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

The following is a conversation with Jordan Jonas, winner of Alone Season 6, a show where the task is to survive alone in the Arctic wilderness longer than anyone else. He is widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest competitors on that show.
He has a fascinating life story that took him from a farm in Idaho and hoboing on trains across America to traveling with nomadic tribes in Siberia. All that helped make him into a world-class explorer, survivor, hunter, wilderness guide, and most importantly, a great human being with a big heart and a big smile.

This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation.

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And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas. you won alone season six and I think are still considered to be one of, if not the most successful, survivor on that show.
So let's go back. Let's look at the big picture.
Can you tell me about the show Alone? How does it work? Yeah, it's a show where they take 10 individuals and each person gets 10 items off of the list you know basic items would be an axe a saw a frying pan you know some pretty basic stuff and then they send them all drop them off all in the woods with a few cameras and uh so the people are actually alone there's not a crew or anything and then you you basically live there as long as you can, you know. And so the person that lasts the longest, you know, once the second place person taps out, they come and get you.
And that individual wins. So it's a pretty legit challenge.
You know, they drop you off, helicopter flies out, and you're not going to get your next meal until you make it happen. You have to figure out the shelter, you have to figure out the source of food, and then it gets colder and colder because I guess they drop you out in a moment where it's going into the winter.
Yeah, they typically do it in temperate, colder climates, things like that, and they start in September, October, so time's ticking when they drop you off and uh yeah the pressure's on you got it's you know you get overwhelmed with all the things you have to do right away like oh man i'm not gonna eat again until i actually shoot or catch something gotta build a shelter it's pretty overwhelming figure your whole location out but it's interesting because once you're there a little while you kind of get into a well at least for me it did there was like a week or maybe not a week but that I was kind of a little more annoyed with things you know it's like oh my site sucks and then and then you kind of accept it like you know what it is what it is no code no amount of complaining is gonna do anybody any good so I'm just gonna make it happen and so then or you know do my best to and then I felt like I got in a zone and I felt like I was right back in kind of Siberia or in that headspace and I I found I actually really enjoyed it I had been a little bit out of I guess you call it the game because I had had a child and and so when we had our daughter we came back to the states and then a bunch of things happened and I just ended up, we didn't end up going back to Russia. So it'd been a couple of years that I was just, you know, we were raising the little girl and boy then, and then.
So you've gotten a little soft. So I was like, did I got a little soft? But then it was fun how like after just some days there, I was like, oh man, I feel like I'm at home now.

And then it was like you're kind of in that flow state.

Actually, there's a few moments like when you left the ladder up or with the moose that you kind of screwed up a little bit. Oh, yeah.
How do you go from that moment of like frustration to the moment of acceptance? I mean, the more you put yourself in life in positions that are kind of outside your comfort zone or push your abilities the more often you're going to screw up and then yeah the more opportunity you have to learn from that and then to be honest it's kind of funny but you almost get to a position where you well you don't feel that uncomfortable it's not unexpected you know you kind of expect expect you're gonna mess up here and there you know i remember particularly with the um the moose the first moose i saw i had a great shot at it but i had a hard time judging distance because it was in a mud flat which means it's hard to it's hard to tell yardage you know because i'm because you usually typically going by trees or markers be like oh i'm probably 30 yards away this was a giant moose and he was 40 something yards away and I estimated that he was 30 something yards away so I was way off and shot and dropped between his legs and then I realized I had not grabbed my quiver so I only had one shot and I just watched him turn around and walk off but I was struck initially with like I actually noticed how unmad I was I was like oh this is actually I was like that was awesome that was like seeing a dinosaur that was really cool and then I was like oh what an idiot how'd I miss but then I was like but it made me that much more determined to make it happen again it was like okay nobody's gonna make this happen except myself you can't can't complain it wouldn't have done me any good to go back and mope about it and so then i was like i had a thought i was like oh i remember these native guys telling me they used to like build these giant fences and funnel game into certain areas and stuff and i was like man that's a lot of calories but i have to make that happen again now so i I kind of went out there and tried that. And that was kind of an attempt at something too.
It could have failed or not worked, but sure enough, it worked and the opportunity came again. The moose came wandering along and I was able to get it, but being able to take failure as sooner you can, the better accept it and then learn from it is kind of a muscle you have to exercise a little bit what's interesting because in this case the cost of failure is like you're not going to be able to eat yeah yeah that was really interesting i mean the the most interesting thing about that show was how high the stakes felt because it didn't feel you know you didn't tell yourself you're on a show at least i didn't you just felt like it was you're going to starve to death if you don't make this happen.
And so the stakes felt because it didn't feel, you know, you didn't tell yourself you're on a show. At least I didn't.
You just felt like it was, you're going to starve to death if you don't make this happen. And so the stakes felt so high.
And, and, um, it was an interesting thing to tap into because, I mean, so many of our ancestors probably all just dealt with that on a regular basis, but it's something that we're all the modern amenities and such and food security that we don't deal with. And it was interesting to tap into what a kind of a peak mental experience that is when you really, really need something to survive.

And then it happens.

It's you can't imagine.

I mean, that's what our all our dopamine and receptors are tuned for that experience in particular.

So it was. Yeah, it was pretty pretty awesome but the pressure felt very on like i always felt the pressure of of providing or starving and then there's a situation when you left the ladder up right you needed fat and uh what is it the ovary need some of the fat right yeah well it was when i got the moose i was so happy the most joy i could almost experience max maxed out but i didn't think i uh i didn't think i won at that point i never thought like oh that's my ticket to victory i thought holy crap it's gonna be me against somebody else that gets a moose now and we're gonna be here six eight months who knows how long and so i can't i can't be here six eight months and still lose so i've got to like i've got to out produce somebody else with a moose so i had all that in my head not already was of course pretty thin and and so i was just like man somebody else gets a moose i'm still going to be behind and so everything felt like precious to me and i had found a plastic jug and i put a whole bunch of the mooses fat in this plastic jug and set it up on a little shelf i thought you know what if a bear comes i'll probably hear it and i'll come out and be able to shoot it so i went to sleep and i woke up the next morning i went out and i was like where's that jug and then i was like wait a second what are all these prints and i started looking around and it took a second to dawn on me because I haven't interacted with Wolverines very often in life.
And I was like, oh, those are Wolverine tracks. And he was just so much sneakier than a bear would have been or something.
So it kind of surprised me and he took off with that jug of fat. And so then I went from feeling pretty good about myself to like, now I'm losing again against whoever, you know, this other person is with a moose.

So I, again, kind of the pressure came back to oh no I gotta produce again you know it wasn't the end of the world and I think they may have exaggerated a little bit how little fat I had left you know I still had a moose has a lot of fat but it did make me feel like I was at a disadvantage again. Yeah, that was pretty intense because those wolverines, they're bold little animals.
He was basically saying, no, this is my moose. And I had to counter his claims.
Well, yeah, they're really, really smart. They figure out a way to get to places really effectively.
Wolverines are like fascinating in that way. So let's go to that happy moment, the moose.
You are the first and one of the only contestants to have ever killed a moose on the show, a big game animal with a bow and arrow. So this is day 20.
So can you take me through the kill? Yeah. i'd missed one and i just decided i'm not here to starve i'm here to like try to become sustainable so i was like i don't care if it's a risk i'm gonna build that fence i built it i would just pick berries and call moose every you know every day and it was actually really pleasant to sit in a berry patch and call moose but then i also had this whole trap and snare lines set out everywhere so i had all these i was getting rabbits um but i went and i was actually taking a rabbit out of a snare when i heard a clank because i'd set up kind of an alarm system with with string and cans so it's a brilliant idea yeah another thing that could have not worked but it worked and it came through and i was like oh i heard the cans clink and i was like no way and so i ran over i didn't know what it was exactly but something was coming along the fence and i ran over and jumped in the bush next to the funnel exit on the fence and sure enough the big moose came running up and you know your heart gets pounding like crazy you're just like no way no way I probably could have waited a little longer and had a perfect broadside shot but I took the shot when he was uh he was he was pretty close like 24 yards but he was quartering towards me which makes it a little harder to make a a perfect kill shot you, you know? And so I hit it and it took off running.
And I just thought, you know, I was super excited. I couldn't believe I actually, you know, I was like, Oh my gosh, got the moose.
I think that was a really good shot. You get all excited, but then it plays back in your head.
And particularly when you're first learning to hunt, there's always an animal that gets away, you know, and you like make a bad decision or not a great shot or something. And it's just, it's just part of it.
And so, of course, you're like, I'm not going to be satisfied until I see this thing. So I followed the blood trail a little while and I saw some bubbly blood, which meant it was hitting the lungs, which meant it's not going know you'll get it and so as long as you don't mess it up and so I went back to my shelter and waited an hour I skinned that rabbit that had caught and then super nervous the slowest hour ever and then I followed it along ended up losing the blood trail I was like no no and then I was like well if no blood, I'm just going to follow the path that I would go if I was a moose, you know, like the least resistance through the woods.
So I followed kind of along the shore there. And sure enough, I saw him up there.
I was like, oh, you know, I was so excited. Lay down, but he hadn't died yet.
And so he just sat there and he would stand up and i would just like no no no no and he would lay back down and go yes and then he would stand up and it was like that for uh you know a couple hours that took him and then finally at one point i you know and a lot of people have asked like why wouldn't you go finish it off um so when an animal like that gets hit it had no no idea what hit it. You know, just all of a sudden it's like, ah, something got it and it ran off and it lays down and it's actually fairly calm and it doesn't really know what's going on.
And if you can leave it in that state, it'll kind of bleed out and as peaceful as possible. If you go chase after it, that's when you lose an animal because as soon as it knows it's's being hunted, you know, it gets panicked, adrenaline and it can just run and run and run and you'll never find it.
So I didn't want it to see me. I knew if I tried to get it with another arrow, there's a chance I could have finished it off, but there's also a not bad chance that it would see me take off or even attack cause the moose can be a little dangerous.
And so, uh, uh i just chose to wait it out and at one point it stood up and fell over and i could tell it had died and walked over like you actually touch it and you're just like whoa no way like that whole burden of weeks of you're gonna starve you're gonna starve and it got rid of that demon to be honest it's of the happiest moments of my life. It's really hard to replicate that joy because it was just so, so real.
You're so directly connected to your needs. It's all so simple.
It was, it was a peak experience for sure. And were you worried that it would take many more hours and it would take it into the night? Yeah, I was.

I mean, until you actually have your hands on it, I was worried the whole time.

It's a pretty nerve-wracking period there between when you get it and when you actually

recover the animal, get your hands on it.

So it took longer than I wanted, but I finally got it.

Can you actually speak to the kill shot itself, just for people who don't hunt?

Yeah. Like what it takes to stay calm, to not freak out too much, to like wait, but not wait too long.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, another thing about hunting is that for every animal you get, you probably don't get, you know, nine or ten that just turned the wrong way when you were drawn back or went way behind a tree or you never had a clean shot or whatever it is and so um every time you can see a moment coming you know your heart really starts beating and you have to like breathe through it i can almost you know you almost feel the nervousness of it and then uh and then you just try to stay calm you know like whatever you do just try to stay calm wait for it to come up draw back you've practiced shooting a lot so you have like kind of a technique like i'm gonna go back touch my face draw my elbow tight and then the arrow is gonna let loose it's a muscle memory it's kind of muscle memory you have a little trigger like draw that elbow tight and then and then uh then it happens and then you just watch the arrow and see where it goes now with the animal you know you try to do it ethically that is like make as good of a shot as you can make sure it is either hit in the heart or both lungs and when that happens it's a pretty quick death which is in death is a part of life and but honestly for for a wild animal, that's probably the best way to go they could have.
Now, when an animal's kind of walking towards you, if it's walking towards you, but not directly towards you, that's what you call quartering towards you, you can picture it's actually pretty difficult to hit both lungs because the shoulder blade and all that bone is in the way. So you have to make a perfect shot to get them both.
And to be honest, when I took my shot, I was a couple inches or a few inches, right. And so it went, went through the first lung and then it sunk the arrow all the way into the moose.
And, but it didn't, it allowed that second lung to stay breathing, which, which meant the moose stayed alive longer. What's your relationship with the animal in the situation like that you said death is a part yeah that's an interesting thought because no matter what your relationship to however you choose to go through life whether you know whatever you eat whatever you do um death is a part of life you know like every animal that's out there is living off of a dead, even plants, you know, it's all, it's all, we're all part of this ecosystem.
I think it's really easy in a, particularly in an urban environment, but anywhere to think that we're separate from the ecosystem, but we are very much a part of it. Um, whether it be, you know, farming requires, you know, all this habitat to be turned into growing soybeans and when you get the plows and the combines you know you're losing all kinds of different animals and all kind of potential habitat so it's not cost free and so when you realize that then you want to produce the food and the things you need uh in an ethical manner so i uh so for me hunting plays a really major role in that like i literally know how many animals a year it takes to feed my family and myself i actually know the exact number and it's like and i know what the cost of that is and i'm aware of it because i'm out in the woods and I see these like beautiful elk and moose and I really love the species love the animals but there is a fact that one of those individuals you know is going to have to feed me and I and particularly like on alone it was very heightened that experience so I shot that one animal and I was so so thankful you know that i wanted to give that big guy a hug and like hey sorry it was you but yeah had to be somebody there's that there's that picture you just almost hugging it right and you you can also think about the the calories the the protein the fat all of that that that comes from that that

