Jeff Zausch: Surviving 286 Days Naked: Jeff Zos' Epic Journey | DSH #1487

Okay, ironically, this is ironic, but in Colombia, there's a spider.

I don't know the professional name.

People can Google it.

I call it the erectus spider.

Yeah.

Because when it bites a person like you or me, we die with a full erection.

Whoa.

True.

The spider bites you.

It causes this erection that never goes away and then you die from it.

All right, guys, we got Jeff here.

Not your normal speaker at Student Action Summit, but inspiring the younger guys, right?

Man, I'm different.

I feel like a fish out of water here, to be honest.

I, you know, everyone is so polished and they're brilliant speakers.

And I'm here talking about what it's like to sleep in the dirt and hunt crocodiles, you know?

I mean, you did what no one's done before, right?

Survive Naked and Afraid twice.

Eight times.

Oh, eight times.

Eight times, bro.

What?

I was one of the first ones to ever do it 12 years ago.

Holy crap.

I've survived more days on Naked Unafraid than anybody's ever done.

286 days to be exact.

And yeah, it's been a wild trip.

Do you think you'll ever do it again at this point?

I leave in October.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

Still not enough.

I'm not done, man.

I'm not done.

There's always another bar.

No matter how high you climb, there's always another mountain.

And so I'm just, you know, I'm still young.

I'm, you know, I haven't died yet, obviously.

Almost, though.

Almost.

Yeah, spoiler alert.

But I'm still here.

I'm still doing it.

Nice.

What was the toughest terrain out of all those expeditions?

People never believe me when I say this.

Louisiana.

Really?

The swamps of Louisiana are the most difficult.

They're harder than the Amazon.

They're more difficult than the deserts of Egypt or Botswana.

I mean, it's the swamps are just relentless.

What makes it so much more difficult?

The mosquitoes, the bugs, the cold, the water.

And then the swamp has all the things you can't see.

The bacteria, the viruses.

And in survival, it's actually those things that'll kill you.

Damn.

Yeah.

So you almost got wrecked out there.

Yeah.

That one,

ironically, that was one of the ones I've left with no diseases.

I was never hospitalized after 60 days in the Louisiana swamps, but I've had some diseases that have almost killed me.

Yeah, you got meningitis, right?

Yeah, meningitis.

I was in the ICU for over a month after that one.

That was 60 days in the Philippines.

I made it.

I made it all 60 days, but I almost died after I got home once the meningitis sat in.

And yeah, that was a rough one.

It's crazy because I've always wanted to go on survivor, but I hear the stories about after and all the parasites people have and all these diseases.

I'm like, ah, 60 days for that.

I don't know.

It's, I've learned, I've learned the hard way why our ancestors only lived to be like 35 years old.

Right.

And then they were dead, you know, and I see it now.

It's, it's the things you can't see.

Most people would think that I'm most scared of crocodiles or lions or leopards, for example.

No, I'm scared of the shit I can't see.

Right.

The bacteria, the viruses, those are the things that terrify me.

Have you ever had a big animal encounter out there?

Oh, yeah.

All the time.

Yeah.

All the time.

Every, every survival challenge I do in Africa, I'm hunted every night.

Holy every single night, I have hyenas and leopards and usually the big cats trying to get in through my boma, which is a six-foot-tall wall of thorns that surrounds me.

And that's the only way that you can survive in Africa without being eaten at night.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

I feel bad for the videographer too, though.

I don't.

The videographer leaves me at night.

Oh, he leaves.

And he goes and stays in his own, you know, comfortable shelter.

He has a generator to charge his batteries and everything, but I'm left out there by myself.

Jeez.

Yeah, it's wild.

The nighttime's more difficult, I'd imagine, than the daytime.

The nighttime is when you'll die.

But ironically, it's the only time I get to relax.

And so, so I'm sleeping nice to the fire.

I'm relaxed.

I'm trying to chill out, but at the same time, I'm being hunted.

And so I never get a good night's sleep out there.

Wow, that's rough.

And you're naked.

And

people underestimate that, bro.

People underestimate how hard it is to be naked in the wilderness.

It's not just made-for-TV stuff.

It makes it difficult.

Oh, yeah.

All the insects, all the scratches from the bleaches.

Dude, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this on your podcast.

I was in Columbia one time.

I got bit on the nether regions by a spider.

Okay.

It swelled up the size of a beer can.

Holy crap.

Seriously, in the morning, I go to take a leak, go out to my favorite pea tree, as I called it, and I look down and it, I look deformed.

Oh, that's when I noticed it.

Yes, that's when I noticed, I looked deformed and I, and I screamed like a little girl, like, ah, you know?

