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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
The Whole Story: The End Of The World As We Know It. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired August 30, 2026 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:29]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Anderson Cooper. Welcome to THE WHOLE STORY.
Prepping was once considered a fringe movement. But in recent years with the pandemic, wars and the threat of increasingly severe natural disasters, preparing for a doomsday scenario is becoming more mainstream. One-third of Americans have spent some part of their household budget on survival equipment or supplies, and an estimated 20 million Americans now identify themselves as preppers.
Experts say the prepper movement is becoming younger and now includes more women and people of color. But what does it actually take to prepare for the end of the world as we know it?
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh has spent decades covering conflict and its aftermath around the world, and in this next hour, he journeys across North America to learn survival tactics from a billionaire's bunker in Kansas to a heavily armed compound in Colorado, and finally to a deserted island in Mexico.
He shows you not only the skills, but the mindset of preppers who believe the end is coming and say they are ready for it.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We all live our lives under the shadow of danger. Nuclear war. Are we to say we can do nothing? That it'd be the end of everything?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you important news.
NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You're all going to die.
We've been obsessed with the end as long as we've been alive. Old age, disaster, total war or pandemic. One will get you for sure. But a sudden collapse, Armageddon or catastrophe, and being ready for it is fast becoming a mainstream obsession.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your destruction is about to happen with fire.
PATON WALSH: Perhaps it's the screens hyping death and dismay at us so fiercely it can seem like the world is always ending right here today. But what used to be a lifestyle preserve for men with guns in the woods is now here in the heart of New York, where 9/11 blackouts covered have shown that the givens, the safety and the immediately available gratification of modern life can vanish in an instant.
(Voice-over): "The End of the World as We Know It."
We've taken a month's long journey into the prepper mindset from suburban families with bugout bags to AR-15s in the wilderness, to billionaires, in old missile silos, to learning basic survival skills on a gorgeous but bug-ridden Mexican Gulf Island, finding out what works, what seems nuts, and what you can't afford.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dave, can you turn the waterfall on?
PATON WALSH: All so you don't have to. You're welcome. And if it all feels a bit silly, you're probably right. But you only have to be wrong once.
I've covered conflict around the world for 25 years and over a dozen wars. So the theory was I'm supposed to have a better gauge of what's a real threat or plan or reasons.
Spiral towards collapse.
(Voice-over): And it's hard not to be sucked up into the emotions of it all. But there are three things in my experience that stood out. Above all there was a lot of focus on the dark side of human nature winning out when really in places immersed in war or horror often it is human charity that stuns you.
And then there were the skills, survival chic really just teaching you things your great grandparents probably knew, like fire lighting or how to get water that can seem eccentric in this world of endless luxury and convenience that wants to convince you it's never going to end. But a lot of it felt like things we should never have forgotten in the first place.
(Voice-over): And finally, there was the cell. People trying to sell you certainty when the one thing I've learned is there is none. So when people tell you that's just never going to happen, it is a red flag. They have no idea.
[20:05:09]
Talk about the end of the world as we know it or the collapse, whatever words you want to choose, many people surely are going to imagine it happening here in an urban environment. So we've come to a city center to get a basic crash course in the dark in survival. Night falls and there's been what people call a collapse. You get off the street in a city like this?
JACK RICHLAND, FORMER U.S. MARINE: Get off the street. Right. You don't want to be out here. There's criminal opportunists. You want to go find a hot site, seek shelter somewhere with not a lot of foot traffic. PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: You want to create a plan and you want to look for resources.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is ex-Marine Jack Richland, and he runs a course in urban survival. If you can't park out or get out of town, he knows how to bug in and is sure other people are the problem.
RICHLAND: Let's go.
PATON WALSH: All right. You wouldn't want to sleep in here, right?
RICHLAND: No. Obviously somebody has.
PATON WALSH: Yes. It stinks.
RICHLAND: And there's cans and food.
PATON WALSH: So the idea is to get up to a higher vantage point.
RICHLAND: Yes. That way we can take a look and gather as much information as we can.
PATON WALSH: OK. And what are you looking for when you're up here, someone like that, and in a -- at a time like that?
RICHLAND: So we want to look for obviously clusters. We don't want to see a heavy group presence. And we want to see what kind of routes we can take to get out of here.
PATON WALSH: I find it amazing. The cities have they shut down in the middle of the night sometimes, like it's not even 10:00. So what do you have here? Right. They don't look friendly.
RICHLAND: Yes. This is a common tool used by bad guys, right?
