- If you really wanted to go naked in the woods,
why don't you just go do it?
You don't need to be humiliated on TV.
I mean, the pay isn't that great.
(upbeat music)
My name is Christopher Nyerges,
I run the School of Self-Reliance
and I teach people practical outdoor skills,
but also things that anybody living in the city
can practice for.
Self-reliance, for living more economically and so forth.
One of the things that I've done,
is worked as a consultant for the Naked and Afraid TV show.
I would vet contestants, and talk with them,
and listen to how they want to be on the show.
And usually they're inflated views of themselves,
and it takes me a few, you know,
a few minutes to cut through the lies.
And sometimes the people are very qualified.
Today, we're playing "Rust".
I have no idea what it's gonna be about,
but I hope I survive.
Okay, here we go.
On a beach with nothing.
Oh no, something is wrong.
Okay, how'd I get here.
- [Woman] So you can't tell, but you are naked.
- I'm naked?
If you really wanted to go naked in the woods,
why don't you just go do it?
There's some grasses that I could maybe weave something.
Got a lot of rocks, maybe some tools, a lot of trees,
maybe some shelter.
I don't know how I got to be naked on the beach,
that's terrible.
Oh, okay, here's a rock.
Let's see, okay, let's see what we can do with this.
Maybe I'm gonna make a shelter.
Let's see what this rock is gonna do.
Sometimes you can get flakes of rock
that will fracture nice and neatly to be like a knife.
So in this case, maybe my barbarian instincts
are taking over and I'm just barbarizing this tree.
Whack, whack, whack.
Oh, there we go, got a tree.
I don't know what we're gonna do with it.
Now this isn't the way I would actually do it
in real life, by the way.
But this barbarian, this naked barbarian,
if that's me right now,
I would probably get a sharp flake
and work it at the bottom or even better,
burn the tree down if I needed wood or find dead wood.
Let's try making a spear with some of this wood.
A spear, it might be good for fish, for small game.
Okay, here, look at that.
Let's go down to the water.
All life has to relate to water.
So you're in a survival situation, go to where the water is.
Oh, let's see what we can eat now.
Let's see what we can eat.
So there's some ferns, the young uncurling fronds
of all the ferns I could eat.
I don't know about that mushroom though.
I guess night already?
Okay, let's make a fire.
With a fire we'll stay warm, we can cook the food,
maybe that ridiculous mushroom if it's edible.
Hey, what is that?
Somebody's over there.
Or somebody was over there.
There's some kind of a structure there.
I would just go ask them for some pants.
We're gonna try to make a fire.
I see the sun is still up.
If I had a lens, I could make a fire.
I'm gonna need tinder.
Oh man, the sun is down already
so now I have to do friction or chemistry.
There's a lighthouse.
Oh hey, look at that, somehow I got a fire.
I'm better than I thought I was.
Let's burn something, burn some dry stuff.
Oh hey, look at that.
The ability to make a fire is one of the hardest things,
one of the skills
that you should definitely take the time to master.
I need some shelter.
I just, I want more than just a fire.
I need a little lean-to.
Wow, look at that.
That's better than the house that I live in, I think.
We have a little bit of wind protection, that's good.
Okay, now what?
We want a shelter, we want to keep that fire going.
We want tools.
I died?
That might happen, you know pigs, the wild ones
that have those tusks, they can cut you up so easily.
Uh-oh, I have my club, I have my rock,
same silly rock.
I want to be careful,
it looks like an abandoned part of the city.
I would be extremely cautious.
These grasses might have grass seeds that I can eat.
Yeah, these guys are gonna go after me.
And oh, what?
I'm dead again?
See, in real life, I would've stayed away from those guys.
I need food, I am starving.
A wild chicken like that would not be in the wild.
It'd be picked off really quickly,
but I'm gonna try to go after it.
That looks like a domestic chicken.
I could probably run it down.
Look at that, I'm not a good aim.
Oh, look at that.
Ah, dinner!
You're gonna have dinner now.
Oh, that poor thing.
That chicken gave its life for me.
A road, a road?
Okay, if I'm trying to get somewhere, follow the road,
stay on the road.
Unless I'm trying to avoid people, avoid the road.