will feed you right you're so grateful for it like the gratitude is is like you know definitely there what about the bow and arrow perspective well when you hunt with a bow you just get so much more up close to the animals you know you can't just get it from 600 yards away you actually have to sneak in within 30 or so yards and uh when you do that the experiences you have are just they're way more dragged out so you know your heart's beating longer you have to control your nerves longer more often than not it doesn't go your way and the thing gets away and you know you've been hiking around in the woods for a week and then your opportunity arises and floats away no and then but at the same time that's the only time when you like really have those interactions with the animals where you got this bugling bull you know like tearing at the trees right in front of you and other cow elk and animals running around you know you get you end up having really uh i don't know there's intimate experiences with the animal just because because you're in it you're kind of in its world you're playing its game it has its senses to defend itself and you have your wit to try to to get over those and it really becomes you becomes, you know, it's not easy. They're not,

it becomes kind of that chess game. And, uh, those prey animals are always tuned in.
It's,

you know, slightest stick they're looking for wolves or for whatever it is. So, um,

there's something really pure and fun about it. Uh, you know, I will say there is an aspect that

is fun. There's no denying it.
It's like how we're, you know, people have been hunting forever. And, and, uh, I think it speaks to that part of us somehow, but, and I think bow hunting is probably the most pure form of it and that you get those experiences more often than with a rifle.
So I, know i enjoy it a lot and and the way they do regulations and such um kind of the best times to hunt are usually allowed for bow because they're trying to you know keep it fair for the animal and such so so the distance the close distance makes you more in touch with sort of uh the the natural way of the predator and prey yeah yeah you're one of the predators where you have to be clever you have to be quiet you have to be calm you have to all of that yeah and the full challenge and the luck involved in the same thing as the predators do exactly how many times do they snap a stick and watch them run off and like darn my stock was failed or you know so yeah you're just you're in that in that ecosystem how'd you learn to to shoot the bow yeah i was i didn't grow up hunting i grew up in a area that a lot of people hunted but my into it. And so I never got into it until, until I lived in Russia with the natives.
It was just such a part of everything we did and a part of our life that when I came back, I got a bow and I started doing archery in Virginia. They had, it was a pretty easy way to hunt because the deer were overpopulated and you could get these urban archery permits.
So you'd go out and, you know, every couple of days you'd have an opportunity to shoot a deer that they needed population control. And so there were a lot of them and it gave you a lot of opportunities to learn quickly.
So that's what got me into it. And then I found I really enjoyed it.
Do you practice with the target also or just practice out? Oh, no, I would definitely practice with a target a lot.

You want to, again, you kind of have an obligation to do your best because you don't want to be flinging arrows into like the leg of an animal.

And it's a cool way, honestly, to provide quality meat for the family.

You know, it's all raised naturally and wild and free until you bring it home into the freezer.

So if we step back, what are the 10 items you brought? And what's actually the challenge of figuring out which items to bring? Yeah, the challenge is that you don't exactly know what your site's opportunities are going to be. So you don't really know, should I bring a fishing net? Am I going to even have a spot to net or not? And things like that.
I brought an axe, a saw, a Leathermanman wave uh ferro rod is like a mix sparks to start a fire a frying pan a sleeping bag a fishing kit a bow and arrow trapping wire and paracord and so those are my 10 items is any uh any regrets any no major regrets i i took i took the saw kind of i thought it would be more of a calorie saver then i i didn't really need it i in hindsight if i was doing you know season seven instead of six and got to watch i would have taken the the net because i i just to make a net, but I would have rather just had two nets and brought one and left the saw because in the northern woods in particular, every tree is, you know, the size of your arm or leg, you can chop it down with an axe and a couple swings. Yeah, yeah, you don't really need the saw.
And so it was handy at times and useful, but I think it was my, if I had to do nine items, I would have been just fine without the saw. So two nets would just expand your food gathering potential.
And then in terms of trapping, you were okay with just the little you brought? The snare wire was good. I ran some, you know, I put out all my snare wire i ran trap line which is just a series of traps through the woods and brush every place you see sign put a snare put a little mark on the tree so i knew where that snare was and just make these paths through the woods and i put out you know i don't know how many 150 200 snares so every day i'd get a rabbit or two out of them and then i had a lot of rabbits but uh once i got the moose i actually took all those snares down because i didn't want to catch anything needlessly and oh you come to find out you can't live off of rabbits man cannot live off a rabbit alone it turns out so you set up a huge number of traps you were also fishing and then always on the lookout for uh moose yeah so like what what's in terms of survival if you were to do it over again over and over and over and over like how do you um maximize your chance of having enough food to survive for a long time you have to be you have to be really adaptable because everything's gonna it's always gonna look different your situation your location i actually had a what i thought was a pretty good plan going into alone and it just the you know the location didn't allow for what i thought it would what was the plan well i thought I would just catch a bunch of fish because I'm on a really good fishing lake.
I'd catch a whole bunch of fish and let them rot for a little while and then just drag them all through the woods into a big pile and then hunt a bear on that big fish pile. Yeah, yeah.
That was the plan, and I thought, but when I got there, for one, I had a hard time catching fish off the bat. You know, they didn't come like I was hoping.
And then for two, it had burned prior. So there were no berries.
And so there were very few berries, which meant there weren't grouse. There weren't bear.
You know, they had all gone to other places where the berries were. And so what I had grown accustomed to kind of relying on in Siberia wasn't there, there, you know, so in, in Russia, which was a similar environment, it was just grouse and berries and fish and grouse and berries and fish.
And then occasionally, you know, you get a moose or something, but I had to reassess, which was part of me being grumpy at the start, like, this place sucks. And then, uh, and then once I reassessed and, and reassessed and and and you know right away i saw that there were moose tracks and such so i just started to plan for that i moved my uh camp in a into a area that was as removed as i could be from where all the action is where the tracks were so that i wasn't disturbing animal patterns i made sure the, the predominant wind was blowing out my scent to sea or, you know, to the water.
And then really, to be honest, if you want to actually survive somewhere, it's different than alone. But you do have to be active.
And it has to, you're going to have to, you're not going to live, you're not going to be sustainable by, you know, starving it out. You'd have to unlock the key that is sustainability and i think there's a lot of areas that still have that potential but you have to figure out what it is it's usually going to be a combination of fishing you know trapping and then hunting and then once you have some the fishing and trapping will get you until you have some success hunting and then that'll buy you three or four months of time to continue and you know to keep hunting again and you just have to roll off of that but every you know depends on where you are what opportunities are there so okay so that's the process fishing and trapping until you're successful hunting and then the successful hunt buys you some more time right right just go year around and then you just go around like that and that's how people did it forever the pressure was i noticed it you know with that you got that moose and then you're happy for a week or so and then you start to be like it's finite i'm gonna have to do this again and you imagine if you had a family that was gonna starve if you weren't successful you know this next time and there's just always that pressure you know it made me really like appreciate the amount of what people had to deal with well in terms of being active like so you have to do stuff all day so you get up and see you get up and planning like what am i gonna in the in the midst of the frustration you have to figure out like what's what's the strategy like how do you put up all the traps what is that a decision like you know most people like sit at their desk and

have like a calendar are you like figuring out like one thing about wilderness life in general

is it's remarkably less scheduled than anything we deal with schedules are fairly unique to

of a modern context so you'd wake up and you just sort of you have a you know confluence of

Thank you. we deal with schedules are fairly unique to of a modern context so you'd wake up and you just sort of you have a you know confluence of things you want to do things you need to do things you should do and you just kind of tackle them as you see fit as it flows in you know so and that's actually one of the things that your people really that i really appreciate about that lifestyle is it really is you're kind of in that flow and so I'd wake up and be like maybe I'll go fishing and then I'll wander over and fish and then I'd be like I'm gonna go check the trap line add every day if I add five or ten snares you know you're constantly adding to your productive potential and then uh but nothing's really scheduled you're just kind of flying by the seat of your pants.
But then there's a lot of instinct that's already loaded in. Oh, there's so much.
Yeah. Like you already, just like wisdom from all the times you've had to do it before.
You're just actually operating a lot on instinct. Like you said, where to find, to place the shelter.
Like how hard is that calculation? Where to place the shelter? If you're like dropped off and this is all new to you, of course, all those things are going to be things you have to really think through and plan. When you're thinking about a shelter, you have to think of, oh, here's a nice flat spot.
You know, that's a good place. But also is there firewood nearby? And if I'm going to be here for months, is there enough firewood that I'm not going to be walking a half a mile to get a dry piece of wood? Is the water nearby there is it is it somewhat open but also protected from the elements because sometimes you get a beautiful spot it was great on a calm day and then the wind comes like and so there's all these factors you know even down to taking in what game is doing in the area also and how that relates to where your shelter is you said you have to consider where the action will be and you want to be away from the action but close enough to it to see it yeah you want to be yeah right and so uh ideally you know and it depends you're always going to make give and takes and one thing with shelters and location selection and stuff it's another thing you just have to trust your ability to adapt in that situation because everybody has a particular you know you got an idea of a shelter you're going to build but then you get there and maybe there's a good cliff that you can incorporate you know or maybe and then you just become creative and that's a really fun process too to just allow your creativity to try to flourish in it what kind of shelters are there there's all kinds of philosophies and shelters.
Uh, people, it's fun to see people try different things. Mine was fairly basic for the simple reason that I had lived, you know, winters through winters in Siberia in a teepee.
So I knew I didn't need like anything too robust. As long as I had calories, I'd be warm and I wasn't particularly worried about the cold.
Um, but you'll see. So I kept my shelter really pretty simple with the idea that I built a simple A-frame type shelter.
And then most of my energy is going to be focused on getting calories. And then, of course, there's always going to be downtime.
And in that downtime, I can tweak, modify, improve my shelter. And that'll just be a constant process that by the time you're there a few months, you'll have all the kinks worked out.
It'll be a really nice little setup, but you don't have to start with that necessarily because you got other needs you got to focus on. That said, you'll see a lot of people on a loan that really focus on, you know, building the log cabin because they want to be secure or incorporating, you know, whatever the earth has around, whether it be rocks or whether it be digging a hole, you know, and we've seen some really cool shelters and I, I, I'm not going to knock it.
Everybody's got, it was all different strokes for different folks. But I mean, my particular idea was to keep it fairly simple, improve it with time, but spend most of my energy.
You know, the shelter you really need to to think about it can't be smoky because that'll be miserable but it is nice to have a fire inside so you need to have a fire inside that's not going to be dangerous and uh smoke free and then also airtight because you're never going to have a warm shelter out there because you don't have seals and things like that but as long as the air is not moving through it you can have a warm enough shelter with a fire with a fire and dryer socks and stuff how do you get the smoke out of the shelter if you have good clay and mud and rock you can build yourself a fireplace which is surprisingly not that hard you know you just oh really yeah it's a fun thing to do it works well you know you take a little hole start stacking rocks around it make it make sure it's opening and it actually works you know um so that's not as hard as you might think um for me where i was i i kind of came up with it as i was there with my a-frame you know i hadn't built an a-frame shelter like that before and so when i built it and then i had put a bunch of tin cans in the ground so that air would get the fire so it was fed by air which helps create a draft um but but i realized in an a-frame it really doesn't the smoke doesn't go out very well even if you leave a hole at the top it like collects and billows back down so then i uh cut some of my tarp and made this and cut a hole in the in the a-frame and then i made like a hood vent that i could pull down and catch the smoke with and so while the fire was going it would just billow out the hood vent and then when it was done burning and was just hot coals i could close it seal it up and keep the heat in so it actually worked pretty well so start with something that kind of works and then keep improving yeah exactly i was wondering i mean the the the log cabin it feels like that's a thing that takes a huge amount of work before work the difference between a log cabin and a warm log cabin this is like an immense amount of work and all the chinking and all the door ceiling and you know the chimney has to be anyway so otherwise it's just going to be the same ambient temperature as outside so uh i don't think alone's the proper context for a log cabin i think like a log cabin's great in as a hunting cabin as you know if you're gonna have something for years but in, six month scenario, I don't know that it's worth the calorie expenditure. And it is a lot of calories.
That's an interesting sort of metaphor of just like get something that works. You see a lot of this with companies, like successful companies, they get a prototype, get a system that's working and improve fast in response to the conditions to the environment yeah because it's constantly changing yeah yeah and you end up being a lot better if you're able to learn how to respond quickly uh versus like having a big plan that takes a huge amount of time to to accomplish that's right enforcing that through the pipeline whether or not it fits yeah yeah can you just speak to like the the place you were, the Canadian Arctic? It looked cold.
Yeah, we were right near the Arctic Circle. I don't know.
It was like 60 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. So it's a really cool area, really remote.
Thousands of little lakes. When you fly over, you're just like, man, it's incredible.
There must be so many of those lakes that people haven't been to you know it really was a neat area really remote and for the show's purpose i think it was perfect because it did have enough game and enough different avenues forward that i think it really did reward activity so i think uh but it's a special place it was uh dene there's a tribe that lived there the dene people which interestingly enough here's a side place. It was Dene.
There was a tribe that lived there, the Dene people, which interestingly enough, here's a side note. When I was in Siberia, I floated down this river called the Padgamonaya Tunguska, and you get to this village called Sulamai, and there's these Ket people, they're called, and there's only 600 of them left.
But this is in the middle of Siberia, not in like the Pacific coast. But their language is related to the Dene people.
And so somehow, you know, that connection was there thousands of years ago. Super interesting.
Yeah, so language travels somehow. Right.
And the remnant stayed back there. It's very interesting to think through history.
Yeah, within language contains a history of a peoples.