PATON WALSH: Sure.
RICHLAND: To restrain people. Now, this is very heavy duty. It's typically difficult to get out of.
PATON WALSH: So you would tighten it on yourself?
RICHLAND: Yes. You want the box right in the center of your hands. OK? And all you're going to do is you're going to come up and bring it down into your chest as hard as you can. OK?
PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: Bingo.
PATON WALSH: Surprisingly, movie-like. Wow.
RICHLAND: Obviously, people is your biggest threat. I believe that it doesn't matter the catalyst, whether it's a civil unrest, economic depression, environmental, war, it doesn't matter that people will only serve their self-interest.
Well, this is a silk hot key. OK?
PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: So a lot of buildings have these maintenance spigots here. There's four different sizes so you just got to figure out which one it is. And now we have water. Everything you want is behind the lock.
PATON WALSH: Yes.
RICHLAND: OK. In urban environment. Yes. Obviously, breaking into anything is illegal. Right? But in a collapse situation, as long as you leave a note saying, hey, you're all right.
PATON WALSH: Yes, sure.
RICHLAND: You know?
PATON WALSH: Yes. Thanks for your milk. Right.
RICHLAND: So one of my favorite techniques is something called raking. So we'll take a rake here. OK. So now when we pick a lock.
PATON WALSH: Yes.
RICHLAND: What we're going to do is we have a pin tumbler system here. So we're going to stick a tension tool in the bottom of the keyway. OK. Because we need to apply tension to the lock to rotate the cylinder. You're going to take a rake and then rake the lock.
PATON WALSH: Whoa. That's fast.
RICHLAND: Fast.
PATON WALSH: And that works on an ordinary door as well?
RICHLAND: Yes. It's the same pin tumbler system.
PATON WALSH: OK.
RICHLAND: OK, now I'm going to teach you something called an SDR, surveillance detection route. And essentially what that is, is we're trying to detect if we have a -- somebody surveilling us, someone is following us. Now, what we're going to do is, is we may just cut a quick loop.
PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: Almost like if he's following us, we're going to cut across the street right here. Then we're just going to loop back this direction.
PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: So that way he is now having to switch directions as well. PATON WALSH: OK.
RICHLAND: That's the big thing about cities is there's tons of reflective surfaces. There's vehicles and lots of mirrors. We can also like use our phone recording behind us so we can look.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Jack shows us his safe house, where his training gets more violent and the gear gets serious. AR-15, SIGs, night vision, this one with a thermal clip-on adapter.
RICHLAND: If you come at me with a number one strike -- go ahead and give me number one. I'm going to cut your arm, so go ahead and give it to me again. So then I'm going to step out. I'm going to trap the arm. All right. So you're going to slap. So follow my hand this way. Don't -- you don't have to grab it, just slap it. Cut. So you're going to -- you're going to follow me with this hand. One, cut. Control the arm. There you go.
PATON WALSH: Would you mind slowing down your attacks?
RICHLAND: There we go.
PATON WALSH: And then that. Right. OK.
[20:10:07]
RICHLAND: So then I can cut.
PATON WALSH: Right. Yes. Fine. OK. I'm very dead. Was that wrong?
RICHLAND: No. That's good. Yes. That's good. So what you're going to do is someone comes up with a gun to me, I'm immediately going to give, you know this. Hey, please don't hurt me. Don't kill me. I'm going to act afraid. I'm going to quickly step off line, driving your hand away. The barrel is pointed in a different direction. It can't go off. Now I'm going to C-clamp the top of the pistol. That will stop it from cycling.
Now the round in the chamber could still go off, so I need to stay away from the barrel. But then I'm going to drive around twisting your wrist, rotating the firearm out. And now I'm in control. OK, put your hands up in the position. Now quickly step sideways, turning your body. Turn your body so that way you're out of the path of the barrel. There you go.
PATON WALSH: Right.
RICHLAND: Good. Easy, right?
PATON WALSH: Yes. It's easier than you think. Your clientele, has it changed over the last years? Have you seen a different type of person coming to you?
RICHLAND: So initially when I started 14 years ago, it was more people interested in prepping and stuff like that. The doomsday prepping was popular. PATON WALSH: The standard guy in the woods, right? Kind of idea.
RICHLAND: Yes. Yes. Now it seems to be more the common person. Just a guy who works a job, maybe at a tech company. You know, want to take care of his family. There's bad people that do bad things. You have to prepare for it.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): While Jack meets the end with violence on tougher streets, there is a softer kind of readiness in an upscale world. What's stunning is the fear of collapse permeates even here in the heart of Manhattan.
