldn't get a missile that high, and maybe they couldn't.
After a devastating loss in the 2012 presidential campaigns, the Republican Party entered a period of intense self-reflection.
And they emerged, it says, with a firm promise to learn from its mistakes.
The GOP vowed to avoid prolonged and vicious primaries.
Well, that's history, right?
I mean, we know what's going on.
None of that happened.
Jeb Bush is trying to hit the reset button.
He's suffering badly in polls.
And his new slogan, I don't know, it doesn't excite me.
See, I sound like the Donald, right?
It doesn't excite me.
But his new slogan is Jeb Can Fix It.
Well, really?
I mean, everything?
Or just it, whatever it is.
That's his new slogan, campaign slogan, Jeb Can Fix It.
And I don't know.
I wasn't really particularly enamored of the slogan, Jeb Can Fix It.
All right, Cody Lundine, rather, is an internationally recognized professional in the field of primitive living skills, modern wilderness survival, and urban Self-reliance training, urban, mind you, with 26 years of hands-on teaching experience.
Due to his intimate understanding of the physics, psychology, physiology, of human survival, he is routinely featured as the consulting expert on real-world emergencies for national and international news outlets.
He has trained private, corporate, and government agencies, thousands of students, dozens of national and international media sources in outdoor survival, primitive living skills, and urban preparedness.
So those of you who thought that all the urban people would be out of luck tonight are wrong.
He will be able to speak to that.
Now, he'll be coming up in just a moment.
I want to say one more thing.
Ted Koppel, interestingly, was on CNN earlier today.
And it was quite an unusual segment, I must say.
It turns out that Ted Koppel has taken on the issue of the grid.
He believes that our Internet infrastructure in America, which, you know, he pointed out was originally designed for scientists and professors to talk to each other and exchange ideas and now is in the hands of virtually everybody wasn't designed to be protected particularly.
And he says that anybody, meaning nation states anyway, can bring down our grid completely.
Just flat bring it down.
Russia and China, he pointed out, not likely to do it because, well, we can do it too and maybe better.
So the mutual assured destruction scenario of that between big nations is unlikely.
However, we've got Korea, we've got the guys dressed in black in the Middle East, and they don't care about any of that.
They want everything to come down.
And he pointed out that if the grid went down for two years, and that's what he thought it would, two years, that in one year, one year of the grid being down, only one in ten in America would survive.
And I know you're probably sitting out there and going, oh, come on.
It's just eight.
So one in ten without electricity couldn't survive?
Well, it's probably accurate.
I'm sure it's accurate.
It may even be undersaid.
It might be worse than that.
And I have urged people for years, beginning probably 20 years ago, just as an experiment, go outside, find the big master switch near your power meter, and turn off the electricity for your house and try and live for a day, two days.
See how that goes.
It's an interesting experiment you all might probably not want to try, but if you do, you'll learn a lot.
All right, coming up after the break, Cody Lundine.
And I'm already getting tons of messages, so he's got a lot of fans out there on the internet.
He did a show called Dual Survival.
Maybe you saw it on the Discovery channel.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Oh, you can dance.
You can die.
Heaven can fly on your mind.
Oh, you see that girl.
Watch that scene.
Kick it fast and see.
Turn it upside down.
Love to hear percussion.
Love to hear it.
So are you just a pretty?
So why will this keep moving to the Nisky Glickie?
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nye.
This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
The Eaton Square Show at 1-952-225-5278.
That's 1-952-Call Art.
Well, I guess I'll let him get away with his stutter tonight.
So I'm going to ask you a couple questions that weren't even down here first.
And one is, in order to get it out of the way, since I have such a paranormal-oriented audience, and you have spent so much time in every kind of wilderness human could spend time in, my audience would like to know if you've seen anything weird in the wild.
And by that, they mean anything you just can't explain or anything that even was paranormal and, of course, Bigfoot.
When they ask about your view on Mother Earth, I think, you know, I think as the, and I wondered, it's the same thing as I watched your program.
You know, you live out in it all the time, and I know that Native Americans have a sort of a view, you know, worldview about the Earth and what she is.
I think a lot of people would feel similar if they spent more time outside.
And to even have you ask me that question kind of personifies what's going on, you know, in our modern world.
A lot of us don't spend a lot of time outside.
And I'm not saying you have to go out in the wilderness to get refreshed by Mother Nature, for lack of a better term, but just we have our head up, you know where.
I mean, I heard you reference before we got on the air together, you know, the Ted Coppel thing.
And, you know, this is, I know that a lot of your listeners, you know, I want to educate and I'd like Art Bell fans to stay alive.
And we're hopelessly, you know, confined to technology as great as it is.
And so that's the point here is we're so disassociated with the natural world and how things really work when they're unplugged that it's a fascination with anyone who does spend time outside.
It's become the non-norm.
You know, my grandparents homestead in South Dakota.
They literally used the Homestead Act and took Indians land, you know, and had the sod home and the whole nine yards.
And so they spent much of their day outdoors, you know, planting in the field, the garden, etc., and about 20% of time indoors.
And today it's the exact opposite.
So to really rack your head around that, if people spent more time outdoors and into something that was real and unplugged for a little bit, figuratively and otherwise, then if the grid did burp, it'd be a hell of a lot less scary for those.
Well, that's my point, is you are, you know, they're ravens, by the way.
They're blackbirds that you see.
And you are out there.
Your job is on radio, and thank God it is, because you've been doing it for decades, and I'm super excited to talk to you tonight because you're like a rock star.
Because when you're in bush, when you're in deep wilderness, or when you're living at a remote location, which I do All three of those, it forces you to pay attention to yourself.
There's no distractions, and that's scary for a lot of people.
So, if you talked about a Ted Coppel grid meltdown, the biggest enemies that we face really are between our own ears.
Well, I think common sense has shown that we don't know what in the hell we're doing anymore on this planet.
I see that all the time in my courses.
You know, so what I mean by that is we become disassociated with what it takes to live.
We're an advanced, quote-unquote, civilization that doesn't know where to put the poop if the toilet doesn't work, that doesn't know how to feed ourselves, and that doesn't, you know, know where the water is coming short of out of the faucet and the wall.
So if you took a whole civilization and realized that most of these people in this civilization don't know how to get basic human needs met, would you call that an advanced society or not?
You know, I'm not an expert in any one of these areas except, you know, watching.
And it's fascinating.
I must say it is fascinating.
Talk to me a little bit about before you were on dual survival, you obviously grew up in a lifestyle that, I don't know, taught you survival, taught you how to do what you do.
Like, I wish I was, say, I was raised by wolves, you know, or something, but it didn't turn out that way.
I'm an only kid, and my dad was military.
So we moved around a lot.
And the only common thing that I had growing up was going outdoors, was being outside.
And so I was outside quite a bit.
And fast forward, through a lot of hellish stuff I put myself through as a youth in basic survival training, except not the type you'd wish on your kids.
I pitched doing what I do to a bunch of summer camps here in Prescott, Arizona, and not one of them wrote me back.
No one gave a damn, you know, about survival training or primitive skills or whatever.
