Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Jordan Jonas,

00:00:03.340 | winner of "Alone" season six,

00:00:05.920 | a show where the task is to survive alone

00:00:09.300 | in the Arctic wilderness longer than anyone else.

00:00:12.800 | He is widely considered to be one of,

00:00:16.120 | if not the greatest competitors on that show.

00:00:19.280 | He has a fascinating life story

00:00:21.560 | that took him from a farm in Idaho

00:00:24.920 | and hoboing on trains across America

00:00:28.560 | to traveling with nomadic tribes in Siberia.

00:00:32.440 | All that helped make him into a world-class explorer,

00:00:37.960 | survivor, hunter, wilderness guide,

00:00:40.120 | and most importantly, a great human being

00:00:43.880 | with a big heart and a big smile.

00:00:46.880 | This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation.

00:00:51.200 | Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode,

00:00:57.000 | I'll start answering some questions

00:00:59.320 | and will try to articulate my thinking

00:01:01.400 | on some top-of-mind topics.

00:01:04.360 | So if that's of interest to you,

00:01:06.880 | keep listening after the episode is over.

00:01:10.080 | This is "Alex Rubin Podcast."

00:01:11.880 | To support it,

00:01:12.720 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:15.360 | And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas.

00:01:18.680 | You won "Alone" season six,

00:01:22.200 | and I think are still considered to be one of,

00:01:25.400 | if not the most successful survivor on that show.

00:01:29.040 | So let's go back.

00:01:30.040 | Let's look at the big picture.

00:01:31.600 | Can you tell me about the show "Alone"?

00:01:34.080 | How does it work?

00:01:35.120 | - Yeah, it's a show where they take 10 individuals

00:01:39.480 | and each person gets 10 items off of the list.

00:01:42.720 | You know, basic items would be an ax, a saw, a frying pan,

00:01:46.880 | you know, some pretty basic stuff.

00:01:48.760 | And then they send 'em all,

00:01:50.440 | drop 'em off all in the woods with a few cameras.

00:01:53.280 | And so the people are actually alone.

00:01:56.360 | There's not a crew or anything.

00:01:57.640 | And then you basically live there as long as you can,

00:02:02.080 | you know, and so the person that lasts the longest,

00:02:04.920 | you know, once the second place person taps out,

00:02:07.840 | they come and get you and that individual wins.

00:02:10.600 | So it's a pretty legit challenge.

00:02:14.360 | You know, they drop you off,

00:02:16.800 | helicopter flies out,

00:02:18.080 | and you're not gonna get your next meal

00:02:20.000 | until you make it happen, so.

00:02:22.320 | - So you have to figure out the shelter,

00:02:23.480 | you have to figure out the source of food,

00:02:25.120 | and then it gets colder and colder

00:02:26.520 | 'cause I guess they drop you out in a moment

00:02:29.280 | where it's going into the winter.

00:02:31.160 | - Yeah, they typically do it in temperate,

00:02:33.480 | colder climates, things like that.

00:02:35.240 | And they start in September, October,

00:02:37.920 | so the time's ticking when they drop you off.

00:02:40.080 | And yeah, the pressure's on.

00:02:43.140 | You know, you get overwhelmed with all the things

00:02:45.600 | you have to do right away.

00:02:46.680 | Like, oh man, I'm not gonna eat again

00:02:48.520 | until I actually shoot or catch something.

00:02:50.960 | Gotta build a shelter.

00:02:52.040 | It's pretty overwhelming.

00:02:53.400 | Figure your whole location out,

00:02:55.160 | but it's interesting 'cause once you're there

00:02:57.200 | a little while, you kind of get into a,

00:03:00.160 | well, at least for me I did.

00:03:01.440 | There was like a week, or maybe not a week,

00:03:03.960 | but that I was kind of a little more annoyed with things.

00:03:07.520 | You know, it's like, oh, my sight sucks, sucks.

00:03:10.680 | And then you kind of accept it.

00:03:13.280 | Like, you know what, it is what it is.

00:03:14.560 | No amount of complaining's gonna do anybody any good,

00:03:18.240 | so I'm just gonna make it happen.

00:03:20.680 | And so then, or, you know, do my best to.

00:03:22.520 | And then I felt like I got in a zone

00:03:24.280 | and I felt like I was right back in kind of Siberia

00:03:26.720 | or in that head space,

00:03:27.880 | and I found I actually really enjoyed it.

00:03:30.720 | I'd been a little bit out of, I guess you'd call it,

00:03:33.040 | the game 'cause I had had a child,

00:03:36.280 | and so when we had our daughter,

00:03:38.680 | we came back to the States,

00:03:40.180 | and then a bunch of things happened,

00:03:42.140 | and I just ended up, we didn't end up going back to Russia.

00:03:44.800 | So it'd been a couple years that I was just,

00:03:47.200 | you know, we were raising the little girl and boy, then.

00:03:49.880 | - So you've gotten a little soft.

00:03:51.120 | - So I was like, "Did I get a little soft?"

00:03:52.940 | (laughing)

00:03:55.280 | But then it was fun how after just some days there,

00:03:58.000 | I was like, "Oh man, I feel like I'm at home now."

00:04:00.880 | And then it was like, you're kind of in that flow state.

00:04:03.480 | - Actually, there's a few moments

00:04:04.760 | like when you left the ladder up or with the moose

00:04:08.000 | that you kind of screwed up a little bit.

00:04:09.960 | - Oh yeah.

00:04:10.800 | - How do you go from that moment of frustration

00:04:13.680 | to the moment of acceptance?

00:04:16.400 | - I mean, the more you put yourself in life

00:04:19.280 | in positions that are kind of outside your comfort zone

00:04:21.880 | or push your abilities,

00:04:24.100 | the more often you're gonna screw up.

00:04:26.040 | And then the more opportunity you have to learn from that.

00:04:29.480 | And then, to be honest, it's kind of funny,

00:04:31.480 | but you almost get to a position

00:04:32.920 | where you don't feel that uncomfortable.

00:04:37.280 | It's not unexpected.

00:04:38.400 | You kind of expect you're gonna mess up here and there.

00:04:40.920 | I remember particularly with the moose,

00:04:44.960 | the first moose I saw, I had a great shot at it,

00:04:48.040 | but I had a hard time judging distance

00:04:49.740 | because it was in a mud flat,

00:04:51.200 | which means it's hard to tell yardage.

00:04:55.600 | 'Cause you're usually typically going by trees or markers,

00:04:58.360 | be like, "Oh, I'm probably 30 yards away."

00:05:00.800 | This was a giant moose, and he was 40-something yards away.

00:05:03.920 | And I estimated that he was 30-something yards away,

00:05:06.320 | so I was way off and shot and dropped between his legs.

00:05:09.920 | And then I realized I had not grabbed my quiver,

00:05:11.960 | so I only had one shot,

00:05:13.160 | and I just watched him turn around and walk off.

00:05:15.940 | But I was struck initially with like...

00:05:20.040 | I actually noticed how unmad I was.

00:05:22.680 | I was like, "Oh, this is actually..."

00:05:24.280 | I was like, "That was awesome."

00:05:25.320 | That was like seeing a dinosaur.

00:05:26.520 | That was really cool.

00:05:27.360 | And then I was like, "Oh, what an idiot.

00:05:28.600 | "How'd I miss?"

00:05:29.440 | But then I was like...

00:05:30.560 | But it made me that much more determined

00:05:32.440 | to make it happen again.

00:05:35.000 | It was like, "Okay, nobody's gonna make this happen

00:05:38.580 | "except myself.

00:05:40.040 | "Can't complain.

00:05:40.880 | "It wouldn't have done me any good

00:05:41.700 | "to go back and mope about it."

00:05:43.300 | And so then I had a thought.

00:05:45.080 | I was like, "Oh, I remember the native guys telling me

00:05:49.180 | "they used to build these giant fences

00:05:51.200 | "and funnel game into certain areas and stuff."

00:05:53.680 | And I was like, "Man, that's a lot of calories,

00:05:55.480 | "but I have to make that happen again now."

00:05:58.440 | So I kinda went out there and tried that,

00:06:01.520 | and that was kind of an attempt at something, too.

00:06:03.800 | It could have failed or not worked,

00:06:05.120 | but sure enough, it worked.

00:06:07.280 | And the opportunity came again.

00:06:10.000 | The moose came wandering along,

00:06:11.440 | and I was able to get it.

00:06:13.000 | But being able to take failure,

00:06:15.120 | as soon as you can, the better.

00:06:17.080 | Accept it and then learn from it

00:06:19.000 | is kind of a muscle you have to exercise a little bit.

00:06:23.020 | - Well, it's interesting, 'cause in this case,

00:06:24.360 | the cost of failure is like,

00:06:25.920 | you're not gonna be able to eat.

00:06:27.760 | - Yeah, that was really interesting.

00:06:29.860 | I mean, the most interesting thing about that show

00:06:33.560 | was how high the stakes felt.

00:06:35.280 | 'Cause it didn't feel, you know,

00:06:36.480 | you didn't tell yourself you're on a show.

00:06:38.160 | At least I didn't.

00:06:39.000 | You just felt like you're gonna starve to death

00:06:41.300 | if you don't make this happen, so.

00:06:43.300 | The stakes felt so high.

00:06:45.200 | And it was an interesting thing to tap into,

00:06:49.840 | because, I mean, so many of our ancestors

00:06:51.680 | probably all just dealt with that on a regular basis,

00:06:54.400 | but it's something that we're,

00:06:55.960 | all the modern amenities and such,

00:06:58.560 | and food security that we don't deal with.

00:07:00.640 | And it was interesting to tap into

00:07:03.040 | what a kind of a peak mental experience that is,

00:07:07.040 | when you really, really need something to survive,

00:07:10.520 | and then it happens, it's, you can't imagine.

00:07:13.000 | I mean, that's what our, all our dopamine

00:07:14.720 | and receptors are tuned for that experience in particular.

00:07:19.320 | So it was, yeah, it was pretty awesome,

00:07:22.420 | but the pressure felt very on.

00:07:24.480 | Like, I always felt the pressure of providing or starving.

00:07:29.480 | - And then there's the situation

00:07:31.120 | when you left the ladder up.

00:07:33.080 | - Right. - And you needed fat,

00:07:34.560 | and what is it, the ovary needs some of the fat.

00:07:37.920 | - Right, yeah, well, it was,

00:07:39.600 | when I got the moose, I was so happy.

00:07:42.120 | The most joy I could almost experience maxed out.

00:07:45.320 | But I didn't think I,

00:07:47.720 | I didn't think I won at that point.

00:07:50.400 | I never thought like, oh, that's my ticket to victory.

00:07:52.720 | I thought, holy crap, it's gonna be me

00:07:55.280 | against somebody else that gets a moose now,

00:07:57.080 | and we're gonna be here six, eight months,

00:07:59.040 | who knows how long.

00:07:59.920 | And so I can't be here six, eight months and still lose.

00:08:03.080 | So I've gotta like,

00:08:04.420 | I've gotta out-produce somebody else with a moose.

00:08:06.720 | So I had all that in my head.

00:08:08.720 | And I already was, of course, pretty thin.

00:08:11.680 | And so I was just like, man,

00:08:13.040 | if somebody else gets a moose, I'm still gonna be behind.

00:08:15.160 | And so everything felt like precious to me.

00:08:18.080 | And then I had found a plastic jug,

00:08:20.080 | and I put a whole bunch of the moose's fat

00:08:21.920 | in this plastic jug and set it up on a little shelf.

00:08:24.800 | And I thought, ah, you know what, if a bear comes,

00:08:26.360 | I'll probably hear it, and I'll come out

00:08:27.600 | and be able to shoot it.

00:08:28.700 | So I went to sleep, and I woke up the next morning,

00:08:31.280 | and I went out, and I was like, where's that jug?

00:08:33.360 | And then I was like, wait a second,

00:08:36.040 | what are all these prints?

00:08:37.060 | And then I started looking around.

00:08:38.720 | And it took a second to dawn on me

00:08:40.440 | 'cause I haven't interacted with wolverines

00:08:42.760 | very often in life.

00:08:43.800 | And I was like, oh, those are wolverine tracks.

00:08:47.440 | And he was just so much sneakier

00:08:48.660 | than a bear would have been or something.

00:08:50.280 | So it kind of surprised me.

00:08:51.400 | And he took off with that jug of fat.

00:08:53.720 | And so then I went from feeling pretty good about myself

00:08:57.000 | to like, now I'm losing again against whoever,

00:08:59.420 | you know, this other person is with a moose.

00:09:01.160 | So I, again, kind of the pressure came back to,

00:09:04.960 | oh, no, I gotta produce again.

00:09:07.400 | You know, it wasn't the end of the world.

00:09:09.440 | And I think they may have exaggerated a little bit

00:09:12.200 | how little fat I had left.

00:09:14.080 | You know, I still had, a moose has a lot of fat.

00:09:16.120 | But it did make me feel like I was at a disadvantage again.

00:09:19.520 | And so, yeah, that was pretty intense

00:09:22.640 | 'cause those wolverines, they're bold little animals.

00:09:26.560 | And he was basically saying, no, this is my moose.

00:09:30.280 | (laughing)

00:09:32.080 | And I had to counter his claims.

00:09:34.660 | - Well, yeah, they're really, really smart.

00:09:36.480 | They figure out a way to get to places really effectively.

00:09:40.280 | Wolverines are like fascinating in that way.

00:09:42.480 | So let's go to that happy moment, the moose.

00:09:47.200 | You are the first and one of the only contestants

00:09:50.320 | to have ever killed a moose on the show,

00:09:52.320 | a big game animal with a bow and arrow.

00:09:55.640 | So this is day 20.

00:09:57.320 | So can you take me through the kill?

00:09:59.680 | - Yeah, so I'd missed one and I just decided

00:10:02.360 | I'm not here to starve.

00:10:04.080 | I'm here to try to become sustainable.

00:10:06.540 | So I was like, I don't care if it's a risk,

00:10:08.180 | I'm gonna build that fence.

00:10:09.240 | I built it.

00:10:10.460 | I would just pick berries and call moose every day.

00:10:13.780 | And it was actually really pleasant

00:10:15.400 | to sit in a berry patch and call moose.

00:10:17.440 | (laughing)

00:10:18.600 | But then I also had this whole trap

00:10:20.240 | and snare line set out everywhere.

00:10:21.880 | So I had all these, I was getting rabbits.

00:10:25.480 | But, and I was actually taking a rabbit out of a snare

00:10:31.060 | when I heard a clank 'cause I had set up

00:10:33.980 | kind of an alarm system with string and cans, so.

00:10:37.700 | - It was a brilliant idea.

00:10:38.880 | - Yeah, another thing that could have not worked,

00:10:41.300 | but it actually worked.

00:10:42.140 | (laughing)

00:10:43.300 | And it came through.

00:10:44.620 | And I was like, oh, I heard the cans clank.

00:10:46.460 | And I was like, no way.

00:10:47.300 | And so I ran over.

00:10:48.380 | I didn't know what it was exactly,

00:10:49.780 | but something was coming along the fence.

00:10:51.620 | And I ran over and jumped in the bush

00:10:53.980 | next to the funnel exit on the fence.

00:10:56.220 | And sure enough, the big moose came running up.

00:10:58.780 | And you know, your heart gets pounding like crazy.

00:11:01.620 | You're just like, no way, no way.

00:11:03.180 | I probably could have waited a little longer

00:11:05.180 | and had a perfect broadside shot.

00:11:07.140 | But I took the shot when he was,

00:11:09.140 | he was pretty close, like 24 yards.

00:11:12.820 | But he was quartering towards me,

00:11:14.740 | which makes it a little harder to make a perfect kill shot.

00:11:18.780 | You know, and so I hit it and it took off running.

00:11:22.160 | And I just thought, you know, I was super excited.

00:11:25.720 | I couldn't believe I actually, you know,

00:11:27.580 | I was like, oh my gosh, got the moose.

00:11:29.400 | I think that was a really good shot.

00:11:30.940 | You get all excited.

00:11:32.460 | But then it plays back in your head.

00:11:34.380 | And particularly when you're first learning to hunt,

00:11:37.540 | there's always an animal that gets away, you know,

00:11:39.860 | and you like make a bad decision

00:11:42.140 | or not a great shot or something.

00:11:44.780 | And it's just part of it.

00:11:47.260 | And so of course you're like,

00:11:49.540 | I'm not gonna be satisfied until I see this thing.

00:11:52.940 | So I followed the blood trail a little while

00:11:55.620 | and I saw some bubbly blood,

00:11:57.020 | which meant it was hitting the lungs,

00:11:58.620 | which meant it's not gonna live.

00:12:00.740 | You know, you'll get it.

00:12:01.580 | And so as long as you don't mess it up.

00:12:03.900 | And so I went back to my shelter and waited an hour.

00:12:06.460 | I skinned that rabbit that had caught

00:12:08.260 | and then super nervous, the slowest hour ever.

00:12:11.540 | And then I followed it along,

00:12:14.500 | ended up losing the blood trail.

00:12:16.300 | I was like, no, no.

00:12:18.100 | And then I was like, well, if there's no blood,

00:12:20.500 | I'm just gonna follow the path that I would go

00:12:23.100 | if I was a moose, you know,

00:12:24.260 | like the least resistance through the woods.

00:12:26.340 | So I followed kind of along the shore there

00:12:28.940 | and sure enough, I saw him up there.

00:12:30.740 | I was like, oh, you know, I was so excited.

00:12:33.140 | Lay down, but he hadn't died yet.

00:12:36.860 | And so he just sat there and he would stand up

00:12:40.700 | and I would just like, no, no, no, no.

00:12:43.780 | And he would lay back down and go, yes.

00:12:45.580 | And then he would stand up and it was like that

00:12:48.220 | for a couple hours it took him.

00:12:51.660 | And then finally at one point,

00:12:53.380 | you know, and a lot of people have asked like,

00:12:55.020 | why wouldn't you go finish it off?

00:12:57.060 | So when an animal like that gets hit,

00:12:59.740 | it had no idea what hit it.

00:13:01.220 | You know, it just all of a sudden it's like, ah,

00:13:02.780 | something got it and it ran off and it lays down

00:13:04.780 | and it's actually fairly calm

00:13:06.500 | and it doesn't really know what's going on.

00:13:08.540 | And if you can leave it in that state,

00:13:10.460 | it'll kind of bleed out and as peaceful as possible.

00:13:13.900 | If you go chase after it, that's when you lose an animal

00:13:18.380 | 'cause as soon as it knows it's being hunted,

00:13:20.740 | you know, it gets panicked,

00:13:21.940 | adrenaline and it can just run and run and run

00:13:24.100 | and you'll never find it.

00:13:25.700 | So I didn't want it to see me.

00:13:27.580 | I knew if I tried to get it with another arrow,

00:13:29.660 | there's a chance I could have finished it off,

00:13:31.180 | but there's also a not bad chance

00:13:34.320 | that it would see me take off or even attack

00:13:37.140 | 'cause moose can be a little dangerous.

00:13:38.580 | And so I just chose to wait it out.

00:13:41.340 | And at one point it stood up and fell over

00:13:44.100 | and I could tell it had died and walked over.

00:13:47.260 | Like you actually touch it and you're just like, whoa,

00:13:50.620 | no way, like that whole burden of weeks of,

00:13:53.980 | you're gonna starve, you're gonna starve.

00:13:56.020 | And it got rid of that demon.

00:13:58.140 | To be honest, it's one of the happiest moments of my life.

00:14:00.860 | It's really hard to replicate that joy

00:14:02.820 | because it was just so, so real.

00:14:05.260 | You're so directly connected to your needs.

00:14:08.260 | It's all so simple, you know?

00:14:09.860 | (laughs)

00:14:10.700 | It was a peak experience for sure.

00:14:14.860 | - And were you worried that it would take many more hours

00:14:17.460 | than it would take it into the night?

00:14:18.960 | - Yeah, I was.

00:14:19.800 | I mean, until you actually have your hands on it,

00:14:21.980 | I was worried the whole time.

00:14:23.820 | It's a pretty nerve wracking period there

00:14:25.780 | between when you get it and when you actually

00:14:28.540 | recover the animal, get your hands on it.

00:14:30.900 | So it took longer than I wanted, but I finally got it.

00:14:34.780 | - Can you actually speak to the kill shot itself

00:14:37.980 | just for people who don't hunt?

00:14:39.460 | - Yeah, so--

00:14:40.300 | - Like what it takes to stay calm,

00:14:41.500 | to not freak out too much, to like wait,

00:14:45.900 | but not wait too long.

00:14:47.020 | - Yeah, yeah, I mean, another thing about hunting

00:14:49.540 | is that for every animal you get,

00:14:51.320 | you probably don't get nine or 10

00:14:54.040 | that just turned the wrong way when you were drawn back

00:14:57.960 | or went way behind a tree or you never had a clean shot

00:15:00.440 | or whatever it is.

00:15:01.320 | And so every time you can see a moment coming,

00:15:06.320 | your heart really starts beating

00:15:07.800 | and you have to breathe through it.

00:15:10.920 | I can almost, you almost feel the nervousness of it.

00:15:13.440 | And then you just try to stay calm.

00:15:17.600 | Whatever you do, just try to stay calm,

00:15:20.160 | wait for it to come up, draw back.

00:15:22.660 | You've practiced shooting a lot,

00:15:24.300 | so you have like kind of a technique.

00:15:26.380 | Like I'm gonna go back, touch my face,

00:15:28.580 | draw my elbow tight, and then the arrow's gonna let loose.

00:15:32.020 | - It's a muscle memory.

00:15:33.100 | - It's kind of muscle memory.

00:15:34.620 | You have a little trigger, like draw that elbow tight,

00:15:37.540 | and then, and then it happens.

00:15:41.460 | And then you just watch the arrow

00:15:42.480 | and see where it goes.

00:15:43.320 | Now with the animal, you try to do it ethically.

00:15:46.740 | That is like make as good of a shot as you can.

00:15:49.240 | Make sure it is either hit in the heart or both lungs.

00:15:53.100 | And when that happens, it's a pretty quick death,

00:15:55.440 | which is, death is a part of life.

00:15:57.540 | But honestly, for a wild animal,

00:15:59.100 | that's probably the best way to go they could have.

00:16:02.220 | Now, when an animal's kind of walking towards you,

00:16:07.060 | if it's walking towards you, but not directly towards you,

00:16:09.460 | that's what you call quartering towards you,

00:16:12.060 | you can picture it's actually pretty difficult

00:16:14.280 | to hit both lungs because the shoulder blade

00:16:17.140 | and all that bone is in the way.

00:16:18.420 | So you wanna, so you have to make a perfect shot

00:16:21.620 | to get 'em both.

00:16:22.460 | And to be honest, when I took my shot,

00:16:23.860 | I was a couple inches or a few inches right.

00:16:26.860 | And so it went through the first lung,

00:16:30.060 | and then it sunk the arrow all the way into the moose.

00:16:33.260 | But it didn't, it allowed that second lung

00:16:35.400 | to stay breathing, which meant the moose stayed alive longer.

00:16:39.600 | - What's your relationship with the animal

00:16:41.980 | in a situation like that?

00:16:43.300 | You said death is a part of life.

00:16:44.360 | - Yeah, that's an interesting thought

00:16:46.200 | because no matter what your relationship to,

00:16:49.580 | however you choose to go through life,

00:16:52.560 | whether whatever you eat, whatever you do,

00:16:55.180 | death is a part of life.

00:16:59.240 | Every animal that's out there is living off of a dead,

00:17:02.800 | even plants, we're all part of this ecosystem.

00:17:06.260 | I think it's really easy in a,

00:17:07.920 | particularly in an urban environment,

00:17:09.620 | but anywhere to think that we're separate

00:17:12.800 | from the ecosystem.

00:17:13.820 | But we are very much a part of it,

00:17:15.720 | whether it be farming requires all this habitat

00:17:20.720 | to be turned into growing soybeans and da-da-da-da.

00:17:24.000 | And when you get the plows and the combines,

00:17:26.040 | you're losing all kinds of different animals

00:17:27.900 | and all kinds of potential habitat.

00:17:30.640 | So it's not cost free.

00:17:33.080 | And so when you realize that,

00:17:35.000 | then you wanna produce the food

00:17:37.360 | and the things you need in an ethical manner.

00:17:41.100 | So I, so for me, hunting plays a really major role in that.

00:17:46.100 | Like I literally know how many animals a year

00:17:49.620 | it takes to feed my family and myself.

00:17:52.100 | I actually know the exact number.

00:17:54.100 | And it's like, and I know what the cost of that is.

00:17:56.860 | And I'm aware of it 'cause I'm out in the woods

00:17:58.580 | and I see these like beautiful elk and moose.

00:18:01.480 | And I really love the species, love the animals.

00:18:05.240 | But there is a fact that one of those individuals,

00:18:10.200 | is going to have to feed me.

00:18:11.540 | And particularly like on a loan,

00:18:14.780 | it was very heightened, that experience.

00:18:16.820 | So I shot that one animal and I was so, so thankful

00:18:21.820 | that I wanted to give that big guy a hug

00:18:24.380 | and like, hey, sorry, it was you, but had to be somebody.

00:18:27.780 | - Yeah, there's that picture of you just almost hugging it.

00:18:31.260 | - Right, right, totally.

00:18:33.440 | - And you can also think about the calories,

00:18:36.260 | the protein, the fat, all of that,

00:18:38.700 | that comes from that, that will feed you.

00:18:40.460 | - Right, you're so grateful for it.

00:18:42.220 | Like the gratitude is like, you know, definitely there.

00:18:46.780 | - What about the bow and arrow perspective?

00:18:48.780 | - Well, when you hunt with a bow,

00:18:49.980 | you just get so much more up close to the animals.

00:18:53.100 | You know, you can't just get it from 600 yards away.

00:18:56.920 | You actually have to sneak in within 30 or so yards.

00:19:00.600 | And when you do that, the experiences you have are just,

00:19:05.600 | they're way more dragged out.

00:19:07.660 | So, you know, your heart's beating longer,

00:19:09.100 | you have to control your nerves longer.

00:19:11.440 | More often than not, it doesn't go your way

00:19:14.380 | and the thing gets away and, you know,

00:19:15.860 | you've been hiking around in the woods for a week

00:19:18.300 | and then your opportunity arises and floats away.

00:19:22.020 | (laughs)

00:19:23.500 | No, and then, but at the same time,

00:19:26.660 | that's the only time when you like really have

00:19:29.500 | those interactions with the animals

00:19:30.760 | where you got this bugling bull, you know,

00:19:33.220 | like tearing at the trees right in front of you

00:19:36.040 | and other cow, elk, and animals running around.

00:19:40.140 | You know, you end up having really,

00:19:44.240 | I don't know what I'm daring to say,

00:19:45.940 | intimate experiences with the animal just because,

00:19:48.940 | 'cause you're in it, you're kind of in its world,

00:19:51.020 | you're playing its game, it has its senses to defend itself

00:19:54.020 | and you have your wit to try to get over those.

00:19:57.120 | And it really becomes, you know, it's not easy,

00:20:00.400 | they're not, it becomes kind of that chess game

00:20:04.160 | and those prey animals are always tuned in,

00:20:07.440 | it's, you know, slightest stick,

00:20:09.400 | they're looking for wolves or for whatever it is.

00:20:12.100 | So there's something really pure and fun about it.

00:20:15.840 | You know, I will say that there is an aspect that is fun,

00:20:18.520 | there's no denying it.