And it's interesting how that evolves over time.

And how wars tell the story.

Like language tells the story of conflict.

And conflict shapes language.

And we get the result of that.

Right.

So fascinating. And the barriers that language creates is also the thing that leads to wars and misunderstandings and all this kind of stuff it's a fascinating tension uh but it got cold there right it got real cold yeah i mean i think i don't know what that i didn't have a thermometer i imagine it probably got to negative 30 at the most you know like it might have gotten it would have definitely gotten colder had we stayed longer but uh yeah I to be honest I I was just I never felt cold out there I was pretty I had that one pretty dialed in and then once you have calories you can stay warm you can stay active you can you know you gotta dress warm you know you don't never let oh there's a good one you're in the cold, never let yourself get too cold because what happens is you'll

stop feeling what's cold and then frostbite and then issues.

And then it's really hard to warm back up.

So every, I, it was so annoying.

I'd be out going to ice fish or something.

And then I would just notice that my feet are cold and you're just like, ah, dang it.

I just turn around, go back, start a fire, dry my boots out, make sure my feet are warm and then then go again. I wouldn't ignore that.
Oh, so you want to be able to feel the cold. Yeah.
You want to make sure you're still feeling things and that you're not toughing through it because you can't really tough through the cold. It'll just get you.
What's your relationship with the cold psychologically, physically? It's interesting. Actually, there's some part of it that really makes you feel alive you know i imagine you know sometime in austin here you come go out and it's hot and sweaty and you're like you get that kind of kind of saps you there's something about that brisk cold that hits your face that you're like wakes you up makes you feel really alive You know, it feels like the margins of air are smaller,

so you're alert and engaged a little more.

There is something that's a little bit life-giving

just because you feel on an edge.

You're on this edge.

But you have to be alert because even, you know,

some of the natives I lived with, the lady had face issues

because she let her head get cold when they were on a snowmobile.

Her hat was up too high, you know, that little mistake. And then it just freezes this part of your forehead and then the nerves go and then you got issues when just hat wasn't high enough so you kind of kind of got to be dialed in on stuff well there's a psychological element to just i mean it's unpleasant if i were to think of what kind of unpleasant would i choose, you know, fasting for long periods of time, going without food in a warm environment is way more pleasant than...
Being fed in a golden... Exactly.
Like if you were to choose... I'd choose the opposite.
Oh, yeah? Okay. Well, there you go.
I wonder if that's... I wonder if you're born with that or if that's developed in maybe your time in Siberia like you, or do you gravitate towards, I wonder what that is, because I really don't like survival in the cold.
I think a little bit of it is learned. He like almost learned not, you learn not to fear it.
You learn to kind of appreciate it. And a big part of that is, I mean, to be's like dressing warm being in good it's not that you know there's no secrets to that as you just can't beat the cold so you just need to dress warm the native you know all that fur all that stuff and then all of a sudden you have your little refuge have a nice warm fire going in your teepee you know and and then I bet you you could learn to appreciate it.

Yeah, I think some of it is just opening yourself up to the possibility that there's something enjoyable about it.

Like here, I run in Austin all the time in like 100 degree heat.

And I go out there with a smile on my face and like, and learn to enjoy it.

Oh, yeah. And so you just like, and learn to enjoy it.
Oh yeah.

And so you just like, I look kind of like you do in the cold.

I don't think I enjoy the heat, but you just allow yourself to enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do feel that way.

I mean, I don't mind the heat that much, but I,

I think you could get to the place where you appreciated the cold.

It's probably just a lack of,

it's kind of scary when you haven't done it and you don't know what you're doing and you go out and you feel cold it's like not fun but i bet you could you'd enjoy it you'll have to come out sometime 100 yeah i mean you're right it does make you feel alive that it like maybe that's the thing that i struggle with is the time passes slower because it does make you feel alive you You get to feel time. But then the flip side of that is you get to feel every moment and you get to feel alive in every moment.
So it's both scary when you're inexperienced and beautiful when you are experienced. Were there times when you got hungry? I got shot a rabbit on day one and I snared a couple rabbits on day two.
And then more and more as the time went. So I actually did pretty well on the food front.
The other thing is when you have all those berries around and stuff, you do have an ability to like fill your stomach. And so you don't really notice if you're getting thinner or if you're losing weight.
So I can say on alone, I was not that hungry. I've definitely been really hungry in Russia.
There were times when I lost a lot of weight. I mean, I lost a lot more weight in Siberia than I did on alone.
Oh, wow. Okay, we'll have to talk about it.
So you caught a fish. You caught a couple.
I think I caught like 13 or so. They didn't show a lot of them.
You caught 13 fish? 13 of those big fish. I caught a couple that were small.
This is like a meme at this point. Yeah, it was.
You're a perfect example of a person who was thriving. I always thought, you know, in hindsight.
Again, when I was out there, I never let myself think you might win i just was gonna be out there as long as i could and tried to remain pessimistic about it no but then the uh but then i remember a thought that i was like i wonder if they're gonna be able to make this look hard you know i didn't have that thought at one point and because it went pretty well and i was definitely it was it was hard psychologically because I didn't know when it was going to end like I thought this could go you know like I said six months it could go eight months a year and then you start to cause you know I had a two and a three-year-old and you start to weigh in the is it worth it if it goes a year and it's not worth it if it goes eight months and I still lose so i feel like i had this pressure and it was psychologically difficult for that reason physically i wasn't too bad this is uh off mic we're talking about gordon ryan competing in jiu-jitsu and maybe that's the challenge he also has to face is to make things look hard. Because he's so dominant in the sport that in terms of the drama and the entertainment of the sport, and in this case of survival, it has to be difficult.
I'll add that for sure, though, that it's the woods. It's nature.
You never know how it's going to go. You know what I mean? It's like every time you're out there, it's a different scenario.
So whatever. Hallelujah.
It went well. So you won after 77 days.
How long do you think you could have lasted? When I left, I weighed what I do right now. So I just weighed my normal weight.
I had a couple hundred pounds of moose. I had at least 100 100 pounds of fish i had you know a pile of rabbits a wolverine you know i had all this stuff and i know i hadn't gotten cold yet i i just thought but in my head i thought if i get today 130 or 40 even if someone else has big game i had a pretty good idea they might quit because

it would be long cold dark days and how miserable is that just it's so boring it's freezing and and so i thought the only time i thought i could think about winning is when i got today 130 or 40 and I definitely had that with what I had.

Now, maybe I would have got, you know, I probably would have gotten more I had caught that big 20 something pound pike on the last day I was there, maybe catch some more of those, you know, I don't you know, and I don't know, like, I don't know how many calories I had stored, but I had a lot. And so how long would that lasted me assuming I didn't get anything else? It definitely would have, I would definitely would have reached my goal of 130 or 40 days.
And then after that, I thought we were just going to push into the, you know, then it's just to see how much who has what reserves and we'll go as far as we can. And that would get me through January into February.
And I just thought, man, that's going to be miserable for people. And you were like, I can last.
And I knew I could do it. What aspect of that is miserable? The hardest thing for me would have been the boredom because it's hard to stay busy when it's all dark out, when the ice is three, four foot thick, you can't fish.
And, um, I just think, I think it would have just been really boring. It would have been a real Zen master to push through it, but because I had experienced it to some degree, I knew I could.
And then I think things that might, you know, you start thinking about family and this and that in those situations. And I just knew that those, because I'd gone to all these trips to Russia for a year at a time, the time context was a little broader for me than I think for some people.
Cause I, I knew I could be gone for a year and come back, catch up with my loved ones, you know, bring what I got back, whether that be psychological or whatever it is. And we'd all enrich each other.
And once it's in hindsight, that year would have been like that talking about it. So I had that perspective and it, so I knew I wasn't going to tap for any other reason other than running out of food someday.
So that was my stressor. And then.
So you're able to, given the boredom, given the loneliness, kind of zoom out and accept the passing of time, just let it pass you know for me i'm gonna act fairly act i like to be active and so i would try to think of creative ways to keep my brain busy you know we saw the like dumb rabbit first skit but then i did a whole bunch of like elaborate normandy reinvasion you know reinvasion and stuff like it was like there was a every day i would think i gotta think of something to make me laugh you know and then do some stupid skit and then that would be i would fill a couple hours of my time and then i'd spend an hour or two a couple few hours fishing and then you spend a few hours you know whatever you're doing would you do that without a camera yeah oh no the the skits funny question that's a good question i don't know I actually don't know that uh I will say that was one of the advantages of being on the show versus uh in Siberia so no because I didn't in Siberia just do skits by myself but I didn't film it and so it was it was a quite nice to have this camera that made you feel like you weren't quite as alone as if you were just in the woods by yourself. And I think for me, I was able to, it was a pain.
It was part of the cause of me missing that moose. You know, there's issues with it, but I just chose to look at it.
It was like, this is an awesome opportunity to share with people a part of me that most people don't get to see. So that was, I just chose to look to look at it that way and it was an advantage because you could do stuff like that i think there's actual power to doing this kind of documenting like talking to a camera or an audio recorder like that that's an actual tool in survival is it i i had a little bit of an experience of being out alone in the jungle and just being able to talk to a thing is much less lonely it is it really is it's a it can be a powerful tool just sharing your experience i had the i definitely had the thought so going back to your earlier comment but i definitely had the thought if i knew i was the last person on earth i wouldn't even bother like i wouldn't do that like I would just probably not I'd just give up I'm sure because even if I had a bunch of food and this and that but because I knew you're you know you're a part you're sharing it gives you a lot of strength to go through and and having that camera just makes it that much more vivid because you know you're not just going to be sharing a vague but an actual experience.
I think if you're the last person on earth, you would actually convince yourself. First of all, you don't know for sure.
There's always going to be. Hope dies last.
Hope really does die last. You really don't know.
You really hope to find. I mean, if you're, if like an apocalypse happens, I think your whole life will become about finding the other person.
It would be. I mean, I guess I'm saying if you're like an apocalypse happens i think your whole life will become

about finding the other it would be and there's a chance i mean i guess i'm saying if you knew you

were for some reason knew you were the last i wonder if you would i wonder if that was the

thought i had if i knew i was the last person like because here i was having a good time having fun

fishing plenty of food but like if i knew i was the last person on earth i don't know that i would

even bother but now if that was for real would i bother that's the question no no i think if you knew if somebody some some way you knew for sure i think your mind will start doubting it that whoever told you you're the last person whatever was lying right right the power of hope might be more than than i accounted for in that situation also uh you might if you are indeed the last person you might want to be documenting it for once you die you know an alien species come comes about because whatever happened on earth is a pretty special thing and if you're the last one you might be like the last person to tell the story of what happened and so that's going to be a way to convince yourself that this is important and so the days will go by like this but it would be lonely boy would that be lonely it would be wow maybe delving into the dredges the depths of yeah i mean something there is going to be existential dread. But also, I don't know, I think hope will burn bright.
You'll be looking for other humans. That's, you know, one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking to you, things I appreciate about you, is you're always, not out of naivety, but you always choose to look at the positive.
You know what I mean? And I think that's a powerful mindset to have. I appreciate it.
Yeah. That'd be a pretty cool survival situation, though, if you're the last person on earth.
If you could share it. If you could share it.
Yeah. Like I said, many people consider you the most successful competitor on a loan.
The other successful one is Roland Welker, rock house guy. Oh, yeah.
This is just a fun, ridiculous question. But head to head, who do you think survives longer? If you want to get into the competitive side of it, I would just say I'm pretty dang sure I had more pounds of food.
And I didn't have the advantage of knowing when it would end, which I think would have been a great psychological. Oh, yeah.
It would have made it really easy. Once I got the moose, I could have shot the moose and just not stressed.
I would have been like a – And so that was a big difference between the seasons that I felt like – I mean, I felt like the psychology of season seven, they kind of messed up by doing a hundred day cap because i for my own experience that was the hardest part but roland's a beast so for people don't know they put a hundred day cap on so it's whoever can survive a hundred days uh for that season it's interesting to hear that for you the uncertainty not knowing when it ends that ends. That was for sure.
It's the hardest. That's true.
It's like you wake up every day. I didn't know how to ration my food.
I didn't know if I was going to lose after six months and then it was all going to be for not. I didn't know if it, you know, I just, there's so many unknowns.
You don't know, like I said, if I shot a moose and it was 100 days, done. If I moose and you don't know it's like crap i could still lose to somebody else but it's going to be way in the future so anyway that for me was definitely the hard part and when you found out that you won and your wife was there it was funny because you're really happy there's great sort of moment of you uh reuniting but also there's a state of shock of like you look you look like you were ready to go much longer that was the most genuine shock i could have i hadn't even like entertained the thought yet i didn't even think it was you'd hear the helicopters and i just assumed there was other people out there.
I just hadn't. I thought.
For one, the previous person that had gone the longest had gone 89 days. I just knew whoever else was out here with me.
Somebody's got that in their crosshairs. They're going to get to 90.
They're not going to quit at 90. They're going to go to 100.
I just figured we can't start thinking about the end until a couple months from when it ended. So I was just shocked.
And they tricked me pretty good. They know how to make you think you're not, you know, that they're not.
So they want you to do the surprise. Yeah, they want it to be a surprise.
You really weren't. I mean, you have to do that, I guess, for survival.
Don't be counting the days. No, I think that would be then, you know, you see that that on some of the people do that for myself, that would be bad psychology.
Cause then you're just always disappointing yourself. You have to be resettled with the fact that this is going to go a long time and suck.
Once you come to peace with that, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you're not going to be constantly disappointed. So what was your diet like? Like, what was your eating habits like during that time? Like how many meals a day this is oh man i was trying to eat the thing i was like not trying to the more the moose is hanging out there the more the critters every critter in the forest is trying to peck at it or mice trying to eat it and stuff so so one of the ways you can protect the food is by eating it so i was having three good meals a day and then i'd like cook up some meat and go to sleep and then uh wake up in the middle of night because they're long nights and like have some meat at night eat a bunch at night and then so i'd usually have a fish fish stew for lunch and then moose for breakfast and dinner and then have some for a nighttime snack because the nights were long.
So you'd be in bed like 14 hours and wake up and eat and dink around and go back to sleep. Is it okay that I was pretty low carb situation? Yeah, I actually felt really good.
I tried to, I tried to, I think I would have felt better if I would have had a higher percentage of fat because, you know, it's still over more protein than if you're on a keto diet, you want a lot of fat. And so I didn't, I didn't try to mix in like nature's carbs, different, like reindeer lichen and things like that.
But honestly, I felt pretty good on that diet. I will say.
How did you, uh, what's the secret to like protecting food? What are the different ways to protect food?

