Outside Podcast

Falls are the leading cause of death in the backcountry. Nothing else comes close. And while many are freak accidents that amount to nothing more than bad luck, some are more nuanced and interesting—and personal. If you found yourself stuck at the bottom of a canyon with a broken leg, what would you do? And why? In this episode, we go inside the thought process of a real-life survivor—one who happens to host a podcast about survival.

Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck know fitness. Petranek was a former adventure racer and RedBull Athlete before founding one of the first CrossFit gyms. Soon after, Stanwyck walked in looking for a new type of workout and quickly became CrossFit LA’s manager. But while their classes made gym members stronger, the pair longed to have a more holistic impact on their clients. In 2011, they created the Whole Life Challenge, a six-week program that focuses on seven lifestyle changes that optimize well-being. The Challenge, which turns healthy living into a game, now attracts more than 50,000 participants a year. Last week, Petranek and Stanwyck sat down with Outside editor Chris Keyes to discuss the problem with diets, the keys to changing habits, the power of crowds, and how small lifestyle changes add up to make a big difference.

Bee venom is similar to a rattlesnake’s. It rapidly disperses in your tissue, and when you’re stung, the pain you feel is a combination of proteins and peptides attacking your cell membranes. Each sting contains enough venom to incapacitate a small mouse, but bees won’t really hurt you unless you’re allergic. Or at least, that’s what you thought until you disturbed a hive of Africanized bees, which have been known to chase attackers for more than ten hours.

There are several thousand species of mushroom, but only a handful that will kill you. And the toxins found in poisonous mushrooms are some of the deadliest natural poisons on earth. Just seven milligrams—one quarter of a grain of rice—is enough to kill an adult. When you picked some mushrooms off the forest floor, you planned to make a nice risotto. But now you’re in the hospital, fighting for your life.

What if you could opt out of society and go live in a completely self-contained glass bubble in the desert? You and your team would be cut off from the rest of society. For two years, you’d have to grow every morsel of food that you wanted to eat and fix anything and everything that went wrong. That was the plan for the team of scientists that entered Biosphere 2 in the mid-nineties. You may remember that they didn’t make it, but why was it the people on the outside who broke the glass and ended the experiment? Our friends at the podcast Terrestrial, from KUOW in Seattle, tell the story of what went wrong.

What happens to people who are swept out to sea? Some survive for months and even years, alone in lifeboats eating whatever they can catch and drinking rainwater. In this episode we ask you, the listener, to imagine a surfing session gone very wrong when a strong offshore wind blows you out into the ocean. You’re alone on your board, at the mercy of the weather. No one knows you’re out here and you have no way of calling for help. Do you have what it takes to endure until a rescue arrives? And then we tell you the true story of someone who did.

As we get ready to roll out new Science of Survival episodes beginning November 14, we wanted to replay the one that started it all. This thrilling re-creation of the classic Outside feature by Peter Stark leads the listener through a series of plausible mishaps on a bitterly cold night: a car accident on a lonely road, a broken ski binding that foils a backcountry escape, a disorienting tumble in the snow, and a slow descent into delirious hypothermia before (spoiler alert!) a dramatic rescue. Be prepared for a vivid and fascinating exploration of our physiological response to extreme cold that will forever change how you think about venturing into frozen landscapes.

Peak performance has always been about getting as close to your genetic potential as possible. The limits of your training, nutrition, and recovery are dictated by your DNA. But what if they weren’t? What if you could change the genetic code you were born with? As sequencing DNA gets cheaper and faster, and gene-editing tools get more precise and easy to use, we’re progressing toward a world where we might all have perfect DNA for our chosen sport—and be able to change it whenever we want. But getting there will be risky. In this final installment of our four-part look at the science of performance, Outside editor Christopher Keyes looks at the efforts of Josiah Zayner, who is taking a damn-the-torpedoes approach to doing everything he can to bring gene editing to a laboratory—or even a garage—near you.

If you want to understand sleep deprivation, you want to talk to a member of the Navy SEALs, who go nearly a week without rest during training. And there’s probably no better Navy SEAL to talk to than Kirk Parsley, the physician who started noticing all sorts of problems with his fellow elite soldiers. They weren’t recovering from workouts, they had trouble concentrating, and they were emotionally unstable. The culprit: they weren’t getting enough zzz’s. After a decade studying the benefits of sleep, Parsley says that getting enough rest at night is the single most effective performance-enhancing habit. Miss two hours of sleep and he can tell. Here, he goes beyond the eight-hour rule to talk specifically about how shuteye makes you faster, stronger, and smarter, and how sleep aids can actually do more harm than good.

Several decades ago, radio producer Scott Carrier and his brother Dave tried to chase down an antelope on foot. That might sound crazy, but Dave was an evolutionary biologist and had just come up with a radical idea: during the heat of the day, humans can outrun most any creature, even one of the world’s fastest animals. His theory was that humans had evolved as endurance predators, able to hunt without weapons. So the brothers gave it a shot, and Scott produced a story about the efforts that absolutely captivated people, especially young men. We talk with Scott about this and replay his amazing piece, which still feels fresh and relevant today.