Keep in mind, this will be my 26th year in business this coming year.
So this was back in a time where no one really cared about this sort of stuff.
And that led to very, very slowly clawing my way to courses that people would enroll in, et cetera, through something called a flyer.
It was on a piece of paper, and you could get pretty colors at the copy store.
And I would put them on something called a phone booth.
And on stores and windows and wherever I could put this colored piece of paper saying, hey, you know, this is my Aboriginal Living Skills School and I'm teaching skills.
And that's literally how it started out, Art, because there was no Facebook, there was no cell phones, there was no YouTube, there was no way to project yourself as something you're not, you know, to be picked up by the next network as the flavor of the month survival show on TV.
I'm sort of convinced, Cody, this is one of my personal things, that as we get older, we get slowly more and more and more disgusted with everything that's going on, the music, the young people, everything that's going on, so that by the time we're finally ready to pass on, it's like, all right, get me out of here.
So you tell me, Art, how can a word describe someone who blows up a federal building and someone who teaches people how to survive an outdoor survival experience gone bad?
Because eventually we're going to talk a dirty word, and I know it'll seem like profanity to a lot of people, but it's not.
It's called credibility and integrity.
And those things have gone by the wayside.
So if someone's a survivalist, quote unquote, and just let me finish, if someone's a survivalist, then I would ask them, oh, really?
What do you teach?
You know, because saying survivalist is kind of like saying tree in the forest.
Well, is it a softwood?
Is it a hardwood?
Is it spring, summer, autumn?
Is it a good bow wood?
Can you make fire with it?
It doesn't mean anything.
And that's my point, is the word survivalist is used by networks because you don't have to vet it.
Because it doesn't really have a meaning.
It's unvetable, which makes it nice when you hire phony people on TV to portray a survival expert, so to speak, according to them.
So if someone asks me, one, I don't like the term, and I'm telling you why I don't like the term, but they'll ask me, what do you do?
And I'll say, what do you want?
Do you want urban preparedness?
Do you want modern outdoor survival skills?
Do you want primitive living skills?
Do you want homesteading?
We're not all in the same bandwidth.
There's different stations on the radio.
It's all the radio, but we could be listening to heavy metal or Art Bell, and I want Art Bell tonight.
It's all the same radio, but they're different stations on the radio, and you'll get a very different experience listening to heavy metal than Art Bell.
I exactly was not, or I guess I was a little unhappy with your being that unhappy with the word survivalist, because, yeah, some of the guys who did bad stuff called themselves survivalists, but that truly doesn't ruin the word.
The media called them survivalists, and that's my point again.
We're dealing with people's lives, Art.
I take that seriously.
Survival instruction deals with whether people live or die based on the advice given.
There's a time for accuracy, and this profession is it.
And when you have a term that not only deals with acts of domestic terrorism, that can also supposedly define a community college instructor who teaches outdoor survival skills, that's not accurate.
And it further muddies the water, like a lot of survival shows out there, which ends up killing people.
And we'll talk about your fascination with survival TV.
And, you know, you thought I was probably your buddy, but I'm going to be breaking your heart.
I mean, so a lot of Native people, if you travel all over the world, like I have, and you go to some more remote locations, you'll see that going barefoot is kind of normal.
It's only interesting and weird in our culture, you know, and in most modern cultures.
But if you get off the beaten trail, a lot of people are going barefoot.
I also am fascinated with, of course, doing more with less.
That's my passion.
And if I don't need to wear shoes, why would I?
I do have sandals that I wear, and I have flip-flops in my Jeep because it's not worth being celibate.
I want to be able to take my sweetheart out to dinner at a restaurant.
And so they can frown on that unless I know the owner, and sometimes I do.
I like tough feet because it's a huge survival asset.
All right, well, let me stop you right there and say, for the average tenderfoot person like myself, if I decided I wanted to toughen up, make my feet tough, and at my age I don't, but if I did, if I did, I could go tromping around the desert and we have lots of stuff out here that will turn your feet into shredded stumps of what they were.
But again, my question is, for me, if I started out and I wanted to get to the point from where I am now, which is zero, to tough feet, we'll call it 10, how long out there walking in the desert?
When you walk barefoot for as many years as I have, you literally walk different.
You drop down with the ball of the foot.
You don't.
Most people strike with the heel.
And that's been, there's a book called Born to Run out there, which has started this barefoot running craze, you know, at the Tarmahara Indians in northern Mexico.
And a lot of people strike with the heel first, and then with the ball of the foot.
That's very jarring, you know, to the human physiology.
It's jarring to the skeleton.
I don't walk that way.
So I've literally, walking barefoot has changed the way I walk biomechanically.
And also it's changed my awareness level.
I look where I step because I am barefoot and so I pay attention to where I'm walking.
And my fascination also is I love to read survival stories.
And there's a lot of POW stories out there as you can imagine.
And one of the first things they did is they took their boots because they knew they couldn't run.
And I was like, I don't want to be that guy.
You know, I don't want to be that dependent on that small piece of gear, as valuable as it is.
I love footwear.
It definitely has a place.
I'm not anti-shoe.
I'm not anti-boot.
I'm not like waving a flag, everyone go barefoot and hug a tree.
I'm not.
I just like to do more with less, and I'm fascinated about what I can get away with on this planet without being a slave.
Well, I think their only complaint was it was TV, you know.
And so on the other hand, I have so much respect for you that you did that, that you went barefoot.
And so let's jump ahead just a little bit because I can't stand not talking about it.
I do watch Naked and Afraid, and it does seem to me, Cody, that my God, being dumped off in a jungle or in Africa or Nicaragua or whatever the destination is, absolutely naked, particularly in a jungle, my God, is really, really terrifying.
And even if you don't consider all the possible dangers and things that can happen to your skin, which are many, the bugs generally eat you to death.
Yeah?
So how much of a test is it to be completely naked, not just bare feet, but bare air van?
All right, but look, I will say this in their defense.
The nakedness seems to be an issue for maybe the first day.
And then when they figure out they don't have water, they don't have food, and they don't have shelter, somehow it slips to second and third and fourth and then forgotten finally when they're starving.
So those shows and the show Survivor, there's a reason they're always filmed in temperate regions because the biggest causes of death are lack of thermoregulation, either hypothermia, the body core temperature drops below 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Celsius, or hyperthermia when it climbs up.
So when you take away the two biggest causes of death and outdoor survival, you can just have all the time you want sitting under the coconut tree arguing and bickering and trying to catch the rat with your hair or whatever.
So I actually, I had a woman call me from Atlanta, Georgia, and she had a very thick accent because she was from Atlanta, Georgia.
And she was going to be on Naked and Afraid and wanted to do that.
And this producer told her that she might want to brush up on her survival skills.
Brush up.
Right.
And I enjoyed this conversation so much.
Usually I have an employee that takes my calls because I can get some weird calls.
But I took this one myself.
And I asked this woman, okay, so what is your experience, ma'am?
Because she was coming to me.
She wanted some training to do this TV show called Naked and Afraid.