00:20:19.360 | It's like how we're, you know,

00:20:22.800 | people have been hunting forever

00:20:25.400 | and I think it speaks to that part of us somehow.

00:20:28.640 | But, and I think bow hunting is probably

00:20:32.600 | the most pure form of it

00:20:34.840 | and that you get those experiences more often

00:20:37.360 | than with a rifle.

00:20:38.960 | So I don't know, I enjoy it a lot

00:20:41.320 | and the way they do regulations and such,

00:20:44.800 | kind of the best times to hunt are usually allowed for bow

00:20:49.280 | because they're trying to, you know,

00:20:51.760 | keep it fair for the animal and such, so.

00:20:54.320 | - So the distance, the close distance

00:20:56.960 | makes you more in touch with sort of

00:21:00.280 | the natural way of the predator and prey.

00:21:04.200 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:05.400 | - You're one of the predators

00:21:07.000 | where you have to be clever, you have to be quiet,

00:21:10.360 | you have to be calm, you have to, all of that.

00:21:12.760 | - Yep.

00:21:13.600 | - And the full challenge and the luck involved

00:21:16.720 | and the same thing as the predators do.

00:21:19.560 | - Exactly, how many times do they snap a stick

00:21:22.440 | and watch 'em run off and like, "Darn, my stock was failed."

00:21:26.040 | Or, you know, so, yeah, you're just,

00:21:28.560 | you're in that, in that ecosystem.

00:21:31.880 | - How'd you learn to shoot the bow?

00:21:33.880 | - Yeah, I didn't grow up hunting.

00:21:35.480 | I grew up in an area that a lot of people hunted,

00:21:38.960 | but my dad wasn't really into it

00:21:40.560 | and so I never got into it until,

00:21:42.440 | until I lived in Russia with the natives.

00:21:44.200 | It was just such a part of everything we did

00:21:46.240 | and a part of our life that when I came back,

00:21:49.400 | I got a bow and I started doing archery in Virginia.

00:21:52.920 | They had, it was a pretty easy way to hunt

00:21:55.120 | 'cause the deer were overpopulated

00:21:57.200 | and you could get these urban archery permits.

00:21:59.400 | So you'd go out and, you know, every couple days

00:22:02.960 | you'd have an opportunity to shoot a deer

00:22:05.600 | that they needed population control

00:22:07.360 | and so there were a lot of 'em

00:22:08.360 | and it gave you a lot of opportunities to learn quickly.

00:22:11.320 | So that's what got me into it

00:22:12.520 | and then I found I really enjoyed it.

00:22:14.760 | - Do you practice with a target also or just practice out?

00:22:18.040 | - Oh no, I would definitely practice with a target a lot.

00:22:20.480 | You wanna, again, you kinda have an obligation

00:22:22.640 | to do your best 'cause you don't wanna be flinging arrows

00:22:25.520 | into like the leg of an animal

00:22:27.720 | and it's a cool way, honestly,

00:22:28.800 | to provide quality meat for the family.

00:22:30.840 | You know, it's all raised naturally and wild and free

00:22:34.520 | until you bring it home into the freezer, so.

00:22:37.240 | - So if we step back, what are the 10 items you brought

00:22:41.200 | and what's actually the challenge

00:22:42.860 | of figuring out which items to bring?

00:22:44.640 | - Yeah, the challenge is that you don't exactly know

00:22:46.880 | what your site's opportunities are gonna be.

00:22:49.280 | So you don't really know, should I bring a fishing net?

00:22:51.920 | Am I gonna even have a spot to net or not?

00:22:53.960 | And things like that.

00:22:55.480 | I brought a axe, a saw, a Leatherman Wave,

00:23:00.480 | a ferro rod, this is like a, makes sparks to start a fire,

00:23:06.320 | a frying pan, a sleeping bag, a fishing kit,

00:23:13.760 | a bow and arrow, trapping wire, and paracord.

00:23:17.340 | And so those are my 10 items.

00:23:19.720 | - Is there any regrets, any?

00:23:22.480 | - No major regrets.

00:23:23.640 | I took the saw, kind of.

00:23:27.200 | I thought it would be more of a calorie saver

00:23:29.560 | than I, I didn't really need it.

00:23:32.680 | In hindsight, if I was doing, you know, season seven

00:23:35.080 | instead of six and got to watch, I would have taken the net

00:23:38.840 | 'cause I just planned to make a net,

00:23:40.880 | but I would have rather just had two nets,

00:23:43.080 | brought one, and left the saw

00:23:44.800 | because in the northern woods in particular,

00:23:47.160 | every tree's, you know, the size of your arm or leg,

00:23:49.560 | you can chop it down with an axe in a couple swings.

00:23:52.000 | Yeah, yeah, you don't really need the saw.

00:23:55.080 | And so it was handy at times and useful,

00:23:57.280 | but I think it was my, if I had to do nine items,

00:24:00.700 | I would have been just fine without the saw.

00:24:02.640 | - So two nets would just expand your--

00:24:06.480 | - Food gathering potential.

00:24:09.600 | - And then in terms of trapping,

00:24:12.440 | you were okay with just the little you brought?

00:24:15.360 | - The snare wire was good.

00:24:17.240 | I ran some, you know, I put out, I used all my snare wire.

00:24:20.720 | I ran trap line, which is just a series of traps

00:24:25.640 | through the woods and brush every place you see sign,

00:24:29.320 | put a snare, put a little mark on the tree

00:24:32.200 | so I knew where that snare was

00:24:33.400 | and just make these paths through the woods.

00:24:35.440 | And I put out, you know, I don't know how many,

00:24:37.640 | 150, 200 snares, so every day I'd get a rabbit

00:24:41.560 | or two out of 'em.

00:24:42.600 | And then, I had a lot of rabbits, but once I got the moose,

00:24:47.600 | I actually took all those snares down

00:24:49.520 | 'cause I didn't wanna catch anything needlessly.

00:24:51.060 | And you come to find out you can't live off of rabbits.

00:24:54.760 | Man cannot live off a rabbit alone, it turns out.

00:24:57.840 | - So you set up a huge number of traps.

00:25:01.320 | You were also fishing and then always on the lookout

00:25:05.640 | for moose. - Yeah.

00:25:09.080 | - So like, what's, in terms of survival,

00:25:12.040 | if you were to do it over again,

00:25:13.740 | over and over and over and over,

00:25:15.080 | like how do you maximize your chance

00:25:19.520 | of having enough food to survive for a long time?

00:25:22.200 | - You have to be really adaptable

00:25:24.300 | because everything's gonna,

00:25:25.960 | it's always gonna look different,

00:25:27.120 | your situation, your location.

00:25:28.480 | I actually had a, what I thought was a pretty good plan

00:25:31.140 | going into a loan.

00:25:32.440 | And it just, you know, the location didn't allow

00:25:36.080 | for what I thought it would.

00:25:37.360 | - What was the plan?

00:25:38.400 | - Well, I thought I would just catch a bunch of fish

00:25:40.760 | 'cause I'm on a really good fishing lake.

00:25:42.920 | I'd catch a whole bunch of fish

00:25:44.240 | and let 'em rot for a little while

00:25:46.320 | and then just drag 'em all through the woods

00:25:48.280 | into a big pile and then hunt a bear

00:25:50.760 | on that big fish pile. - Yeah, yeah.

00:25:54.720 | - That was the plan.

00:25:55.560 | And I thought, but when I got there,

00:25:58.320 | for one, I had a hard time catching fish off the bat.

00:26:00.520 | You know, they didn't come like I was hoping.

00:26:02.880 | And then for two, it had burned prior,

00:26:05.920 | so there were no berries.

00:26:07.440 | And so, there were very few berries,

00:26:09.320 | which meant there weren't grouse, there weren't bear.

00:26:11.600 | You know, they had all gone to other places

00:26:13.840 | where the berries were.

00:26:14.760 | And so, what I had grown accustomed to

00:26:19.100 | kind of relying on in Siberia wasn't there, there.

00:26:21.960 | You know, so in Russia, which was a similar environment,

00:26:26.040 | it was just grouse and berries and fish

00:26:28.200 | and grouse and berries and fish.

00:26:29.360 | And then occasionally, you know,

00:26:30.840 | you'd get a moose or something.

00:26:31.960 | But I had to reassess, which was part of me

00:26:34.680 | being grumpy at the start, like, "This place sucks."

00:26:37.080 | (laughing)

00:26:38.280 | And then, once I reassessed, and you know,

00:26:42.680 | right away I saw that there were moose tracks and such.

00:26:45.200 | So, I just started to plan for that.

00:26:47.840 | I moved my camp into an area that was as removed

00:26:52.760 | as I could be from where all the action is,

00:26:54.720 | where the tracks were, so that I wasn't

00:26:56.800 | disturbing animal patterns.

00:26:58.420 | I made sure the wind, the predominant wind

00:27:00.400 | was blowing out my scent to sea, or you know, to the water.

00:27:04.420 | And then, really, to be honest,

00:27:06.560 | if you wanna actually survive somewhere,

00:27:08.640 | it is different than alone.

00:27:10.040 | But you do have to be active.

00:27:12.760 | And it has to, you're gonna have to,

00:27:14.600 | you're not gonna live, you're not gonna be sustainable

00:27:17.720 | by, you know, starving it out.

00:27:19.320 | You'd have to unlock the key that is sustainability.

00:27:23.280 | And I think there's a lot of areas

00:27:24.420 | that still have that potential,

00:27:26.240 | but you have to figure out what it is.

00:27:27.080 | It's usually gonna be a combination of fishing,

00:27:28.920 | you know, trapping, and then hunting.

00:27:30.600 | And then once you have some, the fishing and trapping

00:27:33.080 | will get you until you have some success hunting.

00:27:35.480 | And then that'll buy you three or four months of time

00:27:38.320 | to continue, you know, to keep hunting again.

00:27:41.720 | And you just have to roll off of that.

00:27:43.420 | But every, you know, depends on where you are,

00:27:46.800 | what opportunities are there.

00:27:48.560 | - So, okay, so that's the process,

00:27:49.840 | fishing and trapping until you're at successful hunting.

00:27:52.900 | And then the successful hunt buys you some more time.

00:27:56.400 | - Mm-hmm, right, right.

00:27:57.480 | - And you just go year-round.

00:27:58.320 | - And then you just go year-round like that,

00:27:59.960 | and that's how people did it forever.

00:28:02.440 | The pressure, I noticed that, you know,

00:28:04.560 | you got that moose, and then you're happy for a week or so,

00:28:07.360 | and then you start to be like, you know, this is finite.

00:28:10.320 | I'm gonna have to do this again.

00:28:11.840 | And imagine if you had a family that was gonna starve

00:28:14.360 | if you weren't successful, you know, this next time.

00:28:17.320 | And there's just always that pressure, you know.

00:28:19.440 | It made me really, like, appreciate

00:28:22.400 | the amount of what people had to deal with.

00:28:25.080 | - Well, in terms of being active,

00:28:26.520 | like, so you have to do stuff all day.

00:28:29.260 | So you get up-- - Get up.

00:28:31.400 | - And planning. - Mm-hmm.

00:28:32.840 | - Like, what am I gonna, in the midst of the frustration,

00:28:35.580 | you have to figure out, like, what's the strategy?

00:28:38.340 | Like, how do you put up all the traps?

00:28:40.480 | Is that a decision, like, you know,

00:28:42.160 | most people, like, sit at their desk

00:28:44.360 | and have, like, a calendar or whatever.

00:28:46.100 | Are you, like, figuring out, like--

00:28:47.640 | - One thing about wilderness life in general

00:28:50.560 | is it's remarkably less scheduled

00:28:53.160 | than anything we deal with.

00:28:55.480 | Schedules are fairly unique, too, of a modern context.

00:28:58.760 | Like, you'd wake up, and you just sort of,

00:29:00.840 | you have a, you know, confluence of things you wanna do,

00:29:05.680 | things you need to do, things you should do,

00:29:08.280 | and you just kinda tackle 'em as you see fit,

00:29:11.500 | as it flows in, you know.

00:29:12.820 | So, and that's actually one of the things

00:29:14.540 | that people really, that I really appreciate

00:29:17.120 | about that lifestyle, is it really is,

00:29:19.120 | you're kind of in that flow.

00:29:21.360 | And so I'd wake up and be like,

00:29:22.560 | eh, maybe I'll go fishing.

00:29:24.080 | And then I'd wander over and fish.

00:29:26.320 | And then I'd be like, ah, I'm gonna go check the trap line,

00:29:29.160 | add every day, if I add five or 10 snares,

00:29:32.680 | you know, you're constantly adding

00:29:34.040 | to your productive potential.

00:29:36.040 | And then, but nothing's really scheduled.

00:29:38.940 | You're just kinda flying by the seat of your pants.

00:29:41.640 | - But then there's a lot of instinct

00:29:44.400 | that's already loaded in. - Oh, there's so much, yeah.

00:29:46.080 | - Like, you already, just, like, wisdom

00:29:47.780 | from all the times you've had to do it before.

00:29:50.120 | That you're just actually operating a lot on instinct.

00:29:52.920 | Like you said, where to find, to place the shelter.

00:29:55.440 | Like, how hard is that calculation,

00:29:56.840 | where to place the shelter?

00:29:58.240 | - If you're, like, dropped off,

00:29:59.600 | and this is all new to you, of course,

00:30:01.240 | all those things are gonna be things

00:30:02.560 | you have to really think through and plan.

00:30:04.520 | When you're thinking about a shelter,

00:30:05.840 | you have to think of, oh, here's a nice flat spot.

00:30:09.080 | You know, that's a good place.

00:30:10.040 | But also, is there firewood nearby?

00:30:11.760 | And if I'm gonna be here for months,

00:30:12.900 | is there enough firewood that I'm not gonna be walking

00:30:14.760 | a half a mile to get a dry piece of wood?

00:30:17.080 | Is the water nearby?

00:30:19.000 | Is there, is it somewhat open,

00:30:22.240 | but also protected from the elements?

00:30:24.960 | 'Cause sometimes you get a beautiful spot.

00:30:26.600 | Oh, this is great, on a calm day.

00:30:27.760 | And then the wind comes, like, (imitates wind)

00:30:29.880 | And so, there's all these factors.

00:30:31.680 | You know, even down to taking in what game

00:30:34.920 | is doing in the area also,

00:30:36.600 | and how that relates to where your shelter is.

00:30:38.600 | - You said you have to consider where the action will be,

00:30:40.800 | and you wanna be away from the action,

00:30:43.040 | but close enough to it.

00:30:44.200 | - To see it, yeah, you wanna be, yeah, right.

00:30:46.200 | And so, ideally, you know, it depends.

00:30:49.760 | You're always gonna make give and takes.

00:30:51.160 | And one thing with shelters,

00:30:52.520 | and location selection and stuff,

00:30:55.080 | that's another thing.

00:30:55.920 | You just have to trust your ability to adapt

00:30:58.160 | in that situation, because everybody has a particular,

00:31:01.600 | you know, you got an idea of a shelter you're gonna build.

00:31:03.440 | But then you get there, and maybe there's a good cliff

00:31:05.200 | that you can incorporate, you know,

00:31:06.600 | or maybe, and then you just become creative.

00:31:08.880 | And that's a really fun process, too,

00:31:10.840 | to just allow your creativity to try to flourish.

00:31:14.360 | - What kind of shelters are there?

00:31:16.360 | - There's all kinds of philosophies in shelters,

00:31:18.760 | which is fun.

00:31:20.400 | It's fun to see people try different things.

00:31:22.640 | Mine was fairly basic for the simple reason

00:31:24.800 | that I'd lived, you know, winters,

00:31:28.000 | through winters in Siberia in a teepee.

00:31:30.280 | So I knew I didn't need, like, anything too robust.

00:31:33.640 | As long as I had calories, I'd be warm,

00:31:35.480 | and I wasn't particularly worried about the cold.

00:31:38.320 | But you'll see.

00:31:40.960 | So I kept my shelter really pretty simple

00:31:43.560 | with the idea that I built a simple A-frame type shelter,

00:31:46.560 | and then most of my energy's gonna be focused

00:31:49.520 | on getting calories.

00:31:50.600 | And then, of course, there's always gonna be downtime.

00:31:52.800 | And in that downtime, I can tweak, modify,

00:31:55.600 | improve my shelter, and that'll just be a constant process

00:31:58.680 | that by the time you're there, a few months,

00:32:00.380 | you'll have all the kinks worked out.

00:32:01.920 | It'll be a really nice little setup.

00:32:03.640 | But you don't have to start with that, necessarily,

00:32:05.480 | 'cause you got other needs you gotta focus on.

00:32:07.920 | That said, you'll see a lot of people on a loan

00:32:10.500 | that really focus on, you know, building the log cabin,

00:32:13.280 | 'cause they wanna be secure,

00:32:14.920 | or incorporating, you know, whatever the earth has around,

00:32:19.640 | whether it be rocks, or whether it be digging a hole.

00:32:23.160 | You know, and we've seen some really cool shelters,

00:32:24.960 | and I'm not gonna knock it.

00:32:28.920 | Everybody's got, there's all these different strokes

00:32:30.920 | for different folks.

00:32:31.760 | But my particular idea was to keep it fairly simple,

00:32:35.400 | improve it with time, but spend most of my energy.

00:32:39.360 | You know, the shelter you really need to think about,

00:32:41.320 | it can't be smoky, 'cause that'll be miserable.

00:32:43.960 | But it is nice to have a fire inside,

00:32:46.040 | so you need to have a fire inside

00:32:47.560 | that's not gonna be dangerous, and smoke-free.

00:32:51.820 | And then also airtight,

00:32:53.320 | because you're never gonna have a warm shelter out there,

00:32:56.040 | 'cause you don't have seals and things like that.

00:32:58.540 | But as long as the air's not moving through it,

00:33:00.880 | you can have a warm enough shelter.

00:33:03.040 | - With a fire.

00:33:03.880 | - With a fire, and dryer socks, and stuff.

00:33:06.760 | - How do you get the smoke out of the shelter?

00:33:09.120 | - If you have good clay, and mud, and rock,

00:33:11.480 | you can build yourself a fireplace,

00:33:13.000 | which is surprisingly not that hard.

00:33:15.280 | - Oh, really?

00:33:16.120 | - Yeah, it's a fun thing to do, it works well.

00:33:17.960 | You take a little hole, start stacking rocks around it,

00:33:21.000 | make sure it's opening, and it actually works.

00:33:23.860 | So that's not as hard as you might think.

00:33:27.840 | For me, where I was, I kind of came up with it

00:33:32.880 | as I was there with my A-frame.

00:33:35.160 | I hadn't built an A-frame shelter like that before,

00:33:38.920 | and so when I built it, and then I had put a bunch

00:33:41.840 | of tin cans in the ground so that air would get the fire,

00:33:45.440 | so it was fed by air, which helps create a draft.

00:33:48.660 | But I realized in an A-frame, it really doesn't,

00:33:53.000 | the smoke doesn't go out very well,

00:33:54.720 | even if you leave a hole at the top,

00:33:56.160 | it collects and billows back down.

00:33:58.360 | So then I cut some of my tarp, and made this,

00:34:02.600 | and cut a hole in the A-frame,

00:34:05.800 | and then I made a hood vent that I could pull down

00:34:08.760 | and catch the smoke with, and so while the fire was going,

00:34:11.240 | it would just billow out the hood vent,

00:34:12.960 | and then when it was done burning,

00:34:16.000 | and it was just hot coals, I could close it,

00:34:17.840 | seal it up, and keep the heat in.

00:34:19.560 | So it actually worked pretty well.

00:34:21.120 | - So start with something that kind of works,

00:34:23.080 | and then keep improving. - Yeah, exactly.

00:34:25.000 | - I always wonder, I mean, the log cabin,

00:34:29.000 | it feels like that's a thing that takes

00:34:30.800 | a huge amount of work before it worked.

00:34:32.600 | - The difference between a log cabin and a warm log cabin

00:34:35.960 | is like an immense amount of work,

00:34:38.200 | and all the chinking, and all the door sealing,

00:34:41.080 | and the chimney has to be, anyway,

00:34:43.760 | so otherwise it's just gonna be

00:34:45.160 | the same ambient temperature as outside.

00:34:47.240 | So I don't think alone's the proper context for a log cabin.

00:34:52.240 | I think like a log cabin's great as a hunting cabin,

00:34:56.680 | as you know, if you're gonna have something for years,

00:34:58.880 | but in a three, six month scenario,

00:35:01.840 | I don't know that it's worth the calorie expenditure.

00:35:04.840 | - And it is a lot of calories.

00:35:06.680 | That's an interesting sort of metaphor

00:35:09.160 | of just like get something that works.

00:35:10.920 | You see a lot of this with companies,

00:35:13.400 | like successful companies, they get a prototype,

00:35:16.160 | get a system that's working, and then improve fast

00:35:19.520 | in response to the conditions, to the environment.

00:35:22.000 | - Yeah, 'cause it's constantly changing.

00:35:24.360 | - And you end up being a lot better

00:35:25.680 | if you're able to learn how to respond quickly,

00:35:30.000 | versus like having a big plan

00:35:31.920 | that takes a huge amount of time to accomplish.

00:35:34.160 | - Right, and forcing that through the pipeline,

00:35:36.320 | whether or not it fits.

00:35:37.520 | - Can you just speak to like the place you were,

00:35:41.000 | the Canadian Arctic?

00:35:42.960 | It looked cold.

00:35:43.880 | - Yeah, we were right near the Arctic Circle.

00:35:45.520 | I don't know, it was like 60 kilometers

00:35:47.760 | south of the Arctic Circle, so it was,

00:35:51.520 | it's a really cool area, really remote.

00:35:53.800 | Thousands of little lakes, you know,

00:35:55.640 | when you fly over, you're just like, man, it's incredible.

00:35:57.760 | There must be so many of those lakes

00:35:59.200 | that people haven't been to.

00:36:00.360 | You know, it really was a neat area, really remote,

00:36:03.760 | and for the show's purpose, I think it was perfect,

00:36:06.600 | 'cause it did have enough game

00:36:08.320 | and enough different avenues forward

00:36:10.960 | that I think it really did reward activity, so I think,

00:36:15.280 | but it's a special place.

00:36:16.360 | It was Dene, there was a tribe that lived there,

00:36:20.320 | the Dene people, which interestingly enough,

00:36:22.720 | here's a side note, when I was in Siberia,

00:36:24.840 | I floated down this river called the Podgomennaya Tunguska,

00:36:28.920 | and you get to this village called Sulamay,

00:36:32.440 | and there's these Ket people, they're called,

00:36:34.560 | and there's only 600 of 'em left,

00:36:37.760 | but this is in the middle of Siberia,

00:36:40.000 | not in like the Pacific Coast,

00:36:42.320 | but their language is related to the Dene people,

00:36:45.640 | and so somehow, you know, that connection

00:36:48.800 | was there thousands of years ago, super interesting, but.

00:36:51.440 | - Yeah, so language travels somehow.

00:36:53.880 | - Right, and the remnant stayed back there.

00:36:56.360 | It's very interesting to think through history.

00:36:58.920 | - Yeah, within languages contains a history of peoples,

00:37:02.320 | and it's interesting how that evolves over time,

00:37:05.160 | and how wars tell the story,

00:37:07.160 | like language tells the story of conflict,

00:37:09.480 | and conflict shapes language,

00:37:11.240 | and we get the result of that.

00:37:13.480 | - Right, so fascinating.

00:37:15.220 | - And the barriers that language creates

00:37:17.600 | is also the thing that leads to wars

00:37:20.560 | and misunderstandings and all this kind of stuff.

00:37:22.860 | It's a fascinating tension, but it got cold there, right?

00:37:26.800 | It got real cold.

00:37:28.200 | - Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know,

00:37:30.080 | I didn't have a thermometer,

00:37:31.160 | but I imagine it probably got to negative 30 at the most.

00:37:35.200 | You know, it might've gotten,

00:37:36.960 | it would've definitely gotten colder had we stayed longer,

00:37:39.120 | but yeah, to be honest, I was,

00:37:43.440 | just that I never felt cold out there.

00:37:45.320 | I was pretty, I had that one pretty dialed in,

00:37:48.100 | and then once you have calories, you can stay warm,

00:37:49.960 | you can stay active, you can, you know,

00:37:52.440 | you gotta dress warm, you know, you don't,

00:37:55.680 | never let, oh, there's a good one.

00:37:56.960 | If you're in the cold, never let yourself get too cold,

00:37:59.720 | 'cause what happens is you'll stop feeling what's cold,

00:38:02.520 | and then frostbite, and then issues,

00:38:04.880 | and then it's really hard to warm back up.

00:38:06.420 | So every, it was so annoying.

00:38:08.160 | I'd be out going to ice fish or something,

00:38:10.800 | and then I would just notice that my feet are cold,

00:38:13.000 | and you're just like, ah, dang it.

00:38:15.040 | I just turn around, go back, start a fire,

00:38:17.680 | dry my boots out, make sure my feet are warm,

00:38:20.040 | and then go again.

00:38:20.920 | I wouldn't ignore that, you know?

00:38:22.640 | - Oh, so you wanna be able to feel the cold.

00:38:24.480 | - Yeah, you wanna make sure you're still feeling things

00:38:26.960 | and that you're not toughening through it,

00:38:28.960 | 'cause you can't really tough through the cold.

00:38:31.360 | It'll just get ya, so.

00:38:32.800 | - What's your relationship with the cold,

00:38:35.640 | psychologically, physically?

00:38:37.660 | - Ah, it's interesting.

00:38:39.640 | Well, I actually, there's some part of it

00:38:41.480 | that really makes you feel alive.

00:38:42.960 | You know, I imagine, you know, sometimes in Austin here,

00:38:45.400 | you go out, and it's hot, and sweaty,

00:38:47.800 | and you're like, ugh.

00:38:48.800 | You get that kind of, kind of saps you.

00:38:50.920 | There's something about that brisk cold

00:38:52.800 | that hits your face that you're like, boo,

00:38:54.640 | wakes you up, makes you feel really alive, engaged.

00:38:57.800 | You know, it feels like the margins of air are smaller,

00:39:00.120 | so you're alert and engaged a little more.

00:39:03.240 | There is something that's a little bit life-giving,

00:39:06.160 | just because you feel on an edge, you're on this edge.

00:39:09.960 | But you have to be alert, because even, you know,

00:39:12.420 | some of the natives I lived with,

00:39:13.600 | the lady had face issues,

00:39:15.240 | because she let her head get cold

00:39:17.700 | when they were on a snowmobile.

00:39:18.880 | Hat was up too high, you know, that little mistake,

00:39:21.040 | and then it just freezes this part of your forehead,

00:39:23.120 | and then the nerves go, and then you got issues

00:39:26.320 | when just the hat wasn't high enough.

00:39:28.160 | So you kind of got to be dialed in on stuff.

00:39:30.440 | - Well, there's a psychological element to just,

00:39:33.120 | I mean, it's unpleasant.

00:39:34.320 | If I were to think of what kind of unpleasant

00:39:38.120 | would I choose, you know, fasting for long periods of time,

00:39:43.120 | because going without food in a warm environment

00:39:45.600 | is way more pleasant than--

00:39:48.320 | - Being fed in a golden bowl.

00:39:49.640 | - Exactly, like if you were to choose--

00:39:51.720 | - I would choose the opposite.

00:39:53.240 | - Oh yeah, okay, well, there you go.