Anna Maria Bounds is a professor of sociology at Queens College who studies and teaches prepping and, of course, also lives it. We find a trove of ways to keep alive in the smallish but big for here space she calls home.
You've got a lot of things. Well, for the end of the world, right?
ANNA MARIA BOUNDS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, QUEENS COLLEGE: This is actually my freezer. I decorated this. You know, one of the things that we have to do is we have to be very economical with our space. This is kind of our communication center.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Behind every tiny prettiness hides matters of life and death.
BOUNDS: So believe it or not, this cute little thing here is a trauma kit. Just special little things. These are like the critical things. My own generator.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Bounds's study of the movement has turned stereotypes on their head. The majority of people in the New York prepper movement, people of color, a trend repeated across the United States.
BOUNDS: So they store food and supplies with the idea that the government isn't coming for them. You know, a lot of people with immigrant backgrounds, a lot of people of color who have discovered that, you know, their neighborhoods are the last ones served during a crisis.
PATON WALSH: Guns are a sensitive question. Do you have weapons as well? Firearms?
BOUNDS: Am I secure in the protection of my apartment and my family? I am. So when --
PATON WALSH: That's a yes to the guns question.
BOUNDS: So -- so my -- so I'm saying I'm -- I'm saying we're OK. And what I'd really like to talk about right now are these green olives.
(LAUGHTER)
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Wealth and wonder bloom outside yet still the end of it all on the mind.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:18:34]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At last, the release of deadly radioactive rain. In a matter of seconds, downtown New York would be a massive ruin.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What scares me is that awful gas that deforms you.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): In the flattest part of Kansas, where the wind blows fierce and free, you are suddenly not in Kansas anymore. Super money gives you super powers, some say, but here it buys you salvation. Space inside a converted nuclear missile silo turned into a luxury survival bunker full of things most of us will never see, especially when the world has ended.
What was the cost to buy the abandoned silo itself?
LARRY HALL, CREATOR, SURVIVAL CONDO PROJECT: 300,000.
PATON WALSH: But that's a bargain, right?
HALL: Oh, yes.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): There is no denying the engineering feat owner and creator Larry Hall has achieved here over years of detailed planning.
HALL: OK, this blue box here you see is a volcanic ash scrubber. We have enough diesel fuel to run these for two and a half years. It just takes care of itself. The computers that control everything. This is what we call the pet park. People get the feeling that, you know, they're outdoors.
[20:20:03]
I have a lot of people, ultra-high net worth individuals that come in here, and a lot of them, when they first contact me, want to build their own private bunker. And I say, well, that's good, but why don't you come and look at what I've built? And then we found out that they value having other adults to bounce ideas off of, as opposed to having just their family locked in a smaller facility that they were exclusive to.
So now you're in the bunker, now you've got other adults saying, what do you think? Like, what's going on? How long do --
PATON WALSH: So you and billionaires need other people?
HALL: Yes, they did, and they really appreciated it.
PATON WALSH: So long as it's other billionaires.
HALL: No. (CROSSTALK)
HALL: No, we have a couple of people that I would put in the billionaire category. Other people are just successful self-made professionals. And these people are all very down to earth.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Down to earth. Hundreds of feet under the earth.
How many floors do you have in total?
HALL: Fifteen.
PATON WALSH: Who chose the red decal?
HALL: I did, actually.
PATON WALSH: It's quite, you know, emergency end of times. So people don't get to have their names on this, right? Just residential six.
HALL: Correct.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is a technical marvel but needs heavy expertise to run. A huge task in and of itself.
You can feel the intensity of the silence down here. Nothing apart from the noise of the ventilation that's keeping you alive. And you're really going to want to have other people around with you.
HALL: You're just trying to dump your kids on me.
PATON WALSH: When the lights go out completely, what --
HALL: Well, you turned it off.
PATON WALSH: I did. Yes, but let's say, let's say you had a power failure.
HALL: That didn't interrupt the power. That's a ludicrous question and just because this system that's currently in here takes 29 seconds or less for the generator to kick in. But the wind turbine is not even connected to the generators. It has not -- it doesn't use fuel. These are nuclear, biological and chemical air filters. These are military grade. They filter out every known pathogen known to man.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): They literally breathe different air here. And you immediately ask, how does the mega-millionaire mind work? Does this sort of prepping, a doggy park and climbing wall, make them feel grounded when in real life they're not?