Yeah, a lot of times, you know, in a typical situation in the woods hunting, you'll raise it up in a tree in a bag, put it in like a game bag so the birds can't peck at it and hang it in a tree so it cools. You got to make sure first to cool it because it'll spoil.
So you cool it by whatever means necessary, hanging it in a cool place, letting the air blow around it. And then you'll notice that every forest freeloader in the woods

is going to come and steal your food.

And it was just fun.

I mean, it was crazy to watch.

It was like all the camp jays pecking at it.

Everything I did, there was something that could get to it. If you put it on the ground on and they poop on it and they kind of mess it up so I uh ultimately it kind of just dawned on me shoot I'm gonna have to build one of those Venki like food caches so I did and I put it up there and I thought I kind of solved my problem to to be honest the Venki then so they would have taken a page out of like they would have mixed me and roll in solution they build this tall stilt shelter and then put a box on the top that's enclosed and then the bears can't get to it the mice can't poop on it the birds the wolverine you know it's safe and i never finished it i mean in hindsight i don't actually know why i think i was just the way it timed like i didn't think something was going to be up there then it did and then i you know you're like counting calories and stuff i should have in hindsight just boxed it in right away but to get ready for the long for the long haul yeah yeah yeah is a rabbit starvation a real thing yeah so you can't just live off protein and rabbits are almost just protein i'd kill a rabbit eat the innards and the brain and the eyes and then everything else is just protein and rabbits are almost just protein.
I'd kill a rabbit, eat the innards and the brain and the eyes, and then everything else is just protein. And so, uh, it takes more calories to, you know, process that protein than you're getting from it without the fat.
So you actually lose, I lost, I had, you know, a lot of rabbits in the first 20 days I had 28 rabbits or something, but I was losing weight at exactly the same speed as everybody else that didn't have anything so that's interesting yeah and i'd never tried that before so i was wondering if i'm catching a ton of rabbits i wonder if i can last what six months on rabbits but no you just starve as fast as everybody else inside to kind of learn that on the fly and adjust i wonder what to make of that. So you need fat to survive, like fundamentally.

Yeah, that's the, yeah.

And you'll notice when the wolverine came or when animals came, they would eat the skin

off of the fish.

They would eat the eyes.

You know, they'd steal the moose fat.

They'd leave all the meat.

Yeah, like behind the eyes is a bunch of fat.

So yeah, you can kind of observe nature and see what they're eating and know where the gold is. What do you like eating when you can eat whatever you want? What do you feel best eating? What do I feel best? I just try to eat clean.
I think I'm not super strict or anything, but I think when I eat less carbs, I feel better. Meat and vegetables.
We eat a lot of meat. i eat a lot of meat so basically everything you ate on loan plus some veggies plus veggies throwing some buckwheat i like buckwheat let's step to the uh the early days of jordan so uh your uh instagram handle is hobo jordan So early on in your life, you hoboed around the U.S.
on freight trains. What's the story behind that? My brother, when he was 17 or so, he just decided to go hitchhiking.
And he hitchhiked down to Reno from Idaho, where we were. And ended up loving traveling, but hated being dependent on on other people so he ended up jumping on a freight train and and just did it he honestly he pretty much got on a train and traveled the country for the next eight years on trains lived in the streets and everywhere but uh you know he was sober so it gives you a different experience than a lot but at one one point when I was, I guess, yeah, 18, he invited me to come along with him.
He'd probably been doing it five or so, four or five years and, uh, or more. And, uh, I said, sure.
So I quit my job and went out with him. Um, Hobo Jordan is a bit of an overstep.
I feel self-conscious about that because I wrote, I rode trains across the country, up and up and down the coast back you know spent the better part of the year running around riding trains and all the staying in places related to that but all the people you know the real hobos those guys are out there doing it for years on end but it was such a for me what it felt like was a it felt like a bit of a rite of passage kind of missing, I think, in modern life. So I did this thing that was a huge unknown.
Ben kind of was there with me, my brother, for most of it. We traveled around, pushed my boundaries in every which way, you know, froze at night and did all the stuff.
And then at the end, I actually wanted to go back and go back home and so I went on my own and went from Minneapolis back you know up to Spokane on my own which was a for my first stint of time by myself for like a week which was interesting along with your own thoughts with your own thoughts is my first time in my life having been like that you know and and so it was it was powerful at the time know what it did too, is it gave me a whole different view of life because I had gotten a job when I was 13 and then 14, 15, 16, 17. And then I was just in the normal run of things kind of, and then that just threw a whole different path into my life.
And then I realized some of the things while I was traveling that I wouldn't experience again until I was living with natives and such. And that was, you know, you wake up, you don't have a schedule, you literally just have needs, and you just somehow have to meet your needs.
And so it's, it's a really sense of freedom you get that is hard to replicate elsewhere. And so that was eye opening to me.
And I think once I did that, I went back. So I went back to my old job at the salad dressing plant.
And there was this old cross-eyed guy. And he was, oh, Hobo Gordo is back.
And that's kind of where I got it. But freedom always was very important to me, I think, from that time on.
What did you learn about the United States, about the people along the way because i took a road trip across the u.s also and there was a there's a romantic element there too of like of the freedom of the well maybe for me not knowing what the hell i'm going to do with my life but also excited by all the possibilities. And then you meet a lot of different people, a lot of different kinds of stories.
And also a lot of people that support you for traveling. Because there's a lot of people kind of dream of experiencing that freedom, at least the people I've met.
And they usually don't. They usually don't go outside of their little town.
They have a thing, and they have a family usually, and they don't explore. They don't take the leap.
And you can do that when you're young. I guess you could do that at any moment.
Just say, fuck it, and leap into the abyss of being on the road. But anyway, what did about this country about the people in this country you're in an interesting context when you're on trains because the trains always end up in the crappiest part of town you know and they are and you're always outside interacting oh the interesting things we know every once in a while you'll have to hitchhike to get from one place to another one interesting thing is you notice you always get picked up by the you know the poor people or you know they're the people that empathize with you stop pick you up you go to whatever ghetto i remember you end up in and people are really oh what are you guys doing you know real friendly and and and relatable it kind of you know broadened your my horizons for sure from being just an Idaho kid and then meeting all these different people and just seeing the goodness in people and this and that.
It's also a lot of drugs and a lot of people with mental issues that you're friends with, dealing with, and all that kind of stuff. Any memorable characters? Well, there few for sure i mean a lot of them i still know that are still around but the uh rocco was one guy we traveled with he's become like a brother but he's um he was he traveled with my my brother for years because they were the two sober guys kind of he rather than traveling because he was hooked on stuff did it to escape all that and so he was kind of sober and straight edge and he always was a 5'7 Italian guy that was always getting in fights and he has his own sense of uh ethics that I think is really interesting because he's super honest but but he expects it of others and so it's funny in the modern context the thing that pops in my head is when he got a car for the first time which wasn't that long you know he's in his 30s or something uh and he registered it which he was mad about that he had to register but then the next year they told him he had to register again and he's like what did you lose my Went down there to the DMV, chewed him out that he had to re-register because he already registered.

Where's the paperwork?

But he just kind of views the world from a different lens, I thought.

But on everything, he's a character.

Now he just lives by digging up bottles and finding treasures in them.

But he notices the injustices in the world and speaks up.

And he's always like, why doesn't everybody else speak up about their car registration and and then there was like you know devo comes to mind because he was such a unique character as far as just for one he would have lived to be 120 because the amount of chemicals and everything else he put into his body and still hey man you know one of those guys you can always get a dime you know always spare dime spare dime and you have bum change and uh i'd see him sometimes and i'd be gone and then go to new york to visit my sister or something and i sure enough there's devo on the street what do you know i didn't uh you go visit him in the hospital because he got bit by 20 you know 27 hobo spider bites you know he's just always rough but uh charismatic vital like the vitality of life was in him but it was just so permeated with drugs and alcohol too it's kind of interesting because i've met people like that they're like they're just yeah joy permeates the whole way of being and they're like they've been through some shit they have scars they've got they're rough but they always got a big smile there's a guy i met in the jungle named pico he lost the leg and he uh drives a boat and he just always has a big smile even given that like the hardship he has to get everything requires a huge amount of work but he's just big smile and there's stories in those eyes something about yeah enduring difficulty that makes you able to appreciate life and look at it and smile any advice for to take a road trip again or if somebody else is thinking of hopping on a freight train it's way easier now because you have a map on your phone you tell you're going you're kind of cheating now it's not about the destiny because the map is about the destination right uh but here is like yeah right give a chance where are you going yeah going anywhere exactly i say do it like go out and do things especially when you're young uh experiences and stuff help create the person you will be in the future putting doing things that you think like oh i don't want to do that i'm a little scared of that i mean that's what you got to do you just get out of your comfort zone and you will grow as a person and you'll go through a lot of wild experiences along the way say yes to life yes to life yeah i love the boredom of it freight train riding is very boring and like you'll wait for hours for a train that never comes and then you'll go to the store and come back and it'll be gone you're like no and but i remember we went to jail we got out and then uh how'd you end up in jail oh you know it was things trespassing on a train but we were we were riding a train and my brother woke up and they had a dead outland on his head. And he hit the train and fell on him.
And we woke up and we were laughing. That's got to be some kind of bad omen.
And then we were looking out of the train and we saw a train worker look and saw us. And he went, oh, we know that's a bad omen.
Anyway, sure enough, the police stopped the train. Somebody had seen us on it.
And they searched it got us and threw us in jail. It was not a big deal.
We were in jail a couple of days. And then, but when we got out, of course, they put us, we were in some podunk town in Indiana and we didn't know where to catch out of there.
And so we were at some factory and we just banning factory and we're right there for like four days. No train that was going enough that we could catch and then we found this big old roll of aluminum foil and now i gotta apologize to this woman because we were so bored just sitting there we built these like hats you know like horns coming out every which way and loops and just sitting there and it was at night and some minivan pulled up to this train that was going by too we're like circled her car entertaining yourself with whatever you can

poor lady was terrified so hitchhiking was tough i didn't like hitchhiking just because you're depending on the other people and it is not i don't know why you just want to be independent but if you do meet really cool people a lot of times there's really nice people that pick you up.

And that's cool.

But I just personally actually didn't do it a lot.

And I wasn't, you know, if you're on the streets for 10 years, you'll end up doing it a lot more because you need to get from point A to point B.

But we just tried to avoid it as much as we could because it didn't appeal to us as much.