00:39:54.920 | I wonder if that's, I wonder if you're born with that,

00:39:58.520 | or if that's developed, maybe your time in Siberia,

00:40:00.880 | like you, or do you gravitate towards,

00:40:03.840 | I wonder what that is, 'cause I really don't like

00:40:06.720 | survival in the cold.

00:40:08.640 | - I think a little bit of it is learned.

00:40:10.360 | You like almost learn not, you learn not to fear it,

00:40:14.080 | you learn to kind of appreciate it,

00:40:16.560 | and a big part of that is, I mean, to be honest,

00:40:20.120 | it's like dressing warm, being in good,

00:40:22.760 | it's not that, you know, there's no secrets to that,

00:40:26.120 | is you just can't beat the cold,

00:40:27.520 | so you just need to dress warm.

00:40:28.520 | The native, you know, all that fur, all that stuff,

00:40:31.520 | and then all of a sudden, you have your little refuge,

00:40:33.760 | have a nice, warm fire going in your teepee,

00:40:37.040 | you know, and then, I bet you could learn to appreciate it.

00:40:41.240 | - Yeah, I think some of it is just opening yourself up

00:40:44.560 | to the possibility that there's something enjoyable

00:40:46.560 | about it, like here, I run in Austin all the time

00:40:50.520 | in like 100 degree heat, and I go out there

00:40:55.200 | with a smile on my face, and like, and learn to enjoy it.

00:40:59.040 | - Oh, yeah.

00:40:59.880 | - And so you're just like, I look kind of like you do

00:41:03.320 | in the cold, and just, I don't think I enjoy the heat,

00:41:06.120 | but you just allow yourself to enjoy it.

00:41:07.440 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do feel that way.

00:41:10.200 | I mean, I don't mind the heat that much,

00:41:12.560 | but I think you could get to the place

00:41:14.840 | where you appreciated the cold.

00:41:16.600 | It's probably just a lack of, it's kind of scary

00:41:19.820 | when you haven't done it, and you don't know

00:41:21.440 | what you're doing, and you go out, and you feel cold.

00:41:23.480 | It's like, not fun, but I bet you could,

00:41:25.720 | you'd enjoy it, you'll have to come out sometime.

00:41:28.040 | - 100%.

00:41:29.200 | I mean, you're right, it does make you feel alive.

00:41:31.680 | That it, like, maybe that's the thing

00:41:34.520 | that I struggle with, is the time passes slower,

00:41:37.520 | 'cause it does make you feel alive.

00:41:39.600 | You get to feel time, but then the flip side of that

00:41:42.680 | is you get to feel every moment,

00:41:45.400 | and you get to feel alive in every moment.

00:41:47.440 | So it's both scary when you're inexperienced,

00:41:51.760 | and beautiful when you are experienced.

00:41:54.700 | Were there times when you got hungry?

00:41:57.100 | - I got shot a rabbit on day one,

00:41:58.740 | and I snared a couple rabbits on day two,

00:42:01.460 | and then more and more as the time went.

00:42:04.980 | So I actually did pretty well on the food front.

00:42:07.760 | The other thing is when you have all those berries around

00:42:11.300 | and stuff, you do have an ability to fill your stomach,

00:42:14.380 | and so you don't really notice if you're getting thinner,

00:42:16.740 | if you're losing weight.

00:42:17.940 | So I can say, on a loan, I was not that hungry.

00:42:23.400 | I've definitely been really hungry in Russia.

00:42:26.120 | There were times when I lost a lot of weight.

00:42:29.400 | I mean, I lost a lot more weight in Siberia

00:42:31.480 | than I did on a loan.

00:42:32.560 | - Oh, wow. - Many times.

00:42:34.200 | - Okay, we'll have to talk about it.

00:42:36.000 | So you caught a fish, you caught a couple.

00:42:40.120 | - I think I caught, like, 13 or so.

00:42:41.880 | They didn't show a lot of 'em.

00:42:43.440 | - You caught 13 fish?

00:42:45.520 | - 13 of those big fish, too.

00:42:48.100 | Well, I caught a couple that were small.

00:42:49.940 | - This is like a meme at this point.

00:42:52.100 | You're a perfect example of a person who was thriving.

00:42:55.020 | - I was thought, you know, in hindsight.

00:43:00.020 | Again, when I was out there,

00:43:01.020 | I never let myself think you might weigh,

00:43:02.660 | and I just was gonna be out there as long as I could

00:43:05.020 | and tried to remain pessimistic about it.

00:43:07.300 | No, but then I remember a thought that I was like,

00:43:10.780 | I wonder if they're gonna be able to make this look hard.

00:43:13.340 | I did have that thought at one point,

00:43:14.940 | and 'cause it went pretty well,

00:43:17.820 | and I was definitely, it was hard psychologically

00:43:21.100 | because I didn't know when it was gonna end.

00:43:23.980 | Like, I thought this could go, you know, like I said,

00:43:26.140 | six months, it could go eight months, a year,

00:43:29.100 | and then you start to, you know,

00:43:30.980 | I had a two- and a three-year-old,

00:43:32.420 | and you start to weigh in the, is it worth it

00:43:35.400 | if it goes a year, and it's not worth it

00:43:37.660 | if it goes eight months and I still lose.

00:43:39.420 | So I feel like I had this pressure,

00:43:41.820 | and it was psychologically difficult for that reason.

00:43:45.020 | Physically, it wasn't too bad.

00:43:47.860 | - This is off-mic, we're talking about Gordon Ryan

00:43:51.860 | competing in jiu-jitsu, and maybe that's the challenge

00:43:55.540 | he also has to face is to make things look hard.

00:43:57.900 | 'Cause he's so dominant in the sport that,

00:44:03.260 | in terms of the drama and the entertainment of the sport,

00:44:08.140 | and in this case of survival, it has to be difficult.

00:44:11.460 | - You know, and I'll add that for sure, though,

00:44:13.660 | that it's the woods, it's nature,

00:44:16.020 | you never know how it's gonna go.

00:44:17.360 | You know what I mean?

00:44:18.200 | It's like, every time you're out there,

00:44:19.260 | it's a different scenario.

00:44:20.420 | So, yeah, whatever, hallelujah, it went well.

00:44:24.180 | - So you won after 77 days.

00:44:27.760 | How long do you think you could have lasted?

00:44:29.580 | - When I left, I weighed what I do right now.

00:44:31.740 | So I just weighed my normal weight.

00:44:33.660 | I had, you know, a couple hundred pounds of moose.

00:44:37.420 | I had at least, you know, a hundred pounds of fish.

00:44:39.980 | I had, you know, a pile of rabbits, a wolverine.

00:44:44.340 | You know, I had all this stuff.

00:44:46.340 | And I hadn't gotten cold yet.

00:44:49.460 | I just thought, but in my head, I thought,

00:44:54.020 | if I get to day 130 or 40,

00:44:57.780 | even if someone else has big game,

00:44:59.940 | I had a pretty good idea they might quit.

00:45:02.140 | Because it would be long, cold, dark days.

00:45:05.620 | And how miserable is that?

00:45:06.860 | Just, it's so boring, it's freezing.

00:45:09.100 | And so I thought, the only time I thought

00:45:12.460 | I could think about winning

00:45:14.500 | is when I got to day 130 or 40.

00:45:17.620 | And I definitely had that with what I had.

00:45:21.420 | Now, maybe I would've got, you know,

00:45:24.140 | I probably would've gotten more.

00:45:25.460 | I had caught that big 20-something pound pike

00:45:28.540 | on the last day I was there.

00:45:30.460 | Maybe catch some more of those.

00:45:32.020 | You know, and I don't know,

00:45:33.460 | like I don't know how many calories I had stored,

00:45:35.860 | but I had a lot.

00:45:36.980 | And so how long would that have lasted me

00:45:38.940 | assuming I didn't get anything else?

00:45:40.860 | It definitely would've,

00:45:42.060 | I definitely would've reached my goal

00:45:44.180 | of 130 or 40 days.

00:45:45.980 | And then after that,

00:45:47.660 | I thought we were just gonna push into the,

00:45:49.700 | you know, then it's just to see how much,

00:45:51.500 | who has what reserves and we'll go as far as we can.

00:45:54.180 | And that would get me through January into February.

00:45:57.340 | And I just thought, man,

00:45:58.180 | that's gonna be miserable for people.

00:46:00.380 | - And you were like, I can last through misery.

00:46:02.380 | - And I knew I could do it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:04.100 | - What aspect of that is miserable?

00:46:06.980 | - The hardest thing for me would have been the boredom

00:46:09.860 | because it's hard to stay busy when it's all dark out,

00:46:14.540 | when the ice is, you know, three, four foot thick,

00:46:17.780 | you can't fish.

00:46:18.660 | And I just think it would've just been really boring.

00:46:23.660 | You would've had to been a real Zen master

00:46:26.300 | to push through it.

00:46:28.100 | But because I had experience to some degree,

00:46:30.140 | I knew I could.

00:46:31.300 | And then I think things that might, you know,

00:46:34.420 | you start thinking about family and this and that

00:46:37.140 | in those situations.

00:46:38.660 | And I just knew that those,

00:46:40.300 | because I'd gone to all these trips to Russia

00:46:42.380 | for a year at a time,

00:46:43.740 | the time context was a little broader for me

00:46:46.340 | than I think for some people.

00:46:47.860 | 'Cause I knew I could be gone for a year and come back,

00:46:51.860 | catch up with my loved ones, you know,

00:46:54.100 | bring what I got back,

00:46:56.220 | whether that be psychological or whatever it is,

00:46:58.420 | and we'd all enrich each other.

00:46:59.700 | And once it's in hindsight,

00:47:01.180 | that year would have been like that talking about it.

00:47:03.220 | So I had that perspective in it.

00:47:05.460 | So I knew I wasn't gonna tap for any other reason

00:47:07.420 | other than running out of food someday.

00:47:09.380 | So that was my stressor.

00:47:11.140 | - So you're able to, given the boredom,

00:47:13.620 | given the loneliness,

00:47:14.700 | kind of zoom out and accept the passing of time.

00:47:19.460 | Just let it pass.

00:47:20.620 | - You know, for me, I'm gonna act fairly.

00:47:22.860 | I like to be active.

00:47:23.860 | And so I would try to think of creative ways

00:47:26.740 | to keep my brain busy.

00:47:28.340 | You know, we saw the like dumb rabbit first skit.

00:47:31.340 | But then I did a whole bunch of like elaborate

00:47:33.540 | Normandy re-invasion, you know,

00:47:35.300 | invasion reenactments and stuff.

00:47:37.620 | It was like a, there was a,

00:47:39.260 | every day I would think of,

00:47:40.300 | I gotta think of something to make me laugh, you know,

00:47:42.380 | and then do some stupid skit.

00:47:44.500 | And then that would be,

00:47:45.340 | that would fill a couple hours of my time.

00:47:47.100 | And then I'd spend an hour or two,

00:47:49.020 | a few hours fishing.

00:47:50.260 | And then you spend a few hours, you know,

00:47:52.660 | whatever you're doing.

00:47:53.500 | - Would you do that without a camera?

00:47:55.340 | - Yeah.

00:47:56.180 | Oh, no, the skits, funny question.

00:47:59.540 | That's a good question.

00:48:00.380 | I don't know.

00:48:01.220 | I actually don't know.

00:48:02.180 | That, I will say that was one of the advantages

00:48:05.300 | of being on the show versus in Siberia.

00:48:08.140 | So no, 'cause I didn't in Siberia,

00:48:09.900 | just do skits by myself.

00:48:11.300 | But I didn't film it.

00:48:13.300 | And so it was quite nice to have this camera

00:48:17.700 | that made you feel like you weren't quite as alone

00:48:19.900 | as if you were just in the woods by yourself.

00:48:23.260 | And I think for me, I was able to,

00:48:25.620 | it was a pain.

00:48:26.460 | It was part of the cause of me missing that moose.

00:48:28.900 | You know, there's issues with it,

00:48:30.980 | but I just chose to look at it as like,

00:48:32.620 | this is an awesome opportunity to share with people

00:48:35.300 | a part of me that most people don't get to see,

00:48:37.340 | you know, 'cause, no, so that was,

00:48:39.740 | I just chose to look at it that way.

00:48:41.260 | And it was an advantage 'cause you could do stuff like that.

00:48:44.060 | - I think there's actual power to doing this kind

00:48:47.180 | of documenting, like talking to a camera

00:48:49.580 | or an audio recorder.

00:48:51.260 | Like that's an actual tool in survival.

00:48:54.000 | I had a little bit of an experience of being alone

00:48:58.100 | in the jungle and just being able to talk

00:49:00.020 | to a thing is much less lonely.

00:49:03.180 | - It is, it really is.

00:49:04.380 | It can be a powerful tool, just sharing your experience.

00:49:09.020 | I had the, I definitely had the thought.

00:49:12.100 | So going back to your earlier comment,

00:49:14.700 | but I definitely had the thought.

00:49:15.520 | If I knew I was the last person on Earth,

00:49:17.660 | I wouldn't even bother.

00:49:18.500 | Like I wouldn't do that.

00:49:19.420 | Like I would just, I'd just give up, I'm sure.

00:49:22.860 | Because even if I had a bunch of food and this and that.

00:49:25.700 | But because I knew, you know you're a part, you're sharing,

00:49:30.420 | it gives you a lot of strength to go through.

00:49:32.220 | And having that camera just makes it that much more vivid

00:49:36.260 | 'cause you know you're not just gonna be sharing

00:49:38.140 | a vague memory, but an actual experience.

00:49:40.200 | - I think if you're the last person on Earth,

00:49:42.420 | you would actually convince yourself.

00:49:45.260 | First of all, you don't know for sure.

00:49:47.740 | There's always going to be--

00:49:48.580 | - Hope dies last.

00:49:50.100 | - Hope really does die last.

00:49:52.060 | You really don't know.

00:49:53.260 | You really hope to find.

00:49:55.000 | I mean if you're, if like an apocalypse happens,

00:49:58.280 | I think your whole life will be going

00:50:00.060 | about finding the other person.

00:50:01.300 | - It would be.

00:50:02.140 | And there's a chance, I mean, I guess I'm saying

00:50:03.980 | if you knew you were for some reason,

00:50:05.420 | knew you were the last, I wonder if you would.

00:50:07.220 | I wonder if, that was a thought I had.

00:50:09.620 | If I knew I was the last person.

00:50:11.700 | Like 'cause out here I was having a good time,

00:50:13.580 | having fun fishing, plenty of food.

00:50:16.460 | But like if I knew I was the last person on Earth,

00:50:18.260 | I don't know that I would even bother.

00:50:19.640 | But now if that was for real, would I bother?

00:50:22.860 | That's the question.

00:50:23.700 | - No, no, no, I think if you knew,

00:50:25.800 | if somebody, some way you knew for sure,

00:50:28.160 | I think your mind will start doubting it.

00:50:30.620 | That whoever told you you're the last person,

00:50:33.880 | whatever was lying.

00:50:36.520 | - Right, right.

00:50:37.360 | The power of hope might be more stronger

00:50:40.080 | than I accounted for in that situation.

00:50:42.820 | - Also, you might, if you are indeed the last person,

00:50:46.380 | you might want to be documenting it for once you die,

00:50:50.360 | you know, an alien species comes about.

00:50:52.800 | 'Cause whatever happened on Earth

00:50:53.960 | is a pretty special thing.

00:50:55.000 | And if you're the last one,

00:50:56.960 | you might be like the last person

00:50:59.920 | to tell the story of what happened.

00:51:01.880 | And so that's gonna be a way to convince yourself

00:51:03.800 | that this is important.

00:51:05.400 | And so the days will go by like this,

00:51:07.320 | but it would be lonely.

00:51:09.240 | Boy, would that be lonely.

00:51:10.600 | - It would be, wow.

00:51:12.720 | You're delving into the dredges, the depths of it.

00:51:16.600 | - Yeah, I mean-- - Of something.

00:51:17.760 | - There is going to be existential dread.

00:51:21.200 | But also, I don't know, I think hope will burn bright.

00:51:25.380 | You'll be looking for other humans.

00:51:26.800 | - That's one of the reasons I was looking forward

00:51:28.640 | to talking to you.

00:51:29.480 | Things I appreciate about you is you're always,

00:51:32.240 | not out of naivety,

00:51:33.280 | but you always choose to look at the positive.

00:51:36.720 | You know what I mean?

00:51:37.560 | And I think that's a powerful mindset to have.

00:51:40.880 | I appreciate it.

00:51:41.700 | - Yeah.

00:51:42.720 | That'd be a pretty cool survival situation, though,

00:51:44.680 | if you're the last person on Earth.

00:51:46.440 | - If you could share it.

00:51:49.040 | (laughing)

00:51:50.520 | - If you could share it, yeah.

00:51:52.560 | Like I said, many people consider you

00:51:56.240 | the most successful competitor on a loan.

00:51:58.640 | The other successful one is Roland Welker, Rock House guy.

00:52:02.120 | - Oh, yeah.

00:52:03.400 | - This is just a fun, ridiculous question,

00:52:05.440 | but head-to-head, who do you think survives longer?

00:52:07.980 | - If you want to get into the competitive side of it,

00:52:12.720 | I would just say I'm pretty dang sure

00:52:15.160 | I had more pounds of food.

00:52:16.820 | (laughing)

00:52:19.040 | But, and I didn't have the advantage

00:52:21.160 | of knowing when it would end,

00:52:22.380 | which I think would have been a great psychological.

00:52:26.000 | - Oh, yeah.

00:52:26.840 | - It would have made it really easy.

00:52:27.660 | Once I got the moose, I could have shot the moose

00:52:29.540 | and just not stressed.

00:52:30.840 | I would have been like a...

00:52:32.460 | And so that was a big difference between the seasons

00:52:34.560 | that I felt like, I mean,

00:52:37.080 | I felt like the psychology of season seven,

00:52:39.440 | they kind of messed up by doing a 100-day cap

00:52:42.100 | because, for my own experience, that was the hardest part.

00:52:44.820 | But Roland's a beast.

00:52:47.040 | So for people who don't know, they put a 100-day cap on it.

00:52:49.240 | So it's whoever can survive 100 days for that season.

00:52:54.240 | It's interesting to hear that for you,

00:52:56.560 | the uncertainty, not knowing when it ends,

00:52:59.760 | is the hardest. - That was for sure, yeah.

00:53:02.280 | - That's true, 'cause you wake up every day.

00:53:05.400 | - I didn't know how to ration my food.

00:53:07.140 | I didn't know if I was gonna lose after six months

00:53:10.320 | and then it was all gonna be for naught.

00:53:12.000 | I didn't know if it, I just, there's so many unknowns.

00:53:15.360 | You don't know, like I said,

00:53:16.740 | if I shot a moose and it was 100 days, done.

00:53:19.480 | If I shot a moose and you don't know,

00:53:21.360 | it's like, crap, I could still lose to somebody else.

00:53:24.140 | But it's gonna be way in the future.

00:53:25.840 | (laughing)

00:53:27.640 | So anyway, that for me was definitely the hard part.

00:53:31.680 | - And when you found out that you won

00:53:33.120 | and your wife was there,

00:53:35.280 | it was funny because you're really happy.

00:53:37.400 | There's a great sort of moment of you reuniting,

00:53:41.480 | but also there's a state of shock of like,

00:53:44.940 | you look like you were ready to go much longer.

00:53:48.820 | - That was the most genuine shock I could have.

00:53:51.420 | I hadn't even like entertained the thought yet.

00:53:53.740 | I didn't even think it was, you'd hear the helicopters

00:53:56.620 | and I just assumed there was other people out there.

00:54:00.020 | I just hadn't, I thought, and for one,

00:54:03.620 | the previous person that had gone the longest

00:54:05.820 | had gone 89 days, so I just knew

00:54:08.180 | whoever else was out here with me,

00:54:09.520 | somebody's got that in their crosshairs.

00:54:11.740 | They're gonna get to 90 and they're not gonna quit at 90.

00:54:14.220 | They're gonna go to 100.

00:54:15.620 | I just figured we can't start thinking about the end

00:54:18.260 | until a couple months from when it ended.

00:54:20.940 | So I was just shocked and they tricked me pretty good.

00:54:25.700 | They know how to make you think you're not,

00:54:28.260 | that you're not alone.

00:54:29.100 | - So they want you to do the surprise.

00:54:30.300 | - Yeah, they want it to be a surprise.

00:54:31.900 | - You really weren't, I mean, you have to do that,

00:54:34.340 | I guess, for survival.

00:54:35.180 | Don't be counting the days.

00:54:36.500 | - No, I think that would be, then you see that

00:54:38.860 | and some of the people do that.

00:54:40.340 | For myself, that would be bad psychology

00:54:42.420 | 'cause then you're just always disappointing yourself.

00:54:44.300 | You have to be resettled with the fact

00:54:46.300 | that this is gonna go a long time and suck.

00:54:48.980 | Once you come to peace with that,

00:54:50.140 | maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised,

00:54:51.780 | but you're not gonna be constantly disappointed.

00:54:54.380 | - So what was your diet like?

00:54:56.220 | Like, what was your eating habits like during that time?

00:54:59.380 | Like, how many meals a day?

00:55:00.700 | (laughing)

00:55:02.940 | - Oh, man, no, I was trying to eat the thing.

00:55:07.940 | I was like, not trying to,

00:55:09.340 | the more the moose is hanging out there,

00:55:10.980 | the more the critters, every critter in the forest

00:55:13.380 | is trying to peck at it or mice trying to eat it and stuff.

00:55:16.940 | - So one of the ways you can protect the food

00:55:18.780 | is by eating it.

00:55:19.620 | (laughing)

00:55:20.580 | - So I was having three good meals a day

00:55:22.740 | and then I'd cook up some meat and go to sleep

00:55:25.460 | and then wake up in the middle of the night

00:55:27.780 | 'cause they're long nights

00:55:28.740 | and have some meat at night, eat a bunch at night.

00:55:33.180 | So I'd usually have a fish stew for lunch

00:55:36.060 | and then moose for breakfast and dinner

00:55:38.420 | and then have some for a nighttime snack

00:55:41.780 | 'cause the nights were long,

00:55:42.820 | so you'd be in bed like 14 hours

00:55:44.740 | and wake up and eat and dink around and go back to sleep.

00:55:49.340 | - Is it okay that I was pretty low carb situation?

00:55:52.380 | - Yeah, I actually felt really good.

00:55:53.940 | I tried to, I think I would have felt better

00:55:56.940 | if I would have had a higher percentage of fat

00:55:59.540 | because it's still more protein

00:56:02.420 | than if you're on a keto diet, you want a lot of fat.

00:56:05.540 | And so I did try to mix in nature's carbs,

00:56:08.460 | different reindeer lichen and things like that,

00:56:10.740 | but honestly, I felt pretty good on that diet, I will say.

00:56:15.740 | - What's the secret to protecting food?

00:56:18.260 | What are the different ways to protect your diet?

00:56:19.700 | - Yeah, a lot of times in a typical situation

00:56:22.740 | in the woods hunting,

00:56:23.580 | you'll raise it up in a tree in a bag,

00:56:25.980 | put it in a game bag so the birds can't peck at it

00:56:28.420 | and hang it in a tree so that it cools.

00:56:31.220 | You gotta make sure first to cool it 'cause it'll spoil,

00:56:33.900 | so you cool it by whatever means necessary,

00:56:36.220 | hanging it in a cool place, letting the air blow around it.

00:56:39.180 | And then you'll notice that every forest freeloader

00:56:44.680 | in the woods is gonna come and try to steal your food.

00:56:48.100 | - Yeah.

00:56:48.940 | - And it was just fun.

00:56:49.820 | I mean, it was crazy to watch.

00:56:51.820 | You know, it's all the jay,

00:56:53.300 | all the camp jays pecking at it.

00:56:55.420 | Everything I did, there was something that could get to it.

00:57:00.420 | If put on the ground, the mice get on and they poop on it

00:57:02.780 | and they kind of mess it up.

00:57:04.620 | So I ultimately, it kind of just dawned on me,

00:57:07.780 | shoot, I'm gonna have to build

00:57:08.780 | one of those Evenki food caches.

00:57:11.460 | So I did and I put it up there

00:57:13.340 | and I thought I kind of solved my problem.

00:57:15.740 | To be honest, the Evenki then,

00:57:18.300 | so they would have taken a page out of like,

00:57:20.220 | they would have mixed me in Roland's solution.

00:57:22.100 | They build this tall stilt shelter

00:57:24.700 | and then put a box on the top that's enclosed.

00:57:27.580 | And then the bears can't get to it,

00:57:29.600 | the mice can't poop on it, the birds, the wolverine,

00:57:32.660 | you know, it's safe.

00:57:33.820 | And I never finished it and in hindsight,

00:57:35.900 | I don't actually know why.

00:57:36.820 | I think I was just, the way it timed,

00:57:38.940 | like I didn't think something was gonna get up there.

00:57:40.540 | Then it did and then I, you know,

00:57:41.940 | you're like counting calories and stuff.

00:57:44.180 | I should have, in hindsight, just boxed it in right away.

00:57:47.100 | - To get ready for the long haul.

00:57:49.100 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:50.820 | - Is rabbit starvation a real thing?

00:57:52.740 | - Yeah, so you can't just live off protein

00:57:55.100 | and rabbits are almost just protein.

00:57:56.700 | I'd kill a rabbit, eat the innards

00:57:59.820 | and the brain and the eyes

00:58:01.620 | and then everything else is just protein.

00:58:03.300 | And so it takes more calories to, you know,

00:58:08.300 | process that protein than you're getting from it

00:58:11.140 | without the fat.

00:58:11.980 | So you actually lose, I lost, I had, you know,

00:58:14.540 | a lot of rabbits in the first 20 days.

00:58:16.220 | I had 28 rabbits or something,

00:58:18.420 | but I was losing weight at exactly the same speed

00:58:20.780 | as everybody else that didn't have anything.

00:58:23.260 | So that's interesting.

00:58:24.460 | Yeah, and I'd never tried that before.

00:58:26.520 | So I was wondering if, I'm catching a ton of rabbits,

00:58:28.920 | I wonder if I can last, what, six months on rabbits?

00:58:31.180 | But no, you just starve as fast as everybody else.

00:58:33.700 | And so I had to kind of learn that on the fly and adjust.

00:58:36.180 | - I wonder what to make of that.

00:58:37.940 | So you need fat to survive, like fundamentally.

00:58:40.700 | - Yeah, that's the, yeah.

00:58:42.260 | And you'll notice when the wolverine came

00:58:43.860 | or when animals came, they would eat the skin off of the fish,

00:58:48.020 | they would eat the eyes, you know,

00:58:50.060 | they'd steal the moose fat, they'd leave all the meat.

00:58:52.380 | Yeah, like behind the eyes is a bunch of fat.

00:58:54.960 | So yeah, you can kind of observe nature

00:58:57.620 | and see what they're eating and know where the gold is.

00:59:01.380 | - What do you like eating when you're like,

00:59:03.260 | when you can eat whatever you want?

00:59:04.820 | What do you feel best eating?

00:59:06.700 | - What do I feel best?

00:59:07.660 | I just try to eat clean, I think.

00:59:09.340 | I'm not like super strict or anything,

00:59:13.100 | but I think when I eat less carbs, I feel better.

00:59:15.820 | Meat and vegetables, I like, we eat a lot of,

00:59:19.700 | you know, I eat a lot of meat.

00:59:21.380 | - So basically everything you ate on a loan,

00:59:23.420 | plus some veggies.