And I asked her three times, what is your outdoor survival skills experience, ma'am?
And she finally said, well, I do nature hikes.
In other words, none.
So the producers were, the keyword here is brush up.
Brush up means go learn it from scratch because you don't know anything about outdoor survival.
So when you take someone and strip their clothes off, which helps with summer regulation, it's key to survival, and you put them in a wilderness environment and expect them to live off the land with minimal gear, you're going to the epic PhD of survival training.
I don't even know if I'm there yet.
And when you take novices and put them out there and you have them sign a legal waiver that says they can't sue Discovery Channel if something inept goes on and you deal with the production company that has no survival skills experience and a network that has no survival skills experience, then there's going to be some issues.
So, Cody Lundine is here tonight, and he's obviously a really, very cool guy to interview.
And we were talking for a minute, anyway, about this series, Naked and Afraid, not his series.
Both are very controversial in a lot of ways, actually, Naked and Afraid and dual survival, which was his, and we'll get to all that.
But with respect to Naked and Afraid, I can't help but ask, and everybody wants me to ask, what do you think is fake and what do you think is real?
I'll give you an example, and you can knock it down.
They've been starving for 20 days, I believe, and tomorrow is extraction day.
But they're sitting there starved half to death on the ground.
And suddenly a deadfall goes off, and they get lucky, and a rabbit just made it, you know, some bird or whatever, just made it in and tripped the deadfall.
And they get the protein they need on day 20 to make it out alive.
Now, they wouldn't go that far, would they, as to put a bird in a trap?
So if you could film something verbatim and actually film something completely accurate in the field or the city or wherever, and then you'd still have this thing called an edit bay with an editor that's going to go take that footage and tweak it to whatever the network wants.
The network has something called a big fat wallet that pays everyone, and they're dictating what goes on behind the scenes.
They're the ultimate authority or no one gets paid.
Wow.
I don't care what survival show you watch.
All television shows are produced.
And some things are done for real and some things are not.
I mean, on dual survival, when it rained, we didn't predict that.
You know, it's not like we caused it to rain or caused some certain things to happen.
So, you know, I've worked in TV a long time, you know, since the mid-90s.
I had one of the first survival shows on Discovery in 2003, pre-Lesdroud, pre-Edward, you know, etc.
So I've been behind the camera, in front of the camera.
I've produced, I've written, I've directed.
You know, so I know all sides of this lens.
And one of the reasons I chose to do dual survival was one, it seemed less BS.
And keep in mind, I got the job in 2009.
And we started filming in January of 2010.
A lot has changed since then.
And I assumed Discovery had credibility.
At one point, they did.
Now they're claimed to fame as having some idiot in black spandex try to shove his face down a snake's mouth.
So they've degenerated into that.
But Dual Survival at the time was kind of one of the earlier survival shows.
I took the show because I was getting paid, because I'm a professional.
I get paid for my work.
I took the show because I could travel the world and I could learn and teach survival skills.
It was an awesome opportunity to do that.
I took the show to directly counter some of the nonsense that was out there on other survival shows because I was tired of having my students come to my courses and ask me, well, can't you drink your pea?
Or whatever it is.
And there's a lot of survival shows.
Here's what you need to remember, Art, about this.
When you watch television, you're in the low alpha waves.
That's what TV induces, low alpha.
And that means a relaxed state and suggestibility.
So that's why commercials sodden people up, right?
That's why you buy the Clorox or whatever.
So TV is all about images.
The reason I put the crazy cartoons I have in both of my books is because I know when people are really scared, when that sympathetic nervous system kicks in and the epinephrine dumps in the body and all complex and fine motor skills go to hell, that they're not going to remember what I have written.
They're going to remember my illustrations in my books.
So when you watch television shows, when you watch survival TV shows by a network with no survival experience, by a production company with no survival experience, by most hosts with no survival experience, and you're in that alpha state and you're susceptible to the training, to the imagery, you're being fed BS.
And the problem with that is when people are in crisis situations, if they're ever in a real survival situation, what comes to the forefront of their memories are those images they've seen in that suggestible state on TV.
What I'm getting at is death.
Okay?
It's not a joke.
My profession helps with keeping people alive.
And I take it very, very seriously.
And when I see networks making a mockery out of my profession, like imagine if they did that with radio, you'd be pissed off.
I'm pissed off about it because once I have to pick up the pieces with my clients and two, some of the survival programming has killed real people that have thought what they were watching on television was real.
I told her that she should know the bioregion she's going to because jungle survival is different from desert survival, which is different from cold weather survival, etc.
And she said, oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense, Cody.
And hell yes, it makes sense.
But that's not what they're after about making sense.
Why have competent people when you can get incompetent people that cause more drama?
Because that's good for ratings.
This isn't about education.
This is about exploitation.
And I've got a problem with that because it deals with people's lives.
Imagine if we had a bunch of shows about doctors, and that was the big crazy shows about doctors, except they weren't really doctors on the TV show, and they were teaching your family how to do surgery.
You walk in the garage and see your son cutting open your daughter or whatever.
Do you think the AMA would have a problem with that?
I have no idea how well they're paid, but probably money could be an issue.
So for you, for example, I mean, Cody, when you were on the TV show, even though I understand the ethical bar was higher, you were exploiting them for travel, for whatever fun you had, and certainly for money.
I'm talking about my profession deals with whether people live or die.
So it's pretty serious.
So when you take a profession, like the medical profession, and you exploit it with phony drama and out-of-context, phony reality television that causes people to die who believe that, that's wrong.
I am a professional survival instructor, and so I went on an outdoor survival skills show as an instructor to teach people.
And I did the best of that, to my ability, and I tried to keep it as clean as possible, even though there was a daily battle with producers that wanted to do other stuff, right?
It's not like I just fell out of the cabbage truck.
I understand that television's television, but there's a line in the sand, and I have a very, very strong line In the sand, my first allegiance is to your listeners.
My first allegiance is to my students.
And if you have a survival instructor who's lying, who's fraudulent, who is causing unnecessary risk, there's a problem there.
Because a real survival instructor deals with mitigating risk, not creating risk.
And so even though I was pushed into certain things on dual survival that it was like, ah, how are we going to do this if I don't with the storyline, I really, really tried.
They didn't like me very much because what they want is a person they can tell what to do and they'll do it.
Because people had a hard time with me on the show because of I would not budge with integrity and I would not budge with safety.
And I always will be a pain in the butt about those two things.
Well, I certainly have ethical standards too for what I do here on the air.
Okay, so when they did this, what you call defamation episode, and I saw it, by the way, and they depicted you, your partner at that time, was trying to trap a snake's head with a forked stick, and you really got a kick out of it.
We have the most species of rattlesnakes of any place in North America.
We have the Massasagra, we have the Mojave rattlesnake, we have the prairie rattlesnake, we have the sidebiter rattlesnake, we have the speckled rattlesnake, we have the twin-spotted rattlesnake, we have the tiger rattlesnake, we have the ring-nosed rattlesnake, we have the western diamond-backed rattlesnake, we have the black-tailed rattlesnake, we have the Arizona black rattlesnake, the western rattlesnake, and the rock rattlesnake.