I mean, how much alcohol do you stock for the end of the world?
HALL: One of our owners has like 6,000 bottles of wine. We've got a pool table, a couple different TV sitting groups. We have a gel burning fireplace.
PATON WALSH: So you can see just outside here over the fireplace, the front door, the gate. Right?
HALL: Yes, but we have a control. We can look at any of the cameras and change them.
PATON WALSH: OK. Sure. How do you defend something like this?
HALL: This place can be fully functional after sustaining an exposure to a 2,000 mile an hour shock wave. What is a small arms fire going to do shooting at a facility like that?
PATON WALSH: But what if you have 20 guys who just want to keep pouring diesel fuel down the ventilation pipes and setting fire to it, or just being an irritant long enough.
HALL: Fair enough.
PATON WALSH: To make your life hard.
HALL: Sure. And that's -- and that's why we have a couple things. A, we have a sniper post on top of this building. OK. And we also have some lethal and non-lethal ways to reach out and touch someone.
PATON WALSH: This may be a very non-American question to ask, but of all the things to have in a survival bunker, why is one a shooting range?
HALL: If there's a need to train people on how to defend it, there's a lot of people that put this very high on their priority list.
PATON WALSH: Oh, wow.
HALL: So come on in here. How many nuclear bunkers have resort-style pools in them? So do you want to see the waterfall on?
PATON WALSH: Yes.
HALL: Dave, can you turn the waterfall on?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
HALL: So this is a saltwater computer controlled pool.
PATON WALSH: OK.
HALL: The air is kept at about 80 degrees in here, and the water temperature is kept at plus or minus two degrees of the air temperature.
PATON WALSH: There's got to be a part of you when the waterfall goes on on the indoor nuclear hardened swimming pool at the end of times thinks this is a little bit absurd.
HALL: You know --- you know what's different about this place?
PATON WALSH: Yes. HALL: We hired a psychologist very early on in our design phase. Every
light in here is 3,000 degrees Kelvin or higher because if you don't do that, it makes people feel depressed.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Food is dizzying. A vault freezer, endless racks, bread baking, coffee hangouts, and their own farm. Underground. Hydroponics.
HALL: See a bunch of new little lettuce things coming up here. So if you had one head of lettuce outside, you'd have 80 in the same space in here.
[20:25:04]
We've grown it all in here. These are the grow lights. You can't stay in it too long because you have headache.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Security and sick bay.
HALL: This is looking back at the main door. And then I can see the inside of the guard shack out there and down the driveway. And then of course we were just in hydroponics and we could see up here. Dave is right there at the kitchen working. He's making his lunch. It's like being in a submarine in 1,000 feet of water. If there's a fire or a problem internal, you have to assume that opening the door to get out is more deadly than the condition inside. This is the jail cell.
PATON WALSH: Right.
HALL: So this is our jail. Somebody is having a bad day.
PATON WALSH: A pretty bad day to be locked up.
HALL: Needs an adult timeout.
PATON WALSH: Right.
HALL: Getting belligerent in the bar.
PATON WALSH: OK.
HALL: Can just sleep it off. The psychologist that we dealt with was really interested in the number of people that we were going to put in here. 75 is a good number. It's between those is a societal structure that they call an extended family. And it has wonderful productivity attributes and really great levels of cooperation.
PATON WALSH: Things all go terribly wrong in the world, and everyone has got to get here first. You're not worried they might get here and find someone else taking it over but if there was even a chance for you to kind of get it up and running if there are people inside?
HALL: No. Because the people that maintain it and secure it are already here.
PATON WALSH: So you're not worried that Dave is just going to take this whole place over and bring his friends --
HALL: It'd be a short stay because I don't know how to work anything in here. Nothing is working now. So we're going to die in here if we can't get out of here. So.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Homes for up to $5 million with tens of thousands of annual upkeep fees. Larry's remarkable feat visible when you step out and see where he started. The next silo to develop, vast, cavernous. These were machines, places of incalculable death, repurposed to give life, deserve it or not, to the very few.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:32:22]
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Where we stop next the land is unforgiving. As though it's as in love with the fall of man as his rise. We drive to remote Colorado through towns whose worlds ended not so long ago, but look like the people who lived here no longer speak of them. Division, desolation, deindustrialization, desert, all expanding, making the end feel nearer, inevitable. Almost welcomed.
Bugging out can come cheaper than a converted nuclear silo, and one option is fortitude ranch out in the hills. We can't say where. The trees torched by earlier fires. The ridgelines harsh.