00:59:24.260 | - Plus veggies, I'll throw in some buckwheat,

00:59:26.420 | like buckwheat, like french bread.

00:59:29.180 | - Let's step to the early days of Jordan.

00:59:33.360 | So your Instagram handle is @hobojordo.

00:59:39.100 | So early on in your life,

00:59:41.060 | you hoboed around the US on freight trains.

00:59:45.780 | What's the story behind that?

00:59:47.720 | - My brother, when he was 17 or so,

00:59:50.100 | he just decided to go hitchhiking

00:59:51.700 | and he hitchhiked down to Reno from Idaho,

00:59:54.780 | where we were, and ended up loving traveling,

00:59:58.740 | but hated being dependent on other people.

01:00:00.900 | So he ended up jumping on a freight train and just did it.

01:00:05.860 | He honestly, he pretty much got on a train

01:00:08.740 | and traveled the country for the next eight years on trains,

01:00:12.540 | lived in the streets and everywhere.

01:00:14.180 | But, you know, he was sober,

01:00:16.960 | so it gives you a different experience than a lot.

01:00:18.940 | But at one point when I was, I guess, yeah, 18,

01:00:21.900 | he invited me to come along with him.

01:00:23.860 | He'd probably been doing it five or so,

01:00:25.540 | four or five years or more.

01:00:28.500 | And I said, "Sure."

01:00:30.340 | So I quit my job and went out with him.

01:00:33.340 | Hobo Jorda is a bit of an overstatement.

01:00:35.100 | I feel self-conscious about that

01:00:36.260 | 'cause I rode trains across the country,

01:00:38.920 | up and down the coast, back.

01:00:40.340 | You know, spent the better part of the year

01:00:43.740 | running around, riding trains,

01:00:45.180 | and all the staying in places related to that.

01:00:47.860 | But all the people, you know, the real hobos,

01:00:50.660 | those guys that are out there doing it for years on end.

01:00:53.220 | But it was such a, for me what it felt like was,

01:00:56.580 | it felt like a bit of a rite of passage experience,

01:00:59.060 | which is kind of missing, I think, in modern life.

01:01:02.140 | So I did this thing that was a huge unknown.

01:01:05.060 | Ben kind of was there with me and my brother for most of it.

01:01:09.340 | We traveled around, pushed my boundaries in every which way,

01:01:13.420 | you know, froze at night and did all the stuff.

01:01:16.260 | And then at the end, I actually wanted to go back

01:01:19.220 | and go back home, and so I went on my own

01:01:22.140 | and went from Minneapolis back up to Spokane on my own,

01:01:26.520 | which was my first stint of time by myself

01:01:29.540 | for like a week, which was interesting.

01:01:31.460 | - Alone with your own thoughts.

01:01:32.700 | - With your own thoughts is my first time in my life

01:01:34.940 | having been like that, you know?

01:01:36.260 | And so it was powerful at the time.

01:01:39.220 | You know what it did, too,

01:01:40.300 | is it gave me a whole different view of life

01:01:42.500 | 'cause I had gotten a job when I was 13,

01:01:45.260 | and then 14, 15, 16, 17.

01:01:47.540 | And then I was just in the normal run of things, kind of.

01:01:50.240 | And then that just threw a whole different path

01:01:52.780 | into my life, and then I realized some of the things

01:01:55.700 | while I was traveling that I wouldn't experience again

01:01:58.460 | until I was living with natives and such.

01:02:00.300 | And that was, you know, you wake up,

01:02:02.420 | you don't have a schedule.

01:02:03.260 | You literally just have needs,

01:02:05.020 | and you just somehow have to meet your needs.

01:02:06.860 | And so there's a really sense of freedom you get

01:02:11.860 | that is hard to replicate elsewhere.

01:02:14.740 | And so that was eye-opening to me,

01:02:17.660 | and I think once I did that, I went back.

01:02:20.180 | So I went back to my old job at the salad dressing plant,

01:02:24.180 | and there was this old cross-eyed guy,

01:02:28.380 | and he was, "Oh, Hobo Gordo's back!"

01:02:30.580 | And that's kind of where I got it.

01:02:33.220 | But freedom always was very important to me,

01:02:36.640 | I think, from that time on.

01:02:38.180 | - What'd you learn about the United States,

01:02:39.940 | about the people along the way?

01:02:42.260 | 'Cause I took a road trip across the U.S. also,

01:02:44.820 | and there's a romantic element there, too,

01:02:47.860 | of the freedom, of the, well, maybe for me,

01:02:52.860 | not knowing what the hell I'm gonna do with my life,

01:02:58.140 | but also excited by all the possibilities,

01:03:00.420 | and then you meet a lot of different people,

01:03:03.780 | and a lot of different kinds of stories.

01:03:06.300 | And also a lot of people that support you for traveling.

01:03:11.300 | 'Cause there's a lot of people kind of dream

01:03:14.060 | of experiencing that freedom,

01:03:16.100 | at least the people I've met.

01:03:17.820 | And they usually don't go outside of their little town.

01:03:22.180 | They have a thing, and they have a family, usually,

01:03:25.180 | and they don't explore, they don't take the leap.

01:03:28.900 | And you can do that when you're young.

01:03:30.180 | I guess you could do that at any moment.

01:03:32.340 | Just say, "Fuck it," and leap into the abyss

01:03:37.340 | of being on the road.

01:03:39.200 | But anyway, what'd you learn about this country,

01:03:41.760 | about the people in this country?

01:03:43.820 | - You're in an interesting context

01:03:45.320 | when you're on trains,

01:03:46.180 | 'cause the trains always end up

01:03:47.380 | in the crappiest part of town.

01:03:50.460 | And you're always outside, interacting.

01:03:53.620 | A lot of the interesting things.

01:03:55.100 | Every once in a while, you'll have to hitchhike

01:03:56.660 | to get from one place to another.

01:03:58.900 | One interesting thing is you notice

01:04:00.300 | you always get picked up by the poor people.

01:04:04.460 | They're the people that empathize with you,

01:04:05.940 | stop, pick you up.

01:04:07.340 | You go to whatever ghetto you end up in,

01:04:10.820 | and people are really, "Oh, what are you guys doing?"

01:04:13.700 | Real friendly and relatable.

01:04:17.440 | It broadened my horizons, for sure,

01:04:20.000 | from being just an Idaho kid,

01:04:22.120 | and then meeting all these different people

01:04:24.480 | and just seeing the goodness in people and this and that.

01:04:28.320 | It's also a lot of drugs and a lot of people

01:04:32.200 | with mental issues that you're friends with,

01:04:36.080 | dealing with, all that kind of stuff.

01:04:38.160 | - Any memorable characters?

01:04:40.240 | - Well, there's a few, for sure.

01:04:43.120 | A lot of 'em I still know that are still around,

01:04:45.180 | but Rocco was one guy we traveled with.

01:04:49.040 | He's become like a brother,

01:04:50.080 | but he traveled with my brother for years

01:04:55.080 | 'cause they were the two sober guys.

01:04:57.760 | Rather than traveling 'cause he was hooked on stuff,

01:05:00.620 | did it to escape all that,

01:05:01.940 | and so he was kind of sober and straight edge,

01:05:05.480 | and he was a 5'7" Italian guy

01:05:08.400 | that was always getting in fights,

01:05:10.400 | and he has his own sense of ethics

01:05:13.840 | that I think is really interesting

01:05:16.240 | 'cause he's super honest, but he expects it of others.

01:05:20.640 | And so it's funny, in the modern context,

01:05:23.080 | the thing that pops in my head

01:05:24.160 | is when he got a car for the first time,

01:05:26.640 | which wasn't that long, he was in his 30s or something,

01:05:30.360 | and he registered it,

01:05:31.920 | which he was mad about that he had to register,

01:05:33.580 | but then the next year,

01:05:35.180 | they told him he had to register again,

01:05:36.740 | and he's like, "What, did you lose my registration?"

01:05:39.520 | He went down there to the DMV,

01:05:41.560 | chewed 'em out that he had to re-register

01:05:43.520 | 'cause he already registered, where's the paperwork?

01:05:46.080 | But he just kind of views the world

01:05:47.720 | from a different lens, I thought.

01:05:49.760 | But on everything, he's the character.

01:05:51.840 | Now he just lives by digging up bottles

01:05:54.000 | and finding treasures in them.

01:05:55.720 | - But he notices the injustices--

01:05:57.800 | - He notices them and speaks up,

01:06:00.440 | and he's always like,

01:06:01.280 | "Why doesn't everybody else speak up

01:06:02.120 | "about their car registration?"

01:06:04.160 | (laughing)

01:06:06.200 | And then there was like, Devo comes to mind

01:06:08.360 | 'cause he was such a unique character

01:06:09.720 | as far as just, for one, he would've lived to be 120

01:06:13.000 | 'cause the amount of chemicals and everything else

01:06:15.140 | you put into his body and still,

01:06:17.020 | "Hey, man," you know, you're one of those guys.

01:06:20.200 | You could always get a dime,

01:06:21.440 | you know, always spare a dime, spare a dime,

01:06:23.160 | and you have bum change,

01:06:24.560 | and I'd see him sometimes, and I'd be gone,

01:06:28.240 | and then go to New York to visit my sister or something,

01:06:30.200 | and I'd go, "Sure enough, there's Devo on the street.

01:06:32.280 | "What do you know?"

01:06:33.120 | And then you go visit him in the hospital

01:06:35.320 | 'cause he got bit by, you know, 27 hobo spider bites.

01:06:39.600 | He was just always rough but charismatic,

01:06:43.920 | vital, like the vitality of life was in him,

01:06:46.240 | but it was just so permeated with drugs and alcohol, too.

01:06:49.280 | It's kind of interesting.

01:06:50.120 | - I wonder what, 'cause I've met people like that,

01:06:51.240 | and they're like, they're just, yeah,

01:06:53.720 | joy permeates their whole way of being,

01:06:55.880 | and they're like, they've been through some shit.

01:06:57.560 | They have scars, they've gotten rough,

01:06:59.440 | but they've always got a big smile.

01:07:01.520 | There's a guy I met in the jungle named Pico.

01:07:03.600 | He lost a leg, and he drives a boat,

01:07:08.600 | and he just always has a big smile,

01:07:10.880 | even given that, like, the hardship he has to get through.

01:07:13.960 | Everything requires a huge amount of work,

01:07:16.320 | but he's just big smile, and there's stories in those eyes.

01:07:19.360 | - Something about, yeah, enduring difficulty

01:07:22.080 | that makes you able to appreciate life

01:07:25.000 | and look at it and smile.

01:07:27.680 | - Any advice for if I were to take a road trip again,

01:07:30.000 | or if somebody else is thinking of hopping out

01:07:32.520 | on a freight train, or hitchhiking?

01:07:34.760 | - It's way easier now, 'cause you have a map on your phone.

01:07:36.800 | You can tell where you're going.

01:07:37.640 | You're kind of cheating now.

01:07:38.600 | - It's not about the destination,

01:07:39.720 | 'cause the map is about the destination.

01:07:41.680 | - Right.

01:07:42.960 | - But here, it's like, you don't really give a damn.

01:07:44.480 | - Yeah, right, the train's where you're going.

01:07:45.680 | You're not going anywhere.

01:07:47.280 | - Exactly.

01:07:48.120 | - I say do it, like, go out and do things,

01:07:50.800 | especially when you're young.

01:07:52.960 | Experiences and stuff help create the person

01:07:55.800 | you will be in the future.

01:07:57.280 | Doing things that you think, like,

01:07:58.480 | oh, I don't want to do that.

01:07:59.360 | I'm a little scared of that.

01:08:01.600 | I mean, that's what you gotta do.

01:08:03.160 | You just get out of your comfort zone,

01:08:04.840 | and you will grow as a person,

01:08:06.680 | and you'll go through a lot of wild experiences

01:08:08.680 | along the way.

01:08:09.520 | Say yes to life in that way.

01:08:12.160 | - Say yes to life, yeah.

01:08:13.440 | I love the boredom of it.

01:08:14.800 | - Freight train riding is very boring.

01:08:17.060 | (laughing)

01:08:18.000 | And you'll wait for hours for a train that never comes,

01:08:21.480 | and then you'll go to the store and come back,

01:08:23.440 | and it'll be gone.

01:08:24.280 | And you're like, no!

01:08:25.840 | But I remember, we went to jail, we got out, and then--

01:08:28.360 | (laughing)

01:08:29.880 | - How'd you end up in jail?

01:08:30.880 | - Oh, you know, it was--

01:08:32.520 | - Thanks.

01:08:33.360 | - Trespassing on a train.

01:08:34.440 | But we were riding a train, and my brother woke up,

01:08:38.600 | and he had a dead owl land on his head.

01:08:40.560 | And he hit the train and fell on him.

01:08:42.480 | And we woke up, and we were laughing.

01:08:44.440 | That's gotta be some kind of bad omen.

01:08:46.240 | (laughing)

01:08:47.840 | And then we were looking out of the train,

01:08:49.560 | and we saw a train worker look and saw us.

01:08:52.000 | And he went, "Oh, we know that's a bad omen."

01:08:54.840 | (laughing)

01:08:55.840 | Anyway, sure enough, the police stopped the train.

01:08:58.440 | Somebody had seen us on it.

01:08:59.720 | And they searched it, got us, and threw us in jail.

01:09:02.440 | It was not a big deal, we were in jail a couple days.

01:09:04.640 | And then, but when we got out, of course they put us,

01:09:08.440 | we were in some podunk town in Indiana,

01:09:10.400 | and we didn't know where to catch out of there.

01:09:12.880 | And so we were at some factory, and we just,

01:09:15.520 | ban in factory, and we were right there for like four days.

01:09:18.240 | No train that was going slow enough that we could catch.

01:09:20.440 | And then we found this big old roll of aluminum foil.

01:09:24.080 | And I gotta apologize to this woman,

01:09:26.080 | 'cause we were so bored just sitting there.

01:09:27.600 | We built these like hats, you know,

01:09:29.320 | with like horns coming out every which way,

01:09:31.360 | and loops, and just sitting there.

01:09:33.000 | And then it was at night, and some minivan

01:09:35.080 | pulled up to this train that was going by, too.

01:09:37.040 | (laughing)

01:09:37.880 | We're like, rrr, rrr, rrr, and went over,

01:09:39.760 | like circled the car. - Entertaining yourself.

01:09:41.360 | - Entertaining yourself with whatever you can.

01:09:43.720 | Poor lady was terrified.

01:09:44.880 | - So hitchhiking was tough.

01:09:46.560 | - I didn't like hitchhiking, just 'cause you're

01:09:49.680 | depending on other people.

01:09:51.240 | And it is not, I don't know why.

01:09:53.120 | You just wanna be independent.

01:09:54.800 | But if you do meet really cool people,

01:09:56.520 | a lot of times, there's really nice people

01:09:58.760 | that pick you up, and that's cool.

01:10:01.040 | But I just personally actually didn't do it a lot.

01:10:04.680 | And I wasn't, you know, if you're on the streets

01:10:09.200 | for 10 years, you'll end up doing it a lot more,

01:10:11.800 | 'cause you need to get from point A to point B.

01:10:13.240 | But we just tried to avoid it as much as we could,

01:10:15.360 | 'cause it didn't appeal to us as much.

01:10:17.560 | - Well, one downside of hitchhiking is people talk a lot.

01:10:21.080 | - Oh, they do.

01:10:21.920 | - So it's both the pro and the con.

01:10:24.080 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:10:25.120 | - 'Cause they'll, you know, sometimes you just wanna be

01:10:28.120 | sort of alone with your thoughts.

01:10:29.880 | There is a kind of lack of freedom in having to listen

01:10:33.880 | to a person that's giving you a ride.

01:10:35.880 | (laughing)

01:10:36.700 | - It's so true.

01:10:37.540 | And then you don't know how to react to it.

01:10:38.560 | I mean, I was young, I remember I got picked up,

01:10:40.480 | I was probably 19 or something.

01:10:41.840 | And then I was just like, "Hey, how's it going?"

01:10:44.080 | And she's like, "Oh, fine, my husband just died."

01:10:46.280 | And then all, and I got diagnosed with cancer,

01:10:49.480 | and this and that, and pretty bitter, and all that,

01:10:52.440 | and understandably so, but you're just like,

01:10:54.480 | "I have no idea how to respond here."

01:10:56.520 | And so then you're young, and you had to be nice,

01:10:59.080 | and I remember that ride being interesting,

01:11:02.480 | 'cause I didn't really know how to respond.

01:11:04.400 | And she was angry, and going through some stuff,

01:11:07.400 | and dumping it out.

01:11:09.080 | She didn't have anyone else to dump it out on.

01:11:10.720 | I was like, "Wow."

01:11:11.560 | - I'm gonna take the freight train next time.

01:11:14.240 | So how'd you end up in Siberia?

01:11:16.300 | - I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how.

01:11:20.940 | (laughing)

01:11:22.240 | But the long story short was I had a brother

01:11:24.600 | that's adopted, and when he grew up,

01:11:26.620 | he wanted to find his biological mom

01:11:28.960 | and just tell her thanks.

01:11:30.160 | And so he did, and when he was probably 20 or something,

01:11:35.160 | he found his biological mom, told her thanks.

01:11:37.400 | Turns out he had a brother that was gonna go over to Russia

01:11:40.960 | and help build this orphanage,

01:11:43.200 | and that brother was about my age.

01:11:45.460 | I mean, I remember at that time I read this verse that said,

01:11:49.040 | "If you're in the darkness and see no light,

01:11:52.760 | "just continue following me," basically.

01:11:54.840 | I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna take that to the bank,

01:11:57.080 | "even though I don't know if it's true or not."

01:11:58.920 | And then the only glimpse of light I got in all that

01:12:01.840 | was when I heard about that orphanage,

01:12:04.200 | to go build that orphanage.

01:12:06.240 | And I prayed about it, and I felt,

01:12:09.320 | and I can't explain, it brought me to tears.

01:12:11.980 | I felt so strongly that I should go.

01:12:13.700 | And so I was like, "Well, that's a clear call.

01:12:16.040 | "I'm just gonna do it."

01:12:17.440 | Yes, I just bought a ticket, got a visa for a year,

01:12:21.240 | and then I went and helped build an orphanage.

01:12:24.440 | And we got that built, but he was an American,

01:12:27.600 | and I wanted to live with the Russians to learn a language.

01:12:29.600 | And so he sent me to a neighboring village

01:12:33.380 | to live with a couple Russian families that needed a hand,

01:12:37.200 | somebody to watch their kids and cut their hay

01:12:39.400 | and milk the cow and all that.

01:12:40.640 | So I found myself in that little Russian village

01:12:44.700 | just getting to know these two guys and their families.

01:12:49.200 | It was pretty fascinating.

01:12:52.200 | And of course, I didn't know the language yet,

01:12:54.240 | and they were two awesome dudes.

01:12:56.120 | Both of them had been in prison

01:12:57.720 | and met each other in prison, and were really close,

01:13:01.360 | 'cause they had found God in prison together

01:13:03.400 | and got out and stayed connected.

01:13:08.400 | And so I'd bounce backs between those two families,

01:13:11.680 | and they used to always tell me about their third buddy

01:13:13.320 | they'd been in prison with, who was a native fur trapper

01:13:16.340 | now in the North.

01:13:17.260 | And so they'd go, "You gotta go meet our buddy up North."

01:13:19.640 | And one day that guy came through to sell furs in the city,

01:13:24.640 | and he invited me to come live with him.

01:13:27.140 | And my visa was about to expire,

01:13:28.660 | but I was like, "When I come back, I'll come."

01:13:29.980 | And so I went back home, earned some more money,

01:13:34.040 | did some construction or whatever, then went back

01:13:36.660 | and headed North to hang out with Yura and Fur Trap.

01:13:42.300 | And that started a whole new,

01:13:45.100 | opened a whole new world that I didn't know about.

01:13:49.100 | - Before we talk about Yura and Fur Trapping,

01:13:50.820 | let's actually rewind, and would you describe that moment

01:13:55.040 | when you were in the darkness as a crisis of faith?

01:13:59.120 | - Yeah, yeah, for sure.

01:14:00.620 | It was like, it was darkness in that I didn't know

01:14:05.620 | how to parse, what is this thing that's my faith?

01:14:10.740 | And what's the wheat and what's the chaff,

01:14:14.820 | and how do I get through it?

01:14:16.100 | And I basically just clung to keeping it really simple.

01:14:21.100 | And oddly enough, in my Christian path,

01:14:27.300 | God was actually defined in a certain, God is love.

01:14:30.820 | And I was just like, that's the only thing

01:14:32.380 | I'm gonna cling to, you know?

01:14:34.780 | And I'm gonna try to express that in my life

01:14:36.980 | in whichever way I can, and just trust that if I do that,

01:14:41.980 | if I act like I, you know, I've heard this lately,

01:14:45.300 | but if you just act like you believe,

01:14:47.560 | over time that world kind of opens to you.

01:14:50.740 | When I said I would go to Russia, I prayed.

01:14:53.740 | I was like, Lord, I don't see you, I don't know,

01:14:56.780 | but I got this, what I felt like was a clear call.

01:15:00.260 | I have only one request, and that is that you would give me

01:15:02.700 | the faith to match my action.

01:15:06.980 | You know, I'm choosing to believe.

01:15:08.700 | Like, I could choose not to, because, you know, whatever.

01:15:12.300 | But I'm gonna choose to act,

01:15:14.740 | and I just ask to have faith someday.

01:15:16.980 | And then, honestly, the whole first year I went through,

01:15:21.420 | that was a very crazy time for me,

01:15:24.060 | learning the language, being isolated,

01:15:26.060 | being misunderstood, blah, blah, blah.

01:15:27.900 | But then trying to approach all that

01:15:30.220 | with a loving, open heart.

01:15:31.700 | And then I came back, and I realized

01:15:34.540 | that that prayer had kind of been answered.

01:15:36.260 | That wasn't the end of my journey, but it was,

01:15:38.580 | I was like, whoa, that was like my deepest request

01:15:42.140 | that I could come up with,

01:15:43.000 | and somehow that had been answered.

01:15:44.500 | - So through that year, you were just like,

01:15:48.140 | first of all, you couldn't speak the language.

01:15:49.540 | - Right. - That's really tough.

01:15:50.420 | That's really tough. - It's tough,

01:15:51.260 | because it's unlike on "Alone," where,

01:15:53.540 | because not only can you not speak, and you feel isolated,

01:15:57.140 | but you're also misunderstood all the time,

01:15:58.860 | so you seem like an idiot and all that.

01:16:01.740 | And so that was tough.

01:16:03.340 | I felt very alone at that time,

01:16:06.340 | at certain times in that journey.

01:16:08.380 | - But you were sort of radiating,

01:16:10.620 | like you said, lead with love.

01:16:11.940 | So you were radiating this kind of camaraderie.

01:16:14.580 | - Mm-hmm, I was really intentional about trying to,

01:16:17.800 | I don't know why I'm here.

01:16:20.620 | I just know that I, that that's my call,

01:16:23.820 | is to love one another.

01:16:25.500 | And so I would just try to like,

01:16:26.940 | and then it meant digging people's wells.

01:16:28.820 | It might mean just going and visiting

01:16:30.260 | that old lady babushka up at the house that's lonely.

01:16:33.540 | And that was really cool.

01:16:34.620 | I got to talk to some fascinating ladies and stuff,

01:16:37.460 | and then go to that village, help those families.

01:16:40.460 | I'm gonna be like, cut the hay,

01:16:42.260 | be the most, the hardest worker I can be,

01:16:44.580 | because that's my goal here.

01:16:47.060 | I didn't have any other agenda or anything,

01:16:49.940 | except to try to live a life of love,

01:16:52.540 | and I couldn't define it beyond that.

01:16:54.380 | - What was it like learning the Russian language?

01:16:56.580 | - Oh, it was super interesting.

01:16:57.820 | I think, I had the thought while I was learning it,

01:17:01.740 | one, that it was way too hard.

01:17:03.480 | Like, if I would've just learned Spanish or German,

01:17:05.780 | I would be so much farther.

01:17:07.020 | But here I am, a year in, and I'm like,

01:17:09.460 | how do you say I want cheese properly?

01:17:11.600 | (laughing)

01:17:13.380 | And then, but at the same time,

01:17:16.500 | it was really cool to learn a language

01:17:18.180 | that I thought in a lot of ways was richer than English.

01:17:22.420 | It's a very rich language.

01:17:23.580 | I remember there was a comedy act in Russian,

01:17:27.060 | but he was saying, you know,

01:17:28.980 | one word you can't have in English is (speaking foreign language)

01:17:33.340 | meaning like, I didn't drink enough to get drunk.

01:17:37.300 | You know, that type thing.

01:17:39.260 | But it's just, you can make up these words

01:17:41.260 | using different prefixes and suffixes,

01:17:44.960 | and blend them in a way that is quite unique and interesting,

01:17:48.060 | and honestly, would be really good for poetry,

01:17:49.780 | 'cause it also doesn't have sentence structure,

01:17:52.020 | in the same way English does.

01:17:54.060 | The words can be jumbled in a way.

01:17:55.900 | - And somehow, in the process of jumbling,

01:17:57.980 | some humor, some musicality comes out.

01:18:02.300 | It's interesting.

01:18:03.140 | Like, you can be witty in Russian

01:18:04.900 | much easier than you can in English.

01:18:06.420 | Like, witty and funny, and also with poetry,

01:18:10.340 | you can say profound things by messing with words,

01:18:14.180 | and the order of words, which is hilarious,

01:18:16.540 | because you had a great conversation with Joe Rogan,

01:18:20.860 | and on that program, you talked about

01:18:23.540 | how to say I love you in Russian, which is hilarious.

01:18:27.740 | And it was, for me, the first time, I don't know why,

01:18:32.220 | you were a great person to articulate

01:18:35.780 | the flexibility and the power of the Russian language.

01:18:38.260 | That's really interesting. - Oh, interesting.

01:18:39.340 | - 'Cause you were saying, like, (speaking foreign language)

01:18:44.340 | You could say every single order,

01:18:49.820 | every single combination of ordering of those words

01:18:53.660 | has the same meaning, but slightly different.

01:18:59.460 | - You could, like, and it would change the meaning

01:19:00.860 | if you took ya out and just said (speaking foreign language)

01:19:04.260 | There's, like, a different emphasis, or maybe,

01:19:06.260 | or (speaking foreign language)

01:19:07.860 | or something, you know, like, all these different--

01:19:09.380 | - Or just (speaking foreign language)

01:19:11.100 | - Right, exactly.

01:19:12.660 | So it is rich, and it was interesting

01:19:14.780 | coming from an English context and getting a glimpse of that

01:19:17.660 | and then wondering about all those, you know,

01:19:19.620 | Russian authors that we all appreciate that,

01:19:22.460 | oh, we actually aren't getting the full deal here.

01:19:25.900 | - Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:19:27.460 | I've recently become a fan, actually,

01:19:29.700 | of Larisa Volokhonskaya and Richard Prevear.

01:19:32.220 | They're these world-famous translators of Russian literature.

01:19:36.500 | Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin,

01:19:38.500 | Bulgakov, Pasternak.

01:19:41.580 | They've helped me understand just how much

01:19:44.540 | of an art form translation really is.

01:19:47.060 | Some authors do that art more translatable than others,

01:19:50.180 | like Dostoevsky is more translatable,

01:19:52.340 | but then you can still spend a week on one sentence.

01:19:54.940 | - Oh, yeah.