So when I see someone who's incredibly inept at handling a snake, I thought it was funny.
You know, and if you, I've never seen the episode, of course, but I've had people explain it to me, you know, and we can talk about the context if you want to.
But I had an attorney send discovery a cease and desist for defamation.
I knew what they were going to do.
They knew what they were going to do.
They ignored my cease and desist.
And so as far as I'm concerned, that was all done with malice because they knew exactly what they were doing.
Even when I did everything that I knew I should do on that show as a professional in my field, God helped me when the editors in New York City got done with it, right?
None of these people had any outdoor survival skills experience.
But the reason that episode came about is Discovery asked me three times to lie to my fan base when they fired me, and I was fired.
I did not quit.
I was fired.
That's a whole story in itself.
They finally realized, I think a few weeks later, and called my entertainment attorney and said, they finally realized, well, how in the hell are we going to explain that Cody's gone?
This just dawned on them a few weeks later.
And they asked my entertainment attorney, would Cody like to do another episode?
And he can say that he quit so he can pursue his Aboriginal living skills school.
And my first answer was something I can't say on the air because of your number one rule.
Well, then there's the ocean, too, just because we don't breathe water.
The ocean is totally rich in resources, but it's the problem where we're not water-based people.
We live on land.
So deserts is number one.
It's a resource game.
It's resources.
So if you look, again, it depends on where you are on the planet and what season it is.
If there's a seasonality whatsoever, the acorns are on or they're not.
And there's no free lunch, pardon the pun.
And it's very, very, I mean, the more I know about survival skills, primitive skills to define this, so we're not calling a tree a tree, the more I realize I just, I don't feel like I know what in the hell I'm doing.
You know, there's so much to know and learn.
I'm just amazed at all of our ancestors and how, I mean, it's amazing we're here.
You know, when you go over to Africa and you're out in the bush and you think just a couple hundred years ago there's people walking around with sharp sticks, it's like, how in the hell did anyone survive out there?
Everything wants to eat you.
You know, there's danger at every turn.
And a lot of it was the same here in North America.
You know, with the grizzly bear and whatever, I have a profound respect for Native peoples.
Yeah, well, the one first thing we've got to have is oxygen.
That's why I put the ocean up there, right?
Because drowning sucks.
But then, yeah, well, it depends on the situation, Art.
And here's where I'm really excited to be on your show because one of my great desert survival instructors, my desert survival instructor is a guy named Dave Gansy.
And Dave Gansy was over with the first Bush War and was actually, you know, Richard Marcinko from Red Cell, SEAL Team 6, took his desert survival course.
Dave Gansi is a real gentleman.
He's in his mid-70s now.
He's like my dad, you know, my desert dad.
And he's an amazing guy.
And when I used to ask him questions, I went to the library, saw him in the paper.
This was like in the early 90s.
And I latched onto him at the public library.
He thought I was some homeless guy.
And I was like, you've got to teach me what you know in the desert.
And he did.
And he had this term variables.
He would always use this word variables.
And he used to drive me crazy.
I was like, Dave, just give me the damn answer.
I don't want to hear your variables.
And now I understand what he means.
So when you ask me a question, water is the most important thing, right, Cody?
You know, I can't say that I've moved on completely because when you're defamed internationally, when they keep running the same episode and it never ends, yeah, that sucks.
But what I'm trying to do, anyone who's been my student knows how I teach, and I'm very passionate about how I teach, and I don't mince words because I'm dealing with people's safety.
So you must have, for the most part, considering what they need for a TV production and what you're trying to give the people and do on the show, you must have found a way to sort of live with that divide in thinking.
Yeah, season one was awesome, and then season two, I found out about Dave Canterbury's fraud to be on the show, and it really went downhill from there.
You know, build survival is flawed in the get-go because being in the military doesn't make you an outdoor survival expert.
You know, being in the military means you're in the military.
So being a plumber doesn't make you a good electrician.
They're two separate professions.
So the context, which I think is important, you have the intention.
You have the context of something, which defines the content of something.
And this is what I go through with every custom course.
So I have a client that says, I want to learn survival skills.
Well, that's like saying Turi to me.
So what do you mean?
And we go down the rabbit hole.
So the show was flawed from the get-go because if you had a show called Dual Military and one person had no military experience, how can you have a fair compare and contrast?
And that's what it's supposed to be about.
So I knew Dave didn't have a lot of experience.
Dave's experience was he spent a year and a half making home movies in his backyard.
And at that time, I had 20 years of experience with my school teaching real people in a real wilderness and were being compared as equals in an edit room in New York City.
Is that fair?
No.
Did I eat a lot of crow?
Yes.
Was I willing to do that?
Yes.
Why?
Because I can control myself.
And I knew that I could teach, instead of 12 clients at a time, millions of people, I could teach, no, don't drink your pea, don't do this, do it this way.
And it made a real difference.
And I'm really, really happy I did the show because of the feedback I've gotten from fans, especially kids.
Sometimes during the course of an entire program, I don't get it.
I'm remembering Blanche when I say that.
But tonight, I get it.
And it took this long.
And I was thinking, boy, Cody sounds like a really angry, bitter guy.
And then I heard the echoes.
You see, Cody and I come from completely different worlds.
Cody Lundine is a primitive skills expert.
I don't know.
It's hard not to use the word survival.
But he thinks the word is ruined.
So I get it all of a sudden.
And I can remember being in the exact condition he's in, and I was in it for a very, very long time.
I used identical words, actually, involving the word yourself as part of the phrase, with a network in the past, in fact, a couple of them.
And so I get it.
I really do.
And I had the same kind of attitude.
Absolute.
I guess anger, you know, anger is not probably the right word.
It is.
I was angry.
Really, really angry.
Many of you know that.
Many Of you who have listened to me for decades know my history with networks and big corporations, right?
So, no need to go into all that, but I remember when I was that angry, as angry as Cody as you hear in his voice tonight when he talks about it.
I have in it, it has ensued that to some degree in myself, it can still come back because it's like part of my soul now or something.
So, all of a sudden, I get it.
Even though we're in completely different worlds in one way, we're in the same world in another way, Cody.
So, I so totally get it.
Here's what I would ask, I guess.
Going forward, if you were to do a show, how about the idea of doing sort of what I finally ended up doing after the second bad experience?
And by that I mean saying, screw you, everybody, I'm going to take a camera out.
I know this idea has been taken already, but I'm going to take a camera out to areas where I can show and teach people how to survive and do it all on my own and just sell it to some network.
When you go through what you and I have gone through with corporations, and you're at a more angry stage than I am right now regarding this, I did that.
I just said, the hell with it, man, I'm going to go do it myself the way I want to do it and the way I think it ought to be done.
And that's what I think is cool about you, you know, and we do have a lot in common.
And the cool thing about technology is you can do that.
Art Bell can say, you know, screw that.
You know, I'm tired of X, Y, and Z. And with technology, you can do your own thing, and I can too, through this thing called streaming.
You know, because cable is a dinosaur.
