I will see you there!
[00:00:08] EJ Snyder, thanks for joining us today, my man. EJ Snyder Hey, thanks for having me, James. I'm really excited to be here with you guys today talking about one of my favorite things, Prepper Camp and what we're gonna be talking about out there and looking forward to it. Appreciate you having me on today. No doubt. So through all your experience and we'll get into it. I had a question for you right at the top. What do you think people get wrong most about wilderness survival?
[00:00:38] I think what people get wrong the most about wilderness survival is they, you know, a lot of times they, they, what do you say, they over inflate their own skill set, you know, their own. Oh, that's a good one. Their own abilities and they don't stay humble to it. They, they, they believe they can do more than they really can. And when you go to the wild, you got to stay humble and they underestimate what mother nature is going to throw at them.
[00:01:03] So for me and the nine pillars of survival that I teach, uh, the first one for me, people think right away. So shelter, fire. No, no, it's mindset. It's going in with the right mindset. If you go into any situation in the world, whether you're in an active shooter situation, you get lost in the wilderness, you get attacked by a bear. Any of those situations.
[00:01:23] It's about your mindset, having a positive mindset, a focused mindset, one that's goal oriented. And that is thinking outside the box and stays calm. I love it. The biggest thing that people have when they get in a situation that overwhelms them is they, they either panic, they get feared, they, they, they lose. They don't get calm. They, they start losing their mind. They get very anxiety. Oh, sure.
[00:01:50] And you, if you don't think logically in this world and you're thinking emotionally, you make bad decisions. So that's what I would set, put out there for that one. Beautiful. I think that's beautiful. So assuming we have, uh, listeners that haven't heard of you or don't know the full extent of things that you do. I think that's really kind of the story with EJ Snyder is like, you know, but do you really know him? Like, do you really know everything he's doing? Yeah.
[00:02:15] Give us a, give us a little bit of background, a little feeling on what's going on now, what you've done in the past, that kind of thing. You got it. Um, so EJ Snyder, you can follow me, uh, on all my social medias. Uh, you can go to ejsnyder.com. That's my website. You can find all things about EJ, what I got going on. We're actually redoing my website, but this, the one up there now is really good, but we're, we're retooling, uh, skull crusher survival, um, to skull crusher outdoors.
[00:02:41] So all things outdoors. Um, and so that's going on. Um, so go to ejsnyder.com. You can link up with all my social medias, survive with EJ on YouTube, all my social medias. Most of them, the tag is at EJ Snyder three, three, three, three. Yeah. That's my number. Three, three, three. And, uh, you can find me there. I am a kid that grew up in of all places, North Jersey, just outside New York city. All my classmates are like, Hey, how the hell you do what you do? You're wrestling them alligators.
[00:03:10] Alligators and stuff. It was a snot nose in the street and rolling up there eating pizza pie, you know, Hey. And so, uh, my father was a misplaced cowboy. So he was a carpenter by trade on the weekends. Uh, my folks divorced when I was very young. So when he had me and my kid brother, we knew, and we loved it. We were going to the woods. We were learning how to hunt fish, camp backpack, canoe, just getting out in the wilderness.
[00:03:36] He should have been in Colorado, quite frankly, but that started my love for the outdoors. And I knew that I didn't belong in a concrete jungle. I belonged in the wilderness. I was born in the wrong damn state. So fast forward at age 19, I joined the army after doing scouting. And I was a camp counselor, a nature guide and archery instructor through the YMCA. I went in the army just felt natural to me. We didn't have a lot of money. I didn't have any vision of going to college or anything like that.
[00:04:05] And so I joined the infantry. I was a paratrooper with the 82nd airborne, went to the 1991 Gulf war, earned my first bronze star during that war as a platoon sergeant. Um, through the process, I went to ranger school in 1988. And that's when I got my first taste of, uh, where's that ranger handbook? There it is. My ranger handbook and this thing here, you go through a pretty tough course, but to stay awake, I would go to the chapter that talked about survival stuff.
[00:04:32] And I reread that and I must've read it in this book a hundred times. And it, it just floored me about survival. Of course, the army, I was pushed in by Johnny Rambo, who I said, that guy I know isn't real, but somebody on this earth has to be that guy. And if not, I'm going to be that guy. So with the combination of those two things, I wound up becoming a ranger instructor in 1996 in Florida, in the swamps of Florida.
[00:04:59] Teaching survival, waterborne operations, boat operations. And in that they made me the primary survival and tracking instructor. So they sent me to a tracking school, sent me to SEER school, SEER level C, where I learned formally survival stuff and how to survive behind enemy lines, just like Johnny Rambo. So came back and I was, I was game on from that time forward over 30 years now, formally teaching survival to civilians and military alike.