Well, one downside of hitchhiking is people talk a lot. Oh, they do.
So it's both the pro and the con. Yeah, yeah.
Because they'll, you know, sometimes you just want to be sort of alone with your thoughts. There is a kind of lack of freedom in having to listen to a person that's giving you a right.
It's so true. And then you don't know how to react to it.
I mean, I was young. I remember I got picked up.
I was probably 19 or something. And then I was just like, hey, how's it going? ride it's so true and then you don't know how to react i mean i was young remember i got picked up i was probably 19 or something and then i was just like hey how's it going she's like my husband just died and then yeah and then there's all and i got diagnosed with cancer and this is that but and pretty bitter and all that and understandably so but you're just like i have no idea how to respond here because you can't so then you're young and you had to be nice.
And I remember that ride being interesting because I didn't really know how to respond. And she was angry and going through some stuff and dumping it out.
She didn't have anyone else to dump it out on. I was like, wow.
I'm going to take the freight train next time. So how did you end up in Siberia? I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how.
But the long story short was I had a brother that's adopted. And when he grew up, he wanted to find his biological mom and just tell her thanks.
And so he did. And when he was probably 20 or something, he found his biological mom, told her thanks.
Turns out he had a brother that was going to go over to Russia and help build this orphanage. And that brother was about my age.
I mean, I remember at that time I read this verse that said, if you're in the darkness and see no light, just continue following me. Basically, I was like, okay, I'm going to take that to the bank, even though I don't know if it's true or not.
And then the only glimpse of light I got in all that was when I heard about that orphanage, to go build that orphanage. And I prayed about it.
And I felt, and I can't explain, it brought me to tears. I felt so strongly that I should go.
And so I was like, well, that's a clear call. I'm just going to do it.
So I just bought a ticket, got a visa for a year. And then I went and helped build an orphanage.
And we got that built. And I wanted, but he was an American.
And I wanted to live with Russians to learn a language. And so he sent me to a neighboring village to live with a couple Russian families that needed a hand.
Somebody to watch their kids and cut their hay and milk the cow and all that. So, uh, I found myself in that little Russian village, just getting to know these two guys and their families.
It was, uh, it was pretty fascinating. And of course I didn't know the language yet and they were two awesome dudes.
Both of them had been in prison and met each other in prison and were really close because they found God in prison together and got out and stayed connected. So I'd bounce backs between those two families.
They used to always tell me about their third buddy they'd been in prison with who was a native fur trapper now in the north. So they'd go, you got to go meet our buddy up north and uh one day that guy came through to sell furs in the city and he like invited me to come live with him and my visa was about to expire but i was like when i come back i'll come and so i uh went back home earned some more money did some construction or whatever then went back and headed north to hang out with Yura and Fur Trap.

And that started a whole new you know opened a whole new world that i didn't know about before we talk about yura and fur trapping let's actually rewind and would you describe that moment when you were in the darkness as a crisis of faith yeah yeah for sure it was like uh

it was darkness in that i i i didn't know how to parse you know what is this thing that's my faith and and what and what is what's the wheat and what's the chaff and how do i get through it and um i basically just clung to keeping it really simple. And, and oddly enough, in my Christian path, it would, that God was actually defined in a certain, God is love.
And I was just like, that's the only thing I'm going to cling to, you know, and I'm going to try to express that in my life in whichever way I can. And, and just trust that if I do that, if I act like I, you know, I've heard this lately, but if you just act like you believe, over time that world kind of opens to you.
When I said I would go to Russia, I'd pray. And I was like, Lord, I don't see you.
I don't know. But I got this, what I felt like was a clear call.
I have only one request. And that is that you would give me the faith to match my action.
You know, I'm choosing to believe like I could choose not to, because, you know, whatever, but I'm going to choose to act and I just asked to have faith someday. And then, and then honestly, the whole first year I went through, that was a very crazy time for me, learning the language, being isolated, being misunderstood, but then trying to approach all that with a loving, open heart.
And then I came back and I realized that that prayer had kind of been answered. That wasn't the end of my journey, but I was like, whoa, that was like my deepest request that I could come up with.
And somehow that had been answered. So through that year, you were just like, first of all, you couldn't speak the language.
That's really tough. That's really tough.
Because it's unlike on Alone, because not only can you not speak and you feel isolated, but you're also misunderstood all the time. So you seem like an idiot and all that and so that was tough i felt very uh alone at that time at certain times in that journey but you were sort of radiating like you said lead with love so you're radiating this kind of camaraderie i was really intentional about trying to about that that was i don't know why I'm here.
I just know that I, you know, that that's my call is to love one another. And so I would just try to like, and that meant digging people's wells.
It might mean just going and visiting that old lady babushka up at the house. It's lonely.
And that was really cool. I got to talk to some fascinating ladies and stuff and then go to that village, help those families.
I'm going to be like, cut the hay, be the hardest worker I can be because that's my goal here. I didn't have any other agenda or anything except to try to live a life of love.
And I couldn't define it beyond that. What was it like learning the Russian language? It was super interesting.
I think I had the thought while I was learning it, one, that it was way too hard. Like if I would have just learned Spanish or German, I would be so much farther.
But here I am a year in and I'm like, how do you say I want cheese properly? But at the same time, it was really cool to learn a language that I thought in a lot of ways was richer than English. It's a very rich language.
I remember there was a comedy act in Russian, but he was saying, you know, one word you can't have in English is, meaning like, I didn't drink enough to get drunk, you know, that type thing. But it's just that you can make up these words using different prefixes and suffixes and blend them in a way that is quite unique and interesting and honestly would be really good for poetry because it also doesn't have sentence structure.
And the same way English does, the words can be jumbled in a way. And somehow in the process of jumbling, some humor, some musicality comes out.
It's interesting. Like you can be jumbled in a way and somehow in the process of jumbling some humor some some uh musicality comes out it's interesting like you can be witty in russian much easier than you can in english like witty and funny and and also with poetry you can say profound things by messing with words in the order of words which is hilarious because uh you had a great conversation with Joe Rogan, and on that program, you talked about how to say I love you in Russian, which is hilarious.
It was for me, the first time, I don't know why, you were a great person to articulate the flexibility and the power of the Russian language. That's really interesting.
No, interesting. Because you were saying like, ya lublu tibia, ya tibia lublu, tibia ya lublu, tibia lublu ya.
You could say every single order, every single combination of ordering of those words has the same meaning, but slightly different. You could, again, it would change the meaning meaning if you took ya out and just said, l'u blu t'b'ya.
Yeah. There's, like, a different emphasis, or maybe, or ya t'b'ya l'u blu, or something, you know, like, all these different...
Or just t'b'ya l'u blu also. Right, exactly.
So it is rich, and it was interesting coming from an English context and getting a glimpse of that, and then wondering about all those, authors that we all appreciate that, oh, we actually aren't getting the full deal here. Oh, yeah, definitely.
I've recently become a fan, actually, of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Prevere. They're these world-famous translators of Russian literature.
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Pasternak, they've helped me understand just how much of an art form translation really is. Some authors do that art more translatable than others, like Dostoevsky is more translatable, but then you can still spend a week on one sentence.
Oh, yeah. Like just how do I exactly capture this very important sentence? But I think what's more powerful is not like literature, but conversation, which is one of the reasons I've been carrying and feeling the responsibility of having conversations with Russian speakers, because I can still see the music of it.
I can still see the wit of it. And in conversation comes out like really interesting kinds of wisdom.
You like, when I listen to like world leaders that speak Russian speak, and I see the translation and it loses. It loses the irony.
The, like in between the words if you translate them literally you you lose the reference in there to the history of the peoples yeah for sure and i've definitely seen that on like you know and if you listen to i think it probably was a Putin speech or something, and you just see that, oh, wow, something major is being lost in translation.

You can actually see it happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case with the, you know, that whole greatest tragedy is the fall of the Soviet Union.

I hear him being quoted as saying all the time.

I bet you there's something in there that's being lost in translation that is interesting i think the thing i see the most lost in translation is the humor i'll just say that that was the hardest that was the tangibly the hardest part about learning the language is that humor comes last and you have to like wait you have to wait that whole year you know or however long it takes you to learn a language to be able to start getting the humor you know some of it comes through but you miss so much nuance and it and and that was really difficult in interaction with people to like just be the guys you know when when there's humor going on and you're totally oblivious to it yeah everybody's laughing and you're like yeah trying to laugh along what did they make of you to be honest this person that came from descended upon us all full of love if i had a nickel for every time i heard like oh americans suck but you're a good american you're like the only good american i've ever met but then of course they never met yeah exactly you're the only one but uh you know I think because I was just, I tried to work hard, tried to be more useful than I was a drain, all that. They all, I think it was pretty appreciated me out there.
I've definitely heard that a lot. So that's nice.
Can you talk about their way of life? So like when you're doing fur tra as a bird trapping was an interesting uh experience you you basically what you do in uh october or something you'll go out to your hunting cabin and you'll have there you'll have like three hunting cabins you'll go stock them with noodles or whatever it is and then for the next couple months or however long you'll go from one cabin usually the guys are just out there doing this on their own so they'll go out and they'll uh go from one cabin and each cabin will have five or six trap lines going out of it every day it'll take a half a day to walk to the end of your trap line open all the traps and a half a day to get back and they'll do that this will spend a week at a cabin open up all the traps and then it'll take a day to hike over to the other cabin go to that one open up all those traps and then there and then like three weeks later so they'll end up back at the first cabin and then check all the traps and so it's kind of that rhythm and they'll do that for uh you know a couple few months during the winter and you're trapping sable they're called sable like pine martin is what we would have the equivalent of over here and uh what is it it's like a weasel a furry little weasel and they make coats out of it and so when i went he showed me how to open the trap showed me the ropes gave me a topographical map there's one cabin there's the other and we parted ways for like five weeks we did run into each other once in the middle there uh at a cabin but other than that you're just off by yourself hoping to shoot a grouse or something to add to your noodles and make your meal better catch a fish and then working really hard trying not to get lost and stuff how do you get from one trapping location to the next that's funny because like it was both basically by landmarks and feel like i didn't have a compass and things like that so by feel okay i got myself into trouble once and i the first time i went to one cabin i got myself into trouble first time i went to the other cabin i nailed it and so i had two different experiences on my first trip but the the one that i nailed it i remember i had to go and it's like a day hike i was like well i know the cabin's south and so if i just walk south you know the left the sun should be on the left in the morning and right in front of me in the middle of the day and by evening it should like end up at my right and just kind of guess what time it is and and follow along and and it's you know it takes you know, it takes all day. And I kid you not, I ended up like a hundred yards from the cabin.
I was like, Whoa, this is the trail. And that's the cabin.
Like, Oh, amazing. And then the other time I went out and, uh, I heading over the mountains and I thought, you know, hours had passed.
I probably had gotten slightly lost. And then, uh, I thought I was halfway there.
So I thought so i thought okay i'm gonna sit down and cook some cook some food get a drink i'm thirsty so i sat down and uh went to start a fire and my matches had gotten all wet because the snow had fallen on me and soaked me and i didn't have them wrapped in plastic i was like oh no i can't drink water you know so i was like well i'm just gonna power through i'm halfway there i kept hiking and then i realized it was getting night and uh and then i realized i was at the halfway point because i saw this rock that i was like oh no that's the halfway point i was like i can't do this and so i need to go get water i ended up having to divert down the mountain and head to the water i ended up you know there's a whole ordeal i had to take my skis off because i was going through an old forest fire burn so they were all really close trees but then the snow was like this deep so i was just trudging through and just wishing a bear would eat me get it over with but i finally made it down to the water chopped the hole through the ice was able to take a sip so you're severely dehydrated severely dehydrated and exhausted exhausted cold like you know you feel sort of nervous you're then over your head and then i and then i got down to the river chopped a whole nice drink it hiked up the river and eventually got to the other cabin it was probably three in the morning or something he chopped a hole in the ice to get some water it was this got to be like the one of the worst days of your life you know it was a bad day for sure i've had a few it was a bad day and it here's what was funny is i got to the cabin at like three in the morning and i should have brushed over a lot of the like the misery that i felt uh and i laid down i was about to go to sleep and then your charges in from from there i was like whoa dude you're what are you doing and i was like how's it going he said oh it sucks and he laid down and just fell asleep i fell asleep and i was like oh that's funny the last few weeks that we've been apart who knows what he went through who knows why he was there at that time at night all just summarized and it sucked and we went to sleep and the next morning we parted ways and who knows what happened. And you didn't really tell him.
Neither of us said what happened. It's just like, oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. And he probably was through similar kinds of things.
Who knows? Yeah. Like what gave you strength in those hours when you're, you know, going to waste high snow, all of of that you're laughing but like that's hard yeah you know that russian's phrase eyes are afraid hands do i'm sure there's a poetic way to translate that right it's kind of like you know just put one foot in front of the other you know when you think about what you have to do it's really intimidating and but you just know if i just do it if i just do it if i just keep trudging eventually i'll get there and pretty soon you realize you'll have covered a couple kilometers or a um and so when you're really in it in those moments i guess you're just you're just putting your head down and getting through i've had similar moments there's wisdom to that like once just take it one step at a time one step at a time i think that a lot honestly i tell myself that a lot when i'm about to do something really hard just you know go side by side one step at a time just gonna get don't like sit there and think oh that's a long ways just go and then you'll look back and you covered a bunch of ground.
One of the things I've realized was helpful in the jungle.

That was one of the biggest realizations for me.

It's like, it really sucks right now.

But when I look back at the end of the day,

I won't really remember exactly how much it sucked.

I have a vague notion of it sucking, and I'll remember the thing so being dehydrated i'll remember drinking water and i won't really remember the hours of feeling like shit that's absolutely true i don't tell it's so funny how like this awareness of that having been through it and then being aware of it means next time you face it you're like you know what you know what? Once this is over, I'm going to look back on it.

And it's going to be like that and nothing.

And I'll actually laugh about it and think it was,

it's a thing I'll remember.

You know, I remember that story of that miserable day

going down to the ice and I can smile about it now.

And now that I know that, I can be in a miserable position

and realize that that's what the outcome will be

once it's over.

It's just going to be a story.

If you survive though.