Cable are rolling newspapers, and they know that.
I know a lot of television executives, and they're all nervous because of things like Hulu and Amazon Prime and Netflix.
And pretty soon the kids of tomorrow will be going, cable what?
And that will be like a rotary phone.
And the cool thing about that, as you know, because you're doing it, and I'd love to talk with you off the air about how you're doing that, is it allows all these super creative people to not get blocked by these executives at a round table, and they can do what they want to do.
And with that, there's loads of junk, of course, that'll be out there.
But then the talent can rise to the top, and the people with the real passion and vision or whatever.
So absolutely, I'm doing my own thing.
That's not common knowledge.
I guess it is now.
The cookies are still in the oven, and I will do a show that is like you've never seen before.
And we are doing a television show like television used to be.
It'll not be a phony reality show.
It'll be a good old-fashioned scripted TV show, you know, with a musical intro and the whole bit like TV used to be.
And it'll be, of course, entertaining because any good instructor or any good educator is a natural entertainer.
You have to be to keep people's attention in the classroom.
So in a sense, I've had live Nielsen ratings for 25 years.
I know what keeps my students engaged, and I know what keeps them not engaged.
So I have a distinct advantage over networks because, one, I know my profession very well, and I also am a teacher.
So any teacher knows to keep the students' attention, they have to be entertaining.
So this show will be highly educational, very entertaining, and completely out of the box.
And it was pitched to networks, and they all refused it because, quote, it was too out of the box for TV.
And so here we have this sameness of monoculture of, you know how it is.
You know, well, this has worked, so let's just do, you know, Friday the 13th, 10, you know, or whatever it is.
But I'm super excited to do the Art Bell thing, you know, and whether a network picks it up, that's groovy.
But it'll already be encased in stone about me doing my thing, how I want to do it.
And really, it's been a really, it was healing.
It was a catharsic product.
I mean, within weeks after being fired, I was already making sets, constructing sets, because it was the way that it was helping me cope with the real damage that that network did.
And I enjoy the process immensely, like I know you do.
I mean, you're passionate about radio like I am about survival skills.
And I'm so happy that we both have the opportunity to, you know, Art Bell can be Art Bell, damn it, you know, and he can do his own thing, you know, on his land in Nevada, and I can do my own thing.
And just five or ten years ago, that's not a possibility, Art, and you know that.
What you can do is, as you point out, just have a, I don't know, have a good web presence somewhere and have a subscription service to what you're going to sell and stream it.
Yeah, because you're a big inspiration for me because you're, you know, it's like Art Bell is like doing its own thing.
You know, and you're a radio legend.
So it's inspiring.
You're inspiring to a lot of people, in my situation or not, that just have something to share but feel this oppressive grip of these six fat guys sitting at a table wearing suits deciding what America watches.
And even if my show sucks, it'll teach you how to stay alive.
You know, because I'm producing the content.
I'm writing the content.
I'm directing the content.
So I'm editing.
I literally have an edit bay, and I've taught myself to edit.
I have people that are helping me in the biz that shall remain nameless that believe in what I'm doing.
So it'll be as professional as I can do it.
But I'm offering real value, and I'm super excited, Art, because not only has it been a healing process, this show that's in my head, has been in my head for 14 years.
Well, then, folks, this is really free survival TV.
And if I knew, I know that there's a lot of people out there, and this is a wonderful chance for me to market this, and I really appreciate you allowing this.
But I don't want to put myself in a box because it's so labor-intensive because it's me and a couple other people.
You know, on Dual Survival, there was like massive amounts of crew and 15 people back in New York City.
And I'm probably like you are where I'm, well, I don't know.
I'll call myself anal retenf because I am.
And I want this thing done right.
And so I have my hands in every little bit of the pie.
And that takes time because there's only one of me.
I'm finding myself, I can't delegate now because all the creative stuff is coming out of my head.
So I really can't say, hey, so-and-so, can you write a script about X, Y, and Z?
I can't do that.
So it's taking a lot of time.
We've been shooting for quite some time.
It's not a new concept.
But really, I've told you more than I've told anyone else, you and your tens of thousands of billions of listeners.
And really, I don't, I would love to tell you about the show later on, and I think you'll dig it.
Let's put it this way.
And I don't do drugs and alcohol.
That wasn't the case in the past.
But never, never have a survival instructor that's drunk or stoned.
That's a little, it's right up there with don't eat yellow snow.
That makes sense.
But if you took a whole bunch of acid and sat down in a chair and turned on the TV and watched a survival show, you'd be watching my show art.
And if you don't like the context of how I'm presenting the information, you won't be able to argue with the content because I'm basing it on sound physics, physiology, and psychology.
And I guess you're going to try and reach out to that group as well because that's most people.
I mean, you know, even if you want to talk ratings, if you want to tell people in cities how to stay alive, You're sending out a very important message, right?
98.6 Degrees, Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive, was my first book, and that's based on modern outdoor survival.
What happens if art's out with the jeep in the desert and it drops an axle or whatever, and art has to survive in a short-term emergency, typically three days or less.
My second book, When All Hell Breaks Loose, is just what you're talking about.
It's a book on urban preparedness, and you can look at the demographics.
I mean, I haven't checked with my publisher in two years.
When All Hill Breaks Loose, it sold well over 100,000 copies, and it was by far the better seller than 98.6 degrees because it dealt with an urban population.
And so you hit the nail on the head.
And yes, I think urban preparedness is important just because the demographics of that, I think 90% of us live in metro areas, and that's to be expected.
So yeah, I'm passionate about that.
And what I'm also passionate about is just self-reliance in general.
You know, I adore living off the grid, but that doesn't mean you have to be out in the bush to live off the grid.
So whether it's composting or recycling, or, you know, we're not sustainable on this planet, and that troubles me.
Because when you have something that's not sustainable, it means there's an end point.
And we keep kicking the can down the road to, you know, your grandkids and your great-grandkids, and sometimes that can't stop.
And so I'm very passionate about trying to do more with less and being as comfortable as possible.
And what I mean by that is I'm not advocating the hippie roll in the dirt and eat grubs.
You know, people are not willing to get dirty and eat bugs, and I don't expect them to.
But my homestead, for example, I've designed it to cooperate with nature.
And my lash-up was basically being as how hypo and hyperthermia are the biggest killers of people in outdoor survival situations, a lack of thermal regulation, core body temperature.
We've touched on that briefly.
I wanted to design a home that would regulate its own temperature.
Because according to people who do these sort of studies, up to 30 to 40% of our energy budget in the United States of America goes to keeping your house room temperature, which is a crime.
So what I've done, and it doesn't need to just be done in Arizona, of course it's easy here because of our Sundays, not Sundays during the week, but our solar radiation days, is I've designed a passive solar earth home that again heats and cools itself.
I don't burn any wood.
It regulates its own temperature, which is key to survival.
And I catch rain.
I compost waste, including my own poop.
And basically, the missing link I have is growing food because I was flying around the world doing a TV show for so long.
And that's my missing link.
So my homestead is pretty much self-supporting.
