Reviewer

Cal Reiner

Structural welder, 20 yrs · 80+ programs bought & tested · Central Texas

Cal spent twenty years as a structural welder in central Texas before moving to the desk. He prepped through 2020 the hard way — starting with an ice-storm power outage in 2013 that left his family without water for three days, which sent him down a rabbit hole that cost him several thousand dollars in courses before he found the ones worth owning. He went through four dating programs in the year after his divorce in 2014, not for journalism, just because he was forty and did not know what he was doing; two were junk, one was useful, and one he still thinks about. He started writing about what he bought in 2022, partly to recoup his losses and partly because the honest reviews genuinely were not there. Since then he has purchased and worked through more than 80 survival, self-defense, and men's dating programs. He field-tests anything physical — water filtration, food storage, self-defense drills — before writing. He will tell you when a $197 PDF is a $197 PDF and when it is actually worth clearing shelf space for.

108 reviews on the desk