And

I tell people that's the closest I've ever come to quitting a challenge.

Really?

It's because I thought I might lose my manhood.

Yeah, you know, like, I will do a lot for survival.

I will not lose my manhood.

Damn.

Did it go back to normal eventually?

It went back to normal.

Thank God.

Yeah.

Did they give you anti-venom or what?

What happened?

No,

they gave me a shot of epinephrine or something like in the manhood.

It hurt, dude.

It was terrible.

But

it probably saved me.

So it, yeah, it was the spiders to this this day i don't do spiders can you die from a spider bite oh yeah oh yeah in fact okay ironically this is ironic but in colombia there's a spider i don't know the professional name people can google it i call it the erectus spider yeah because when it bites a person like you or me we die with a full erection whoa true the spider bites you it causes this erection that never goes away and then you die from it and that was my fear when i got bit by this i'm like not only am I going to die here,

I'm going to die in the most embarrassing fashion you can.

Wow.

But fortunately, you know, I survived.

What a tough way to go out, huh?

Terrible way to go.

Either the worst way or the best way, but in the jungle by myself, worst way.

Damn, that is nuts.

Any snake bites?

I have had a snake bite.

Never on Naked Unafraid, ironically.

I was kayaking down the Salmon River in Idaho, and a rattlesnake fell out of a bush when I was by the shore, fell into my kayak, bit me on the ankle.

Damn.

I get out of the kayak, get to shore, take my boot off.

Sure enough, there's a snake biting my ankle.

I'm seven miles from the nearest ranges.

So I drop all my gear, you know, and just run as fast as I can because that venom is going through my blood.

It's working its way up to my heart.

And the faster you get to a hospital, the better you are.

Right.

All the things that they tell you in the news and on these, you know, fairy tale stories that come.

All right, guys, Sean Kelly here, host of the Digital Social Hour podcast.

Just filmed 33 amazing episodes at Student Action Summit.

Shout out to Code Health, you know, sponsor these episodes, but also I took them before filming each day.

Felt amazing.

Just filmed 20 episodes straight and I'm not even tired, honestly.

Much like this, where it's just based off.

you know, the code, the codes that are in the saline solution.

Code Health has been awesome.

Feel the drop and then go code yourself.

Cut it open and suck the venom out.

It's all fake.

None of that's real.

And fortunately, I, you know, made it back to a hospital and I was okay.

Did you put a tourniquet on it?

Did you?

I did.

I wrapped my belt around it.

The thing is, is you can only leave a tourniquet on for a couple minutes at best

before it starts to kill your flesh.

Whoa.

It's like your brain.

When your brain goes without oxygen, it dies.

Same thing when you put a tourniquet on.

So every couple minutes, I had to loosen the tourniquet to allow blood to get to my foot.

Damn.

Otherwise, you know, people have been bit by a snake.

They put a tourniquet on.

They get to the hospital, they have to cut their foot off because the tourniquet on was on so long, their foot died.

Wow.

So that is nuts.

Yeah.

Leading up to the actual show, do you practice?

Do you like go to similar venues and practice?

I don't practice because I, you know, I know what I know, but I prepare and I prepare like a UFC fighter would prepare for a fight, except in reverse.

So I gain weight.

Okay.

And so I gain about 50 pounds before every challenge.

Yeah.

And my next challenge is October.

So I've already gained 25 of it.

Wow.

I have 25 more pounds to go.

And usually when I'm out there, I lose about a pound a day.

So a 60-day survival challenge, I'm losing 60 pounds.

Geez, that's a lot.

Dude, I come out of there weighing what I did in junior high school.

It's crazy.

What's the longest fast you've had?

Like you couldn't find food.

How many days did you go?

Nine days.

Nine days.

Nine days.

While being super active, too.

Yeah, yeah, super active, hunting every day, building shelter every day.

And so you're burning thousands of calories a day, similar to a professional athlete.

But then you have nothing to eat for nine days.

It's brutal.

Like to me, I always say the worst part of what I do is starvation.

I bet.

Because like animals in nature, they, they, why they gorge themselves every time they eat is because they don't know when their next meal is coming.

Right.

So when I'm surviving out there, I have to live the same way.

When I kill an impala, I eat 20 pounds of that impala

that first night because I don't don't know when the next meal I'm going to get is.

What did you find on that ninth day?

What animal was it?

An electric eel.

An eel.

An eel.

And those electric eels, they actually killed dozens of people every year.

And I speared that thing with a wooden spear.

Wow.

It electrocuted the shit out of me.

Shit.

Through the spear?

Through the spear.