01:19:55.780 | - Like, just how do I exactly capture

01:19:57.940 | this very important sentence?

01:20:00.380 | But I think what's more powerful

01:20:02.380 | is not, like, literature, but conversation,

01:20:07.380 | which is one of the reasons I've been caring

01:20:12.380 | and feeling the responsibility of having conversations

01:20:16.180 | with Russian speakers,

01:20:17.500 | because I can still see the music of it.

01:20:21.180 | I can still see the wit of it.

01:20:22.660 | And in conversation comes out, like,

01:20:24.660 | really interesting kinds of wisdom.

01:20:27.620 | When I listen to, like, world leaders

01:20:31.180 | that speak Russian speak, and I see the translation,

01:20:36.060 | and it loses.

01:20:37.500 | It loses the irony, like, in between the words.

01:20:43.860 | If you translate them literally,

01:20:46.020 | you lose the reference in there

01:20:50.180 | to the history of the peoples.

01:20:53.420 | - Yeah, for sure.

01:20:54.420 | And I've definitely seen that on,

01:20:56.500 | like, you know, and if you listen to,

01:20:58.460 | I think it probably was a Putin speech or something,

01:21:00.820 | and you just see that, oh, wow,

01:21:02.180 | something major's being lost in translation.

01:21:04.540 | You can actually see it happen.

01:21:06.860 | I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case

01:21:08.860 | with the, you know, that whole greatest tragedy

01:21:11.380 | is the fall of the Soviet Union,

01:21:12.860 | that I hear him being quoted as saying all the time.

01:21:14.980 | I bet you there's something in there

01:21:17.260 | that's being lost in translation that is interesting.

01:21:20.380 | - I think the thing I see the most lost in translation

01:21:23.540 | is the humor.

01:21:25.420 | - I'll just say that that was the hardest,

01:21:27.300 | that was the tangibly the hardest part

01:21:28.940 | about learning the language, is that humor comes last.

01:21:31.500 | And you have to, like, wait.

01:21:32.940 | You have to wait that whole year, you know,

01:21:35.100 | or however long it takes you to learn a language

01:21:36.780 | to be able to start getting the humor.

01:21:38.740 | You know, some of it comes through,

01:21:39.820 | but you miss so much nuance.

01:21:41.460 | And that was really difficult in interaction with people

01:21:45.900 | to, like, just be the guy, you know,

01:21:48.260 | when there's humor going on

01:21:49.380 | and you're totally oblivious to it.

01:21:50.860 | - Yeah, everybody's laughing and you're like,

01:21:53.940 | trying to laugh along.

01:21:57.340 | What do they make of you?

01:21:58.700 | - To be honest?

01:22:00.860 | - This person that came from no, descended upon us,

01:22:03.660 | all full of love.

01:22:06.020 | - I've had a nickel for every time I heard, like,

01:22:08.500 | oh, Americans suck, but you're a good American.

01:22:10.740 | You're, like, the only good American I've ever met.

01:22:12.580 | But then, of course, they never met any.

01:22:14.100 | - Yeah, exactly, you're the only one.

01:22:16.540 | - But, you know, I think because I was just,

01:22:20.100 | tried to work hard, tried to be more useful

01:22:24.020 | than I was a drain, all that, they all,

01:22:26.900 | I think it was pretty appreciated me out there.

01:22:30.340 | I definitely heard that a lot, and so that's nice.

01:22:33.540 | - Can you talk about their way of life?

01:22:35.540 | So, like, when you're doing fur trapping.

01:22:39.340 | - Yeah, so fur trapping was an interesting experience.

01:22:43.660 | Basically, what you do in October or something,

01:22:47.300 | you'll go out to your hunting cabin,

01:22:49.940 | and you'll have, like, three hunting cabins.

01:22:52.060 | You'll go stock 'em with noodles or whatever it is,

01:22:54.940 | and then for the next couple months or however long,

01:22:57.620 | you'll go from one cabin, usually the guys

01:22:59.540 | are just out there doing this on their own,

01:23:00.940 | so they'll go out and they'll go from one cabin,

01:23:04.180 | and each cabin will have five or six trap lines

01:23:06.780 | going out of it every day.

01:23:08.220 | It'll take a half a day to walk into your trap line,

01:23:10.860 | open all the traps, and a half a day to get back.

01:23:12.780 | And they'll do that, so they'll spend a week at a cabin,

01:23:14.900 | open up all the traps, and then it'll take a day

01:23:17.300 | to hike over to the other cabin, go to that one,

01:23:19.980 | open up all those traps, and then there,

01:23:21.900 | and then, like, three weeks later or so,

01:23:23.460 | they'll end up back at the first cabin,

01:23:25.580 | and then check all the traps.

01:23:26.940 | And so it's kind of that rhythm,

01:23:28.300 | and they'll do that for, you know,

01:23:30.980 | a couple few months during the winter.

01:23:33.380 | And you're trapping sable, they're called sable,

01:23:36.300 | like pine martin is what we would have

01:23:38.300 | the equivalent of over here, and--

01:23:40.460 | - What is it?

01:23:41.300 | - It's like a weasel, a furry little weasel,

01:23:43.420 | and they make coats out of it.

01:23:45.700 | And so when I went, he showed me how to open a trap,

01:23:49.140 | showed me the ropes, gave me a topographical map.

01:23:52.500 | There's one cabin, there's the other,

01:23:54.140 | and we parted ways for, like, five weeks.

01:23:56.260 | We did run into each other once in the middle there

01:23:59.380 | at a cabin, but other than that,

01:24:01.300 | you're just off by yourself, hoping to shoot a grouse

01:24:05.060 | or something to add to your noodles

01:24:07.260 | and make your meal better, catch a fish,

01:24:09.380 | and then working really hard,

01:24:11.860 | trying not to get lost and stuff.

01:24:13.340 | - How do you get from one trap and location to the next?

01:24:16.100 | - That's funny, 'cause it was basically by landmarks

01:24:19.940 | and feel, like I didn't have a compass and things like that.

01:24:23.300 | - By feel, okay.

01:24:25.260 | - I got myself into trouble once,

01:24:27.180 | and the first time I went to one cabin,

01:24:29.380 | I got myself into trouble.

01:24:30.980 | First time I went to the other cabin, I nailed it.

01:24:33.660 | And so I had two different experiences on my first trip.

01:24:36.860 | But the one that I nailed, I remember I had to go,

01:24:40.060 | and it's like a day hike.

01:24:41.620 | I was like, well, I know the cabin's south,

01:24:43.620 | and so if I just walk south,

01:24:45.700 | you know, the sun should be on the left in the morning

01:24:48.620 | and right in front of me in the middle of the day,

01:24:50.780 | and by evening, it should end up at my right,

01:24:53.420 | and just kind of guess what time it is and follow along.

01:24:57.340 | And it takes all day, and I kid you not,

01:25:01.100 | I ended up like 100 yards from the cabin.

01:25:03.540 | (laughs)

01:25:04.380 | I was like, whoa, this is the trail,

01:25:05.940 | and that's the cabin, like, oh, amazing.

01:25:08.060 | And then the other time, I went out,

01:25:09.900 | and I was heading over the mountains,

01:25:13.300 | and I thought, you know, hours had passed.

01:25:15.540 | I probably had gotten slightly lost.

01:25:17.540 | And then I thought I was halfway there,

01:25:20.400 | so I thought, okay, I'm gonna sit down

01:25:21.860 | and cook some food, get a drink, I'm thirsty.

01:25:25.340 | So I sat down and went to start a fire,

01:25:28.100 | and my matches had gotten all wet,

01:25:29.500 | 'cause the snow had fallen on me and soaked me,

01:25:31.340 | and I didn't have 'em wrapped in plastic.

01:25:32.780 | I was like, oh, no, I can't drink water.

01:25:35.340 | You know, so I was like, well, I'm just gonna power through.

01:25:38.300 | I'm halfway there, but I kept hiking,

01:25:39.980 | and then I realized it was getting night,

01:25:41.660 | and then I realized I was at the halfway point,

01:25:45.180 | 'cause I saw this rock that I was like,

01:25:46.900 | oh, no, that's the halfway point.

01:25:49.140 | I was like, I can't do this, and so I need to go get water.

01:25:51.460 | I ended up having to divert down the mountain

01:25:53.660 | and head to the water.

01:25:54.660 | I ended up, you know, it was a whole ordeal.

01:25:57.820 | I had to take my skis off, 'cause I was going through

01:25:59.620 | an old forest fire burn, so they were all really close trees,

01:26:02.460 | but then the snow was like this deep,

01:26:04.060 | so I was just trudging through,

01:26:05.620 | and just wishing a bear would eat me and get it over with.

01:26:09.980 | But I finally made it down to the water,

01:26:12.380 | chopped a hole through the ice, was able to take a sip.

01:26:14.980 | - So you're severely dehydrated.

01:26:16.580 | - Severely dehydrated, and I--

01:26:18.340 | - Exhausted, cold. - Exhausted, cold.

01:26:20.540 | Like, you know, you feel sort of nervous.

01:26:23.180 | You're in over your head, and then I got down to the river,

01:26:25.740 | chopped a hole in the ice, drank it, hiked up the river,

01:26:27.980 | and eventually got to the other cabin.

01:26:29.420 | It was probably three in the morning or something.

01:26:31.380 | - He chopped a hole in the ice to drink.

01:26:34.980 | - To get some water, yeah.

01:26:37.060 | - It's gotta be, like, one of the worst days of your life.

01:26:40.660 | - You know, it was a bad day for sure.

01:26:42.780 | I'm out of fumes. (laughs)

01:26:44.900 | It was a bad day, and here's what was funny,

01:26:47.540 | is I got to the cabin at, like, three in the morning,

01:26:49.500 | and I brushed over a lot of the misery that I had felt,

01:26:53.660 | and I laid down, I was about to go to sleep,

01:26:56.500 | and then Europe charges in from the other way.

01:26:59.320 | I was like, "Whoa, dude, Europe, what are you doing?"

01:27:02.360 | And I was like, "How's it going?"

01:27:03.620 | He's like, "Oh, it sucks."

01:27:04.540 | And he laid down and just fell asleep.

01:27:06.780 | I fell asleep, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny.

01:27:08.020 | "The last few weeks that we've been apart,

01:27:10.460 | "who knows what he went through?

01:27:11.560 | "Who knows why he was there at that time at night?"

01:27:14.480 | All just summarized, and it sucked,

01:27:16.420 | and we went to sleep, and the next morning,

01:27:18.220 | we parted ways, and who knows what happened.

01:27:20.380 | - And you didn't really tell him.

01:27:21.220 | - I never knew neither of us said what happened.

01:27:24.380 | It's just like, "Oh, that's interesting."

01:27:26.580 | - Yeah, and he probably was through similar kinds of things.

01:27:29.340 | - Who knows, yeah.

01:27:30.180 | - Like, what gave you strength in those hours

01:27:33.740 | when you're, you know, just going through waist-high snow,

01:27:38.740 | all of that?

01:27:41.180 | You're laughing, but, like, that's hard.

01:27:44.980 | - Yeah, you know that Russian phrase,

01:27:48.140 | (speaking in Russian)

01:27:50.180 | eyes are afraid, hands do.

01:27:52.820 | I'm sure there's a poetic way to translate that.

01:27:54.620 | - Right, it's kind of like, you know,

01:27:55.900 | just put one foot in front of the other.

01:27:57.420 | You know, when you think about what you have to do,

01:27:58.980 | it's really intimidating, but you just know,

01:28:01.820 | if I just do it, if I just do it,

01:28:03.580 | if I just keep trudging, eventually I'll get there,

01:28:06.460 | and pretty soon, you realize,

01:28:07.900 | oh, I've covered a couple kilometers, right?

01:28:10.820 | And so when you're really in it in those moments,

01:28:12.820 | I guess you're just putting your head down

01:28:14.940 | and getting through.

01:28:16.180 | - I've had similar moments, there's wisdom to that.

01:28:19.020 | Like, once, just take it one step at a time.

01:28:21.460 | - One step at a time, I think that a lot.

01:28:22.900 | Honestly, I tell myself that a lot

01:28:24.100 | when I'm about to do something really hard,

01:28:25.460 | just, you know, (speaking in Russian)

01:28:27.900 | one step at a time.

01:28:28.820 | Just gonna get, don't, like, sit there and think,

01:28:31.940 | oh, that's a long ways.

01:28:34.100 | Just go, and then you'll look back

01:28:35.780 | and you've covered a bunch of ground.

01:28:37.340 | - One of the things I've realized

01:28:38.780 | that was helpful in the jungle,

01:28:39.860 | that was one of the biggest realizations for me,

01:28:43.100 | is, like, it really sucks right now,

01:28:47.900 | but when I look back at the end of the day,

01:28:51.100 | I won't really remember exactly how much it sucked.

01:28:56.900 | I have a vague notion of it sucking,

01:28:58.980 | and I'll remember the good things.

01:29:00.380 | So, being dehydrated, I'll remember drinking water,

01:29:05.060 | and I won't really remember the hours of feeling like shit.

01:29:09.020 | - That's absolutely true.

01:29:10.180 | I gotta tell you, it's so funny how, like,

01:29:11.900 | this awareness of that, having been through it

01:29:14.500 | and then being aware of it means,

01:29:16.100 | next time you face it, you'll be like, you know what?

01:29:17.740 | Once this is over, I'm gonna look back on it,

01:29:20.020 | and it's gonna be like that and nothing,

01:29:21.380 | and I'll actually laugh about it and think it was,

01:29:23.860 | it's a thing I'll remember.

01:29:24.980 | You know, I remember that story of that miserable day

01:29:27.500 | going down to the ice, and I can smile about it now,

01:29:30.380 | and now that I know that, I can be in a miserable position

01:29:33.040 | and realize that that's what the outcome will be

01:29:35.020 | once it's over. - It's just gonna be a story.

01:29:36.460 | - It's just gonna be a story.

01:29:37.420 | - If you survive, though.

01:29:38.460 | - If you survive, and that can be.

01:29:40.220 | - So, you mentioned you've learned about hunger

01:29:44.880 | during these times.

01:29:47.100 | When was, like, the hungriest you've gotten?

01:29:49.260 | - It was the first time, so to continue the story slightly,

01:29:52.460 | I went fur trapping with that guy,

01:29:55.260 | and then it turned out all his cousins

01:29:57.340 | were these native nomadic reindeer herders,

01:29:59.500 | and after I, like, earned his trust and he liked me a lot,

01:30:03.020 | he took me out to his cousins who were all these,

01:30:06.200 | you know, nomads living in teepees.

01:30:07.940 | I was like, this is awesome.

01:30:08.860 | I didn't even know people still lived like this,

01:30:10.820 | and they were really open and welcoming

01:30:12.780 | 'cause their cousin just brought me out there

01:30:15.260 | and vouched for me, but it was during fencing season,

01:30:19.580 | and fencing in Siberia for those reindeers,

01:30:22.180 | like, an incredible thing.

01:30:23.100 | You take an ax, you go out, and you just build

01:30:26.780 | these 30-kilometer loop fences with just logs interlocking.

01:30:31.220 | It's tons of work, and all these guys

01:30:33.540 | are more efficient bodies.

01:30:35.300 | They're better at it, and I'm just, like,

01:30:38.020 | working less efficiently and also a lot bigger dude,

01:30:41.400 | but we're all just on the same rations, kind of,

01:30:44.420 | and I got down, that was like 155 pounds,

01:30:47.860 | you know, getting down pretty dang skinny

01:30:49.580 | for my 6'3" frame and just working really hard,

01:30:53.260 | and it's in the spring in Siberia.

01:30:54.820 | There's no, like, there's not much to forage.

01:30:56.700 | You know, in the fall, you can have pine nuts

01:30:58.580 | and this and that, but in the spring,

01:30:59.900 | you're just stuck with whatever random food you've got,

01:31:03.140 | and so that's where I lost the most weight

01:31:07.020 | and felt the most hungry, and I had a lot of other issues.

01:31:10.060 | You know, I was new to that type of work,

01:31:12.940 | and so working as hard as I could,

01:31:15.320 | but also making mistakes, chopping myself with the ax,

01:31:18.060 | and getting injured, all kinds of stuff, you know?

01:31:22.220 | - So injuries plus very low calorie intake.

01:31:25.740 | - Low, yep.

01:31:26.780 | - And exhausted.

01:31:27.700 | - I remember if you got, you were the poor son of a gun,

01:31:29.980 | you get stuck slicing the bread, you know,

01:31:31.660 | like you're here cutting the bread,

01:31:32.940 | and somebody throws all the spoons

01:31:34.340 | and drops the pot of soup there,

01:31:36.540 | and it's like before you can even done slicing your slice,

01:31:39.060 | all the meat's, like, gone from the bowl.

01:31:41.180 | Everybody else has grabbed the spoon in midair and poof,

01:31:43.980 | and you're just like, "Oh, hoping this one little noodle's

01:31:47.100 | "gonna give me a lot of nourishment."

01:31:48.640 | (laughing)

01:31:50.860 | - Wow, so everybody gets, I mean, yeah,

01:31:54.260 | first come, first serve, I guess.

01:31:55.660 | - 'Cause it's like all the dudes out there

01:31:57.300 | working on the fence.

01:31:58.220 | - So you mentioned the ax, and you gave me a present.

01:32:01.540 | This is probably the most badass present I've ever gotten.

01:32:06.540 | So tell me the story of this ax.

01:32:10.140 | - So the natives, when I got there, I thought,

01:32:12.620 | you know, I grew up on a farm,

01:32:13.740 | I thought I was pretty good with an ax,

01:32:15.100 | but they do tons of work with those things.

01:32:18.140 | And I really grew to love their type of ax,

01:32:22.140 | their style of ax, and just an ax in general.

01:32:24.240 | They'd always say it's the one tool you need

01:32:25.900 | to survive in the wilderness, and I agree.

01:32:29.100 | And this one has certain, yeah, design features

01:32:32.740 | that the natives, that was unique to the Evenki,

01:32:36.100 | to the natives I was with.

01:32:37.300 | One is, with these Russian heads, or the Soviet heads,

01:32:40.940 | whatever they had, they're a little wider on top here,

01:32:43.900 | meaning you can put the handle through from the top,

01:32:46.820 | like a tomahawk, and that means you're not dealing

01:32:50.000 | with a wedge, and if it ever loosens and you're swinging,

01:32:52.660 | it only gets tighter, it doesn't fly off.

01:32:55.660 | And so that's something that's kinda cool.

01:32:58.280 | Then they have, what they do that's unique is,

01:33:05.420 | so you can see, there's the Wolverine ax,

01:33:07.740 | so it's got the little Wolverine head

01:33:09.140 | in honor of that Wolverine I fought on the show.

01:33:11.540 | - So you have actually two axes, this is one of the small.

01:33:15.100 | - This is a little smaller, I didn't wanna make it

01:33:16.700 | too small, 'cause you need something

01:33:18.380 | to actually work out there, you need something

01:33:20.300 | kinda serious.

01:33:21.120 | But then they sharpen it from one side,

01:33:23.980 | so if you're right-handed, you sharpen it

01:33:26.000 | from the right side, and that means when you're

01:33:27.940 | in the woods and living, there's a lot of times

01:33:30.000 | where you're, whether you're making a table,

01:33:31.700 | or a sleigh, or an ax handle, or whatever you're doing,

01:33:34.180 | that you're holding the wood and doing this work.

01:33:36.700 | And it makes it really good for that planing.

01:33:39.300 | The other thing it is, especially in northern woods,

01:33:41.700 | all the trees are like this big, you know,

01:33:43.820 | you're never cutting down a big, giant tree.

01:33:46.220 | And so when you swing with a single-sided ax like this,

01:33:50.060 | sharpened from the one side, it really,

01:33:52.180 | with your right-hand swing like this,

01:33:53.820 | it really bites into the wood, and gives you a,

01:33:56.780 | because with that, if you can picture it,

01:33:59.280 | that angle's gonna cause deflection.

01:34:02.140 | And without that angle on your right-handed swing,

01:34:04.140 | it just, like, bites in there like crazy.

01:34:06.340 | And so, that, there's other little,

01:34:11.020 | you know, the handle was made by some Amish guys in Canada.

01:34:14.380 | This is all hand-forged by--

01:34:16.780 | - Oh, it's hand-forged?

01:34:17.620 | - Yeah.

01:34:18.440 | - I mean, yeah, it looks--

01:34:19.280 | - And so it's a pretty sweet little--

01:34:20.940 | - Yeah, it's amazing.

01:34:22.180 | - There's other things, you know,

01:34:23.180 | like I slightly rounded this pole here.

01:34:25.540 | It's just a little nuance, 'cause when you pound a stake in,

01:34:28.600 | if you picture it, if it's convex, when you're pounding it,

01:34:33.340 | it's gonna blow the fibers apart.

01:34:34.860 | If it has just a slight concave,

01:34:36.860 | it helps hold the fibers together.

01:34:39.200 | And so, it's a little nuance, not too flat,

01:34:41.880 | 'cause you wanna still be able to use the back as you would.

01:34:44.420 | - What kind of stuff are you using the axe for?

01:34:46.380 | - Oh, so the axe is super important to chop through ice

01:34:49.500 | in a winter situation, which you probably,

01:34:51.300 | hopefully, won't need. (laughs)

01:34:53.380 | But what I use an axe all the time for is when I'm,

01:34:57.860 | when it's wet and rainy, and you need to start a fire,

01:35:01.340 | like, it's hard to get to the middle of dry wood

01:35:04.740 | if it's just a knife or a saw.

01:35:06.940 | And so, I can go out there, find a dead, tall tree,

01:35:10.620 | you know, a dead standing tree, chop it down,

01:35:12.820 | split it apart, split it open,

01:35:14.500 | get to the dry wood on the inside,

01:35:16.560 | shave it, some little curls,

01:35:18.620 | and have a fire going pretty fast.

01:35:20.540 | And so, if I have an axe, I feel always confident

01:35:23.100 | that I can get a quick fire in whatever weather,

01:35:25.860 | and I wouldn't feel the same without it in that regard.

01:35:29.580 | So, that's the main thing.

01:35:31.360 | Of course, you can use it, I use it

01:35:34.420 | if you're taking an animal apart,

01:35:36.140 | or if you're, you know, all kinds of,

01:35:39.020 | what else, building a shelter, skinning teepee poles,

01:35:44.460 | or whatever you're doing.

01:35:45.500 | - What's the use of a saw versus an axe?

01:35:47.300 | - I greatly prefer an axe.

01:35:49.760 | A saw, though, has, its value goes up quite a bit

01:35:53.600 | when you're in hardwoods.

01:35:55.020 | Like, when you're in a hardwood oaks and hickory

01:35:57.900 | and things like that, they're a lot harder to chop.

01:36:00.860 | So, a saw is pretty nice in those situations, I'd say.

01:36:04.380 | In those situations, I'd like to have both.

01:36:07.880 | In the north woods, and in more coniferous forests,

01:36:11.220 | I don't think there's enough advantages

01:36:13.060 | that a saw incurs.

01:36:14.100 | With a good axe, now, you'll see people

01:36:15.700 | with little camp axes and stuff,

01:36:18.380 | and they just don't think they like axes.

01:36:20.460 | It's like, well, you haven't actually tried a good one first.

01:36:23.460 | And get good with it.

01:36:24.300 | The one thing about an axe, they're dangerous,

01:36:25.820 | so you need to practice, always control it with two hands,

01:36:28.900 | make sure you're not, you know where it's gonna go,

01:36:30.980 | it doesn't hit you, or when you're chopping,

01:36:33.700 | like, say, you're creating something,

01:36:35.360 | that you're not doing it on rocks and stuff,

01:36:37.220 | so that it's, you're doing it on top of wood,

01:36:39.220 | so that when you're hitting the ground,

01:36:40.540 | you're not dulling your axe.

01:36:41.700 | You know, you gotta be a little bit thoughtful about it.

01:36:43.940 | - Have you ever injured yourself

01:36:45.060 | with an axe in the early days?

01:36:46.580 | - Oh, yeah. (laughs)

01:36:47.960 | That first, so I'd gotten a knee surgery,

01:36:50.780 | and then about three months later,

01:36:53.100 | I had torn my ACL, and I went over to Russia,

01:36:55.180 | and I was like, well, I got a good knee, it's okay.

01:36:56.700 | And then, that's when I was building

01:36:58.020 | that fence that first time.

01:36:59.680 | And at one point, I chopped my rubber boot with my axe,

01:37:04.500 | 'cause it reflected off, and I was new to 'em,

01:37:06.500 | and I was really frustrated, 'cause I'd done it before.

01:37:10.540 | And the native guy was like, oh, you know,

01:37:14.400 | I think there's a boot we left.

01:37:15.980 | You know, a few years ago, we left a boot

01:37:18.380 | like four kilometers that way.

01:37:19.660 | So we got the reindeer, took 'em, rode 'em over.

01:37:22.100 | Sure enough, there's a stump with a boot upside down.

01:37:24.820 | Pull it off, put it on.

01:37:25.740 | I was like, sweet, I'm back in business.

01:37:27.480 | Went back, couple days later, bing, choom, chopped it.

01:37:30.820 | Cut your foot, cut my rubber boot,

01:37:32.900 | and I was just like, dang it.

01:37:34.180 | And I was mad enough that I just grabbed the axe

01:37:36.980 | and swung it at the tree, and it just one-handed,

01:37:39.060 | and deflected off, and bam, right into my knee.

01:37:41.380 | - Oh, no. (laughs)

01:37:43.420 | - I was like, oh, I fell down.

01:37:44.980 | I was like, oh, my gosh, 'cause you get your axe

01:37:46.800 | really razor sharp, and then just swung it into my knee.

01:37:50.540 | I didn't even wanna look.

01:37:51.460 | I was like, oh, no.

01:37:52.500 | I looked, and it wasn't a huge wound,

01:37:54.460 | because it had hit right on the bone of my knee,

01:37:56.780 | but it split the bone, cut a tendon there,

01:37:59.540 | and I was out in the middle of the woods.

01:38:00.660 | So I literally, I knew I was in shock,

01:38:02.940 | 'cause I'm just gonna go back to teepee right now.

01:38:04.440 | So I ran back to teepee, laid down,

01:38:06.840 | and honestly, I was stuck there for a few days.

01:38:08.980 | I was in so much pain, and my other knee was bad.

01:38:12.740 | It was rough.

01:38:14.140 | I literally couldn't even walk at all or move.

01:38:17.580 | I had to, there was a plastic bag.

01:38:19.940 | I had to poop in it, and roll to the edge of the teepee,

01:38:23.260 | shove it under the moss, like I was just totally immobilized.

01:38:27.060 | - I guess that should teach you to not act

01:38:30.420 | when you're in a state of frustration or anger.

01:38:32.700 | - There you go.

01:38:33.540 | I mean, it's such a lesson, too.

01:38:35.100 | There were so many of those, and it was always,

01:38:37.980 | I was always in a little bit over my head,

01:38:39.580 | but like I said, you kind of do that enough,

01:38:41.260 | and you make a lot of mistakes, but every time you learn.

01:38:45.300 | Now it's like an extension of my arm.

01:38:46.740 | That's not gonna happen,

01:38:47.580 | because I just know how it works now.

01:38:50.620 | - You mentioned wet wood.

01:38:52.220 | How do you start a fire

01:38:54.780 | when everything around you is wet?

01:38:57.340 | - I mean, it depends on your environment,

01:38:58.720 | but I will say in most of the forests

01:39:00.220 | that I spend a lot of time in, in all the north woods,

01:39:02.860 | the best thing you can do is find a dead standing tree.