If you survive.

And that can be. So you mentioned you've learned about hunger during these times like when was like the hungriest you've gotten it was the first time so to continue the story slightly i went for trapping with that guy and then it turned out all his cousins were these native nomadic reindeer herders and after I like earned his trust and he liked me a lot he he took me out to his cousins who were all these you know nomads living in teepees I was like this is awesome I didn't even know people still lived like this and they were really open and welcoming because their cousin just brought me out there you know and vouched for me but it was during fencing season and fencing siberia for those reindeers like an incredible thing you take an axe you go out and you just build these 30 kilometer loop fences with just logs interlocking it's tons of work and all these guys are more efficient bodies they're better at it and i'm just like working less efficiently and also a lot bigger dude but we're all just on the same rations kind of and and and i got down that was like 155 pounds you know getting down pretty dang skinny for my 6-3 frame and just working really hard and then it's in the spring in siberia there's no like there's not much to forage you know in the fall you pine nuts and this and that.
But in the spring, you're just stuck with whatever random food you've got. And so that's where I lost the most weight and felt the most hungry.
And I had a lot of other issues, you know, I was new to that type of work. And so working as hard as I could, but also making mistakes, chopping myself with the axe and getting injured, all kinds of stuff, you know? So injuries plus very low calorie intake.
Low, yep. And exhausted.
I remember if you got, you were the poor son of a gun to get stuck slicing the bread, you know, like you're here cutting the bread and somebody throws all the spoons and drops the pot of soup there. And it's like, before you can even slice in your slice, all the meat's like gone gone from the bowl everybody else has grabbed the spoon in midair and you're just like oh hoping this one little noodle is gonna give me a lot of nourishment wow so everybody gets i mean yeah first come first serve i guess because it's like all the dudes out there working on the fence so you mentioned the axe and you gave me a present this is a probably the most badass present i've ever gotten uh so tell me the story of this of this axe so the natives when i got there i thought you know i grew up on a farm i thought i was pretty good with an axe but they do tons of work with those things and um and i really grew to love their type of axe or style of axe and just an axe in general they'd always say it's the one tool you need to survive in the wilderness and and i agree and uh what is this one has certain yeah design features that the natives uh that was unique to the event key to the natives i was with one is with these russian heads or

the soviet heads whatever they had they're a little wider on top here meaning you can put

the handle through from the top like a tomahawk and it uh i mean you're not dealing with a wedge and if it ever loosens and you're swinging it only gets tighter it doesn't fly off and so that's something that's kind of cool um then they have what's what they do that's unique is so you can see there's the wolverine axe so it's got the little wolverine head in honor of that wolverine i fought on the show so you have actually two axes this is one of the small this is a little smaller i didn't want to make it too small because you need a something to actually out there. You need something kind of serious.
But then they sharpen it from one side. So if you're right-handed, you sharpen it from the right side.
And that means when you're in the woods and living, there's a lot of times where you're, whether you're making a table or a sleigh or an axe handle or whatever you're doing, that you're holding the wood and doing this work. And it makes it really good for that planing.
The other thing it is, especially in northern woods, all the trees are like this big, you know, that you're never cutting down a big giant tree. And so when you swing with a single sided axe like this, sharpen from the one side, it really with your right hand swing like this, it really bites into the wood and gives you a because with that, if you can picture it, that angle is is going to cause deflection and without that angle on your right-handed swing it just like bites in there like crazy and so uh that there's other little divine you know the handle was made by some amish guys in canada this is all hand forged by uh oh it's hand forged yeah i mean yeah and so it's a pretty sweet little.
Yeah. It's amazing.
There's other things, you know, like I slightly rounded this pole here. It's just a little nuance.
Cause when you pound a steak in, if you picture it, if it's, if it's convex, when you're pounding it, it's going to blow the fibers apart. If it has just a slight concave, it helps hold the fibers together.
And so it's a little nuance, nuanced not too flat because you want to still be able to use the back as you would what kind of stuff are you using the axe for oh so the axe is super important to chop through ice in a winter situation which you probably hopefully won't need but what i use an axe all the time for is when i'm when it's wet and rainy and you need to start a fire like it's it's hard to get to the middle of dry wood if just a knife or a saw and so you can I can go out there find a dead tall tree you know dead standing tree chop it down split it apart split it open get to the dry wood on the inside shave it some little curls and have a fire going fast. And so if I have an ax, I feel always confident that I can get a quick fire in whatever weather.
And I wouldn't feel the same without it in that regard. So that's the main thing.
Um, of course you can use it. I use it if you're taking an animal apart or if you're, uh, you know, all kinds of, what else, building a shelter, skinning teepee poles or whatever you're doing.

What's the use of a saw versus an axe?

I greatly prefer an axe.

A saw, though, its value goes up quite a bit when you're in hardwoods.

Like when you're in a hardwood, oaks and hickory and things like that, they they're a lot harder to chop so a saw is pretty nice in those situations I'd say um in those situations I'd like to have both uh in the north woods and in like more coniferous forests I don't think there's enough advantages that a saw incurs with a good axe now you'll see people with little like camp axes and stuff and they just don't think they like axes it's like well you haven't actually tried to try a good one first and get good with it the one thing about an axe they're dangerous so you need to like practice always control it with two hands make sure you're not you know where it's gonna go it doesn't hit you or when you're chopping like say you're creating something that you're not doing it on rocks and stuff so that it's you're doing on top of wood so that when you're hitting the ground you're not dulling your axe you know there's you got to

be a little bit thoughtful about it have you ever injured yourself on the next in the early days

oh yeah that first so i'd gotten a knee surgery uh and then about three months later i had torn

my acl i went over to russia and i was like well i got a good knee it's okay and then that's when

i was building that fence that first time and uh at one point I chopped my rubber boot with my axe because it reflected off and I was new to him and uh and I was really frustrated because I'd done it before and uh and the native guy was like oh you know we got I think there's a boot we left you know you know a few years ago we left a boot like four kilometers that way so we got the reindeer took him wrote him over sure enough there's a boot we left. A few years ago, we left a boot like four kilometers that way.
So we got the reindeer, took him, rode him over. Sure enough, there's a stump with a boot upside down.
Pull it off, put it on. I was like, sweet, I'm back in business.
Went back. A couple days later, chopped it, cut your foot, cut my rubber boot.
And I was just like, dang it. And I was mad enough that I just grabbed the axe and swung it at the tree.
And it just one-handed like deflected off and bam right into my no and i was like oh i fell down i was like oh my gosh because you get your axe really like razor sharp and then just swung it into my knee i didn't even want to look i was like oh no i looked and it wasn't a huge wound because it had hit right on the bone of my knee but it split the bone cut a tendon there and i was out in the out in the middle of the woods. So I literally, like, I knew I was in shock.
I was like, I'm just going to go back to teepee right now. So I, like, ran back to teepee, laid down, and honestly, I was stuck there for a few days.
I was in so much pain, and my other knee was bad. It was, like, rough.
I had to, I couldn't even, I literally couldn't even walk at all or move. I had to, like, there was a plastic bag.
had to like poop in it and like roll to the edge of the teepee, like shove it under the moss. Like I was just totally immobilized.
I guess that should teach you to not act when you're in a state of frustration or anger. There you go.
I mean, it's such a lesson too. There were so many of those.
And it was always, I was always in a little bit over my head, but like I i said you kind of do that enough and you're make a lot of mistakes but every time you learn i'm like now it's like an extension of my arm that's not going to happen because i just know how it works now uh you mentioned wet wood uh how do you start a fire when everything is around you is wet i mean it depends on your environment but i will say in most of the forests that i spend a lot of time in in all the north woods the best thing you can do is find a dead standing tree so it can be down pouring rain and you chop that tree down and then when you when you split it open no matter how much it's been raining it'll be dry on the inside so chop that tree down chop a piece you know foot long piece out and then split that thing open and then split it again and then you get to that in inner dry wood and then you try to do this maybe under a spruce tree or under your own body so that it's not getting rained on while you're doing it make a bunch of little curls that'll like catch a flame or light and then you make a lot a lot more kindling and little pieces of dry wood than you think because it'll happen you'll light it and it'll burn through and it's like dang it so just be patient you're gonna be fine you know like and make a nice pile of curls that you can light or spark and then get a lot of good dry kindling and then don't be afraid to just boom boom boom pile a bunch of wood on and make a big old fire. Get warm as fast as you can.
It's amazing how much of a recharge it is when you're cold and wet. You can throw relatively wet wood on top of that.
Once you get that going, yeah, then it'll dry as it goes. But you need to be able to split open and get all that nice dry wood on the inside.
I saw that you mentioned that you look for fat wood. What's fat wood? So on a lot of pine trees, a place where the tree was injured when it was alive, it like pumps sap to it.
And this is a good point because I use this a lot. It pumps that tree full of sap.
And then years later, the tree dies, dries out, r rots away but that sap infused wood um it's it's like turpentine in there you know it's oily and so if it gets wet it does you can still light it it repulses water and so if you can find that in a rainstorm you can just make a little pile of those shavings get the crappiest spark or quickest light and it'll just sit there and burn like a like a factory fire starter you know it's really really nice that's good to spot it's a good thing to keep your eye out for yeah it's really fascinating and then you make this thing that's just to get the sauna going fast what was that that was a well oh it's a used motor oil i had if you mix it with some sawdust and then no sauna's going just like it's kind of like homemade fatwood i don't know how many times i've watched uh happy people uh a year in the taiga by wernherzog you've you've talked about this movie um where where is that located relative to you were? So there's this big river called the Yenisei that feeds through the middle of Russia. And there's a bunch of tributaries off of it.
And one of the tributaries is called the Padkam in the Tunguska. And I was up that river.
And just a little ways north is another river called the Bakhta. And that's where that village is where they filmed happy people.
So in Siberian terms, we're neighbors. Nice.
Similar environment, similar place. The fur trapper that I was with knew the guy in the films.
What would you say about their way of life, maybe in the way you've experienced it and the way you saw in happy people? There there's something really really powerful about uh spending that much time being independent you know depending on what we talked about a little earlier but you're putting yourself in these situations all the time where you're uncomfortable where it's hard but then you're rising to the occasion you're making it happen there's nobody when you're fur trapping by yourself there's nobody else to look at to blame for anything that goes wrong it's just yourself that you're reliant on and and and there's something about the natural rhythms that you are in when you're when you're that connected to the natural world that really is does feel like that's what we're designed for. And so there's a there's a psychological benefit you gain from spending that much time in that realm.
And for that reason, I think that, you know, people that are connected to those ways are able to tap into a particular I noticed that a lot with the natives. So if I met the natives in the village, I would think of them as like unhappy people.
Like they drink a lot. They always fight and the murder rate is through the roof.
The suicide rates through the roof. But you meet those same people out in the woods living that way of life.
I thought these are happy people. And it's kind of it's an interesting juxtaposition to be the same person.
But then, you know, I lived in a native village that had the reindeer herding going on around it.

And everybody kind of benefited because of that.

I also went to a native village that they didn't hold those ways anymore.

And so everybody was just in the village life.

And it just felt like a dark place.

Whereas the other native village, it was rough in the village because everybody drank all the time.

But it had that escape. And it had that escape valve.
And then once you're out there, it was rough in the village because everybody drank all the time. But it had that escape and it had that escape valve.

And then once you're out there, it's just a whole different world.

And it was such an odd juxtaposition.