[00:05:27] And I've gone to a few other survival courses at Arctic survival school. I've been to the Thai jungle school, survival school for in Thailand. And then I started traveling and learning with indigenous tribes and other folks that knew survival, because I believe you can never be, I hate the term expert in survival, because I'm a lifelong student of survival. And I think I can master a lot of things, but I'll never, you know, think I'll ever get it all. I will try.
[00:05:55] And so through that process, I went to the, back to the Iraq in the second time in Operation Iraqi Freedom, earned a second bronze star, Legion of Merit, Order of St. Maurice. In that time, I went for 15 months to Northern Iraq and Kirkuk. I retired after 25 years. What do I do now? And I really got into TV and film. I was trying to, while I was on the island of Hawaii at my last duty station, I started trying to consult on films for military and wilderness survival skills.
[00:06:26] Started doing some acting and stunt work. Was a huge fan of the show Survivor. Applied for it multiple times. And when I was teaching, I went out and became a contract seer instructor teaching survival skills. Okay. At Warfare Center in North Carolina, where I've been living ever since. And I got the call from Survivor. Long story short, I was made the final cast. They replaced me with another guy, the football coach, Jimmy Johnson, the Dallas Cowboy coach.
[00:06:55] And that's a bad thing because I'm a Giants fan. But whatever. I started floating around about the people who were looking for certain characters to be on these reality shows. And lo and behold, Discovery Channel discovered me, no pun intended, for dual survival. I went and tried out when they were replacing the first host, Dick Canterbury. Yep. Tried out with four other guys. I wound up coming in second place.
[00:07:19] But they had a little crazy show that they were planning, little beknownst to me, that I wound up filming the very first show of Naked and Frayed. Filmed the pilot episode, was consulting and helping produce it. Wow. That was a little over 12 years ago. Wow. God, time flies. Nice. And we're like 18 seasons into this thing and a whole bunch of spinoffs now.
[00:07:42] And I'm very proud of that, that I got to have a whole bunch of other outdoors men and women to get out there and take that experience on, which is a real life experience. I've done six total challenges, never tapped out 206 days. I later went on to host season nine of Dual Survival. Nice. I was in First Man Out and a whole bunch of other TV things. But besides that, I'm a published writer and an author over probably hundreds of articles and magazines and periodicals.
[00:08:10] I published my first book, Emergency Home Preparedness, on the 1st of October. I'm already working on several other books. I'm a motivational speaker, a life coach, serial entrepreneur. I own Skullcrusher LLC. I just stepped down from Survival Mastery due to I had too much going on and they were going a different direction. And I just need to take care of my personal things like my pickle company, Freedom Pickles, which is blowing up. We're going to be at Prepper Camp. So you can taste our pickles.
[00:08:38] Best tasting pickle on the planet and the healthiest scores of 90 on the Yucca app. I have a Rocco Ventures, which is my consulting life coach company. I own a tow truck company down in Florida. I just closed the bar, sold two apps, and I am part of Freedom 75, a veteran company that is helping veterans through getting tactical gear and getting outside. I'm partnered with them. And I think that's about it. But when do I sleep? Ah, you know, just saying, you'll sleep when we get ready to head on.
[00:09:08] But I sleep five hours a night, not a minute more. And I love life, love doing everything in it. But the bigger important thing for me, like we're here today, and I know that's a little bit long. But as I get out in front of all these great people and I put the message that God put on me, which is getting the word about surviving tough days. Yeah. Getting your mindset right and having the skills at whatever level you're at to do that.
[00:09:34] And so any medium I can get in front of people, whether it's TV, radio, writing, speaking, or podcasts, or my YouTube channel, I am armored by God to get this out there. Because one, he built me a certain way, and there's not a lot of people that are cut from the cloth that I am. Sure. And this is what you'll say about EJ Snyder.
[00:09:58] Tough as nails, huge heart of gold, and a skillful, natural leader, charismatic. And when a bad situation comes, I head to the sounds of the gun. I head into the fire. I don't run away from it. And if it's my time to go on that day, you know, I've made my peace with this world, made my peace with God. Here I come. So... Roger that, man. Roger that, man.
[00:10:22] So what are you bringing out of that universe of yours, which you have over there? You have like a whole universe of EJ. What are you bringing to Prepper Camp? What are you going to be teaching to the... What are you doing? Two classes, right? I'm doing two classes. The first class, you know, so I'll have my booth set up out there. So you come over and see Skullcrusher Outdoors. I'll have a bunch of survival gear there. You can come take pictures with me, talk story, ask questions. I got autographs.