I do have photo ticks, which of course you know about the batteries.
There's shelf life on all that stuff.
That's right.
But we go back to the Ted Coppel thing.
You mentioned I can visualize your setup because of my lash thing or whatever you called it.
That Art doesn't really know that the grid's down because Art's got his own grid going on.
If you would like to join in the conversation, and frankly, I'm having such a really good time with this interview that I just realized two hours left and has gone by, and I haven't given out any numbers or even thought about doing so, nor have I gone nearly through my list of questions for Cody.
Cody Lundine, my guest.
But if you would like to join us, my national number, and I will get you in the conversation, I promise, is Area Code 952-225-5278.
Once again, area code 952-225-5278.
You can reach us on Skype.
Wonderful instrument, Skype.
You download it because it's free to your device, and then all you do is add us.
It's called adding a contact, right?
Once you become a little familiar with Skype, you'll get the place where you add a contact.
And in North America, America, and Canada, you put in MITD 51.
MITD51.
If you're outside the U.S. and Canada, M-I-T-D-5-5.
That's M-I-T-D 5-5.
So if you want to say something to Cody, that would be the way to do it as we progress through this final hour.
Not me, but I've been in a compromised situation years ago.
I think it was in 94 or so with a bunch of students.
We all got horribly sick on something we ate in the field.
And I had, you know, I say this story right before people want to sign up for my courses, right?
This isn't exactly good marketing, but you asked.
And so we got into something in the field that we shouldn't have.
I think it was something I brought in.
It was like an old squash because I've been growing native gardens for years.
And I had students down on the ground, and they were vomiting and pooping their pants.
They didn't have the energy to pull down their pants.
And it was very, very scary.
Of course, it was in the dead of night.
And I had to hike out using the North Star to a ranch I knew about and puking myself.
I was sick too.
And with a student of mine who's a friend of mine to this day for whatever reason.
And that was scary.
I thought I was going to lose some students in that course.
And I had people hallucinating, seeing fairies, seeing all sorts of stuff.
And I thought I might lose some because, again, dehydration, the biggest cause of death on the planet is lack of sanitation through diarrhea and dysentery.
It kills hundreds of thousands of people every year right now.
And I thought when I went to call and those helicopters came in, I didn't know if I was going to have some dead students at this college course.
And if I had, I would have quit and I would have done something else.
Because a lot of cities are, I mean, let's talk about poop.
Who doesn't like to talk about poop?
You know, the average adult puts out about a half a pound of fecal matter a day.
So if you have sanitation systems that are compromised, which of course they would be in our Ted Coppel exercise, it's going to be a crappy situation out there.
You know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of fecal matter will be around our major cities, including garbage, and then we have a roaring comeback of cockroaches and rats and mice, and we have epidemics, and that's how these things start.
And we have compromised emergency response systems.
It's scary, you know, because that's plausible.
These are real things.
You know, we can talk about alien abductions and EMPs and Bigfoot and earth changes and whatever.
What about the poop?
It's the little things that kill people.
And we don't know where to put our refuse if we don't have guys and trucks taking it away.
And I've just said, and I'll say it again, and I teach it in every damn class I do, the first thing we learn how to do in an Aboriginal Living Skills course is how to safely poop in the outdoors.
Because most people don't know how to do that.
And we translate that over into our backyard on the urban courses that we do.
And hundreds of thousands of people die every year of diarrhea and dysentery.
And they dehydrate from the inside out.
So it's these little things that I wanted to talk with you about as well that are important, that people, we're so used to sitting on a toilet that it doesn't even dawn on us.
Talk about grid down.
I'm not worried about the spoiled lasagna, so to speak.
I'm worried about that first bell movement, right?
If it goes in the creek behind your house, what are you going to do with it?
And there's lots of things you can do with it.
I recycle it.
That's one thing you can do with it, but you've got to be on your game.
Got to have your game face on for that.
So there's a lot of, as wonderful as I, I love modern technology.
I really enjoy going to the grocery store, but it's an illusion.
You know, we don't have bananas and apples in the same season.
You know, so I think it's really important that people just get a little bit more grounded and realize and go outdoors and maybe have a tomato plant in a pot indoors instead of a pothos plant or something and getting reinvigorated about what it means to be a human being on planet Earth and stay alive in the same sense.
Let's say that you prepare, that you do the things that you should do to prepare for, I don't know, the power going off or whatever else might go on or happen that would be bad, and you've built a...
With the lights are on at Art's place, party at Arts, you know, so you need to think about that and whether the generator's in a soundproof box, ventilated or whatever.
To me, power is a wonderful thing, but it's overrated for base survival.
I mean, it's funny that you mentioned that you have recommend people turn their own grid off, because that's an exercise in my second book, When All Hell Breaks Loose, I actually recommend that people, I mean, obviously if you're in an apartment complex, you don't want to switch the breaker because it pisses people off, but you can just tape over your own electrical outlets or whatever, but shut your grid down and define where the pain comes from first, because people's pain can be different.
And I want to be real clear, Art, even though I'm not saying build another house, but you do not need air conditioning in the desert if the architecture fits the land that it's based upon.
I forget the, it's like for every foot, it changes in temp, but then it kind of stabilizes out at like 55 or whatever it is, which is, of course, is incompatible.
We don't want our living room 55.
But here's three things your listeners should know about as far as self-reliant design.
One is solar south.
My house is pointed solar south because we're in the northern hemisphere.
So all the windows are to the south.
I don't like the north for past solar design.
So I have right orientation.
I have lots of insulation.
Dead airspace keeps the cocoa hot and the Kool-Aid cold.
So it does both.
And you know, it can get damn cold in your studio.
It can get smoking hot because the deserts have both.
We're screwed both ways because of lack of atmosphere.
And the other is thermal mass.
And that's where this concrete in my house comes into play.
And that's where my flagstone floor comes into play, where the sunlight comes through my windows, hits the floor, soaks in, turns to long-wave radiation because it was short-wave when it came from the sun.
And it re-radiates back out and keeps my house warm when the sun goes away.
And it's free.
In ancient Rome, there was a sun law, you know, where if you built a building in my sun, I could sue you because the sun was free energy.
The Roman baths were faced the right direction.
Otherwise, you know, they were all freezing their butts off.
So insulation, orientation, and thermal mass, and I have thermal mass because I have a lot of earth over my house as well.
You think like an animal.
Animals aren't walking around like gringos and donkeys in the noonday sun.
They're burrowing into a saguaro cactus or they're burrowing into the ground.
Now that said, you don't need to have an earth home.
Insulation is key, and windows are key.
If I was building a structure in the desert or the mountains, I'd want as much insulation in the walls as I could possibly afford.
But also, if you insist on that view out the northern windows, that's why your heating bill is $500 a month.
Because you have to adapt to the environment, and this is this disconnect we have, where we're designing boxes called houses to fit into areas based on ego or the view or whatever it is.
We're not paying attention to what the natural world is, and that's a mistake.
And that's why we have these outrageous heating and cooling bills, and people are screwed.
If the grid goes down, if the grid goes down, I don't need the grid where I live.