Did we build that?
That's not too shabby.
That's way beyond the ability of a person
to build in an emergency setting.
If you have all of those reeds, that's not too bad.
Now we want a roof.
Oh yeah, this is very ambitious.
This would take you all day to do this.
Even if you don't have a fire in a shelter like this,
the enclosed, encapsulated space,
traps your body heat.
So you gotta have some kind of a roof.
A hat for your house.
Only the God of the game would call your roof a hat.
I would be eating the cactus in real life.
Those palms, I would be digging into,
if that's an agave, the heart is edible.
Hey, there's a lot of food here,
even though this is a desert environment.
I could be eating my water.
Come on, makers of the game,
allow me to get my water from the cacti.
Does it relate to the real world?
There's some intellectual things that I can see
that you might get from this.
But the real world is much more nuanced
in terms of what you can do,
or what you can't do, or what you will do, or you won't do
because of what you know, or what you know it will lead to.
Other than that, it's interesting.
In an emergency, you want clothing first.
So that's your shelter at a short distance.
And then to make a quick emergency shelter, like a lean-to,
or a body hollow, we make the simple ones
in three or four hours.
Even a small lean-to that you can get into
that traps your body heat will help you survive.
Now, let's check out this water.
No, you could sip a saline water.
I could sip some of this,
but you can't just drink the water if you're dehydrated
'cause it's gonna cause a net water loss.
You're gonna vomit, you're gonna have diarrhea.
Give me pants, I need pants.
'Cause always do the most convenient thing,
the most readily available
that causes the least damage to provide for your needs.
And what's this?
This is like a cistern,
cisterns have water in them.
And cisterns actually might provide protection.
It can't be a medieval castle.
I don't think that somebody's home.
Oh, oh, look at that.
Look at that guy.
See, you could stand, what?
I died?
They could cut you up so easily,
(echoing) so easily.
(soft piano music)
We have a beach, there's probably fish down there.
There's probably crustaceans of some sort.
There should be seaweeds.
I could eat, dry, cook, eat the seaweeds.
(rock crashing)
I guess I'm gonna get some food there.
It would be a possible choice.
What, what, what?
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Who is that?
What? Okay.
Junkyards are awesome.
You have metal, you have tools.
Okay, who's this?
I need weapons.
Before I had a chance, they knocked me off.
Still naked.
Still a naked guy in the woods.
Oh, oh, hey, hey, hey, hey, whack!
I'm gonna whack, oh, okay.
I'm probably stupid and naked again just like before.
Okay, that looks like a "Mad Max" town.
Look at that.
Oh this is a very unfriendly place
where they're protecting something.
That means they have something to protect.
Oh okay, somebody already shot at me, get down.
I need to duck, I need to hide, I need to crawl.
Oh, get him, fight him, get his weapon.
Who is he?
See, I always believe that, why fight?
Your enemy could be a friend.
Oh, well that guy didn't think that.
(loud booming)
I don't know where I am.
Oh, there we go,
look, the Gods of the game have given me fire.
Isn't that awesome?
Uh-oh.
(cultists chanting)
This looks like I'm in Australia.
No, that's not Australia.
We've got some cultists,
some crazy cult followers here,
doing some weird,
oh yeah, look at that.
(rock crashing)
No, no, no no.
Oh, oh.
You know, that's life.
Sometimes death is a blessing.
There are people there who are incredible hoarders.
Way beyond what is reasonable.
When you are in the sharing mode, there's more for all,
there's more people to do more work.
It's actually a more positive thing.
I don't think that was in this.
I don't know if I had an option in this "Rust" game
to be a part of a larger community.
All there was, was I have to defend myself right away.
Kill them before they kill me.
What kind of world is that?
People think, well that's the way it is.
No, nothing is the way it is in the world
unless you make it that way.
I'm gonna score the game.
So 1 to be the worst,
and 10 to be the most accurate to life.
I am gonna give it a 6, I'll say a 6.
If your mindset is,
that I want to extract lessons from this?
Then, go do the real work in the real world.
I think you might get something out of it.
And I try to impart the necessity
of treating life sacredly and specially, it's not a game.
This is a game, but in real life, it's not quite that way.
(dinging music)