[00:10:52] I've got videos of survival training that I've done that you can purchase. All kinds of stuff. I will be... My first class that I'm going to be speaking on is Emergency Home Preparedness. I got a little light going on there. It's okay. And so this book here is my first published book. Very proud of it. It actually comes from my website, the video Ultimate Bug-In and Home Defense Guide. We published just the, you know, bug-in portion of it called Emergency Home Preparedness. We've sold over 2,000 copies.
[00:11:22] You can find it on Amazon or at Prepper Camp. Come get a signed copy from me. But I'll be doing a class on the basics of home preparedness. Not going to do the whole book, but I'm going to give you what I call the Everyday Joe or Joan, Down and Dirty. What one needs to do in the different categories of preparing your home. One, how to get home. And when you do, you know, the top three to five things of what you need to do when it comes to shelter,
[00:11:48] food, water, security, morale, which is one thing that's always forgotten when people are preparing for the... Because we learned during the pandemic, 90% of the world stays home. Whether they're ordered to or not, they stay home. When people say, when the shit hits the fan, I'm going to bug out. Well, that's not true. We found that only 10% of the populace bugs out. Half of them are bugging out to go bug in somewhere else.
[00:12:17] Yeah, that's what I like. A friend's house, a place they've set up already, which is good. And then there's the other half like me that can just go out with just a knife. A shout out to my good friend, Mark Begg of Begg Knives. It's beautiful. Blade Brothers. This is something he gave me last Blade Show. And good fixed blade knife is always good to have, but I'll get out there and I'll be able to do it. So we created this book to help people, whether you're an urbanite in the city,
[00:12:45] somebody living in the great urban areas or the cul-de-sacs of the neighborhoods outside the city or out in the rural areas. The good thing I find, though, with a lot of rural people that grew up farming or in the country, well, they've been doing this their whole life. So most of them are way ahead of the game compared to others. And that's okay. My goal with anything I teach, whether it's the Survive with EJ survival class or at my YouTube page,
[00:13:14] is to teach the everyday Joe or Joan to be the best them they can be within their limitations, their skills, physical limitations, health concerns, any of that stuff, to give them the self-confidence to be able to know they'll be okay. And so that's the first class I'm going to be giving. The second class is another fun and favorite topic of mine. If you're an overlander out there, you know about it's bug-out vehicles, the different types, how to prepare them, what speed, the situations you need to think about when you're moving in a convoy.
[00:13:43] Although I think someone's giving a convoy class at our Prepper Camp folks. If you aren't signed up for Prepper Camp, they're having a sale right now. You better get some tickets because let me tell you, we've got a plethora of speakers, not just EJ, but I'm going to be, if I have the time to sit in some of these classes. So I'm not going to dab into anybody else's classes. I may just give it a hint and go, hey, sign up for this class like convoy. Sure. But I will touch on it. And I'll probably have my bicycle there that I use for bicycle bug-outting.
[00:14:13] My truck, which looks like the zombie apocalypse is coming. Most people, when they see my truck, they ask me, hey, who's in that truck? Is it Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers or what? Because I've got some crazy stuff up top. I look forward to seeing it. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a crazy-ass shovel up there that I got from Prepper Camp. The guy had it. He had this little bunker on wheels, I called it. It was a trailer. Oh, yeah. I saw it. Mammoth Rigs. It's mammoth. Yeah, that's it.
[00:14:42] Mammoth. Yeah, mammoth something. Well, he had this shovel on there called Crazy Beaver. And the doggone shovel literally has teeth. And so I was like, I got to have that. And it was red and black, which is my colors for my logo. My truck is silver, red, and black all over. So it was perfect. I'm a little OCD that way. That's okay. And so that's what I'll be teaching. And also Freedom Pickles will be there. We'll be doing pickle tasting. We'll have jars of pickle for purchase. Nice.
[00:15:11] We have a dill. We have a garlic and a hot and spicy. And if we have some of our new flavors launched by then, we may have a sour, a special recipe, and a couple others. But we're growing. We're a startup company at the moment. So we can't overwhelm ourselves with too many flavors at the moment. So that's what I'm bringing. What are you bringing? Well, I'll be bringing the coffee, man. Disaster coffee. You've got to have coffee. I'm sure we'll be linking up.