Not fear, Cody, but I mean, what I'm saying, what I'm trying to say, and I guess I better say it directly, is somebody's going to come and take your stuff away.
You know, so I understand about uncomfortable people.
I've been doing it for a long time in real wilderness with people who are just like, my God, I paid for this.
On some of the more aggressive courses.
And it's really scary.
But at the same time, it can really be a rallying experience where the tribe comes out and everyone pulls together.
You know, like Katrina, like Hurricane Katrina.
You know, it was a government failure.
But if you read all those news releases, a lot of these quote-unquote poor neighborhoods, because they were used to doing something called talking to each other every day, they pulled together and they found out why Mrs. Withers wasn't on her porch in her rocking chair.
And they totally took care of their own.
And that's what can happen.
Survival situations could bring out the beast in people.
Or the best.
Exactly.
And that's one of the reasons I love my profession is because there's a lot of head games going on.
There's a lot of psychology involved.
And to be a good leader like Sir Ernest Shackleton, someone like him that kept all his men alive in Arctic conditions, it's really inspiring.
And that's what I'm trying to instill in people is, you know, party on, man.
You know, you can do this.
And if you can't do this, die with your damn boots on.
That's kind of a bad metaphor for me, but you know what I mean.
Again, I grew up around grandparents chopping the heads off chickens and having root cellars and canning their garden produce in South Dakota, right?
It's not strange to me.
The prepping movement was just something that was normal in my grandma's day.
It was something they just did.
They would have laughed, you know, at the prepping movement.
It was just common sense.
I think preparation is good.
Again, like I mentioned about an hour and a half ago, and ma'am, this has flown quickly, that when preparation is done in fear, when it's done in a fear-based thing, it's temporary at best.
And so if people want to be a part of the prepping movement because they really dig simplifying their lives and being more self-reliant and not being a slave and, you know, turning their kids on to how a tomato really grows and that it's actually, you know, a plant before it's a vegetable, I think that's great.
Do you want to, let's say, well, you know me and specifics, but okay, I got your question.
You need to deal with, of course, there's the very, very short-term hygiene and sanitation, which we've kind of briefly talked about.
There's a water element that's going to come in.
There's clearly the personal self-defense element that's going to come in eventually.
There's communications.
There's some regulation like we talked about, like, wow, it's 110 in my apartment, stuff like that.
So really, this, I will answer your question, but people always ask me, hey man, Cody, what's like your ultimate bug out bag, dude?
And I'm saying, well, think about just basic backpacking equipment.
If you think about what a backpacker has, they don't have to interact with nature at all.
They can walk around blissfully ignorant of how the natural world works because they've got everything on their back.
And you could be a backpacker and camp out in Central Park.
A lot of people are in tents after earthquakes, right?
You know, the buildings are unstable.
So if you take these little sized bites of the elephant, because you asked a massive question, and people realize, okay, well, Cody says a bug out kit could just be really good backpacking gear.
We have a sleeping bag to keep us warm if it's cold, a ground pad to prevent conduction.
We have some food to eat.
We might have a little stove to cook it on if it requires that.
We have some water and a way to disinfect it.
We have a flashlight to get down those 50 flights of stairs.
Stuff like that.
And when people take this big, massive elephant and carve it down into that manageable slice, Then they just get more of, okay, we've got a flashlight, let's get a bunch of batteries, we've got camping food, let's get a little bit more of that, let's start storing some water in gallon jugs or a 55-gallon drum if we can do that in our apartment.
Let's get a bunch of Ziploc bags and plastic bags.
We can always put them in the toilet bowl with no water and poop in them.
You know, and I love newspaper.
It is a fire hazard, obviously, but shredded newspaper is good for diapers or sanitary napkins or wiping your butt or disposing of a dead body.
I mean, shredded newspaper, you know, if you poop in the bowl with a plastic bag, you can add different stuff to that and contain that fecal matter for the meantime.
There's all these little things, but it's daunting.
And you ask a great question because it's daunting, you know, because there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen.
The biggest stuff that should happen is cooperation.
And ideally, every apartment building will have some game plan.
Unfortunately, that probably doesn't happen because the guy that wants to make a game plan or the girl is thought to be a wacko.
So I tried to let them have me put up a Nanton on the roof, and I did have one for a while.
But they made me take it down.
And I said, look, you people, I actually went to the board.
I said, if we get a big earthquake, and we are here in earthquake country, you know, and or hit by a typhoon, and we're certainly in typhoon country, communication is going to go down.
I mean, I have a book on communication or a chapter on communications, and ham is where it's at.
And I keep, I have, there's a local ham community in Prescott, and some of the guys keep saying, Cody, come here, and I just haven't had the time, but I would love a ham unit myself because communications are, I mean, they're worth their weight in gold, clearly.
Now, my master's is in emergency management, and I actually have read Cody's books.
They're awesome.
Hearing him tonight explain some of the things, I think he understands that, like, an EMP, any kind of thing that happens, he's exactly right.
They say on an EMP attack in central, you know, central to the U.S., if that did that, 90% of the people in the U.S. would be dead from feces, just like he's talking about, not being able to get to their drugs from, you know, the older folks and people who need drugs or the young people who have whatever.
So there's all these problems that are going to compound.
And Cody's on the mark.
The one thing I would mention, I don't know if Cody's ever read the blog by the gentleman when Argentina collapsed, but his blog describes the best places to live.
And it wasn't out all by yourself in the middle of nowhere because those became rape horror rooms.
It wasn't living in the inner cities.
Those just became violent cesspools.
It was living in small communities where you knew everybody, just like Cody was saying, in the poor areas where everybody knew everybody, if somebody broke in your house, your neighbor would hear you scream.
Tribes have been around for tens of thousands of years.
And the mountain man, and I'm not being sexist, just the term mountain man, they died fairly young, you know, and they had a rifle and they had flour and they had a mule and with a horse, but they were doing everything by themselves.
And that's exhausting.
So I'm all for, even though I'm a loner, believe it or not, you know, it's like I can't be because I'm a teacher.
But the community is where it's at.
You know, the tribe is where it's at.
And I would love to do something.
You know, I mean, the federal government, it's not their job to take care of us.
You know, that's the antithesis of self-reliance.
But it'd be cool if we had a program similar to like McGruff the Crime Dog or Smokey the Bear for fires to have some sort of cool thing that would prompt people to be more interested, especially kids, in self-reliance.
Instead of just, you know, waving a flag on 9-11 and eating a piece of pie.
You know, it's like it'd be nice to do something proactive and make it fun for the younger generation because they'll be taking care of us in the future.
I mean, I do love fire, and I can hold my own, but there's a lot of other things I do because I have to, you know, to be well-rounded out as an instructor.
You may know him from the TV show we did called Dual Survival.
You may know him in varying different ways, and soon you'll know him, perhaps, in a different way.
But we're talking about survival.
Sorry.
Survival.
So here's a way of thinking about this, Cody, that I want to lay on you for your thoughts.
So I live in one of these towns.
Perhaps about it.
We're located about 65 miles west of Las Vegas.