DREW MILLER: Come on in. Puppies, you come out. Frodo, come here. Mandalorian, come on. Come on.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): The collapse is Drew Miller's life. All he thinks about.
MILLER: This is mainly a guard post. This is solid wood and steel. I can shoot right down the wall here. And then from the one over there, shoot down the wall there. That's castle terminology. It's called the bastion.
So we define a collapse as two things. One, the economy is not functioning. People aren't going to work. They're staying home trying to survive. And then secondly, there's loss of law and order, widespread, long lasting loss of law and order. People are going to start starving to death. And they're not -- you know, some people will willingly just stay home and die or kill themselves. But I think most people will try to go out and find food.
PATON WALSH: Does it ever get lonely?
MILLER: No, there's always people here on site.
PATON WALSH: Coming in and out.
MILLER: Yes. And in a collapse, you know, it'd be 100 plus people. So I said first --
PATON WALSH: Well, there isn't a collapse now.
MILLER: No.
PATON WALSH: Now often it's just you, right?
MILLER: Well, you know, the U.S. is in an early stage of civil war right now.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Inside the warmth of budget rooms from what once seemed to be a family hillside retreat, he plots how to survive the most horrible events.
MILLER: But we have a really hard and fast rule in a collapse, and that is, you will never have more than 50 percent of our members together in any one spot at any time. And the reason is, it's not just that I got six guard posts manned all the time. I want to keep people near those walls. So if there's a marauder alert and attack within, you know, ideally less than a minute, you can get to your assigned walls.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): It is a survivalist community in waiting, preparing to make its own flour, bake its own bread, raised on the premise of mutual dependency, self-rule, a world without government where guns are the law. But Drew's world feels built on grievances with our world today rather than an imminent sense it is ending.
MILLER: They do nothing to warn us with threats, regulations to make it hard for us to prep, and stealing food from us in a collapse. That's what our government does for us.
[20:35:06]
PATON WALSH: How would you describe your normal client?
MILLER: We have a lot of former military, former intelligence officers that people are aware of the threats, but a lot of us --
PATON WALSH: Men mostly?
MILLER: Pardon?
PATON WALSH: Men, mostly?
MILLER: No, mostly couples. We do get some single folks, but most of members tend to be married, some with kids, not as much younger folks. It tends to be a little bit older. They seem to be more aware of it. This is a --
PATON WALSH (voice-over): The it is the thing here weighing on every moment. Radios unplugged in case an electromagnetic pulse hits the antenna. Food in every corner. You can't get away from the idea someone wants to kill you.
Well, the worlds still there, Drew.
MILLER: So we've got all kinds of tools, lots of axes. We've got chainsaws. We also have a lot -- PATON WALSH: You're very cheerful. Your countenance is perfectly
always sunny and getting stuff done. But doesn't it exhaust you dealing with all this dread all the time?
MILLER: As an intelligence officer, starting in the Cold War. So I've dealt with threats. Now to me it's just the opposite. It gives me peace of mind at night knowing that whatever shit hits the fan, we can survive it.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Drew's business means planning for ghastly eventualities.
MILLER: The worst scenario for me is a starving mother coming with kids who are not members, and they're outside our walls and they're begging for food. That's the worst thing. I, as a staff person, will tell that starving lady, no, you cannot come closer. If you come closer, we will shoot you. We will not give you anything. Go away. There's a chance that that starving lady with kids is a decoy. There's a marauder group over here. They're trying to draw me and our attention over here. And they're about to attack on the other side of the compound. She could have a virus.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): A little horror and sorrow sits in the air here of men aging, white, wronged, undervalued or misunderstood.
MILLER: So this is a single member room in here.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): It is cobbled together like they are living in the end of times before it's begun.
You fed us some beans last night. They were four years old.
MILLER: Four years out of date. Yes. We did that. And, you know, canned beans aren't necessarily the most tasty thing, but they're edible. They'll keep you alive. We could do a stretcher demo.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): The infirmary readied with its own practice and ethics.
MILLER: Behind here is an operating table. So we would pull this out over here if we needed to operate. These are all surgical supplies and gears. Medical reference books up here. This is our -- we don't have anesthesia. So if you have an operation, we have to again do it the old fashioned way. Kirkland cheap whiskey here so we could get you drunk for it. But it's going to be -- it's going to be very unpleasant to get hurt, but that works to our advantage because marauders also know there's no hospital for them.
We at least have a clinic. We've got doctors on the staff. A marauder attacks us and they get wounded they're probably going to die. There's no hospitals operating in a collapse.
