This month on Bullet Points, we take a while to get to know about, and learn from Andy Quitmeyer, host of the new Discovery Channel show, Hacking the Wild, a show that combines quick thinking, gadgets, and survival–all things I personally am interested in. Despite his busy schedule, members of the press were able to send over a few questions for him to answer, and let us know more about the show, the experience, and a few tips here and there we hope you’ll never need.
So, tell us a little bit about how you become a digital survivalist and what we need to do to get started.
Cool. So, for me, my kind of journey began with I did stuff with electronics and computers and doing like – building software and doing, like, research and stuff like that. But I really hated being stuck inside all day. Like, I’d be working on some computing problem and, you know, 15 hours would go by. I’d watch the sun rise out of my window and watch the sun set and I’d still be just hammering away on the computer, and it made me really frustrated. So, I started my PhD work trying to figure out a way that I can still do cool things with technology, but in a way that would force me to be outside, in nature.
So, then I met a bunch of these field biologists, and these field biologists are some of the craziest, most focused, dedicated people I’ve ever met in my life. And I mean, they make any, like, survivalist that you’ll ever see on TV – myself included – look like total wimps. These guys are, like, way nuttier than I am. I watch them, like, clambering up a bunch of trees to try to find this ant, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Why are you going up that waterfall? That’s not a route to go,’ but so they’re just like so badass and I’m like, ‘Hey, I want to do some work with these guys.’ And so, I would start – normally what happened at the beginning is a lot of these scientists need different interesting tools to do their research outdoors, and so usually they’d get, like, an engineer or something to make some stuff. But that engineer would sit in the lab and then make these devices or tools and then they bring the lab out in the field, and then of course the first thing that would happen would be that the tool would break. And so, then the field biologist is stuck out there hauling around this, you know, $500,000 piece of equipment that is broken and they have no way to fix it. So, I made this proposal that I should just do the engineering outdoors, because if you can make something outside you can fix it outside. And so, I just started hauling lots of electronic equipment around with these field biologists, going on these expeditions. And it really opened my eyes to a whole bunch of different things, like it’s difficult to do electronics outdoors, but once you start getting a few kind of systems, a little bit of infrastructure together – like my little organising backpack I helped design and develop that you’ll see in the TV show, it holds all of my electronics so they don’t drop on the ground and get lost, they are organised quickly and they turn right back into a backpack – so like building a little bit of stuff like that lets you overcome all of the really big difficulties of doing electronics in the wild. And once you’re able to do electronics in the wild, you can, like, do anything. You can – you can really stay out there. You can repair stuff, you can hack, you know, stuff into other stuff. That’s how, you know, you can turn parts of your laptop into some kind of, like, SOS messaging devices or whatever.
And so, people from the production company AMPLE, they saw me releasing some of my weird videos online on YouTube – me, like, building strange electronics or trying to generate power out in the wilderness while I was – you know, to power my electronics or tools, or whatever I need. And they were like, ‘Hey, we want to do this TV show and you can, you know, focus on survival skills and you’re going to use the – all of your electronic and technology-building skill is specifically for survival.’ And so, then we, yeah, started doing that and really exploring that. And that’s pretty much what happened.
But I would say the very first steps for people who want to go and make their own technology in the wild is first actually go force yourself to like go outside somewhere, cut off from normal infrastructure, like you know, power outlets and walls and stuff like that. Even if you just go and sit in a park, you’re – you’ll get started. And then you want to figure out things like your power; like, I have a little how-to article about how to take one of those little cheap cell phone battery packs – you know, the ones that you can, like, keep your cell phone running all day with – and use that to do things like charge your laptop off of so you can have this power that goes with you. Or get just a very – you can get very small, cheap solar panels that will help you, if you’re in like a sunny place, keep all your equipment charged.
So, once you’re outside and you’ve got power taken care of, then you just need to bring some tools with you. If you’ve got tools, if you’ve got power and you’re outside, just hang out, open your eyes, look at cool stuff around you and think about interesting things that you might want to build, or things – or you can try things that maybe you saw online that maybe you can try to replicate. Like if you see some kind of SOS beacon that I made in a TV show, a lot of them, they posted little how-to videos about how to make it yourself. So, try to build off of techniques and articles that you’ve already seen before and just do them outside. Try it outside and you’ll learn so much.
Okay. Talking about the technology that you’re using for your show, can you enumerate maybe the top three pieces of equipment that you take along with you, aside from the usual mobile phone, laptop and the like?
Yeah, definitely. So, I would say one of my top equipment is, number one is probably a butane-powered soldering iron or an electrically battery-powered soldering iron, basically a portable soldering iron. And this is one of the first keys that I really discovered in the hiking hacks about how to break – how to bust out of the laboratory and do electronics in the wild, because a soldering iron is like, it’s your main tool for dealing with electronics. It lets you melt metal and make tiny, tiny circuit connections or repair common breakages in your electronics or create new hybrid types of electronics by just having what is essentially just like a hot metal thing that can melt stuff. And then when it comes to actual survival situations, there’s lots of other things you can do with it. I’ve used the soldering iron to melt edges of like safety – like a Mylar safety blanket to like turn into a bag that can hold water for me. That was like a kind of an emergency situation stuck out in the wilderness one time, so I managed to get a little extra water that way. And so that’s number one, I would say, is soldering iron.
Number two would probably be like a multi-tool that is more specifically for electronics. When you think of a regular multi-tool that like most survivalists will have, it will have like your like big old pliers and it will have like a big knife and stuff like that. My multi-tool has like a very tiny screwdriver, because most of the time if you need to get in some kind of electronics, they are put together in a factory and they have very tiny little intricate screws holding them together. And if that little screw is standing between you and actually trying to live, that is going to be the most frustrating, horrible experience ever. And most of the times they’re connected to the electronics too, so you can’t just rip it open or else you’ll break everything you’re trying to deal with. So, having a multi-tool that can deal with very tiny electronics; my multi-tool also has a wire stripper on it too, so I can very effectively put together lots of different kinds of electronics very quickly.