Because the spear was in water.

The spear had got wet.

And so the electricity went through the spear and it went into my arm, up my arm, into my chest.

And

my heart rhythm wasn't normal for a couple hours.

Holy shit.

After that.

It was wild.

Damn.

Yeah, I was going to ask you how you caught it, but damn.

And that was just the first one.

I killed two more after that.

That didn't stop you.

The second one electrocuted me too.

And then I got smart after that.

And then I learned to catch them on fishing hooks, drag them up on shore.

and just beat them with a machete.

And when they're not in the water, they don't electrocute.

How big were those?

Six feet long.

Damn, those were huge.

As big around as our legs.

I mean, unbelievable.

And I've looked for electric eel in every seafood shop around the world.

I can't find it.

You can't find it because they kill the people that try to kill them.

But amazing foods.

There's some baby ones in the Asian ones, like H Mart and stuff.

Yes.

I've eaten sushi with eel, but they're teeny tiny.

They're like the size of my pinky or something.

These were six feet long.

I was making steaks out of these things.

Did you eat it raw?

No, I cooked it.

You cooked it?

And it was like a mix between fish and pork huh it was like bacon grease dripping out of that thing eel's top five foods for me eel is good oh it's fine i love misemio very good yeah i love eel sushi eel avocado oh it was worth the electrocution

what's the tastiest and the grossest thing you've eaten out there uh the tastiest uh it might be wild boar because basically you're eating bacon and ham let's be real uh the grossest thing i ever eat um i was filming a series of dual survival for discovery channel i'm the host of that show

And me and my co-hosts were working our way through the deserts of Botswana during the dry season, no water anywhere in sight.

For two and a half days, we went with no water.

We were dying at this point.

And we were following this elephant trail, thinking logically, well, elephants know where the water is.

Let's follow the elephant trail that'll lead us to water.

We followed that thing for two days.

Shit.

Didn't find any water,

but we were seeing elephant dung along the ground.

And, and for those of you that haven't seen elephant dung, it's very moist, very, very moist.

So we ended up having to pick up that elephant dung and squeeze it out, drain it into our mouths.

And we were drinking elephant shit water.

Wow.

And it tasted like it was coming straight out of the elephant.

Like it is, it is worse than I can possibly imagine.

Like the hairs on my neck are standing up right now, just telling you about the experience.

And the worst part was it was so nasty.

We were throwing up in our mouths, but we had to swallow the throw up because we were so dehydrated that we were going to die.

So I was eating elephant shit water with throw-up at the same time.

And that's when I really started to evaluate my career choices.

Wow.

I bet that was the best water once you found it that you've ever had.

You know what's horrible?

It was two hours later that we found a lake.

Two hours later, man.

It was a...

You wish you stuck it out?

Bro, we were were hating ourselves.

Like, you should have seen our eyes when we saw this lake for the first time.

We were just like, you have got to be kidding me.

What was the most difficult animal to catch?

Probably an American alligator in Louisiana because

you catch them on a hook, like a big hook, like the size of your hand.

They swallow the hook and it gets stuck.

And so you're able to pull them into shore.

But once you get them onto shore, that's it.

Like you have no more help.

And so you have to jump on the back of the alligator, put something over its eyes so it can't see you and pin its mouth shut with your hands.

Wow.

And all while doing this, it tries to roll.

It's called the death roll.

And so you have to get a machete through the back of its neck.

So its neck articulates left, right, up, down.

And the armored plates on the back of the neck, there's a gap between them, which allows the neck to articulate.

And that's the only weakness on the alligator.

That's the only place where you can put a knife into its brain.

And you have to do that before it rolls you.

So that's hands down the most dangerous animal that I've had to kill and eat out there.

Did it get to that point where it was rolling on you?

Just about.

It was starting to roll when I put the knife in through its brain.

And then, and what's ironic, though, is like, some people might view this as like, oh my gosh, poor alligator.

Alligators don't feel pain.

Really?

Now, you may read different on some stupid little Google search, but I'm telling you, when I put that machete through the back, through the neck of that alligator, it didn't even flinch.

Wow.

Bro, it didn't even blink.

And

there is science out there that say alligators don't feel pain.

And I believe it.

I have that experience.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

That's very interesting.

Any bear encounters?

I go bear hunting every year.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Twice a year.

It's a side thing for you.

Yeah.

Every spring, every fall, I go bear hunting.

It's a thing out there in Idaho and Montana.

Yeah.

I can't even remember.

I hope you guys are enjoying the show.

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Thank you.

Remember the last time I bought beef at a store?

Wow.

My freezer's just full of deer, elk, and bear.