PATON WALSH: Would you treat them?
MILLER: No, we would not. And I'll be frank how we'll handle the marauders. If someone does attack us and we shoot marauders and they don't drag their bodies off and we won't let them drag bodies off if we can't, we're not going to be cannibals. We're not going to eat the marauders. But I will tell you this. I'm going to take that body and bury it, shallow bury it, where our chickens can free range on the bugs and the worms that that body will produce. So we will indirectly eat marauders. We won't directly eat them.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Drew takes us shooting. I've never fired a gun in 25 years of covering conflict. It is exhilarating. Reeks of power. Provided you do not care where the bullet lands.
All the ones that are really close are yours. So --
MILLER: Yes, so this one was obviously mine.
PATON WALSH: Obviously yours. Yes.
MILLER: Right there.
PATON WALSH: My one small criticism of it, is it possible to suggest that your brain isn't wired to view a future in which this doesn't happen?
MILLER: I'm thinking for a reality and facing it realistically. And the reality is we are guaranteed collapse disasters. I can name individual threats. Do we need to stop the dogs or -- no, we got to put the dogs out because they're making noise. Can we put the dogs outside? They're making noise. We can hear that. Come on. Outside. Come on.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): It is a world where you are wrong and they are right. And when the end comes, that will be even more the case. And you will be dead for doubting them.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:44:26]
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is the ground zero of survival. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. We're heading out to a stunning sliver of Mexico beach for things to get really nasty. To learn and test rudimentary survival skills, things that sound basic and easy but are truly, really hard. To get hungry, tired, wet and angry, all of which are better than dying.
[20:45:01]
AMOS RODRIGUEZ, SURVIVAL EXPERT: Yes, there is a lot of bugs. There could be ants or scorpions. There's spiders.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Amos Rodriguez is an American reality TV survival expert who teaches skills to a growing number of Americans willing to pay $5,000 to go through major discomfort in the ruins of an old fishing hut.
RODRIGUEZ: Termite nests. Pretty big.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): So at least they know what it's like, what it requires of them, if the end comes.
RODRIGUEZ: I want them to learn these skills so they can do this in any environment, in any bioregion, under any conditions. The idea is that when you get out with these skills, you can use them in any place on the planet.
PATON WALSH: So you've brought some food with us, but for authenticity purposes, I'm just going to eat what we find.
RODRIGUEZ: OK, let's do that.
PATON WALSH: All right? So when I lose my mind out of hunger.
RODRIGUEZ: OK, don't eat me.
PATON WALSH: You'd be patient with me. Yes? Be patient.
RODRIGUEZ: Don't yell at me. I'll get you food.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): There is a pyramid of survival here. Shelter first, then fire, then water, then food. Your body or mind may demand the opposite. But there is logic to it.
RODRIGUEZ: Yes, it's the sacred order of survival. Shelter, fire, water and food, but every situation is different.
PATON WALSH: Yes.
RODRIGUEZ: In this bioregion, this could be my shelter, but fire will be more important because right away I can purify water. And that's what I will really need in here. I need to drink water because this saltwater environment, the sun, the heat, the walking is taking away my water.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): I have a cheat shelter the best you can get even though one night the horizontal rain gets in. But I still need to learn making one from scratch.
RODRIGUEZ: They're standing pretty straight. Straight tree in there, we can use that one and use that as a ridge pole.
PATON WALSH: Oh, tarantula.
RODRIGUEZ: A tarantula. That's why we clean. Look how big that thing is.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Bug in. Bug out. This is just bugs. And they eat each other, too. This is a wasp that can paralyze a tarantula and carry him off. Nature birthed us, keeps us alive, but would gladly eat us whole.
RODRIGUEZ: That's what I do. I just start with the basic shelter, and then slowly improve it every day. And the longer you stay, the better. As long as you can fit inside and it will protect you if a rain comes.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Shelter done, we need fire next. But nature doesn't care and gives us water instead.
Do you want me to get that higher? The challenge now is to get as much of our stuff dry as quickly as possible, while putting up a tarpaulin in the rain. You can't even see where it goes. You don't like that.
RODRIGUEZ: See, just about a minute, this coconut is full. It's one minute.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is the stuff of life you probably need the most by now, so be ready for it. We have an hour left of daylight, but nothing real for me to eat. We put up a net found in the debris here between two poles. But that's not food now.