And then I would say number three would be a source of renewable energy. Usually I have a portable solar panel on me and that I can use to recharge my batteries. You can even use it as a sensor sometimes, like if it gets really cloudy the amount of electricity it puts out will drop and I can use that. Or if I’m out somewhere and I need to leave something open or I need to know if inclement weather is about to happen, I can use it as a sensor to set off a little alarm for me. But mostly you can use the solar panel to keep your electronics going without having to rely on a wall in your house. Make you free from modern infrastructure.
All right, okay. So, for my next question, on top of the tools that you’re bringing with you, I guess it’s also your mindset and knowledge that will get you out of a sticky situation for your show. Okay, so as a survivalist, what’s going on in your head before you hit the field?
Yeah, oh, I like this question too. So – and I would say there’s many different types of survivalists and types of like approaches you’ll see and like the mindset of –especially like if you like look on TV or read books by different survivalists, a lot of them will have like very different kind of responses. Some are like trying to act, you know, acting like real tough and like – or just like knowing, like really knowledgeable.
For me, my mindset is very open. Unlike a lot of people, I think I screw up on my show a lot more than a lot of people do, but I’m okay with that. It’s all about learning to me, and you’re getting tossed into places you have no – you know nothing about and I think one of the real dangers is thinking that you know what’s going on when really you might be very naive or clueless. So, I have the mindset where I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to try this out;’ if it doesn’t work that’s fine because I’ll come up with – you know, I’ll have a bunch of different backup plans. So, when I’m going out, I try to have the mindset of just keeping myself open, keeping very positive in my mind, because you’re just going to fail at everything. That’s all I ever do. You’re going to see me get frustrated, but then I try to bounce right back.
And that’s probably the most important tool to have on hand really, is a good mental attitude where you’re not going to punish yourself for it because everything’s going to go wrong and in all my expeditions everything has gone wrong. So, I’ve gotten – I’ve really gotten used to failing, and as I tell my students – they’re here in Singapore and they’re very worried about their grades all the time and I tell them like, ‘Hey, listen, if your project hasn’t fallen apart more than ten times before you do your final presentation, you’re not doing it right.’ So, if you’re out there surviving and you haven’t failed enough times yet, you still have a lot more failures to go and it’s a great thing. Just try to embrace it.
I’d like to ask something, because this is a really interesting take on the survivalist genre for shows and we’d love to know how you came up with the concept, and even more interestingly is that where you got the skills necessarily to pull it off?
Well, so in terms of the concept, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. So, I would say that the concept of really like surviving with the technology in the wild isn’t my main motivation. My motivation comes more from my like research in digital naturalism, about just trying to get people to engage with nature more often. And so, I’m really trying to use the survival genre to really not show people just – I try to show people how they can survive in the wild, but really, secretly, what I’m trying to do is show them that, ‘Hey, you know what? You don’t need to be that scared of nature and you can go do interesting electronics or computer programming or whatever your job is – you can actually go do it in the wilderness.’ And so, my real secret motivation is to try to use this survival genre to make people less scared of nature. So that’s kind of where the idea kind of comes from: how can we use something that’s popular like the survival genre to reduce people’s fear of the wilderness and show them that, ‘Hey, with a couple of quick, easy tips, you can actually survive in the wilderness and not only just survive, but you can thrive out there. You can play with electronics. You can build cool, interesting stuff and I’ll show you how.’ So that’s where I would say this comes from, is this motivation to get people to love nature more.
And then you had a second question that followed up from that. What was it again?
Learning the skills.
Oh, the skills.
Where you got the skills to pull it off, yeah.
So, a lot of them came from, as I mentioned, failing over and over and over again. It comes from like, you know, the very first hiking hack I went on. Again, like I said, we went in, we came out ten days later. We had a horrible disease that people didn’t know what it was; it was kind of eating our skin and they just put us on a slew of antibiotics. We stepped on terrible snakes. I tore my rotator cuff. We were trying to build electronics; 90% of the things that we built out there totally failed. But since then, just keep trying. So, it comes from this combination of trying things, not being afraid to fail and then making yourself try it again until it works. So, a lot of it is really trial and error, testing things out.
And then like anyone will tell you with any kind of electronics, the internet is an amazing resource these days. Things like YouTube, there’s this guy, the Primitive Technology survival guy, who has this great YouTube channel where he basically goes through like the dawn of man to having like just like mud and he ends up building like, you know, iron smelting facilities that he’s like built by hand just out of like clay pots and stuff like that. And so, like studying all these other adventurers, these other digital naturalists that exist on the internet, gives lots of inspiration. And importantly, it motivates you to share your own ideas back, because there are so many times that I learn cool techniques by documenting and freely sharing like some cool idea I had of like, ‘Oh, hey, look at this interesting hack where I can try to monitor these ants and know if they’re going to attack all my equipment again.’ And I’ll post something like that, document it, let people freely make their own versions of it and then other people will remix this and make other kinds of cool versions and be like, ‘Oh hey, if you do this with this it actually makes it run with much less battery power,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’
So, there’s a huge element of all these people on the internet working with each other, trying to help each other out. And so that’s where I have like an Instructables account and a Hackaday account where I post different weird things that I make. And other people can go see them, leave comments and we can all become better digital naturalists and digital survivalists together. So that’s an important source of learning.
All right, cool, thanks Andy.
Cool, no problem.
Also published in GADGETS MAGAZINE June 2017 Issue