It's funny that the people that go trapping experience that happiness and still don't have a self-awareness to stop themselves then drinking and doing all the dark stuff when they go to the village it's it's strange that you're not able to you're in it you're happy but you're not able to sort of reflect on that the nature of that happiness that's it's really weird i've thought about that a lot and i don't i don't know the answer it's like there's a to comfort. There's a huge, and it's all multifaceted and somewhat complex because, you know, you can be out in the woods and have this really cool life.
I will say it's a little bit different for men than women because the men are living like the dream as far as like what I would like. So you're hunting and fishing and, you know, managing reindeer and you got these, all these adventures.
So what ends up happening is that a lot more guys than girl young men out there in the woods and so there's a draw also i think to go to the village probably to find a woman and then there's a draw of like technology and the new things and i think it but then once they're there honestly alcohol becomes so overwhelming that everything else kind of just fiddles away and i just but- But it's funny that the comfort you find, there's a draw to comfort. But once you get to the comfort, once you find the comfort, within that comfort you become the lesser version of yourself.
Yeah, for sure. It's weird.
What a lesson for us. Like we need to keep struggling.
Yeah, a lot of times you have to force yourself in that. So like if we took them as an example, I mean, a lot of times you drag this drunk guy into the woods, literally just drag him into the woods and then he'd sober up.
And then he was like a month blackout drunk and now he's sobered up and now boom, back into life, back into being a knowledgeable, capable person. And because comfort's so available to us all, you almost have to force yourself into that situation.
Plan it out. Okay, I'm going to go do that.
Do the hard thing. Do that hard thing and then deal with the consequences when I'm there.
What do you learn from that on the nature of happiness? What does it take to be happy? Happiness is interesting because it's like, it's complex and multifaceted. It includes a lot of things that are out of your control and a lot of things that are in your control.
And it makes, it's quite the moving target in life. You know what I mean? So one of the things that really impacted me when I was a young man and I read the Gulag Archipelago was don't pursue happiness because the ingredients to happiness can be taken from you outside of your control, your health, your but pursue like a spiritual fullness.
Pursue. Pursue.
I think he words it duty and then happiness may come alongside or it may not. But so he gave the example that I thought was really interesting in the prison camps.
Everybody's trying to survive and they've made that their ultimate goal. I will get through this.
And then and they've all basically turned into animals in pursuit of that goal and like lying and cheating and stealing. And then he was like, somehow the corrupt Orthodox church produced these little babushkas who were like candles in the middle of all this darkness because they did not allow their soul to get corrupted.
And he's like, what they did do is they died. They all died, but they were lights while they were alive and lost their lives, but they didn't lose their souls.
So for myself, that was really powerful to read and realize that the pursuit of happiness wasn't exactly what I wanted to aim at. I wanted to aim at living out my life according to love, like we talked about earlier.
Trying to be that candle. Trying to be that candle.
Yeah, make that your ideal. And then in doing so, it was interesting.
So for me personally, my personal experience with that is I thought when I went to Russia that I kind kind of gave up i was like in my 20s i spent my whole 20s living in teepees and doing all this stuff that i thought i should be getting a job i should be pursuing a career i should get an education of some sort like what am i doing for my future but i felt i knew where my purpose was i knew what my calling was i'm just gonna do it and it it sounds glamorous now when I talk about it, but it sucked a lot of the times. And it was a lot of loneliness, a lot of giving up what I wanted, a lot of watching people I cared about.
You put all this effort in and you just see the people that you put all this effort in and just die and this and that. It was that happened all the time.
And then the other thing I thought I gave up was like a relationship because you couldn't, you know, I wasn't going to find a partner over there. And so interestingly enough, now in life, I can look back and be like, whoa, weird.
Those two things I thought I gave up is where I've been like almost provided for the most in life. Now I have this, this career guiding people in the wilderness that I love.
Like I genuinely love it. I find purpose in it.
I know it's healthy and good for people. And then I have an amazing wife and an amazing family.
Like how did that happen? But I didn't exactly aim at it. I consciously, in a way, I mean, I hoped it was tangential, but I aimed at something else, which was those lessons I kind of got from the Gulag Archipelago.
So you have, just because you mentioned Gulag Archipelago, I got to go there. You have some suffering in your family history, whether it's the Armenian Assyrian genocide or the Nazi occupation of France.
Maybe you could tell the story of that. What this, the survival thing, it runs in your blood, it seems.
I love history. Like I find so much richness in knowing what other people went through and find so much perspective in my own place in the world.
I have the have the advantage of in my direct family, my grandparents, yeah, they went through the Armenian genocide. They were Assyrians, which was a, you know, it was like a Christian minority indigenous people in the Middle East.
They lived in Northwestern Iran. And, uh, during the chaos of world war one, you know, and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and it had all kinds of issues.

And one of its issues was it had a big minority group and it thought it would be a good time to get rid of it. And, you know, they can justify it in all the ways you can.
Like there were some people that were rebelling or this or that. But ultimately, it was just a big collective guilt and extermination policy against the armenians and the assyrians and the uh my grandparents my grandma was 13 at the time and my grandpa was 17 which is interesting because it happened almost 100 years ago but our generative my dad was born when my mom was my grandma was pretty old so um but my grandmother her dad was taken out to be shot you know the turks were coming in and rounding up all the men and they took them out to be shot and then they took my grandma and her she had seven brothers and sisters and her mom and they like drove her out into the desert uh basically she her dad got taken out to be shot so his name was shalman umar or whatever took him out they were all tied up all shot he said a quick prayer before they shot him but he fell down and he uh found he wasn't hit and usually of course they'd come up and stab everybody or finish them off.
But there was some kind of an alarm and all the soldiers rushed off. And he found himself in the bodies and was able to untie himself.
They were naked and, you know, hungry and all that. And he ran out of there, escaped, went into a building and found the loaf of bread wrapped in a shirt and was able to escape.
He fled. He never saw his family for, so to

continue the story, my grandma got taken with her, with her mother and brothers and sisters and all just, they just drove them into the desert until they died basically and run them around in circles and this and that, and then all the raping and pillaging that accompanies it. And, um, uh at one point her mom had the baby and the baby died and her mom just collapsed and said i just can't go any further and and my grandma and her sister like picked her up to tea we got to keep going and like picked her up they left the baby along with the other everybody else had died it was just the three of them left and somehow they

bumbled across this british military camp and were rescued uh my neither the sister nor my great-grandmother ever really covered as far as you know recovered from what i understand but my grandma did um to say at the same time in another village in north in iran there theks came in and were burning down my grandpa's village and they caught and my grandpa's dad was in a wheelchair and he had like some money belt and he stuffed all his money in it and told it gave it to grandpa and just told him to run and don't turn back and they came in the front door as he was running out the back and they uh he never saw his dad again but he said he turned around and saw the bill you know the house on fire never knew what happened to his sister she then so he was just alone he ran yeah at some point he uh i can't remember he like lost his money belt like he took his jacket off forgot it was something happened um anyway so he got he was in a refugee camp. He ended up getting taken in by

some Jesuit missionaries. So anyway, both of them had lost basically everything.
And then at some point they met in Baghdad, started a family, immigrated to France. And then it just so happened to be right before world war two.
And so then the Nazis invaded my aunt. She's still alive, but she, she actually met a resistance fighter you know for the french and under a bridge somewhere and they and they fell in love and she got married so she had kind of an in on the on the french resistance at one point and of course they were all hungry they'd recently immigrated but also had this nazi occupation and all that and so the uncle joe the resistance fighter guy told him like hey we're gonna storm this noodle factory like come and so they stormed the noodle factory and all my aunts around in there and we're like throwing out noodles into wheelbarrows and everybody was running uh then the nazis came back and took it back over and like shot a bunch of people and everything.
And, and, uh, grandpa, cause he had already come from where he came from was paranoid. So he buried all the noodles out in the garden.
And then my two aunts got stuck in that factory overnight with all the Nazi guards or whatever. And then the, the Nazi guards went all from house to house to find everybody that had had noodles and, you know, punish them.
But they didn't find my grandpa's. Fortunately, they searched his house.
Oh, but not the garden. And then so they had noodles and somehow it must have been in the same factory or something, but olive oil.
And they just lived off of that for the whole all the whole war years. My aunts ended up getting out of that.
They hid behind boxes and crates overnight and stuff. And the resistance stormed again in the morning and they got away and stuff but anyway chaos so when they moved to america i will say the most patriotic family everywhere ever they loved it it's like paradise here i mean that's a that's a lot to go through um what lessons do you do you draw from that on perseverance look i'm one i'm

just one generation away from all that suffering like my aunts and uncles and dad and stuff were

the kids of these people and somehow i don't have that like what happened to all that trauma like i

it's like somehow my grandparents bore it and then they were able to build a family but not just a

family that but a happy family.

Like I knew all my aunts and uncles, and I didn't know them. They died before me.
But it was so much joy. The family reunions were the best thing ever at the Jonas's.
And it's just like, how in one generation did you go from that to that? And it must have been a great sacrifice of some sort

to not pass that much like resentment or like what did they do to to break that chain in one generation do you think it works the other way like where their ability to escape genocide to escape Nazi occupation gave them a gratitude for life.

Oh, yeah.

It's not a trauma in the sense like you're forever bearing it. The flip side of that is just gratitude to be alive when you know so many people did not survive.
Yeah, it must be because the only footage I saw of my grandma was like they were all the kids and stuff and they were cooking up a rabbit that they were raising or whatever. And they, uh, uh, but a joyful woman, you could see it in her and she must've been so, she must've understood how fortunate she was and been so grateful for it.
And so thankful for every one of those 11 kids she had. So I recognize it again in my, in my dad, cause my dad went through a really slow kind of painful decline in his health and he had diabetes ended up losing one leg and so he lost his job he had to watch his mom or my mom go to school he had long all he wanted to do was be a provider and be like a family man i bet the best time in his life was when his kids ran to him and gave him a hug but then all of a sudden he found himself in a position where he couldn't work and he had to watch his wife go to school which was really hard for her and and become the breadwinner for the family and he just felt like a failure and i watched him go through that after all these years of letting that foot heal we went out first day and we were splitting firewood with the splitter and he was just so good to be back out jordan is so nice and he crushed his foot in the log splitter and you're just like no and so then they just amputated it we've got both legs amputated and then his health continued to decline he lost his movement in his hands so he was like incapacitated to a degree and in a lot of pain i would hear him at night in pain all the time and uh i delayed a trip back to russia and just stayed with my dad for those last six months and it was so interesting having had lost everything i've watched him wrestle with it through the years but then he found his joy and his purpose just in being almost i mean a vegetable i'd have to help him pee roll roll him onto the cot, take him to dialysis.
And, and, but we would laugh. He would like, I'd hear him at night crying or like in pain, like, ah, and then in the morning he'd have like encouraging words to say.
And, and that's at it. And I was like, wow, that's how you face loss and suffering.
And, and he must've gotten that from him somehow from his parents. And then, you know, i find myself on this show and i had a thought like why is this easy to me in a way like you know why is this thing that's and i was like and it just felt like this gift that had kind of handed down and now would be my duty to hand down you know like and it's but it's kind of an interesting and be the beacon of that represent that, represent that kind of perseverance in the simpler way that something like survival in the wilderness shows.
Yeah. It's the same.
It rhymes. It rhymes, and it's so simple.
Like, the lessons are simple, and so we can take them and apply them. So that's on the survivor side.
What about on the people committing the atrocities? What do you make of the Ottomans, what they did to Armenians or the Nazis, what they did to the Jews, the Slavs and basically everyone? What do you, why do you think people do evil in this world? um it's interesting that it's really easy right it's really easy you can almost see it

sense it in yourself to justify um to justify a little bit of evil or you see yourself cheer a little bit when the enemy gets knocked back in some way um it's really in the way it's just perfectly naturalist for us to feed that hate and feed that tribalism in group, out group. We're on this team.
And I think that can happen. I think it just happens slowly, like one justification at a time, one step at a time.
You hear something and it makes you think then that you are in the right to perform some kind of you know you're justified and create you know break a couple eggs to make an omelet type thing and then but all of a sudden that takes you down this whole train to where pretty soon you're justifying what's completely uh unjustifiable this is gradual yeah it's a gradual process of a little bit at a time. I think that's why, like, for me, like, having a path of faith is, like, works as, like, a mooring because it can help me shine that light on myself.
You know, it's like something else. Because if you're just looking at yourself and looking within yourself for your compass in life, it's really easy to get that thing out of whack but you kind of need a perspective from which you can step out of yourself and look into yourself and judge yourself accordingly and am i walking in line with that ideal you know and then and i think without that check your your subject you know it's easy to ignore the fact that you might be able to commit those things.
But we live in a pretty easy, comfortable society. Like, what if, you know, what if we pictured yourself in the position of my grandparents and then all of a sudden you got the upper hand in some kind of a fight? What are you going to do? You know, you definitely picture becoming um evil in that situation i think one thing faith in god can do is humble you before these kinds of complexities of the world and humility is a way to avoid the slippery slope towards evil, I think.
Humility that you don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And you defer that to sort of bigger powers to try to understand that.
Yeah. I think there's a kind of, I mean, a lot of the atrocities were committed by people who are very sure of themselves being good.
Yeah, that's so true. It is sad that religion is at times used as a way to kind of just, as yet another tool for justification.
Exactly, yeah. Which is a sad application of religion.
It really is. It's so inherent and so natural in us to justify ourselves.
I mean, I think it's almost just understanding history. You read history.
It blows my mind that, and I'm super thankful that somehow and this has been missed you so much but somehow