01:39:07.060 | So it can be downpouring rain, and you chop that tree down,

01:39:11.060 | and then when you split it open,

01:39:13.540 | no matter how much it's been raining,

01:39:14.980 | it'll be dry on the inside.

01:39:16.900 | So you chop that tree down, chop a piece,

01:39:18.980 | you know, a foot long piece out,

01:39:21.220 | and then split that thing open, and then split it again,

01:39:24.860 | and then you get to that inner dry wood,

01:39:27.660 | and then you try to do this maybe under a spruce tree

01:39:30.420 | or under your own body,

01:39:31.460 | so that it's not getting rained on while you're doing it.

01:39:34.020 | Make a bunch of little curls that'll catch a flame or light,

01:39:37.820 | and then you make a lot more kindling

01:39:40.860 | and little pieces of dry wood than you think,

01:39:42.740 | 'cause what'll happen, you'll light it,

01:39:43.820 | and it'll burn through, and then like, dang it.

01:39:46.140 | So just be patient, you're gonna be fine.

01:39:48.540 | You know, like, and make a nice pile of curls

01:39:52.620 | that you can light or spark,

01:39:54.540 | and then get a lot of good dry kindling,

01:39:57.540 | and then don't be afraid to just boom, boom, boom,

01:39:59.640 | pile a bunch of wood on and make a big old fire,

01:40:02.020 | get warm as fast as you can.

01:40:03.460 | It's amazing how much of a recharge it is

01:40:05.960 | when you're cold and wet.

01:40:07.460 | - You can throw relatively wet wood on top of that.

01:40:09.700 | - Once you get that going, yeah, then it'll dry as it goes,

01:40:12.900 | but you need to be able to split open

01:40:14.620 | and get all that nice dry wood on the inside.

01:40:18.020 | - I saw that you mentioned that you look for fat wood.

01:40:21.800 | What's fat wood?

01:40:22.940 | - So on a lot of pine trees,

01:40:24.700 | a place where the tree was injured when it was alive,

01:40:27.540 | it like pumps sap to it.

01:40:29.420 | And this is a good point, because I use this a lot.

01:40:32.340 | It pumps that tree full of sap,

01:40:34.900 | and then years later, the tree dies, dries out, rots away,

01:40:38.980 | but that sap-infused wood,

01:40:41.900 | it's like turpentine in there, you know?

01:40:45.900 | It's oily, and so if it gets wet, you can still light it.

01:40:49.780 | It repulses water.

01:40:51.400 | And so if you can find that in a rainstorm,

01:40:55.220 | you can just make a little pile of those shavings,

01:40:57.140 | get the crappiest spark or quickest light,

01:40:59.180 | and it'll just sit there and burn

01:41:01.220 | like a factory fire starter.

01:41:04.060 | You know, it's really, really nice.

01:41:06.000 | So it's good to spot.

01:41:07.580 | It's a good thing to keep your eye out for.

01:41:09.420 | - Yeah, it's really fascinating.

01:41:10.820 | And then you make this thing.

01:41:12.900 | That's just to get the sauna going fast.

01:41:14.900 | (laughs)

01:41:17.620 | - What was that?

01:41:18.460 | That was oil?

01:41:19.280 | - Oh, it was used motor oil.

01:41:20.380 | I add, if you mix it with some sawdust,

01:41:22.500 | and then, no, the sauna's going just like that.

01:41:26.420 | It's kind of like homemade fat wood.

01:41:28.540 | - I don't know how many times I've watched Happy People,

01:41:32.340 | A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog.

01:41:35.260 | You've talked about this movie.

01:41:37.500 | Where is that located relative to where you were?

01:41:40.700 | - So there's this big river called the Yenisei

01:41:43.500 | that feeds through the middle of Russia.

01:41:45.940 | And there's a bunch of tributaries off of it.

01:41:48.340 | And one of the tributaries is called the Podkom

01:41:50.540 | in the Tunguska, and I was up that river.

01:41:52.820 | And just a little ways north is another river

01:41:55.100 | called the Bakhta, and that's where that village is

01:41:57.580 | where they filmed Happy People.

01:41:59.140 | So in Siberian terms, we're neighbors.

01:42:01.580 | (laughs)

01:42:03.020 | - Nice.

01:42:04.260 | - Similar environment, similar place.

01:42:06.540 | The fur trapper that I was with knew the guy in the film.

01:42:10.940 | - What would you say about their way of life?

01:42:13.020 | Maybe in the way you've experienced it

01:42:15.180 | and the way you saw in Happy People.

01:42:17.860 | - There's something really, really powerful

01:42:21.660 | about spending that much time being independent,

01:42:26.660 | depending on what we talked about a little earlier,

01:42:30.700 | but you're putting yourself in these situations

01:42:32.300 | all the time where you're uncomfortable, where it's hard,

01:42:34.660 | but then you're rising to the occasion.

01:42:36.180 | You're making it happen.

01:42:37.260 | When you're fur trapping by yourself,

01:42:39.820 | there's nobody else to look at to blame

01:42:42.380 | for anything that goes wrong.

01:42:43.620 | It's just yourself that you're reliant on.

01:42:45.980 | And there's something about the natural rhythms

01:42:50.860 | that you are in when you're that connected

01:42:55.820 | to the natural world that really does feel like

01:42:58.380 | that's what we're designed for.

01:42:59.540 | And so there's a psychological benefit you gain

01:43:02.060 | from spending that much time in that realm.

01:43:06.060 | And for that reason, I think that people

01:43:08.420 | that are connected to those ways

01:43:09.740 | are able to tap into a particular...

01:43:12.700 | I noticed it a lot with the natives.

01:43:14.540 | So if I met the natives in the village,

01:43:17.460 | I would think of them as unhappy people.

01:43:21.820 | They drink a lot, they're always fighting,

01:43:25.900 | the murder rate is through the roof,

01:43:27.660 | the suicide rate's through the roof.

01:43:29.220 | But if you meet those same people out in the woods

01:43:32.020 | living that way of life, I thought these are happy people.

01:43:35.380 | And it's an interesting juxtaposition,

01:43:37.780 | it'd be the same person.

01:43:39.060 | But then I lived in a native village

01:43:42.100 | that had the reindeer herding going on around it

01:43:44.700 | and everybody benefited because of that.

01:43:46.660 | I also went to a native village

01:43:48.020 | that they didn't hold those ways anymore.

01:43:51.020 | And so everybody was just in the village life

01:43:52.980 | and it just felt like a dark place.

01:43:54.460 | Whereas the other native village,

01:43:56.220 | it was rough in the village

01:43:57.580 | because everybody drank all the time.

01:43:59.020 | But it had that escape and it had that escape valve.

01:44:02.020 | And then once you're out there,

01:44:02.860 | it's just a whole different world.

01:44:04.460 | And it was such an odd juxtaposition.

01:44:08.380 | - It's funny that the people that go trapping

01:44:12.780 | experience that happiness.

01:44:14.580 | And still don't have a self-awareness

01:44:19.220 | to stop themselves from then drinking

01:44:21.860 | and doing all the dark stuff when they go to the village.

01:44:24.860 | It's strange that you're not able to,

01:44:27.340 | you're in it, you're happy,

01:44:28.780 | but you're not able to reflect

01:44:30.820 | on the nature of that happiness.

01:44:33.420 | - It's really weird.

01:44:34.420 | I've thought about that a lot

01:44:35.460 | and I don't know the answer.

01:44:36.980 | It's like there's a huge draw to comfort.

01:44:39.340 | There's a huge,

01:44:40.180 | and it's all multifaceted and somewhat complex

01:44:42.540 | because you can be out in the woods

01:44:44.340 | and have this really cool life.

01:44:45.380 | I will say it's a little bit different for men than women

01:44:48.260 | because the men are living the dream

01:44:50.780 | as far as what I would like.

01:44:53.180 | So you're hunting and fishing and managing reindeer

01:44:56.460 | and you got all these adventures.

01:44:58.700 | So what ends up happening is that a lot more guys

01:45:00.700 | than young men out there in the woods.

01:45:02.900 | And so there's a draw also, I think,

01:45:04.300 | to go to the village probably to find a woman.

01:45:07.740 | And then there's a draw of technology and the new things.

01:45:11.180 | And I think it,

01:45:12.100 | but then once they're there, honestly,

01:45:13.900 | alcohol becomes so overwhelming

01:45:15.580 | that everything else kind of just fiddles away.

01:45:19.540 | - But it's funny that the comfort you find,

01:45:22.660 | there's a draw to comfort.

01:45:23.980 | But once you get to the comfort,

01:45:26.900 | once you find the comfort,

01:45:28.700 | within that comfort,

01:45:29.860 | you become the lesser version of yourself.

01:45:32.780 | - Yeah, oh, for sure.

01:45:33.780 | - It's weird.

01:45:34.620 | - What a lesson for us.

01:45:37.060 | - Like we need to keep struggling.

01:45:39.060 | - Yeah, a lot of times you have to force yourself in that.

01:45:41.500 | So like if we take them as an example,

01:45:43.900 | I mean, a lot of times you drag this drunk guy

01:45:46.020 | into the woods,

01:45:47.380 | literally just drag him into the woods

01:45:50.020 | and then he'd sober up

01:45:51.180 | and then he was like a month blackout drunk

01:45:53.660 | and now he's sobered up

01:45:54.500 | and now boom, back into life,

01:45:56.140 | back into being a knowledgeable, capable person.

01:45:59.940 | And because comfort's so available to us all,

01:46:02.420 | you almost have to force yourself into that situation,

01:46:05.220 | plan it out.

01:46:06.100 | Okay, I'm gonna go do that.

01:46:08.380 | - Do the hard thing.

01:46:09.220 | - I'm gonna do that hard thing

01:46:10.460 | and then deal with the consequences when I'm there.

01:46:13.300 | - What do you learn from that

01:46:15.260 | on the nature of happiness?

01:46:16.460 | What does it take to be happy?

01:46:18.180 | - Happiness is interesting

01:46:19.380 | because it's complex and multifaceted.

01:46:23.580 | It includes a lot of things that are out of your control

01:46:26.060 | and a lot of things that are in your control.

01:46:27.900 | And it's quite the moving target in life.

01:46:32.740 | You know what I mean?

01:46:33.580 | - Yeah.

01:46:34.420 | - One of the things that really impacted me

01:46:37.700 | when I was a young man and I read the Gulag Archipelago

01:46:41.100 | was don't pursue happiness

01:46:42.820 | because the ingredients to happiness

01:46:44.780 | can be taken from you,

01:46:46.180 | outside of your control, your health.

01:46:48.820 | But pursue a spiritual fullness.

01:46:52.460 | Pursue, I think he words it, duty.

01:46:57.220 | And then happiness may come alongside or it may not.

01:47:00.340 | So he gave the example that I thought

01:47:01.980 | was really interesting in the prison camps.

01:47:04.580 | Everybody's trying to survive

01:47:06.740 | and they've made that their ultimate goal.

01:47:08.220 | I will get through this.

01:47:09.460 | And then, and they've all basically turned into animals

01:47:13.060 | in pursuit of that goal

01:47:14.220 | and like lying and cheating and stealing.

01:47:16.580 | And then he was like,

01:47:17.420 | and somehow the corrupt Orthodox church

01:47:19.980 | produced these little babushkas

01:47:21.940 | who were like candles in the middle of all this darkness

01:47:25.580 | because they did not allow their soul to get corrupted.

01:47:28.180 | And he's like, what they did do is they died.

01:47:30.420 | They all died, but they were lights while they were alive

01:47:34.020 | and lost their lives, but they didn't lose their souls.

01:47:36.700 | So for myself, that was really powerful to read

01:47:38.900 | and realize that the pursuit of happiness

01:47:41.180 | wasn't exactly what I wanted to aim at.

01:47:43.500 | I wanted to aim at living out my life according to love,

01:47:47.500 | like we talked about earlier.

01:47:48.980 | - Trying to be that candle.

01:47:50.300 | - Trying to be that candle.

01:47:51.540 | Yeah, make that your ideal.

01:47:52.980 | And then in doing so is interesting.

01:47:55.500 | So for me personally, my personal experience of that is

01:47:58.980 | I thought when I went to Russia that I kind of gave up.

01:48:01.380 | I was like in my 20s, I spent my whole 20s

01:48:04.180 | living in teepees and doing all this stuff

01:48:06.220 | that I thought I should be getting a job.

01:48:08.140 | I should be pursuing a career.

01:48:09.540 | I should get an education of some sort.

01:48:11.980 | Like what am I doing for my future?

01:48:14.020 | But I felt I knew where my purpose was.

01:48:15.900 | I knew what my calling was.

01:48:16.740 | I'm just gonna do it.

01:48:17.740 | And it sounds glamorous now when I talk about it,

01:48:20.340 | but it sucked a lot of the times.

01:48:21.820 | And it was a lot of loneliness,

01:48:24.540 | a lot of giving up what I wanted,

01:48:27.060 | a lot of watching people I cared about.

01:48:29.500 | You put all this effort in and you just see the people

01:48:31.940 | that you put all this effort in just die,

01:48:33.540 | and this and that, and then commits,

01:48:35.180 | it was that happened all the time.

01:48:36.540 | And then the other thing I thought I gave up

01:48:38.300 | was a relationship 'cause you couldn't,

01:48:40.620 | I wasn't gonna find a partner over there.

01:48:45.220 | And so interestingly enough, now in life,

01:48:48.500 | I can look back and be like, whoa, weird,

01:48:50.260 | those two things I thought I gave up

01:48:52.740 | is where I've been almost provided for the most in life.

01:48:55.580 | Now I have this career guiding people in the wilderness

01:48:59.500 | that I love, I genuinely love it.

01:49:01.220 | I find purpose in it.

01:49:02.300 | I know it's healthy and good for people.

01:49:04.540 | And then I have an amazing wife and an amazing family.

01:49:07.820 | How did that happen?

01:49:09.060 | But I didn't exactly aim at it.

01:49:10.900 | I consciously, in a way, I mean, I hoped it was tangential,

01:49:15.900 | but I aimed at something else,

01:49:18.060 | which was those lessons I kind of got

01:49:19.860 | from the Gulag Archipelago.

01:49:21.180 | - So you have, just 'cause you mentioned Gulag Archipelago,

01:49:26.020 | I gotta go there.

01:49:27.740 | You have some suffering in your family history,

01:49:30.620 | whether it's the Armenian-Assyrian genocide

01:49:35.700 | or the Nazi occupation of France.

01:49:38.260 | Maybe you could tell the story of that.

01:49:46.620 | The survival thing, it runs in your blood, it seems.

01:49:50.020 | - I love history.

01:49:51.500 | I find so much richness in knowing what other people

01:49:54.460 | went through and find so much perspective

01:49:56.220 | in my own place in the world.

01:49:57.780 | I have the advantage of, in my direct family,

01:50:01.260 | my grandparents, yeah,

01:50:02.380 | they went through the Armenian genocide.

01:50:04.780 | They were Assyrians, which was like a Christian minority,

01:50:08.260 | indigenous people in the Middle East.

01:50:10.740 | They lived in Northwestern Iran.

01:50:12.620 | And during the chaos of World War I,

01:50:16.420 | and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing

01:50:21.020 | and it had all kinds of issues.

01:50:22.460 | And one of its issues was it had a big minority group

01:50:25.940 | and it thought it would be a good time to get rid of it.

01:50:28.100 | And you know, they can justify it in all the ways you can,

01:50:33.100 | like there were some people that were rebelling

01:50:35.540 | or this or that.

01:50:36.380 | But ultimately, it was just a big collective guilt

01:50:39.460 | and extermination policy against the Armenians

01:50:44.140 | and the Assyrians and my grandparents.

01:50:47.380 | My grandma was 13 at the time and my grandpa was 17,

01:50:51.540 | which is interesting 'cause it happened

01:50:53.500 | almost a hundred years ago,

01:50:54.380 | but our, just my dad was born when my mom was,

01:50:56.700 | my grandma was pretty old, so.

01:50:58.200 | But my grandmother, her dad was taken out to be shot.

01:51:04.260 | You know, the Turks were coming in

01:51:06.900 | and rounding up all the men

01:51:08.940 | and they took them out to be shot.

01:51:10.420 | And then they took my grandma and her,

01:51:14.220 | she had seven brothers and sisters and her mom

01:51:17.140 | and they like drove her out into the desert.

01:51:19.340 | Basically, she, her dad got taken out to be shot,

01:51:24.100 | so his name was Shalman Yamar or whatever.

01:51:26.380 | Took him out.

01:51:27.980 | They were all tied up, all shot.

01:51:29.820 | He said a quick prayer before they shot him,

01:51:31.860 | but he fell down and he found he wasn't hit.

01:51:36.160 | And usually, of course, they'd come up

01:51:37.380 | and stab everybody or finish him off,

01:51:39.660 | but there was some kind of an alarm

01:51:41.820 | and all the soldiers rushed off

01:51:43.860 | and he found himself in the bodies

01:51:45.220 | and was able to untie himself.

01:51:46.580 | They were naked and, you know, hungry and all that

01:51:49.500 | and he ran out of there, escaped,

01:51:52.380 | went into a building and found a loaf of bread

01:51:55.140 | wrapped in a shirt and was able to escape, fled.

01:51:59.620 | He never saw his family for, so to continue the story,

01:52:02.780 | my grandma got taken with her mother

01:52:07.220 | and brothers and sisters and all just,

01:52:08.580 | they just drove them into the desert until they died,

01:52:10.420 | basically, and run them around in circles

01:52:12.540 | and this and that and then all the raping

01:52:14.700 | and pillaging that accompanies it.

01:52:16.300 | And at one point, her mom had the baby

01:52:21.300 | and the baby died and her mom just collapsed

01:52:25.460 | and said, "I just can't go any further."

01:52:26.980 | And my grandma and her sister, like,

01:52:30.420 | picked her up to, "We gotta keep going,"

01:52:32.420 | and like, picked her up and they left the baby

01:52:34.740 | along with the other, everybody else had died.

01:52:36.940 | It was just the three of them left

01:52:38.660 | and somehow they bumbled across this British military camp

01:52:42.980 | and were rescued.

01:52:44.200 | Neither the sister nor my great-grandmother

01:52:48.360 | ever really covered as far, you know,

01:52:49.940 | recovered from what I understand,

01:52:51.380 | but my grandma did.

01:52:53.360 | At the same time, in another village in Iran there,

01:52:58.700 | the Turks came in and were burning down my grandpa's village

01:53:02.940 | and they caught, and my grandpa's dad was in a wheelchair

01:53:06.380 | and he had, like, some money belt

01:53:08.300 | and he stuffed all his money in it

01:53:09.460 | and gave it to grandpa and just told him to run

01:53:12.340 | and don't turn back.

01:53:13.300 | And they came in the front door

01:53:14.620 | as he was running out the back

01:53:16.300 | and he never saw his dad again.

01:53:19.240 | But he turned around and saw the house on fire,

01:53:22.840 | never knew what happened to his sister.

01:53:25.380 | So he was just alone, he ran.

01:53:27.780 | Yeah, at some point he, I can't remember,

01:53:30.780 | he, like, lost his money belt

01:53:32.540 | and, like, he took his jacket off, forgot it was in there.

01:53:34.500 | Something happened.

01:53:35.520 | Anyway, so he got, he was in a refugee camp.

01:53:38.700 | He ended up getting taken in by some Jesuit missionaries.

01:53:41.340 | So anyway, both of them had lost basically everything.

01:53:44.820 | And then at some point they met in Baghdad,

01:53:47.840 | started a family, immigrated to France,

01:53:51.380 | and then it just so happened to be right before World War II

01:53:54.180 | and so then the Nazis invaded.

01:53:56.700 | My aunt, she's still alive,

01:53:58.060 | but she actually met a resistance fighter,

01:54:02.900 | you know, for the French.

01:54:04.140 | And under a bridge somewhere.

01:54:06.660 | And they fell in love and she got married,

01:54:09.620 | so she had kind of an in on the French resistance

01:54:13.460 | at one point.

01:54:14.300 | And of course, they were all hungry.

01:54:16.100 | They'd recently immigrated,

01:54:17.380 | but also had this Nazi occupation and all that.

01:54:20.660 | And so the Uncle Joe, the resistance fighter guy,

01:54:24.420 | told him, like, hey, we're gonna storm this noodle factory.

01:54:27.560 | Like, come.

01:54:28.400 | And so they stormed the noodle factory

01:54:29.940 | and all my aunts around in there

01:54:31.320 | and were, like, throwing out noodles into wheelbarrows

01:54:33.540 | and everybody was running.

01:54:34.840 | Then the Nazis came back and took it back over

01:54:38.440 | and, like, shot a bunch of people and everything.

01:54:41.260 | And Grandpa, 'cause he had already come

01:54:44.180 | from where he came from, was paranoid,

01:54:45.460 | so he buried all the noodles out in the garden.

01:54:47.740 | And then my two aunts got stuck in that factory overnight

01:54:51.880 | with all the Nazi guards or whatever.

01:54:53.540 | And then the Nazi guards went all from house to house

01:54:56.300 | to find everybody that had had noodles

01:54:58.340 | and, you know, punish 'em.

01:55:00.320 | But they didn't find my grandpas, fortunately.

01:55:02.860 | They searched his house, oh, but not the garden.

01:55:05.140 | And then, so they had noodles

01:55:07.500 | and somehow must have been in the same factory or something,

01:55:09.900 | but olive oil, and they just lived off of that

01:55:11.780 | for all the whole war years.

01:55:13.700 | My aunts ended up getting out of the,

01:55:15.700 | they hid behind boxes and crates overnight and stuff,

01:55:18.400 | and the resistance stormed again in the morning

01:55:20.660 | and they got away and stuff.

01:55:22.500 | But anyway, chaos.

01:55:23.980 | So when they moved to America, I will say,

01:55:25.580 | the most patriotic family everywhere ever.

01:55:27.940 | They loved it.

01:55:29.040 | (laughing)

01:55:29.880 | It was like paradise here.

01:55:32.140 | - I mean, that's a lot to go through.

01:55:36.780 | What lessons do you draw from that on perseverance?

01:55:40.340 | - Look, I'm just one generation away

01:55:42.560 | from all that suffering.

01:55:43.940 | Like my aunts and uncles and dad and stuff

01:55:47.060 | were the kids of these people.

01:55:48.780 | And somehow, I don't have that,

01:55:51.460 | like what happened to all that trauma?

01:55:53.140 | Like it's like somehow my grandparents bore it.

01:55:57.280 | And then they were able to build a family,

01:55:59.480 | but not just a family, but a happy family.

01:56:02.140 | Like I knew all my aunts and uncles

01:56:03.580 | and I didn't know them, they died before me,

01:56:05.140 | but it was so much joy.

01:56:08.920 | The family reunions were the best thing ever

01:56:10.860 | at the Jonas's.

01:56:11.700 | And it's just like how in one generation

01:56:15.240 | did you go from that to that?

01:56:16.940 | And it must have been a great sacrifice

01:56:21.020 | of some sort to not pass that much resentment,

01:56:26.100 | or like what did they do to break that chain

01:56:29.700 | in one generation?

01:56:30.680 | - Do you think it works the other way?

01:56:31.880 | Like where their ability to escape genocide,

01:56:36.360 | to escape Nazi occupation gave them a gratitude for life?

01:56:41.360 | - Oh yeah.

01:56:43.640 | - It's not a trauma in the sense

01:56:44.680 | like you're forever bearing it.

01:56:47.520 | The flip side of that is just gratitude

01:56:50.200 | to be alive when you know so many people did not survive.

01:56:53.040 | - Yeah, it must be because the only footage

01:56:55.280 | I saw of my grandma, it was like they were all,

01:56:57.480 | the kids and stuff, and they were cooking up a rabbit

01:57:00.440 | that they were raising or whatever.

01:57:01.680 | And they, but a joyful woman, you could see it in her.

01:57:05.920 | And she must have been so, she must have understood

01:57:10.440 | how fortunate she was and been so grateful for it

01:57:13.280 | and so thankful for every one of those 11 kids she had.

01:57:16.600 | So I recognize it again in my dad,

01:57:18.920 | 'cause my dad went through a really slow

01:57:21.600 | kind of painful decline in his health.

01:57:24.160 | And he had diabetes, ended up losing one leg.

01:57:28.080 | And so he lost his job.

01:57:29.400 | He had to watch his mom, or my mom go to school.

01:57:32.800 | He had long, all he wanted to do was be a provider

01:57:35.560 | and be like a family man.

01:57:36.880 | I bet the best time in his life

01:57:38.240 | was when his kids ran to him and gave him a hug.

01:57:40.080 | But then all of a sudden he found himself

01:57:42.080 | in a position where he couldn't work

01:57:43.320 | and he had to watch his wife go to school,

01:57:45.760 | which was really hard for her,

01:57:47.000 | and become the breadwinner for the family.

01:57:50.600 | And he just felt like a failure.

01:57:52.220 | And I watched him go through that.

01:57:53.600 | After all these years of letting that foot heal,

01:57:55.780 | we went out, first day,

01:57:57.740 | and we were splitting firewood with the splitter.

01:57:59.480 | And he was just so good to be back out, Jordan.

01:58:01.640 | It was so nice.

01:58:02.480 | And he crushed his foot in the log splitter,

01:58:04.200 | and you're just like, no.

01:58:05.600 | And so then they just amputated it.

01:58:07.600 | We've got both legs amputated.

01:58:09.560 | And then his health continued to decline.

01:58:11.920 | He lost his movement in his hands.

01:58:13.360 | So he was like incapacitated to a degree,

01:58:16.120 | and in a lot of pain.

01:58:17.080 | I would hear him at night in pain all the time.

01:58:19.160 | And I delayed a trip back to Russia

01:58:22.440 | and just stayed with my dad for those last six months.

01:58:24.920 | And it was so interesting having had lost everything.

01:58:29.400 | I've watched him wrestle with it through the years.

01:58:31.660 | But then he found his joy and his purpose

01:58:34.280 | just in being almost, I mean, a vegetable.

01:58:37.580 | I'd have to help him pee, roll him onto the cot,

01:58:40.140 | take him to dialysis.

01:58:42.320 | But we would laugh.

01:58:43.460 | He would hear him at night crying, or in pain, like, ah!

01:58:47.680 | And then in the morning,

01:58:48.560 | he'd have encouraging words to say.

01:58:50.720 | And I was like, wow, that's how you face loss and suffering.

01:58:55.720 | And he must have gotten that somehow from his parents.

01:58:59.880 | And then I find myself on this show,

01:59:01.720 | and I had a thought, why is this easy to me, in a way?

01:59:05.560 | Why is this thing that's, and I was like,

01:59:07.560 | and it just felt like this gift

01:59:09.320 | that it kind of handed down,

01:59:11.320 | and now it would be my duty to hand down.

01:59:13.400 | But it's kind of an interesting thought.

01:59:16.560 | - And be the beacon of that,

01:59:17.680 | represent that kind of perseverance

01:59:19.720 | in the simpler way that something like survival

01:59:24.720 | in the wilderness shows.

01:59:26.400 | - Yeah. - It's the same.

01:59:28.360 | It rhymes.

01:59:29.360 | - It rhymes, and it's so simple.

01:59:30.880 | Like, the lessons are simple,

01:59:32.680 | and so we can take 'em and apply 'em.

01:59:35.180 | - So that's on the survivor side.