[00:15:42] What do you got? I've drank mushroom coffee from Rise. If you haven't tried Rise or heard about them, I encourage you to do that. You know, mom says eat your vegetables and eat your mushrooms. Well, I wasn't a kid that liked mushrooms much. But later, like these last couple of years, when I go to the woods, I find mushrooms like all the time. It actually started back in 2020. And I got in love with oyster mushrooms. And I enjoyed their taste. I found them by the bushel full.
[00:16:12] Like when I was on my 60 Day Naked Afraid Challenge, I found five pounds of them one day. And we had mushroom soup. Oh, my God. We're feeding seven of us. So, you know, that was a big score. So everybody got quite a bit in their belly that night. And so I've been studying mushrooms. And people don't understand how healthy God's put on our earth everything we need for food, for healing yourself, taking care of inflammation, vitamins. You just need to know where to look.
[00:16:39] And so I've become fascinated with mushrooms. So I drink the mushroom tea. It's a mushroom coffee. It has caffeine in it. It's got a little coffee in it. But it has six of the essential mushrooms you need in your life, like lion's mane, shaka, reishi, and these things. So I've been testing it for the company. They sent me a couple because I was really – I don't want to purchase it. And I'm on their monthly semi-year day because I'm drinking three of them a day. But you drink it.
[00:17:09] I didn't do it for two days. And I noticed not having it in my system. Wow. Because I also take mushroom supplements. What did you feel? Whenever I'm starting something new health-wise, I'll try it for a week. I'll stop it for like three days just to see what happens. And then I know it works because I'm quite a healthy guy. I'm a very natural person. I think you shouldn't put certain things in your body that are out there. Like my pickles, for instance.
[00:17:37] It was very crucial for us to be able to naturally process our pickles so that they're naturally preserved. We use a natural salt in it. So it's a healthy salt for you with a low sodium count. So it's good salt for you because your body needs salt. No chemicals, no dyes, no GMOs, no garbage, no preservatives. And our pickles are locally sourced, organic if we can get them until we can start growing them ourselves.
[00:18:02] Our garlic, our dill, and all our spices, we grow ourselves. Oh, that's great. So you get a healthy pickle. It's not just – I promise the best tasting. A lot of people, when they eat it, they don't understand what they're tasting because they've been eating malin olive or some of these other ones. Yeah, yeah. We put three chemicals in there that will give you cancer and take you to an early grave. So please don't eat malin olive. I love that they employ a lot of people. Come work for us at Freedom Pickles. There you go. Because you know you're putting a healthy product out there.
[00:18:32] We score a 90 on the Yucca app. I'll say that again. A 90 when you take that Yucca app and you scan the little UPC codes, it tells you what's in there. And ain't nobody close to us. To score a 90 on that for any food product is amazing. So we're really proud of it. Look at us up at freedompickles.com. Check us out. We are a veteran-owned company, Army. My partner's an Air Force guy. He's New York. I'm Jersey. We love pickles.
[00:18:57] We got his grandmama Marion's world-famous old-world recipe. It got Will to my partner, Jason. And in honor of her, we were making these pickles the old-school way, canned cooking them, cooking the brine, hand-pack them, put the labels on by hand, and we are giving back a portion of our proceeds to veteran causes or charities. And we're hiring a lot of veterans once we start standing our canneries up to work for us, truck for us, do our tastings, and helping out veterans.
[00:19:27] And so if you go to my website, if you take a class with me, you buy one of my books, you get an autograph, I always donate 20% of any proceeds that Skullcrusher LLC makes to veterans. Wow. So I give back to veterans. I do a lot of work with veterans, especially homeless veterans, and especially cancer's another big cause of mine in kids. Yeah. That's a good trifecta. Well, look, man, I can't wait to meet you in person. It's been a long time coming.
[00:19:58] Thanks for joining us on the show today, folks. Hey, let's talk one last thing if we got a minute. You got a minute, James? Sure. Last year was my first prepper camp, and me and Rick and Jane have been trying to get me out there for a while. I signed up a few times, but then that always is the time Naked Afraid gives you a call in September. Oh, of course. And I hit Yankoff for an adventure, so I had to pull out. But I went last year. We had Hurricane Helene hit. Yeah.
[00:20:25] And where else to be in a natural disaster than with a bunch of survivalist preppers? And there was about 250 to 300 of us out there early. So a lot of people come early. They camp out, get ready for the weekend event. But a day, ground zero, day one of prepper camp, it hit. And I still came. I'm driving through this thing. I'm on the east side of it, coming from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Got my trailer with me. And I came. And it blew through.