It's difficult, I heard, because of their scent.

So they could smell the humans from like miles away, right?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And that's why it's fun, too, because the bears, they're the predators, right?

You're in their environment.

So deer hunting.

It's kind of almost unfair.

Right.

You know, you have a big rifle and the deer is just meandering along, but a bear now you're almost on, you know, fair playing field a little bit.

Right.

And some people use dogs to chase them down, scare them up in a tree, and then they shoot them out of a tree.

I think that's unfair.

So I just go into the wilderness and track them and find them.

Nice.

Has one ever gone aggro on you?

Super aggressive?

It there was one bear.

I had to shoot it five times

before it finally dropped.

It was 350 pounds.

Jeez.

And I mean, it was a monster.

It was a monster.

That's big for Idaho, Montana area.

Now, I know in North Carolina, they get bears that are 600 plus, but out west, 350-pound bear.

Like, that's a big bear.

That's no joke.

Yeah, it was like Freddy Krueger.

Like, if you imagine, like, just shooting this bear over and over and over, and it keeps coming at you.

It's scary, bro.

It's terrifying.

What'd you shoot it with?

30 out 6.

Wow.

Five bullets.

Five, 30 out six rats.

Those things are huge.

Yeah.

You know, like for people watching, like, that bullet is as long as your middle finger.

Holy crap.

Five of those things.

I mean, bears are some of the most amazing, tough, resilient animals that I've ever encountered, which is ironic because that's what I, you know, gave my speech on today.

Turning point, but yeah.

Where do you rank bear meat in terms of taste out of all the meats?

A lot of people don't eat it.

A lot of people say it's gamey and fatty.

But dude, like, I love bacon.

I love pork.

I love grease and fat.

So for me, it's it's probably number five on the list, which isn't bad.

I mean, there's some people that go and hunt bears and they don't even eat the meat.

Really?

I think that's wrong.

I will never hunt anything that I don't eat every piece of that animal.

You know, I value the animal's life, even though I hunt it for food.

And so I eat everything.

Yeah.

I eat the eyeballs, the tongue.

the brain like it's damn you know you can use every part of the animal i i make a bear rug out of the skin it's similar to native americans that's what they did yeah yeah you and rogan Rogan got to get on a bear hunt together.

Dude, we need to.

He always talks about how good it tastes.

It makes me want to try it.

Dude, yeah.

I'd love to go on a Kodiak Alaskan bear hunt.

Are those polar bears?

Those are the grizzlies.

Are the grizzlies?

But they're coastal grizzlies.

So they call them brown bears.

Brown bears and grizzlies are the same species, but brown bears live on the coast.

Grizzlies live inland.

And the coastal bears are so much bigger.

So much bigger.

I would love to go on a hunt.

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It does.

Yeah, I've heard the polar bears are the most aggressive, right?

Polar bears, dude.

So I take a trip to Greenland every year

to go photograph polar bears.

And I have never seen an animal on this planet more violent and aggressive than a polar bear.

Wow.

I mean, you can see it a mile away.

And if it sees you, it will chase you down.

to kill you from a million.

From a mile away.

Holy crap.

And

they're unbelievable.

Everything they see, they want to kill um and uh of course you don't hunt polar bears there's only some very um you know remote tribes that still do that and uh inuits and different things and so i would never hunt one they're beautiful amazing animals but they are violent damn yeah so as a photographer of them what's what's the strategy if you can't get close you can't even get within a mile i try to get close is the thing so the the thing is is you want to you want to get as close as you can but be in a boat okay right somewhere where they can't get you They can swim, though, right?

They can swim.

They're amazing swimmers.

They swim faster than like dolphins through the water.

It's incredible.

It's terrifying.

Yeah, that's super scary.

Wow.

You love adrenaline, huh?

I love adrenaline.

Yeah, I love it.

People know me for my saying, this is what I live for.

And I scream it whenever I'm like in the moment out there.

And

yeah, photographing polar bears in Greenland.

Like as me as their number one food source, that's what I live for.

Well, if the world ever ends, I will be texting you first to survive in the wild with you.

I already have an area picked up.

Let's go.

It's been fun, Jeff.

Where can people find you and watch the show and everything?

Instagram is

my main social media.

So just my name, Jeff Zouch on Instagram.

Recently, I started my own company, Padanova.com.

And I take people now on wilderness adventure trips all across the world so they can experience it for themselves.

Nice.

So if you want to explore the pyramids of Egypt or photograph polar bears in Greenland, I'm your guy.

Come on a trip with me.

I'll show you some fun.

Let's go check them out, guys.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, bud.

Yeah, pleasure.