01:59:36.820 | What about on the people committing the atrocities?

01:59:39.920 | What do you make of the Ottomans,

01:59:42.080 | what they did to Armenians, or the Nazis,

01:59:44.680 | what they did to the Jews, the Slavs,

01:59:46.240 | and basically everyone?

01:59:47.920 | What do you, why do you think people do evil in this world?

01:59:52.560 | - It's interesting that, it's really easy, right?

02:00:00.280 | It's really easy, you can almost sense it in yourself

02:00:02.800 | to justify, to justify a little bit of evil,

02:00:07.800 | or you see yourself cheer a little bit

02:00:10.840 | when the enemy gets knocked back in some way.

02:00:14.720 | It's really, in a way, it's just perfectly natural,

02:00:17.760 | for us to feed that hate, and feed that tribalism,

02:00:21.680 | in-group, out-group, we're on this team.

02:00:23.780 | And I think that can happen,

02:00:26.600 | I think it just happens slowly,

02:00:30.480 | like one justification at a time, one step at a time.

02:00:33.180 | You hear something, and it makes you think,

02:00:38.320 | then, that you are in the right to perform some kind of,

02:00:41.240 | you know, you're justified, and, you know,

02:00:45.520 | break a couple eggs to make an omelet type thing.

02:00:47.680 | And then, but all of a sudden that takes you down

02:00:50.800 | this whole train, to where pretty soon,

02:00:53.360 | you're justifying what's completely unjustifiable.

02:00:57.960 | - It's just gradual.

02:01:00.560 | - Yeah.

02:01:01.400 | - It's a gradual process, of a little bit at a time.

02:01:03.960 | - I think that's why, for me, having a path of faith,

02:01:07.880 | is like, works as like a mooring,

02:01:09.720 | because it can help me shine that light on myself.

02:01:12.160 | You know, it's like something else,

02:01:13.120 | 'cause if you're just looking at yourself,

02:01:14.440 | and looking within yourself for your compass in life,

02:01:19.440 | it's really easy to get that thing out of whack,

02:01:21.840 | but you kind of need a perspective

02:01:25.280 | from which you can step out of yourself,

02:01:27.340 | and look into yourself, and judge yourself accordingly.

02:01:29.560 | And am I walking in line with that ideal?

02:01:33.080 | You know, and then, I think without that check,

02:01:36.840 | your subject, you know, it's easy to ignore the fact

02:01:40.020 | that you might be able to commit those things,

02:01:42.400 | but we live in a pretty easy, comfortable society.

02:01:45.520 | Like, what if, you know, what if we pictured yourself

02:01:49.140 | in the position of my grandparents,

02:01:51.600 | and then, all of a sudden, you got the upper hand

02:01:53.720 | in some kind of a fight?

02:01:55.360 | What are you gonna do?

02:01:56.200 | You know, you could definitely picture

02:01:58.640 | becoming evil in that situation.

02:02:03.360 | - I think one thing faith in God can do

02:02:09.160 | is humble you before these kinds of complexities

02:02:13.800 | of the world, and humility is a way

02:02:16.480 | to avoid the slippery slope towards evil, I think.

02:02:20.100 | Humility that you don't know who the good guys

02:02:23.800 | and the bad guys are, and you defer that

02:02:26.840 | to sort of bigger powers to try to understand that.

02:02:31.420 | - Yeah.

02:02:32.260 | - I think there's a kind of, I mean,

02:02:34.120 | a lot of the atrocities were committed

02:02:36.280 | by people who are very sure of themselves being good.

02:02:41.280 | - Yeah, that's so true.

02:02:43.360 | - It is sad that religion is, at times,

02:02:46.960 | used as a way to kind of, as yet another tool

02:02:51.960 | for justification, which is a sad application of religion.

02:02:57.840 | - It really is.

02:03:00.360 | It's so inherent and so natural in us

02:03:02.760 | to justify ourselves, it's really,

02:03:07.080 | I mean, I think it's almost,

02:03:08.600 | I mean, just understanding history,

02:03:12.360 | you read history, it blows my mind that,

02:03:15.840 | and I'm super thankful that somehow,

02:03:19.460 | and this has been misused so much,

02:03:20.760 | but somehow this ideology arose that,

02:03:23.560 | love your enemies, forgive, forgive those

02:03:27.680 | that persecute you, and just on down the line,

02:03:32.840 | that something like that rose in the world

02:03:35.200 | into a position where we all kind of accept those ideals,

02:03:39.240 | I think is really remarkable and worth appreciating.

02:03:44.120 | That said, a lot of that gets wrapped up

02:03:47.360 | in what you're talking, you know,

02:03:49.480 | what is so natural just becomes another instrument

02:03:51.520 | for tribalism or another justification for wrong,

02:03:55.560 | and so I, even myself, am self-conscious

02:03:57.840 | sometimes talking about matters of faith

02:03:59.640 | because I know when I'm talking about it,

02:04:00.800 | I'm talking about something else other than,

02:04:04.160 | you know, other than what someone else might think of

02:04:06.920 | when they hear me talking about it, so it's interesting.

02:04:10.040 | - Yeah, I've been listening to Jordan Peterson

02:04:13.120 | talk about this, he has a way of articulating things,

02:04:15.840 | which are sometimes hard to understand in the moment,

02:04:18.040 | but when I read it carefully afterwards,

02:04:20.800 | it starts to make more sense.

02:04:21.960 | I've heard him talk about religion and God

02:04:24.560 | as a kind of base layer, like a metaphorical substrate

02:04:29.400 | from which morality of our sense

02:04:32.440 | of what is right and wrong comes from,

02:04:34.480 | and just our conceptions of what is beautiful in life.

02:04:38.040 | All these kinds of higher things that are like fuzzy,

02:04:42.960 | understand? - Mm-hmm.

02:04:44.280 | - That their religion helps create this substrate

02:04:47.140 | from which we as a species, like as a civilization,

02:04:50.720 | can come up with these notions,

02:04:52.360 | and without it, you are lost at sea.

02:04:55.760 | - I guess for him, morality requires that substrate.

02:04:59.520 | - Like you said, it's kind of fuzzy,

02:05:01.080 | so I've only been able to get clear vision of it

02:05:04.600 | when I live it, and it's not something you profess

02:05:07.880 | or anything like that, it's something

02:05:09.320 | that you take seriously and apply in your life,

02:05:13.560 | and when you live it, then there's some clarity there,

02:05:16.600 | but that it has to be kind of defined,

02:05:19.880 | like it's like, and that's where you come in

02:05:22.360 | with the religion and the stories,

02:05:23.680 | because if you leave it completely undefined,

02:05:26.640 | I don't really know where you go from there.

02:05:30.120 | I actually, isn't it funny to speak to that?

02:05:33.960 | I did mushroom, have you ever done those before?

02:05:36.360 | - Mushrooms, yeah.

02:05:38.100 | - I've done 'em a couple times, but one time was,

02:05:40.320 | didn't do that many, the other time, more,

02:05:42.320 | and I had a really profound experience

02:05:45.960 | in helping couch all this in a proper context for myself,

02:05:51.200 | so when I did it, I remember I was sitting on a swing

02:05:54.200 | and I could see my, everything was so blissful,

02:05:56.800 | except I could see my black hands on these chains,

02:06:00.120 | like on the swing, but everything else was blissful

02:06:03.360 | and kind of amorphous, and I could see the outline

02:06:06.560 | of my kids, and I could just feel the love for them,

02:06:09.480 | and I was just like, man, I just feel the love,

02:06:11.720 | it's so wonderful, but then at times I would try

02:06:16.120 | to picture 'em, and I couldn't quite picture the kids,

02:06:18.000 | but I could feel the love, and then I started asking

02:06:21.800 | all the deepest existential questions I could,

02:06:24.680 | and it felt like I was just one answer,

02:06:25.880 | another answer, another answer,

02:06:27.240 | everything was being answered, and I felt like

02:06:29.600 | I was communing with God, whatever you wanna say,

02:06:32.280 | but I was very aware of the fact that that communing

02:06:36.000 | was just peeling back the tiniest corner of the infinite,

02:06:39.320 | and it just dumped me with every answer

02:06:41.820 | I felt like I could have, and it kind of blew me away,

02:06:46.660 | so then I asked it, well, if you're the infinite,

02:06:49.880 | why did you reveal to me yourself?

02:06:51.320 | Why did you use the story of Jesus to reveal yourself?

02:06:55.480 | And then that infinite, amorphous thing

02:07:00.480 | had to somehow take form for us to be able to relate to it,

02:07:05.880 | it had to have some kind of a form,

02:07:08.600 | but whenever you create a form out of something,

02:07:11.660 | you're boxing it in and subjugating it to boundaries

02:07:14.840 | and stuff like that, and then that subject to pain

02:07:18.120 | and subject to the brokenness and all that,

02:07:20.000 | and I was like, oh, wow, but when I had that thought,

02:07:22.200 | then all of a sudden, I could relate my dark hands

02:07:25.880 | on the chains to the rest of the experience,

02:07:27.960 | and then all of a sudden, I could picture my children

02:07:30.720 | as the children rather than this amorphous feeling of love.

02:07:35.200 | It was like, oh, there's Elan and Altai and Zion,

02:07:37.840 | but then they were bounded, and then once they're bounded,

02:07:42.040 | you're subject to the death and to the misunderstanding

02:07:44.760 | and to all that, and I picture the amoeba or the cell,

02:07:49.200 | and then when it dies, it turns into a unformed thing,

02:07:53.160 | and so we need some kind of form to relate to,

02:07:57.280 | so instead of always just talking about God

02:07:59.800 | completely intangibly, it kind of gave me a way

02:08:02.440 | to relate to it, and I was like, oh, wow,

02:08:04.200 | that was really powerful to me in putting it

02:08:07.640 | in a context that was applicable.

02:08:12.120 | - But ultimately, God is the thing that's formless,

02:08:17.120 | that is unbounded, but we humans need,

02:08:23.040 | I mean, that's the purpose of stories,

02:08:26.800 | they resonate with something in us,

02:08:28.800 | but when you need the bounded nature,

02:08:31.960 | the constraints of those stories,

02:08:33.640 | otherwise we wouldn't be able to--

02:08:36.200 | - Relate to it.

02:08:37.040 | - Can't relate to it, and then when you look

02:08:40.640 | at the stories literally, or you just look at 'em

02:08:43.520 | just as they are, it seems silly.

02:08:48.520 | It's just too simplistic.

02:08:50.800 | - Right, right, and then that was always,

02:08:52.800 | a lot of my family and loved ones and friends

02:08:56.080 | have completely left the faith, and I totally,

02:08:59.120 | in a way, I get it, I understand,

02:09:01.000 | but I also really see the baby that's being thrown out

02:09:04.400 | with the bathwater, and I want to cherish that

02:09:07.800 | in a way, I guess.

02:09:08.800 | - And it's interesting that you say that

02:09:11.400 | the way to know what's right and wrong

02:09:13.560 | is you have to live it.

02:09:15.760 | Sometimes it's probably very difficult to articulate,

02:09:19.320 | but in the living of it, do you realize it?

02:09:24.160 | - Yeah, and I'm glad you say that,

02:09:26.240 | because I found a lot of comfort in that,

02:09:28.160 | because I feel somewhat inarticulate a lot of the times,

02:09:31.320 | and unable to articulate my thoughts,

02:09:33.120 | especially on these matters, and then you just think,

02:09:36.440 | I just have to, but I do have to, I can live it.

02:09:38.840 | I can try to live it, and then what I also am struck with

02:09:41.840 | right away is I can't, 'cause you can't love everybody.

02:09:44.520 | You can't love your enemies, and you can't,

02:09:46.680 | but as placing that in front of you as the ideal

02:09:50.840 | is so important to put a check on your human instincts,

02:09:54.840 | on your tribalism, on your, I mean, you can very quickly,

02:09:59.840 | like we talked about with evil,

02:10:02.920 | it can really quickly take its place in your life.

02:10:06.160 | I almost, you almost won't observe it happening,

02:10:09.440 | but, and so I so much appreciate all the, me striving,

02:10:14.440 | and that's where, I grew up in a Christian family,

02:10:17.800 | so I had these cliches that I didn't really understand,

02:10:21.520 | like a relationship with God, like what does that mean?

02:10:24.680 | But then I realized when I struggled with trying,

02:10:28.360 | with taking, I actually did try to take it seriously,

02:10:30.920 | and struggle with what does it mean

02:10:32.280 | to live out a life of love in the world,

02:10:34.800 | but that's like a wrestling match,

02:10:36.600 | 'cause it's not that simple.

02:10:37.720 | It doesn't sound, it sounds good,

02:10:39.400 | but it's really hard to do, and then you realize

02:10:42.960 | you can't do it perfectly, but in that struggle,

02:10:46.840 | in that wrestling match is where I actually sensed

02:10:49.200 | that relationship, and then it's,

02:10:50.920 | and that's where it kind of gains life,

02:10:53.520 | and how that, and I'm sure that relates

02:10:57.000 | to what Jordan Peterson is getting at in his metaphor.

02:11:03.040 | - Yeah, in the striving of the ideal,

02:11:07.720 | in the striving towards the ideal,

02:11:09.520 | you discover the, how to be a better person.

02:11:13.800 | - One thing I noticed really tangibly on "Alone"

02:11:16.440 | was that because I had so many people that were close to me

02:11:19.360 | kind of just leave it all together,

02:11:21.080 | I was like, I could do that.

02:11:22.480 | I actually understand why they do, or I could not.

02:11:26.880 | I do have a choice, and so I had to choose at that point

02:11:29.880 | to maintain that ideal, and, 'cause I could add enough time

02:11:34.880 | on "Alone," one nice thing is you don't have any distractions.

02:11:38.120 | You have all the time in the world to go into your head,

02:11:40.240 | and I could play those paths out in my life,

02:11:44.160 | and not only in my life, but I feel like societally

02:11:46.360 | and generationally, I throw it all away,

02:11:50.720 | and everybody start from square one,

02:11:52.320 | or we can try to redeem what's valuable in this

02:11:57.400 | and wrestle with it, and so I just chose that path.

02:12:02.400 | - Well, I do think it's a kind of wrestling match,

02:12:06.440 | 'cause you mentioned Gulag Archipelago.

02:12:10.040 | I'm very much a believer that we all have the capacity

02:12:12.720 | for good and evil, and striving for the ideal

02:12:16.760 | to be a good human being is not a trivial one.

02:12:20.540 | You have to find the right tools for yourself

02:12:23.780 | to be able to be the candle, as you mentioned before.

02:12:27.040 | - I get it.

02:12:27.880 | - And then for that, religion and faith can help.

02:12:32.160 | I'm sure there's other ways, but I think it's grounded

02:12:34.720 | in understanding that each human is able to be

02:12:38.720 | a really bad person and a really good person,

02:12:42.640 | and that's like a choice, it's a deliberate choice,

02:12:46.480 | and it's a choice that's taken every moment

02:12:48.920 | and builds up over time, and the hard part about it

02:12:54.760 | is you don't know, you don't always have the clarity,

02:12:59.240 | using reason to understand what is good,

02:13:02.480 | what is right, and what is wrong.

02:13:04.000 | You have to kind of live it with humility

02:13:06.880 | and constantly struggle, 'cause then, yeah,

02:13:09.520 | you might wake up in a society

02:13:12.340 | where you're committing genocides,

02:13:15.920 | and you think you're the good guys,

02:13:19.600 | and I think you have to have the courage

02:13:21.880 | to realize you're not.

02:13:24.080 | It's not always obvious.

02:13:25.800 | - It isn't, man.

02:13:27.100 | - And only history has the clarity to show

02:13:30.520 | who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

02:13:33.720 | - Right, you gotta wrestle with it.

02:13:35.320 | It's like that quote, the line between good and evil

02:13:39.040 | goes through the heart of every man,

02:13:40.760 | and we push it this way and that,

02:13:43.480 | and our job is to work on that within ourselves.

02:13:47.880 | - Yeah, that's the part that's what I like,

02:13:53.060 | sort of the full quote talks about the fact

02:13:56.120 | that it moves, the line moves moment by moment,

02:14:01.120 | day by day.

02:14:02.360 | We have the freedom to move that line.

02:14:07.360 | So it's a very deliberate thing.

02:14:10.640 | It's not like you're born this way, and that's it.

02:14:13.440 | - Yeah, I agree.

02:14:15.360 | - And especially in conditions that are like war and peace,

02:14:21.300 | in the case of the camps, absurd levels of injustice

02:14:26.300 | in the face of all that.

02:14:30.580 | When everything is taken away from you,

02:14:32.020 | you still have the choice to be the candle,

02:14:34.860 | like the grandmas.

02:14:36.180 | By the way, grandmas in all parts of the world

02:14:40.580 | are like the strongest humans.

02:14:41.760 | - Shout out to the grandmas, seriously.

02:14:44.700 | - It's like, I don't know what it is.

02:14:46.940 | I don't know, they have this wisdom

02:14:50.320 | that comes from patience and have seen it all,

02:14:54.240 | have seen all the bullshit of the people

02:14:55.920 | that come and gone, all the abuses of power,

02:14:58.960 | all of this, I don't know what it is,

02:15:01.480 | and they just keep going.

02:15:03.240 | - Right, right.

02:15:04.080 | Yeah, it's so true.

02:15:07.660 | - What do you think of, as we've gotten a bit philosophical,

02:15:13.120 | what do you think of Werner Herzog's style

02:15:16.360 | of narration?

02:15:17.380 | I kind of wish he narrated my life.

02:15:19.260 | - Yeah, it's amazing to listen to.

02:15:22.340 | - 'Cause that documentary's actually in Russian.

02:15:26.100 | I think he took a longer series, yeah,

02:15:30.660 | and then put narration over it.

02:15:33.780 | And that narration can transform a story.

02:15:38.060 | - Yeah, he does an incredible job with it.

02:15:40.300 | I will say, have you seen the full version?

02:15:43.460 | Have you watched the four-part full version?

02:15:45.580 | - You should, you'd like it.

02:15:46.600 | It's in Russian, and so you'll get the fullness of that.

02:15:49.500 | He had to fit it into a two-hour format,

02:15:53.000 | and so I think what you lose in those extra couple hours

02:15:56.000 | is worth watching, and I think you'll like it.

02:15:59.820 | - Yeah, they always go pretty dark.

02:16:03.140 | - Do they?

02:16:03.980 | - He has a very dark sense about nature

02:16:06.800 | that is violence and it's murder.

02:16:09.400 | - I think that's important to recognize

02:16:11.400 | because it's really easy, I mean,

02:16:13.940 | especially with what I do and what I talk about,

02:16:16.680 | and I see so much of the value in nature.

02:16:19.640 | Gosh, I also see a beautiful moose

02:16:24.040 | and a calf running around, and then next week,

02:16:26.400 | I see the calf ripped to shreds by wolves,

02:16:28.500 | and you're just like, "Ugh!"

02:16:30.040 | And it's not as Rousseauian as we'd like to think.

02:16:41.240 | Things must die for things to live, like you said,

02:16:44.180 | and that's just played out all the time,

02:16:46.540 | and it's indifferent to you,

02:16:48.380 | doesn't care if you live or die,

02:16:51.080 | and doesn't care how you die

02:16:52.560 | or how much pain you go through while you die.

02:16:55.140 | It's pretty brutal, so it's interesting

02:16:58.640 | that he taps into that, and I think it's valuable

02:17:01.560 | because it's easy to idealize in a way.

02:17:05.400 | - Yeah, the indifference is,

02:17:06.900 | I don't know what to make of it.

02:17:09.820 | There isn't indifference.

02:17:11.640 | It's a bit scary, it's a bit lonely.

02:17:14.240 | You're just a cog in the machine of nature

02:17:18.760 | that doesn't really care for you.

02:17:21.540 | - Totally.

02:17:22.380 | I think that's something I've sat with a lot on that show.

02:17:25.400 | It's another part of the depths

02:17:26.920 | of your psychology to delve into,

02:17:29.320 | and that's when I thought, I understand that deeply,

02:17:34.320 | but I could also choose to believe

02:17:36.920 | that for some reason it matters,

02:17:38.500 | and then I could live like it matters,

02:17:40.460 | and then I could see the trajectories,

02:17:42.180 | and that was another fork in the road of my path, I guess.

02:17:45.780 | - What do you think about the connection to the animals,

02:17:48.020 | though, in that movie, it's with the dogs,

02:17:50.900 | and with you, it's the other domesticated, the reindeer.

02:17:55.060 | What do you think about that human-animal connection?

02:17:59.780 | - In the context of that indifference,

02:18:01.060 | it's interesting that we assign so much value

02:18:04.360 | and love and appreciation for these animals,

02:18:06.820 | and in some degree, we get that back in a reciprocal.

02:18:09.620 | I think right now, you just said the reindeer.

02:18:11.740 | I think of the one they gave me,

02:18:13.680 | 'cause he was long and tall, so they named him Dlinni,

02:18:16.220 | and I just remember Dlinni,

02:18:19.180 | and just watching him eat the leaves

02:18:20.780 | and go with me through the woods

02:18:22.220 | and trust him to take me through rivers and stuff,

02:18:24.820 | and it really is special.

02:18:28.580 | It's really enriching to have that relationship

02:18:32.980 | with an animal, and I think it also puts you

02:18:35.660 | in a proper context.

02:18:36.620 | One thing I noticed about the natives

02:18:37.940 | who live with those animals all the time

02:18:39.720 | is they relate to life and death a little more naturally.

02:18:44.380 | We feel really removed from it,

02:18:46.260 | particularly in urban settings,

02:18:47.580 | and I think when you interact with animals

02:18:51.500 | and you have to confront the life and the death of them

02:18:54.760 | and the responsibility of a symbiotic relationship you have,

02:18:59.200 | I think it opens a little bit of awareness

02:19:02.720 | to your place in the puzzle,

02:19:06.100 | and puts you in it rather than above it.

02:19:10.580 | - Have you been able to accept your own death?

02:19:13.520 | - I wonder, you know, you wonder when it actually comes,

02:19:16.860 | what you're gonna think, but I did have my dad to watch,

02:19:21.860 | confront it in as positive a manner as you could,

02:19:27.060 | and that's a big advantage,

02:19:29.700 | and so I think when the time comes that I will be ready,

02:19:35.300 | but I think that's easy to say when the time feels far off.

02:19:39.340 | You know, it'll be interesting

02:19:40.480 | if you got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow in stage four.

02:19:43.420 | It's like, be heavy.

02:19:45.860 | - Did you ever confront death

02:19:47.000 | while in survival situations?

02:19:48.660 | I mean, when you're, I mean, you're in--

02:19:50.580 | - I did have a time where I thought I might,

02:19:54.580 | I was gonna die.

02:19:55.500 | I had a lot of situations that could've gone either way,

02:19:58.260 | and a lot of injuries, broken ribs and this and that,

02:20:01.020 | but the one that I was able to be conscious

02:20:05.000 | through a slowly evolving experience

02:20:07.340 | that I thought I might die in was,

02:20:09.220 | at one point, we were siphoning gas out of a barrel,

02:20:12.140 | and it was almost to the bottom,

02:20:13.340 | and I was like, so it's sucking really hard

02:20:14.900 | to get the gas out, and then I didn't get the siphon going,

02:20:18.220 | so I waited, and then while I was sitting there,

02:20:20.780 | Eura put a new canister on top and put the hose in,

02:20:24.540 | and I didn't see, and so then I went to get another siphon,

02:20:29.180 | and I went, like, sucked as hard as I could,

02:20:31.300 | and it just instantly, like, a bunch of gas filled my mouth,

02:20:33.860 | and I couldn't, like, spit it out.

02:20:35.360 | I had to go, (gasps) like that,

02:20:37.120 | and I just, full mouthful of gas that I just drank,

02:20:40.740 | and I was just like, oh, like, what is that gonna do?

02:20:43.560 | And he and my friend were gonna go on this fishing trip,

02:20:48.560 | and so was I, and I was just like, oh, I might just stay,

02:20:50.920 | and I was in this little Russian village,

02:20:52.440 | and they were like, all right, well.

02:20:55.660 | Eura was like, man, I had a buddy that died

02:20:59.120 | doing that with diesel a couple years ago,

02:21:01.080 | and I was like, oh, man, and so, anyway,

02:21:03.420 | I made my way to the hospital, and by then,

02:21:05.300 | you know, you're really out of it because,

02:21:07.540 | and then, and it was, they put me in this little dark room.

02:21:11.260 | It almost sounds, like, unrealistic,

02:21:13.880 | but it's actually how it happened.

02:21:15.180 | They put me in a little room with a toilet,

02:21:20.180 | and they gave me a cold, you know, galvanized bucket,

02:21:23.180 | and then, like, they just had a cold water faucet,

02:21:25.420 | and they're just like, just chug water,

02:21:27.300 | puke into the toilet, and just flush your system

02:21:29.300 | as much as you can, but they only had a cold water faucet,

02:21:32.060 | so I was just sitting there, like, chug, chug, chug, chug,

02:21:33.940 | until, like, you puke, and chug until you puke,

02:21:36.260 | and I'm in the dark, and I, and I was, like,

02:21:38.860 | started to shiver 'cause I was so cold,

02:21:40.860 | but I said to, like, still, like,

02:21:42.380 | get this thing up to me and chug until I puked.

02:21:45.300 | I was picturing, I remember reading, you know,

02:21:47.340 | about the Japanese torture, where they would put a hose

02:21:50.260 | in somebody and then make 'em drink water until they puked.

02:21:53.460 | Anyway, the, and I, and I just felt so,

02:21:56.900 | the only way I can express it, I felt so possessed,

02:21:59.260 | like, demon possessed, like, I was just permeated with gas.

02:22:01.820 | I could feel it, it was coming out of my pores,

02:22:03.780 | and I, like, wanted to, like, rip it out of me,

02:22:06.020 | and I couldn't, I'd, like, puke into the toilet,

02:22:08.620 | and then couldn't see, but I was wondering

02:22:10.860 | if it was, like, rainbow, you know, and then,

02:22:13.460 | and then I just remember, like, I could tell

02:22:15.060 | I was going out pretty soon, and I remember looking

02:22:20.020 | at my hands up close, I could see 'em a little bit,

02:22:22.100 | and I, I was like, oh, that's how dad's hands looked,

02:22:24.820 | you know, they were alive, alive, and then,

02:22:26.460 | and then I was like, oh, puke, and I was like,

02:22:28.220 | oh, interesting, is it, are my hands gonna look like that

02:22:31.580 | in a few minutes or whatever, and so then I wrote down,

02:22:33.540 | like, to my family what I thought, you know,

02:22:35.860 | like, I love you all, like, feel at peace, blah, blah, blah,

02:22:40.540 | and then I passed out, and I woke up, but I didn't think,

02:22:43.980 | I actually thought, I, I'm not, when I went to pass out,

02:22:46.600 | I thought it was, there was a coin toss for me,

02:22:48.940 | so I really felt like I was confronting the end there.

02:22:52.640 | - What are the harshest conditions

02:22:55.580 | of surviving on Earth?

02:22:57.060 | - Well, there are places that are just purely uninhabitable,

02:23:00.740 | but I think as far as places that you have a chance--

02:23:04.420 | - You have a chance, that's a good way to put it.