RODRIGUEZ: This is called like Cuban yoyo. It's a traditional method of fishing for a lot of people here. So the flare goes out and then you need a little give it. And then you have to give the lure some action. So pull, pull, pull, pull it, pull it, pull it, pull it. Once you throw it point the flare of the yoyo out towards where you're throwing the lure. Yes.
PATON WALSH: Whoa. Everyone stay out of the way. I'm fishing for humans. Whoa.
RODRIGUEZ: There you go. Beautiful. That's it. Then start reeling. Yes. That's it, that's it.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): But we catch nothing, and dusk is upon us. So with the help of a boat and bait, neither naturally occurring, we head out. The stingray, a beautiful neighbor can strike you through your boots with its venom. So let it avoid you like it wants to. But the tide is out and so is dinner.
RODRIGUEZ: The best fishing is usually in the incoming tide, so when the tide is incoming, and then everybody moves in here, that's the time to fish.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Dusk means hunting is over and hunger and isolation win.
Because we haven't caught anything or found much since we got here, this is my dinner. My third coconut.
(Voice-over): Sunrise and the problems are all the same, except I now have a little brain fog.
Well, I haven't eaten now for nearly 12 -- no, eight hours. No.
[20:50:07]
Twenty hours, and I'm kind of all right. A bit light headed.
(Voice-over): The first task today is second in the pyramid of survival, but easily the hardest. Fire.
RODRIGUEZ: See all this fluffy stuff?
PATON WALSH: Yes, sure.
RODRIGUEZ: The key things are the tinder bundle. So it's all the fluffy stuff that we've been collecting. This one is a little moist. You can feel it. It feels a little, a little cooler.
PATON WALSH: Yes. Yes.
RODRIGUEZ: Yes. You're going to make a nest like a bird's nest.
PATON WALSH: Right. Like that?
RODRIGUEZ: Like that. Yes. So that's your tinder bundle. That's what it's going to catch your call. And from here we're going to blow it up into flames.
PATON WALSH: Right.
RODRIGUEZ: And then you need tiny, small, medium and largest. A lot of people they want to start their fire with --
PATON WALSH: Big things. Yes, sure. Yes.
RODRIGUEZ: Big stuff like this. That's not going to work. The tiniest are like the inside of the lead of a pencil.
PATON WALSH: Oh, OK.
RODRIGUEZ: We need a good bundle of them.
PATON WALSH: Yes. Sure.
RODRIGUEZ: OK. There are different ways to do fire. Some of the easiest ones are like the ferro rod. This one --
PATON WALSH: Show me how that works. I mean, that's crazy.
RODRIGUEZ: Yes. This one, the angle is really important to have the right angle and usually go to your tinder bundle and you put a spark in there.
PATON WALSH: Yes. Whoa. Now the littles?
RODRIGUEZ: Now the little ones on top of that. So now it's a matter of getting those little. Hold on. Don't put too many in there. Just make sure they catch on fire first.
PATON WALSH: I'm blowing on it. Is that the wrong thing to do?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes -- no, you can do blowing. Yes. It's the fire triangle. You need oxygen, fuel and the spark. You got the spark from this thing. The fuel is your tinder bundle and your sticks and oxygen is your air. That's going to give it in there. There is only so much food, only so many calories we can get out of this place. So you got to be really conservative with the amount of work that you're doing to make this fire. That's why I always tell people training trumps gear.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): You will probably not be on a deserted island with a ferro rod, so you have to get busy with plan B.
RODRIGUEZ: No, you can --
PATON WALSH (voice-over): We're going the simplest, toughest route. Hands and a stick only.
RODRIGUEZ: You get the floor going.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Blisters can mean no fire.
RODRIGUEZ: This is why you want to learn how to make it. Have the right pressure. So you're -- I'm pushing down, but that's it. Those are cold there.
PATON WALSH: And I ruined it.
RODRIGUEZ: No, but, you know, that's it. A lot of people got here and like, I just got muscled through it and make it happen. And no, that's not usually how it works. You got to be like soft. If you walk too fast, you're going to be missing food. If you do it too hard in here, then you're going to be all tired and you won't be able to do it.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): And I am tired. Light and heavy at the same time. Irritable, but also drifting. All these pretty creatures, but none yet food. There is an urgency about all this now. I really must be better at it. And eventually a catch.
RODRIGUEZ: That's dinner. Don't let it go. Keep the tension.
PATON WALSH: Can I pick it up?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes, yes. Good job.
PATON WALSH: Took me two and a half days. Do feel quite bad for the fish.
(Voice-over): But there is still more work before food.
