Smash Notes
037: Dan Richards | When Should You Quit?
Dan Richards, Global Rescue CEO, is here to remind you that there’s a fine line between pushing through adversity and putting yourself in unreasonable peril. His company Global Rescue rescues those who walk that line then somehow slip, any place in the world. He shares stories of some of those rescues and what they taught him…
People
Notes
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Dan Richards says a one-week Global Rescue membership starts at $119, and that amount gives full access to every service. A helicopter, a fixed-wing aircraft, or a ground team all come with the one-week price.
Global Rescue keeps the major helicopter companies in Nepal under contract and uses the helicopters 20 or 30 times a year. When weather blocks a flight, a ground team travels on foot or with yaks, horses, and Nepalese ponies, and sometimes the rescuers show up on horseback. The medical membership covers a need for hospitalization more than 160 miles from home, plus a field rescue off a mountain, out of a desert, or out of another difficult environment. The security membership covers danger of imminent grievous bodily harm, including Egypt during the Arab Spring and Haiti after the earthquake. Operators decide whether a place is too dangerous to enter right away, then wait and try again.
In the 10 years since Dan Richards founded Global Rescue, the company has always reached someone who requested a rescue.
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Dan Richards says his company handled an open-ocean rescue about a month before the conversation. An ocean rowing team was rowing from India to Australia. About halfway there, one teammate was boiling a pot of water and dumped it on his thigh. He had third degree burns over the top of his thigh. Sun and salt in that harsh environment made the burn septic very quickly.
The team reached Dan Richards by satellite phone. His group worked with the Australian Navy and identified a freighter already passing on its way to Australia. They coordinated a rendezvous between the two vessels, got the injured rower aboard, and got him to a hospital a few days later. He was fine. Joe De Sena asked whether the rest of the rowing team continued without him. They did. Dan Richards calls them a hardcore group, and he says it was not only men: he thinks two women were on board as well.
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Colonel Tim Nye lived in Hawaii for four years and watched people go up a volcano and then fail to get down. Choppers, state rangers, or the military had to go in. The cost sat on the taxpayer, with no program to reimburse it. Colonel Nye asks why a taxpayer should fund a trip someone took unprepared.
Dan Richards prices a one-week Global Rescue membership at $119. The panel calls that price the inexpensive fix, and a very small percentage of people ever place the call. Bucket-list striving still sends people with no business on the trip after another trophy. Joe De Sena says Spartan Race pushes people to get outside, and running sweep is about getting people off the course safely. Pick the spot. Do not go into the middle of the jungle on a first trip.
Shackleton had no GPS device and nobody extracting him. Satellites let a traveler in the wilderness stay in touch, which changes the explorer expedition mentality. The traveler is not fully alone. Unforeseen trouble includes a weather change, a tree falling, or political unrest. True pilot error is failing to prepare, failing to think the trip through, or leaving the right equipment behind.