[00:20:52] But man, if you don't know, I'm sure you heard the stories about what happened in Western North Carolina. Me and Pork Chop out there cutting with chainsaws, cutting the road so people can get to the event. Sure. Then we started helping. After that event was over, I stayed five days and helped out the local communities because I've been looking for land out that way. And then I came back to Fayetteville. What else can we do? We started sending convoys of supplies in as much as we could every day. And then I got a call from a buddy who was in trouble up on Banner Elk Mountain. Nobody could get to him.
[00:21:21] He was running out of batteries for one of his needed medical pieces of equipment, which meant when he didn't have any more power, he was going to be facing a life and death situation. I went and traded in my little five by eight, got me a six by 10 trailer, enclosed trailer, loaded up with supplies, got a team waiting for me at a distribution center so we can grab more supplies. And we went into the zone and I stayed there for over 10 weeks.
[00:21:48] I went over every inch of that place because I got the skill set and the weather all to get to places up in the hollers where other people couldn't go and check on people. I had an intel guy with me that was marking down bridges that were out, roads washed away, what the situation was, where we went. We were sharing that information across an amazing battlefield. Forget FEMA. They were just in the way causing problems. And that's the truth. And I'm not throwing, you know, salt in their wounds because there's some good people over there I know.
[00:22:17] But they were in the way. We had special operators setting up action bases we call FOBs, F-O-Bs, board operating bases. A guy named Smith over there at the Harley-Davidson dealership near Black River in Swanoa Valley where that was one of the worst hit. We had a place up north at Banner Elk at the Elk River Airfield. And we set up stuff down in Bryson City. We joined the Cherokee Nation.
[00:22:44] They let us set up a place out there bringing in volunteers with helicopters and planes and volunteers coming in with skill sets to do first aid from all over the country. But the problem was there was no management of these assets, nobody talking to each other. So we set up an Intel infrastructure so people could go on there and see where people needed help. So not everybody was stepping on everybody.
[00:23:09] This guy, Bill, who was a former COO for Blackwater, this is one of his specialties. He was helping organize things. I was trying to kind of assist him in doing that. And I'm very proud of the work we did out there. I brought Epic Times out there to do an article on me and what my team was doing as well as to do a video. And they did about a 20-minute special on it, getting stories with people that were affected by it, got my opinion about it.
[00:23:38] And just I want them to go around with me, embed it, and see the damage so we had a legitimate documented reality of what was really going on. It's huge, man. So please don't forget about Western North Carolina. We're coming up on one year, and they've been forgot about. The first administration clearly did not care for whatever reasons, conspiracy you want to say or whatever you put your tinfoil hat on. A lot of it is very true.
[00:24:08] But once the new administration got in there, they made a lot of promises. A lot of big things started happening. But we could still do better. It's not that they forgot about us because once they got in, the big trucks started moving in and building roads, which is what we needed to get up into the mountain. Oh, definitely. They opened up I-40 almost overnight. So there was good stuff going on, but there's still more to be done. We got to remind the Trump administration, hey, we're still out here. We still need help.
[00:24:36] Because what's going on, you know, God bless the governor who's trying to help. Personally, in my opinion, the wrong guy got in there. But he is trying to help and do what he can with the money to afford it. And the astronomical number is in the billions. And what we're getting from FEMA and some other places due to regulations and rules is not going to cut it. It's just going to put a dent in it, but not enough. So I think we're at this pepper camp on the anniversary.
[00:25:06] I'm going to have a donation bucket out there to help out. One of my good friends that's with Mr. Beast. He works with Mr. Beast. He's doing a lot of stuff about bringing – he's been bringing RVs out there to families that, you know, had to go through the winter in tents. Yeah. And we can't have them do that again because they only got $750 from FEMA and they were told it was a loan. Yeah, I remember. And God bless those in the California area that they lost everything in the fires. That's tragic.
[00:25:36] That was preventable. Yeah. That was kind of a self-inflicted wound. But nonetheless, those are our American brothers and sisters out there. You got that right. But it's funny how they were handed, in a lot of cases, $180,000 without question. And then we're sitting over here and people that may not even be on the census report are living in Walmart tents. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the propane lines and everything. Not trying to turn this into anything political.
[00:26:05] My point is remember Western North Carolina. We're still digging out. We ought to do something this year at Prepper Camp for those people. It's a good call. Think about that. I appreciate you having these names. Thank you. Yeah, no doubt. You were great. Everyone at EJStatter.com, everything EJ. You got it, man. I'll talk to you soon. Remember, survival's simple. Just don't die. I like it. Talk to you soon, man. See you. Hey, we'll see you.