RODRIGUEZ: Go right there.
PATON WALSH: Oh, from the back. OK.
RODRIGUEZ: And then I go up.
PATON WALSH: Right.
(Voice-over): Scale, gut and pin through a stick.
RODRIGUEZ: There you go. Pull.
PATON WALSH: Right. Can I eat this now, please?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): We try my new half skills.
Oh, I'm sorry.
(Voice-over): But drop it for speed.
RODRIGUEZ: There we go.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is constant. A race to get water and food. The clock being about calories.
That's got to be done, isn't it?
RODRIGUEZ: Probably done.
PATON WALSH: Now you just eat it like this?
RODRIGUEZ: It might be hot.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is as close to a pause or pleasure as you get. The rest --
It's really good.
[20:55:04]
RODRIGUEZ: It's really good.
PATON WALSH: -- is work and worry.
RODRIGUEZ: Oh, wow.
PATON WALSH: It's really good.
RODRIGUEZ: That's a really good fish.
PATON WALSH: It's embarrassing. 28 hours since our meal last.
(Voice-over): We keep the bones to make a soup, but we can't just chase fish. We need bigger calories and beasts to hunt.
Now, this is all much harder than it looks.
RODRIGUEZ: You can get full.
PATON WALSH: No. This is going up.
RODRIGUEZ: Yes.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): There are also snares and traps, wires, loops, laid out some animals walk into them.
RODRIGUEZ: The trigger system is just a tiny knob in there.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): And then this deadfall trap, complex enough. I almost immediately forgot how it works.
Oh, funny.
(Voice-over): Amos says we need to talk about water, though, more.
And we're standing in it, but we can't drink any of it. How do you get around that here?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes, if we drink salt water or blackish water in this case, because it's a saltwater environment, this will make you crazy before it kills you. So you can't be drinking it. And here we are relying on rain. All the animals here, the deer, the raccoon, everybody needs fresh water. So you know there is fresh water here. You can survive for a whole month, probably with no food but water after four or five days.
PATON WALSH: Yes.
RODRIGUEZ: You're probably going to perish.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): But soon I'm back to fishing, as this is the only way it seems here to get food.
It gets harder and harder to do well when you're hungry, and only really eaten three fish and coconuts in nearly two days now. So it's starting to realize just how much of your time you have to devote to trying to get calories to function. It's not fun. What is going on?
(Voice-over): Amos grew up in El Salvador's horrific civil war in the '80s, an ending of his childhood world, he says, sparked a need for self-reliance, readiness. His parents were preachers and targeted by the junta.
RODRIGUEZ: When my parents got captured, I was 10 years old and to me it was almost like a wake-up call. I was a child playing in the trees, eating mangoes, and all of a sudden I had to be really ready to help my family. I had to run away. It was complete chaos in the house. Tons and tons of military police were at the house capturing my mom, capturing my dad. Yes, we didn't find my mom until three days later. She's been in torture chambers. She was being tortured and raped by the military.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): His takeaways are twofold. Learn stress management and that you need other people.
RODRIGUEZ: Maybe because I had to rely on my own self-determination, my own trains of thought, in my own breathing, trying to understand how my body was reacting to those stressful situations.
PATON WALSH: What was the one single lesson that you took away from it?
RODRIGUEZ: Probably to try to stay grounded, to increase your levels of self-connection, to increase your levels of awareness. My life goal now is to help people connect to themselves by being here, by connecting to the land, by connecting to your trees, the plants, the animals, and increases your awareness, your levels of connection. And that starts with ourselves. For a lot of people at the end of the world is actually happening. And the way we have seen social change happen is going to be more global. PATON WALSH (voice-over): Out here hell is not other people, but no
other people. There would have been no survival without Amos, his skills, something I need decades to mimic. The big things, food and water, hard, but the small things, too. Endless tiny bites that stayed with me for weeks.
Just constantly something you didn't even know if it's mosquito or a midge or whatever. But all down my leg as well.
(Voice-over): The challenges are profound. Overwhelming. I'm not sure I could cope with this much failure in solitude, alone in beauty, or 100 feet underground.
HALL: They would kill you.
PATON WALSH (voice-over): Or in the woods or mock street fighting. This entire experience has been about other people. The fear of them, of what they might do to end the world as we know it, and what they will do once it's ended.
It is a culture, an industry born of the fear of others, but one that ultimately teaches you how badly you need other people, too, as the connection, not being alone, is how you survive. And might even stop the world ending in the first place.