02:23:06.780 | - Maybe Greenland, I think of Greenland because I think of,

02:23:10.600 | you know, those Vikings that settled there

02:23:12.380 | were rugged, capable dudes, and they didn't make it,

02:23:16.900 | but there are Inuit that, that, you know,

02:23:19.060 | natives that live up there, but that's a hard life,

02:23:23.000 | you know, and the population's never grown very big,

02:23:25.180 | 'cause they're, you're scraping by up there,

02:23:26.940 | and you picture, and the Vikings that did land there,

02:23:31.180 | you know, they just weren't able to quite adapt,

02:23:34.500 | and the fact that they all died out is just a symbol,

02:23:37.660 | so that must be a pretty difficult place to live.

02:23:40.340 | - What would you say, that's primarily

02:23:42.420 | because just the food sources are limited?

02:23:44.700 | - Food sources are limited, but the fact

02:23:46.660 | that some people can live there means it is possible,

02:23:49.100 | you know, they've figured out ways to catch seals

02:23:51.980 | and do things to survive, but it's by no means

02:23:56.180 | easier to be taken for granted or obvious.

02:23:58.900 | I think it's a hard, probably a harsh place to try to live.

02:24:02.340 | - Yeah, it's fascinating, not just humans,

02:24:04.340 | but to watch how animals have figured out how to survive.

02:24:08.500 | Watching like a documentary on polar bears,

02:24:10.700 | like, they just figure out a way,

02:24:13.460 | and they get, and they've been doing it for generations,

02:24:16.180 | and they figure out a way.

02:24:17.280 | They travel, like, hundreds of miles to like,

02:24:21.780 | to the water to get fat, and they travel 100 miles to like,

02:24:26.780 | for whatever other purpose, because they wanna stay

02:24:31.060 | on the ice, I don't know, but it's like,

02:24:32.740 | there's a process, and they figure it out

02:24:35.900 | against the long odds, and some of them don't make it.

02:24:38.380 | - It's incredible, it's, what a, what tough things, man.

02:24:43.100 | You just think every little, every animal you see

02:24:45.980 | up in the mountains when I'm up in the woods,

02:24:47.620 | it's that thing just surviving

02:24:48.900 | through the winter scraping by, it's tough, tough existence.

02:24:53.900 | - What do you think it would take to break you,

02:24:57.340 | let's say mentally?

02:24:58.760 | Like, if you're in a survival situation.

02:25:03.000 | - I mean, I think it would have, mentally,

02:25:06.420 | it would have to be, well, we talked about that earlier,

02:25:11.420 | I guess, the thing that I've confronted

02:25:15.500 | that I thought I knew was that if I knew

02:25:17.580 | I was the last person on Earth, I wouldn't do it.

02:25:20.580 | Like, I thought, but maybe you're right,

02:25:22.100 | maybe I just would think I wasn't.

02:25:24.360 | But I think, you know, I can't imagine,

02:25:26.820 | I can't imagine, we're so blessed in the time we live,

02:25:31.820 | but I can't imagine what it's like to lose your kids,

02:25:35.740 | something like that, it was an experience

02:25:37.220 | that was so common for humanity for so much of history.

02:25:40.200 | Would I be able to endure that?

02:25:43.780 | I would have at least a legacy to look back on

02:25:48.060 | of people who did, but God forbid I ever have

02:25:52.060 | to delve that deep, you know what I mean?

02:25:55.060 | I could see that breaking somebody.

02:25:57.100 | - And I mean, in your own family history,

02:25:59.540 | there's people who have survived that,

02:26:01.660 | and maybe that would give you hope.

02:26:03.140 | - I mean, I think that's what I would have

02:26:04.860 | to somehow hold on to.

02:26:07.020 | - But in a survival situation,

02:26:08.620 | there's very few things that--

02:26:10.660 | - I don't know what it would be.

02:26:12.340 | So on a loan, on a loan, I knew,

02:26:15.940 | I wasn't gonna, and ultimately, it is a game show.

02:26:18.700 | So it's like, ultimately, I wasn't gonna kill myself

02:26:21.580 | out there, but so if I hadn't been able

02:26:26.580 | to procure food and I was starving to death,

02:26:30.140 | it's like, okay, I'm not, I'm gonna go home.

02:26:32.780 | You know, but if you put yourself in that situation,

02:26:35.620 | but it's not a game show,

02:26:39.020 | and having been there to some degree,

02:26:41.060 | I will say, I wasn't even close.

02:26:43.620 | Like, I don't even know.

02:26:44.700 | - Yeah.

02:26:45.540 | - Yeah, I hadn't got, it hadn't pushed my mental limit

02:26:48.420 | at all yet, I would say, or on the scale.

02:26:51.300 | But that's not to say there isn't one.

02:26:53.140 | I know there is one, but I have a hard time.

02:26:56.580 | I know I've dealt with enough pain

02:26:59.980 | and enough discomfort in life

02:27:03.000 | that I know I can deal with that.

02:27:05.260 | I think it gets difficult when you start

02:27:07.500 | to, when there's a way out, and you start

02:27:10.540 | to wonder if you shouldn't take the way out,

02:27:12.900 | as far as like, if there's no way out,

02:27:17.300 | I don't know what to do.

02:27:19.740 | - Oh, that's interesting.

02:27:20.780 | I mean, that is a real difficult battle

02:27:25.060 | when there's an exit, when it's easy to quit.

02:27:27.580 | - Right, yeah, why am I doing this?

02:27:30.000 | - Yeah, that's a thing that gets louder and louder

02:27:35.000 | the harder things get.

02:27:36.780 | - That voice.

02:27:37.820 | - It's not insignificant.

02:27:39.140 | Like, if you think you're doing permanent damage

02:27:43.820 | to your body, you would be smart to quit.

02:27:46.640 | You should just not do that when it's not necessary,

02:27:51.020 | because health is kinda all you have in some regards.

02:27:53.940 | So, I don't blame anyone, then they quit

02:27:57.300 | because of that reason, it's like, good.

02:27:59.300 | But if you're in a situation and you don't have

02:28:04.220 | the option to quit, is knowing that you're doing

02:28:06.700 | permanent, that's not gonna break, that won't break me.

02:28:08.860 | You know, you just have to get through it.

02:28:10.920 | I'm not sure what my mental limit would be

02:28:13.620 | outside of like, the family suffering

02:28:18.100 | in the way that I described earlier.

02:28:19.720 | - When it's just you, it's you, you're alone,

02:28:22.340 | there's the limit, you don't know what the limit is.

02:28:26.340 | - I don't know the limit.

02:28:27.180 | - Injuries, like physical stuff is annoying, though.

02:28:31.220 | - Oh.

02:28:32.140 | - That could be--

02:28:32.980 | - Isn't it weird how, I mean, I can have a good life,

02:28:36.260 | happy life, and then you have a bad back,

02:28:37.980 | or you have a headache, and it's amazing

02:28:40.060 | how much that can overwhelm your experience.

02:28:42.340 | Then, again, that was something I saw in Dad

02:28:47.300 | that was like, interesting, how can you find joy in that,

02:28:51.540 | when you're just steeped in that all the time?

02:28:53.540 | And people I'm sure listening, there's a lot of people

02:28:55.580 | that do, and it's so, and talk about the cross to bear,

02:29:00.580 | and the hero journey to be, like, good for you

02:29:04.060 | for trying to find what you can, your way through that.

02:29:08.900 | There was a lady in Russia, Tanya,

02:29:12.460 | and she had cancer and recovered,

02:29:15.620 | but always had a pounding headache.

02:29:18.500 | And she was really joyful, and really fun to be around.

02:29:21.940 | And I just like, man, I mean, you just have to have

02:29:25.220 | a really bad headache for today to know how much

02:29:27.220 | that throws a wrench in your existence.

02:29:29.780 | So, all that to say, if you're not right now

02:29:33.380 | suffering with blindness, or a bad back,

02:29:36.020 | or, just count your blessings, 'cause it is all,

02:29:39.420 | it's so easy to have, it's amazing how complex we are,

02:29:42.740 | how well our bodies work, and when they go out of whack,

02:29:46.260 | it can be very overwhelming, and they all will

02:29:48.340 | at some point, and so that's an interesting thing

02:29:50.540 | to think ahead on, how you're gonna confront it

02:29:52.820 | when it does.

02:29:54.460 | Keeps you humble, like you said.

02:29:56.140 | - It's inspiring that people figure out a way.

02:29:58.060 | With migraines, that's a hard one, though.

02:30:00.700 | - You have headaches.

02:30:01.900 | (laughing)

02:30:02.740 | - It's so hard.

02:30:04.220 | - Oh, man.

02:30:05.860 | 'Cause those can be really painful.

02:30:07.900 | - It's overwhelming.

02:30:09.260 | - And dizzying, and all of this, ugh.

02:30:11.340 | (laughing)

02:30:13.740 | That's inspiring, that's inspiring that you found that.

02:30:16.060 | - There's not nothing in that.

02:30:17.700 | I mean, you can find, somehow you can tap into purpose,

02:30:22.660 | even in that pain.

02:30:23.860 | I guess I would just speak from my dad's experience.

02:30:26.500 | I saw somebody do it, and I benefited from it.

02:30:29.820 | So, thanks to him for seeing the higher calling there.

02:30:34.780 | - You wrote a note on your blog in 2012,

02:30:38.940 | you spent five weeks-ish in the forest alone.

02:30:43.940 | I just thought it was interesting, 'cause this is

02:30:46.300 | in contrast to on the show alone.

02:30:49.780 | You're really alone, like you're not talking to anybody,

02:30:53.020 | and you realize that, you're right.

02:30:56.420 | I remember at one point, after several weeks had passed,

02:30:58.900 | I wandered into a particularly beautiful part of the woods

02:31:01.540 | and exclaimed out loud, "Wow."

02:31:03.860 | It struck me that it was the first time I had heard

02:31:06.380 | my own voice in several weeks, with no one to talk to.

02:31:10.060 | Did your thoughts go into something like deep place?

02:31:18.460 | - Yeah, I'd say my mental life was really active.

02:31:21.780 | When you're that long alone, I'll tell you what you won't

02:31:27.340 | have is any of the skeletons in your closet

02:31:30.260 | that are still in your closet.

02:31:32.220 | You will be forced to confront every person.

02:31:35.860 | One thing, if you've cheated on your wife or something,

02:31:40.380 | you'll be confronted with the random dude

02:31:42.700 | you didn't say thank you to, and the issue

02:31:46.500 | that you didn't resolve.

02:31:48.020 | All this stuff that was long gone will come up,

02:31:51.380 | and then you'll work through it, and you'll think

02:31:53.100 | how you should make it right.

02:31:56.500 | I had a lot of those thoughts while I was out there,

02:31:59.700 | and it was so interesting to see what you would

02:32:03.420 | just brush over and then confront it,

02:32:08.420 | because in our modern world, when you're always distracted,

02:32:11.380 | you're just never, ever gonna know until you take the time

02:32:14.700 | to be alone for a considerable amount of time.

02:32:17.060 | - Spend time hanging out with the skeletons.

02:32:18.900 | - Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

02:32:21.660 | I recommend it.

02:32:23.060 | - So you said you guide people.

02:32:24.980 | What are your favorite places to go to?

02:32:27.820 | - Well, if I tell 'em, then is everybody gonna go there?

02:32:32.500 | - I like how you actually have, it might be a YouTube video

02:32:35.820 | or your Instagram post where you give 'em a recommendation

02:32:38.860 | of the best fishing hole in the world,

02:32:41.020 | and you give detailed instructions on how to get there,

02:32:43.500 | but it's like a journey of a life.

02:32:44.780 | It's like a Lord of the Rings type of journey.

02:32:46.380 | - Right, right.

02:32:47.220 | No, I love the, there's a region that I definitely love.

02:32:52.980 | You know, there's a region that I definitely love

02:32:55.180 | in the States because it's special to me.

02:32:57.260 | I grew up there.

02:32:58.500 | Stuff like that, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana,

02:33:00.780 | those are really cool places to me.

02:33:02.460 | I like the small town vibes they're still maintaining

02:33:05.580 | and stuff there.

02:33:06.420 | - Just a mix of like mountains and forests.

02:33:09.780 | - Mm-hmm, but you know another really awesome place

02:33:12.780 | that blew my mind was New Zealand,

02:33:15.780 | that South Island of New Zealand was pretty incredible.

02:33:19.540 | As far as just stunning stuff to see,

02:33:22.580 | I was pretty high up there on the list.

02:33:24.820 | But all these places have such kind of unique things

02:33:29.460 | about Canada became, like where they did a loan,

02:33:32.580 | it's not typically what you'd say

02:33:35.340 | because it's fairly flat and cliffy and stuff,

02:33:37.480 | but it really became beautiful to me

02:33:39.100 | 'cause I could tap into the richness of the land,

02:33:41.620 | you know, or the fishing hole thing.

02:33:45.300 | It's like that's a special little spot,

02:33:47.100 | you know, something like that.

02:33:48.180 | And you see the beauty, and then you start to see

02:33:50.220 | the beauty in the smaller scale.

02:33:52.660 | Like, oh, look at that little meadow with that,

02:33:54.300 | it's got an orange and a pink and a blue flower

02:33:56.500 | right next to each other, that's super cool.

02:33:58.220 | You know, and there's a million things like that.

02:34:01.260 | - Have you been back there yet?

02:34:02.900 | Back to where the loan show was?

02:34:05.020 | - No, we're going back this summer.

02:34:07.580 | I'm gonna guide a trip up there, take a bunch of people.

02:34:09.940 | I'm really looking forward to being able to enjoy it

02:34:12.340 | without the pressure of, it's gonna be a fun trip.

02:34:16.540 | - What advice would you give to people

02:34:18.220 | in terms of how to be in nature?

02:34:23.220 | So, like, hikes to take or journeys to take out in nature

02:34:27.060 | where it could take you to that place

02:34:29.260 | where the busyness and the madness of the world

02:34:32.060 | can dissipate and you can be with it.

02:34:36.860 | Like, how long does it take for you,

02:34:38.380 | for people usually, to just like--

02:34:40.540 | - Yeah, I think you need a few days probably

02:34:42.940 | to really tap into it.

02:34:44.420 | But maybe you need to work your way there.

02:34:46.700 | It's awesome to go out on a hike,

02:34:50.700 | go see some beautiful little waterfall,

02:34:52.860 | or go see some old tree, or whatever it is.

02:34:56.220 | But I think just doing is it.

02:35:01.340 | Everybody thinks about doing it.

02:35:03.180 | You just really do do it.

02:35:05.140 | Like, go out and then plan to go overnight.

02:35:08.380 | Don't be so afraid of all the potentialities

02:35:12.100 | that you delay it inevitably.

02:35:15.260 | It's actually one of the things that I've enjoyed

02:35:17.940 | the most about guiding people is giving them the tools

02:35:21.820 | so that now they have this ability into the future.

02:35:24.860 | You can go out and feel like,

02:35:26.100 | "I'm gonna pick this spot on the map and go there."

02:35:29.380 | And that's a tool in your toolkit of life

02:35:33.180 | that is, I think, really valuable

02:35:34.580 | because I think everybody should spend some time in nature.

02:35:39.140 | I mean, I think it's been pretty proven healthy.

02:35:42.820 | - Yeah, I mean, camping is great.

02:35:45.780 | And solo, a guy and she has to do it solo is pretty cool.

02:35:49.020 | - Yeah, that's cool you did.

02:35:50.460 | - Yeah, it's cool.

02:35:51.280 | And I recorded stuff, so that helped.

02:35:53.700 | - Oh, good, yeah.

02:35:54.540 | - So you sit there and you record the thoughts.

02:35:56.860 | Actually, for having to record the thoughts,

02:35:59.300 | I had to like, it forced me to really think through

02:36:01.900 | what I was feeling to convert the feelings into words,

02:36:05.240 | which is not a trivial thing

02:36:08.580 | because it's mostly just feeling.

02:36:12.420 | You feel a certain kind of way.

02:36:15.660 | - That's interesting.

02:36:18.260 | You know, I felt like the way I met my wife

02:36:20.940 | was like we met at this wedding

02:36:22.580 | and then I went to Russia, basically.

02:36:24.660 | And we kept in touch via email for that year.

02:36:28.860 | And a similar thing, it was really interesting to be,

02:36:32.020 | I have to be so thoughtful and purposeful

02:36:34.300 | about what you're saying and things.

02:36:36.140 | Like, I think it's probably a healthy, good thing to do.

02:36:40.540 | - What gives you hope about this whole thing

02:36:42.380 | we have going on, the future of human civilization?

02:36:47.180 | - If we talk, you know, we talked about gratitude earlier.

02:36:49.340 | Like, look at what we have now.

02:36:50.700 | That could give you hope.

02:36:51.700 | Like, look at what we've, the world we're in.

02:36:54.380 | We live in such an amazing time with, you know.

02:36:57.580 | - Buildings and roads.

02:36:58.740 | - Buildings and roads and food security.

02:37:01.180 | And, you know, I lived with the natives

02:37:03.340 | and I thought to myself a lot,

02:37:04.740 | like, I wonder if not everybody

02:37:06.220 | would choose this way of life.

02:37:07.420 | Because it is, there's something really rich

02:37:10.460 | about just that small group,

02:37:13.420 | your direct relationship to your needs, all that.

02:37:17.220 | But with the food security and the, you know,

02:37:21.020 | modern medicine, the things that we now have

02:37:23.780 | that we take for granted but that,

02:37:26.020 | I wouldn't choose that life if we didn't have those things.

02:37:29.220 | Otherwise, you're gonna watch your family starve to death

02:37:31.420 | or things like that.

02:37:33.540 | So we have so much now, which should lead us to be hopeful

02:37:38.180 | while we try to improve

02:37:40.540 | because there's definitely a lot of things wrong,

02:37:42.860 | you know, but I guess there's a lot of room for improvement

02:37:47.380 | and I do feel like we're sort of watching it,

02:37:49.140 | walking on a knife's edge, you know.

02:37:51.060 | But I guess that's the way it is.

02:37:54.780 | - As the tools we build become more powerful.

02:37:57.180 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:37:58.740 | (laughs)

02:37:59.900 | - Knife's edge is getting sharper and sharper.

02:38:02.300 | I've talked, I'll like argue with my brother about that.

02:38:07.860 | Sometimes he takes the more positive view

02:38:09.940 | and I'm like, ooh, I mean, it's great, we've done great,

02:38:12.660 | but man, more and more people with nuclear weapons

02:38:16.540 | and more, it's just gonna take one mistake

02:38:19.540 | with the more power.

02:38:21.540 | - I think there's something about the sharpness

02:38:23.300 | of the knife's edge that gets humanity to really focus

02:38:28.300 | and like step up and not screw it up.

02:38:31.940 | There is, just like you said with the cold,

02:38:34.580 | going out into the extreme cold,

02:38:36.940 | it like wakes you up.

02:38:38.900 | And I think it's the same thing

02:38:39.940 | when nuclear weapons is just like wakes up humanity,

02:38:42.620 | like let's not screw this up.

02:38:43.820 | - Everybody was half asleep.

02:38:44.900 | - Exactly.

02:38:45.740 | (laughs)

02:38:46.780 | And then we keep building more and more powerful things

02:38:48.860 | to make sure we stay awake.

02:38:50.300 | - Yeah, exactly, stay awake, see what we've done,

02:38:52.900 | be thankful for it, but then improve it.

02:38:55.100 | And then, of course, I appreciated your little post

02:38:59.460 | the other week where you said you wanted some kids.

02:39:01.180 | You know, that's a very direct way to relate to the future

02:39:04.540 | and to have hope for the future.

02:39:06.140 | - I can't wait.

02:39:07.500 | And hopefully I also get a chance to go out

02:39:09.860 | in the wilderness with you at some point.

02:39:11.300 | - I would love it.

02:39:12.140 | - That'd be fun.

02:39:12.980 | - Open invite, let's make it happen.

02:39:14.060 | I got some really cool spots of it.

02:39:16.020 | Have in mind to take you.

02:39:17.980 | - Awesome, let's go.

02:39:19.460 | Thank you for talking today, brother.

02:39:20.700 | Thank you for everything you stand for.

02:39:22.540 | - Thanks, man.

02:39:25.040 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:39:26.620 | with Jordan Jonas.

02:39:28.160 | To support this podcast,

02:39:29.340 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:39:31.900 | And now, let me try a new thing

02:39:35.620 | where I try to articulate some things

02:39:37.900 | I've been thinking about,

02:39:39.080 | whether prompted by one of your questions

02:39:40.820 | or just in general.

02:39:42.800 | If you'd like to submit a question,

02:39:44.540 | including an audio and video form,

02:39:47.600 | go to lexfriedman.com/ama.

02:39:51.780 | Now, allow me to comment on the attempted assassination

02:39:55.360 | of Donald Trump on July 13th.

02:39:57.320 | First, as I've posted online,

02:40:00.640 | wishing Donald Trump good health

02:40:02.540 | after an assassination attempt

02:40:05.380 | is not a partisan statement.

02:40:07.220 | It's a human statement.

02:40:08.380 | And I'm sorry if some of you want to categorize me

02:40:13.000 | and other people into blue and red bins.

02:40:16.620 | Perhaps you do it because it's easier to hate

02:40:20.160 | than to understand.

02:40:21.680 | In this case, it shouldn't matter.

02:40:23.240 | But let me say, once again,

02:40:25.160 | that I am not right-wing nor left-wing.

02:40:28.120 | I'm not partisan.

02:40:29.620 | I make up my mind one issue at a time,

02:40:31.560 | and I try to approach everyone and every idea

02:40:34.760 | with empathy and with an open mind.

02:40:38.100 | I have and will continue to have

02:40:40.420 | many long-form conversations

02:40:42.940 | with people both on the left and the right.

02:40:46.360 | Now, onto the much more important point.

02:40:50.440 | The attempted assassination of Donald Trump

02:40:53.200 | should serve as a reminder

02:40:55.040 | that history can turn on a single moment.

02:40:58.800 | World War I started with the assassination

02:41:01.500 | of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

02:41:03.680 | And just like that, one moment in history,

02:41:06.740 | on June 18th, 1914, led to the death of 20 million people,

02:41:11.740 | half of whom were civilians.

02:41:14.240 | If one of the bullets on July 13th

02:41:18.040 | had a slightly different trajectory,

02:41:20.360 | where Donald Trump would end up dying

02:41:22.520 | in that small town in Pennsylvania,

02:41:25.000 | history would write a new dramatic chapter,

02:41:28.080 | the contents of which all the so-called experts

02:41:31.320 | and pundits would not be able to predict.

02:41:33.960 | It very well could have led to a civil war,

02:41:37.560 | because the true depth of the division

02:41:39.220 | in the country is unknown.

02:41:41.040 | We only see the surface turmoil on social media and so on.

02:41:45.120 | And it is events like the assassination

02:41:47.320 | of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

02:41:48.880 | where we as a human species get to find out

02:41:52.760 | what the truth is of where people really stand.

02:41:56.100 | The task then is to try and make our society

02:41:59.980 | maximally resilient and robust

02:42:02.280 | to such destabilizing events.

02:42:04.480 | The way to do that, I think,

02:42:06.600 | is to properly identify the threat, the enemy.

02:42:10.560 | It's not the left or the right that are the, quote, enemy.

02:42:14.760 | Extreme division itself is the enemy.

02:42:17.600 | Some division is productive.

02:42:19.760 | It's how we develop good ideas and policies.

02:42:22.520 | But too much leads to the spread of resentment and hate

02:42:26.280 | that can boil over into destruction on a global scale.

02:42:30.040 | So we must absolutely avoid the slide into extreme division.

02:42:35.040 | There are many ways to do this,

02:42:36.720 | and perhaps it's a discussion for another time.

02:42:39.720 | But at the very basic level,

02:42:42.280 | let's continuously try to turn down the temperature

02:42:44.760 | of the partisan bickering and more often celebrate

02:42:48.000 | our obvious common humanity.

02:42:51.360 | Now, let me also comment on conspiracy theories.

02:42:54.260 | I've been hearing a lot of those recently.

02:42:57.200 | I think they play an important role in society.

02:43:00.040 | They ask questions that serve as a check on power

02:43:03.000 | and corruption of centralized institutions.

02:43:06.040 | The way to answer the questions raised

02:43:08.180 | by conspiracy theories is not by dismissing them

02:43:11.200 | with arrogance and feigned ignorance,

02:43:14.080 | but with transparency and accountability.

02:43:17.520 | In this particular case, the obvious question

02:43:20.160 | that needs an honest answer is why did the Secret Service

02:43:24.320 | fail so terribly in protecting the former president?

02:43:27.220 | The story we're supposed to believe is that a 20-year-old,

02:43:31.400 | untrained loner was able to outsmart the Secret Service

02:43:35.140 | by finding the optimal location on a roof

02:43:38.000 | for a shot on Trump from 130 yards away.

02:43:42.180 | Even though the Secret Service sniper spotted him

02:43:44.720 | on the roof 20 minutes before the shooting

02:43:47.520 | and did nothing about it.

02:43:48.880 | This looks really shady to everyone.

02:43:53.020 | Why does it take so long to get to a full accounting

02:43:56.800 | of the truth of what happened?

02:43:58.400 | And why is the reporting of the truth concealed

02:44:00.880 | by corporate government speak?

02:44:03.240 | Cut the bullshit.

02:44:04.580 | What happened?

02:44:05.800 | Who fucked up and why?

02:44:07.760 | That's what we need to know.

02:44:09.280 | That's the beginning of transparency.

02:44:11.520 | And yes, the director of the U.S. Secret Service

02:44:13.720 | should probably step down or be fired by the president.

02:44:17.320 | And not as part of some political circus

02:44:19.240 | that I'm sure is coming, but as a step towards uniting

02:44:23.440 | an increasingly divided and cynical nation.

02:44:25.780 | Conspiracy theories are not noise, even when they're false.

02:44:31.760 | They are a signal that some shady, corrupt,

02:44:35.040 | secret bullshit is being done

02:44:37.040 | by those trying to hold on to power.

02:44:39.800 | Not always, but often.

02:44:42.200 | Transparency is the answer here, not secrecy.

02:44:45.560 | If we don't do these things, we leave ourselves vulnerable

02:44:49.360 | to singular moments that turn the tides of history.

02:44:52.520 | Empires do fall, civil wars do break out

02:44:57.160 | and tear apart the fabric of societies.

02:45:00.760 | This is a great nation.

02:45:02.800 | The most successful collective human experiment

02:45:05.420 | in the history of earth.

02:45:07.560 | And letting ourselves become extremely divided

02:45:10.120 | risks destroying all of that.

02:45:12.540 | So please ignore the political pundits,

02:45:15.960 | the political grifters, clickbait media,

02:45:18.520 | outrage-fueling politicians on the right and the left

02:45:22.640 | who try to divide us.

02:45:24.340 | We're not so divided.

02:45:26.320 | We're in this together.

02:45:27.480 | As I've said many times before, I love you all.

02:45:31.540 | This is a long comment.

02:45:35.040 | I'm hoping not to do comments this long in the future

02:45:37.920 | and hoping to do many more.

02:45:39.680 | So I'll leave it here for today.

02:45:42.500 | But I'll try to answer questions

02:45:44.600 | and make comments on every episode.

02:45:46.840 | If you would like to submit questions, like I mentioned,

02:45:49.640 | including audio and video form, go to lexfriedman.com/ama.

02:45:54.640 | And now let me leave you with some words

02:45:57.480 | from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

02:46:00.760 | Adopt the pace of nature.

02:46:03.360 | Her secret is patience.

02:46:06.100 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:46:10.580 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:46:15.580 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6 | Lex Fridman Podcast #437

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