We're probably six or eight miles at most from the California border.
And it's a deep desert, as you know.
And there are only three major roads, actually only two major roads, out of town.
Three maybe.
And that's it.
So if something really horrible happened, we have had discussions here.
We have a unique situation here in Promo Devada because we have underground water.
We have water wells and underground water and septics and so forth and so on.
And then when you add to that emergency power and dried food that lasts a very long time, you have a situation where you can live for a long time except for the most dangerous thing of all.
Well, a lot died, but as far as you're talking about egress and ingress, the highways were clogged.
I talked to people after my second book came out, with people emailing me, we were stuck in traffic for eight hours and went two miles.
So you're going to have, I mean, a four-lane highway is not that big of an artery when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people.
And, you know, it's just not sustainable for the type of stuff, you know, let's all go to Perump.
But I understand what you're saying, and I think that I don't want people to think that I'm not well aware of strategy, you know, and I understand, and I can instinctively think like an animal because I've spent a lot of time in the bush, and most animals are hunted.
So I understand the psychology that goes into someone who's really scared and hungry, and I understand Not wanting to be eaten.
And I really, really wish that we would all get with the program.
And I know it's never going to happen, right, for everyone, but I'm hoping your listeners will be inspired to go out and be a little bit more self-reliant after our talk tonight.
And I really, I really appreciate the opportunity to come on your show.
Not to mention that I think you're a radio god.
But you know what I'm saying?
Self-reliance doesn't have to be scary.
It doesn't have to be fear-based.
My grandparents called it good old common sense.
And so I take my heart is with my grandparents because they originally inspired me to do more with less because they could do, they went through the depression, for God's sake, you know, and told me some of the stories.
And so they're my inspiration with trying to be prepared and not doing it with this psycho-zombie fear, you know, that's so common out there.
It's a big mistake.
Fear is the mind killer, right?
Dune, Benny Gesseret training, Frank Herbert, you know, fear is the mind killer, and it really is.
And it can keep you alive.
Adrenaline is a wonderful thing, but it can also paralyze your thought process.
And you know I'm a purist by now, and you know I'm pretty hardcore in my methodology, but I agree that even if people are scared and they're preparing, thank God they got the pinnot beans.
And I applaud them for that, and I think that's very wise.
And I think until there's more government subsidies to do some more alternative transportation, we're probably going to be in the petroleum phase for a little bit longer.
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Well, that's just pitiful.
And then one thing, you talked about recycling your poo.
So you kind of recommend then, if I've got it right, for the urban person in terms of preparation, there's just not a hell of a lot you can do in a giant apartment building or something, but you can have a go bag prepared?
Yeah, I mean, most people will probably be exiting out, and it's really, I think, okay, for the average family, find out what hurts.
You know, what are your needs?
And Americans confuse those with wants.
The needs are we need oxygen, we need water, we need food for longer term, we need to be thermoregulated.
It can't be too cold, it can't be too hot.
We need some sort of basic sanitation plan as well as hygiene.
It will be nice to have communications, and it will be nice to have some sort of transportation, even if it's walking down barefoot to the city if you have to.
I would assess all the resources I have in my apartment.
I would assess all the resources I have in my immediate area and in my existing town.
And I would be aware of all the three ways into Perump, Nevada if I needed to get out of town, but be aware that that might not be the most prudent thing to do.
It really depends on the variables of, of course, psychotic people and looters.
And one of your call-in guests hit the nail on the head.
I mean, it's where 90% of Americans are on some sort of mind-altering drug, whether it's caffeine or Prozac or whatever.
So when you have hundreds of thousands of people that can't get access to mental health medication, you've got a serious blowout along with the stress of an urban survival situation.
So the family should assess what their strong points are, what their weak points are, custom make it to your family.
There is no one-size-fits-all kit or mindset or methodology for staying alive.
And be prepared to adapt and party on and keep that mindset that you're going to get through this even if you don't, especially if you have kids.
If mom and dad melts down in front of the kids, it's game over.
So you have to have your game face on for your children, if nothing else, and try to do as best you can for them in a very, very scary situation.
And so if you're in an urban area and it lights out, the grid goes down, you know, for a year, let's say, obviously you're not going to be able to remain in the city.
I mean, there's a lot of green areas now, a lot of like, there's a lot of city gardens going on in abandoned lots.
Okay, here's what's going to happen, or here's my crystal ball.
You're going to have a tremendous amount of fires because when people don't have any access to anything to heat or cook with, they're going to burn whatever they can, including the picnic table in the backyard.
Because people are inept making fire and handling fire because they don't understand fire, you're going to have a lot of fires in towns, and it will burn down cities and burn down towns because of the one idiot on The block who didn't get his stuff together.
The other thing that will happen, unfortunately, is when people deal with alternative heating sources or cooking, they'll die of carbon monoxide.
Carbon monoxide now is the number one poisoning in the United States of America right now, let alone in a grid-down situation.
So you'll have those things.
You'll have the roaring comeback of epidemics with the fecal matter.
You'll have carbon monoxide.
You'll probably have the fires.
You'll have problems with sanitation.
And then you've got the psychotic crazies.
Eventually kill each other off or try to take your stuff or whatever.
So there'll be the initial casualties of people taking 12 buckshot to the face.
But whether you stay or whether you go, I mean, where are you going?
People always think, oh, we're going to head to the hills.
There's a lot of dead people in the hills aren't.
It's like, try to shelter in place if you can.
Have a plan B. Try to have a plan C. And again, there's so many variables in this situation.
It can be so scary and confusing.
And everyone's trying to sell you this crap on their website that have no experience in survival skills.
Stick to basic physiology first and realize that everyone's going to be really scared.
So that's where the psychology comes in.
And the physics of heat loss and gain regarding hypo and hyperthermia are key.
And that's, again, we go back to my homestead or the right clothing in the right environment or the sleeping bag you brought with you, etc.
Because a grid down situation in the wintertime in Minnesota is much different than a grid down situation in June in Phoenix.
So, you know, it's these catastrophes like in France where they had the grid down in August when most people were on vacation because that's how they do things there.
Thousands of people died in their apartments art of hyperthermia and dehydration.
We're not talking outdoor survival skills here.
I'm talking about keeping your listeners alive in their apartment or out in the woods.
And it boils down to keeping things simple and not forgetting about what human physiology requires to stay alive.
And don't buy into this, I almost cussed, but don't buy into this stuff out there of people selling everything under the sun.
My motto is the more you know, the less you need.
And I'm a fan of critical gear.
But critical gear is based on needs, not wants.
Please don't, your listeners should not be roped into all the stuff people are trying to sell.
Think like my grandparents.
Keep it simple.
The less moving parts, the better.
Keep a party on mindset and roll with the variables as best you can.
I'm out here on the East Coast in West Virginia, and I was wanting to take some survival courses, and I didn't know if he knew anybody out here that he would recommend.
So, and to answer his question, I don't know anyone in that area, but I do have a thing on my website, choosing a good instructor, ask for a professional resume.
If they don't have one, that's your first red flag.