this ideology arose that love your enemies forgive forgive those that persecute you and just on down the line that something like that rose in the world into a position where we all kind of accept those ideals, I think is really remarkable and worth appreciating. That said, a lot of that gets wrapped up in what you're talking, you know, what is so natural just becomes another instrument for tribalism or another justification for wrong.
And so I even myself am self-conscious sometimes talking about matters of faith, because I know when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about something else other than, you know, what someone else might think of when they hear me talking about it. So it's interesting.
Yeah. I've been listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this.
He has a way of articulating things, which are sometimes hard to understand in the moment. But when I like it carefully afterwards, it starts to make more sense.
I've heard him talk about religion and God as a kind of base layer, like a metaphorical substrate from which morality of our sense of what is right and wrong comes from, and just our conceptions of what is beautiful in life. all these kinds of higher things, they're like fuzzy, understand? That their religion helps create the substrate for which we as a species, like as a civilization can come up with these notions and without it, you are lost at sea.
I guess for him, morality requires that substrate. Like you said, it's kind of fuzzy.
So I've only been able to get clear vision of it when I live it. It's not something you profess or anything like that.
It's something that you take seriously and apply in your life. And when you live it, then there's some clarity there, but that it has to be kind of defined.
Like it's like, it's, and that's where you come in with the religion and the stories, because if you leave it completely undefined, I don't know, really know where you go from there. I actually, isn't it funny to speak to that? I did mushroom.
Have you ever done those? Mushrooms. Yeah.
I've done them a couple of times, but one time was didn't do that many the other time more and i had a i had a really profound experience in helping couch all this in in the proper context for myself so i could i when i did it i remember i was sitting on a swing and i could see my everything was so blissful except i could see my black hands like chains, like on the swing, but everything else was blissful and kind of amorphous. And I could see the outline of my kids.
And I could just feel the love for them. And I was just like, man, I just feel the love.
It's so wonderful. Like, you know, but then I would, you know, at times I would try to picture him and I couldn't quite picture the kids, but I could feel the love.
And then I started asking all the deepest existential questions I could, you know, and it felt like I was just one answer, another answer, another answer. Everything was being answered.
And I felt like I was communing with God, whatever you want to say. But I was very aware of the fact that that communing was just peeling back the tiniest corner of the infinite.
And it just dumped me with every answer I felt like I could have. And it kind of blew me away.
So then I asked it, well, if you're the infinite, like, why did you reveal to me yourself? Why did you use like the story of Jesus to reveal yourself? And then that infinite amorphous thing had to somehow take form for us to like, for us to be able to relate to it. It had to have some kind of a form.
But whenever you create a form out of something, you're like boxing it in and subjugating it to boundaries and stuff like that. And then that subject to pain and subject to the brokenness and all that.
And I was like, oh, wow. But when I had that thought, then all of a sudden, I could relate my dark hands on the chains to the rest of the experience.
And then all of a sudden, I could picture my children as the children rather than this amorphous feeling of love. It was like, oh, there's Ilana and Altai and Zaya.
But then they were bounded. And then once they're bounded, you're subject to the death and to the misunderstanding and to all that.
Like, you know, I picture the amoeba or the cell. And then when it dies, it turns into an unformed thing.
And so we need some kind of form to relate to. So instead of always just talking about God completely intangibly, it kind of gave me a way to relate to it and i was like oh wow that's that was really powerful to me and and putting it in a context that was applicable but ultimately god is sort of the that's formless, that is unbounded.
But we humans need, I mean, that's the purpose of stories. They resonate with something in us.
But when you need the sort of the bounded nature, the constraints of those stories, otherwise we wouldn't be able to like- Can't relate to it. Can't relate to it.
Yeah, yeah. And then when you look at the stories literally where you just look at them just as they are, it seems silly.
It's too simplistic. Right, right.
And then that was always, you know, a lot of my family and loved ones and friends have completely left the faith. And I totally, in a way, get it like i understand but i also really see the baby that's being thrown out with the bath water and i want to cherish that in a way i guess and it's interesting that you say that the way to know what's right and wrong is uh you have to live it sometimes it's it's probably very very difficult to articulate, but in the living of it,

do you realize it?

Yeah. You have to live it.
Sometimes it's probably very difficult to articulate.

But in the living of it, do you realize it?

Yeah, I'm glad you say that.

Because I found a lot of comfort in that.

Because I feel somewhat inarticulate a lot of the times.

And unable to articulate my thoughts, especially on these matters.

And then you just think, I just have to.

But I do have to.

I can live it.

I can try to live it. And then what I also am struck with right away is I can't, because you can't love everybody.
You can't love your enemies and you can't. Um, but as placing that in front of you as the ideal is so important to put like a, a check on your human instincts, on your tribalism, on your, uh, I mean, you can very quickly, like we talked about with evil,

you know, it can really quickly take its place in your life. I don't know if you almost want to observe it happening, you know, but, uh, and so I so much appreciate all the, the me striving.

And that's where, you know, I grew up in a Christian family. So I had these like

cliches that I didn't really understand, like a relationship with God, like, what does that mean? But then I realized when I struggled with trying with taking, I actually did try to take it seriously and struggle with what does it mean to live out a life of love in the world. But that's like a wrestling match, because it's not that simple.
It doesn't sound it sounds good, but it's really hard to do. And then you realize you can't do it perfectly.
But, but in that struggle, in that wrestling match is where I actually sense that relationship. And then it's, and that's where it kind of gains life and how that really, and I'm sure that relates to what Jordan Peterson is getting at in his metaphor.

In the striving of the ideal, in the striving towards the ideal, you discover how to be a better person.

One thing I noticed really tangibly on Alone was that because I had so many people that were close to me kind of just leave it all together. I was like, I could do that.
I actually understand why they do. Or I could not, you know, I do have a choice.
And so I had to choose at that point to, to maintain that ideal. And because I could add enough time on alone.
One nice thing is you don't have any distractions. You have all the time in the world to go into your head.
And I could play those paths out in my life. And not only in my life, but I feel like societally and generationally, like I throw it all away and everybody start from square one.
Or we can try to redeem what's valuable in this and wrestle with it. And.
And so I just chose that path. Well, I do think it's a kind of wrestling match because you mentioned Gulag Archipelago.
I'm very much a believer that we all have the capacity for good and evil. And striving for the ideal to be a good human being is not a trivial one.
You have to find the right tools for yourself to be able to be the candle, as you mentioned before. I like that.
And then for that, religion and faith can help. I'm sure there's other ways, but I think it's grounded in understanding that each human is able to be a really bad person and a really good person.
And that's like a choice, it's a deliberate choice. And it's a choice that's taken every moment and builds up over time.
And the hard part about it is you don't know, you don't always have the clarity using reason to understand what what is good, and what is right, and what is wrong. You have to kind of live it with humility and constantly struggle.
Because then, yeah, you have to, you might wake up in a society where you're committing genocides, and you think you're the good guys. And I think you have to have the courage to realize you're not.
It's not always obvious. It isn't, man.
And only history has the clarity to show who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Right.
You have to wrestle with it. It's like that quote, you know, the line between good and evil goes through the heart of every man, and we push it this way and that.
And our job is to work on that within ourselves. Yeah, that's the part.
That's what I like. The full quote talks about the fact that it moves.
The line moves moment by moment, day by day. We have the freedom to move that line.
So it's like a very deliberate thing. It's not like you're born this way and that's it.
Yeah, I agree. And especially in conditions that are like war and peace,

in the case of the camps, absurd levels of injustice

in the face of all that.

When everything is taken away from you,

you still have the choice to be the candle, like the grandmas.

By the way, grandmas in all parts of the world are like the strongest seriously it's like i don't know what it is i don't know they have this like wisdom uh that comes from patience and have seen it all they've seen all the bullshit of the people that come and gone all the abuses of power all of this i don't know what it is and they just keep going right right it's just yeah it's so true what do you think of as we've gotten a bit philosophical what do you think of uh warner herzog style of narration i kind of wish he narrated my life. Yeah, it's amazing to listen to.
Because that documentary is actually in Russian. I think he took a longer series, yeah, and then put narration over it.
And that narration can transform a story. Yeah, he does an incredible job with it will say have you seen the full version have you watched the four-part full version as you should you'd like it's in russian and so you'll get the fullness of that and it's uh he had to fit it into a two-hour format and so i think what you lose in those extra couple hours is worth watching i think you'll like it it.
Yeah, they always go pretty dark. Do they? He has a very dark sense about nature that is violence and it's murder.
I think that's important to recognize because it's really easy, I mean, especially with what I do and what I talk about, and I see so much of the value in nature. Gosh, you know, I also see like a beautiful moose and a calf running around.
And then next week I see the calf rip to shreds by wolves and you're just like, oh, and it's not as, it's not as Rousseauian as we'd like to think, you know. it is, you know, things must die for things to live, like you said, and that's just played out all the time.
And it's indifferent to you. Doesn't, doesn't care if you live or die and doesn't care how you die or how much pain you go through while you, you know, it's like, it's pretty brutal.
So that it's interesting that he taps into that and i think i think it's valuable because it's easy to idealize in a way but yeah the indifference is i don't know what to make of it there isn't a difference it's a bit scary it's a bit lonely you're just a cog in the in the machine of nature that doesn't about you. Totally.
I think that's something I've sat with a lot on that show is another part of the depths of your psychology delve into. But it, and that's when I thought like, I could, I understand that deeply, but I could also choose to believe that for some reason it matters.
And then I could live like it matters. And then I could see the trajectories.
And that was another fork in the road of my path, I guess. What do you think about the connection to the animals? So in that movie, it's with the dogs.
And with you, it's the other domesticated, the reindeer. What do you think about that human-animal connection? In the context of of that indifference isn't interesting that we assign so much value and love and appreciation for these animals and in some degree we get that back in a recipient i think right now you just said the reindeer i think of uh the one they gave me because he was long and tall so they named him dleeney and and i just remember dleeney and just watching him eat the leaves and go with me through the woods and trust him to take me through rivers and stuff and uh and it really is special it's really enriching you know to have that relationship with an animal and i think it also puts you in a proper context one thing i noticed about the natives who live with those animals all the time is they relate to life and death a little more naturally.
It feels, you know, we feel really removed from it, particularly in urban settings. And I think when you interact with animals and you have to confront the life and the death of them and the responsibility of a symbiotic relationship you have, I think it opens a little bit of awareness to your place in the puzzle and puts you in it rather than above it.
Have you been able to accept your own death? I wonder. You know, you wonder when it actually comes, what you're going to think.
But I did have did have you know I did have my dad to watch confronted in as positive a manner as you could and I and that's a big advantage and so I I think when the time comes that I will be ready but I think it but I think that's easy to say when the time feels far off you know it'll be interesting if you got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow and stage four it's like be heavy did you ever confront death while in survival situations i mean when you're i mean you're in i did i did have a time i had a time where i thought i might i was gonna die i had a lot of situations that could have gone either way and a lot of injuries broken ribs and this and that But the one that I was able to die. I had a lot of situations that could have gone either way and a lot of injuries, broken ribs and this and that.
But the one that, that I was able to be conscious through a slowly evolving experience that I thought I might die in was at one point we were siphoning gas out of a barrel and it was almost to the bottom. And I was like, so it's sucking really hard to get the gas out.
And then I didn't, I didn't get the siphon going. So I like waited.
And then while I was sitting there, Europe put the, a new canister on top and put the hose in and I didn't see. And so then I went to get another, you know, siphon and I went like sucked as hard as I couldn't.
It just instantly like a bunch of gas filled my mouth and I couldn't like spit it out. I had to go like that.
And I just full mouthful of gas that I just drank and I was just like oh like what is that gonna do and um and he and my friend were gonna go on this fishing trip and so was I and I was just like oh I might just stay and I was in this little Russian village and and they're like all right well you're always like man I had a buddy that died doing that with diesel a couple years ago you know and i was oh man and so anyway i made my way to the hospital and by then you know you're really out of it because and then uh and it was they put me in this little dark room it almost sounds like unrealistic but it's actually how it happened they put me in a little a little room with a toilet and they gave me a cold you know galvanized bucket and then like they just had a cold water faucet and they're just like just chug water and puke into the toilet and just flush your system as much you can but they only had a cold water faucet so i was just sitting there like chug chug chug until like you puke and chug until you're puking i'm in the dark and i and i was like started to shiver because i was so cold but i said to like still like get this thing up to me and chug until you puke and I'm in the dark. And I was like started to shiver because I was so cold.
But I said to like still like get this thing up to me and chug until I puke. I was picturing.
I remember reading about the Japanese torture where they would put a hose in somebody and then make them shrink water until they puke. Anyway, and I just felt so – the only way I can express it, I felt so possessed, like demon possessed.
Like I was just permeated with gas. I could feel it just coming out of my pores.
and I and I just felt so the only way I can express it I felt so possessed like demon possessed like I was just permeated with gas I could feel it was coming out of my pores and I like wanted to like rip it out of me and I couldn't I'd like puke into the toilet and then couldn't see but I was wondering if it was like rainbow and then and then I just remember like I could tell I was going out pretty soon and um and I remember looking at my hands close. You'd see them a little bit.
And I was like, oh, that's how dad's hands looked. You know, they were alive, alive.
And then, you know, interesting. Are my hands going to look like that in a few minutes or whatever? And so then I wrote down like to my family what I thought, you know, like I love you all.
I feel at peace, blah, blah, blah. And then I passed out and I woke up.
I didn't think, I actually thought, when I went to pass out, I thought it was, there was a coin toss for me. So I really felt like I was confronting the end there.
What are the harshest conditions to survive in on earth? Well, there are places that are just purely uninhab i think as far as places that you have a chance you have a chance that's a good way to put it what maybe greenland i think of greenland because i think of you know those vikings that settled there were rugged capable dudes and they didn't make it but there are in you that that you know natives that live up there but that's a hard life you know and the population's never grown very big because they're you're scraping by up there and you picture and the and the vikings that did land there you know they just weren't able to quite adapt and the fact that they all died out is just a symbol to that must be a pretty difficult place to live. What would you say that's primarily because just the food sources are limited? The food sources are limited, but the fact that some people can live there means it is possible.
You know, they've figured out ways to catch seals and do things to survive, but it's by no means easier to be taken for granted or obvious. I think it's probably a harsh place to try to live.
Yeah, it's fascinating, not just humans, but to watch how animals have figured out how to survive. I'm watching like a documentary on polar bears.
Like, they just figure out a way. And they get, and they've been doing it for generations and they figure out a way.
They They travel hundreds of miles to the water to get fat, and they travel 100 miles for whatever other purpose, because they want to stay on the ice, I don't know. But it's like, there's a process, and they figure it out against the long odds, and some of them don't make it.
It's incredible's what a what really tough things man you just think every little every animal you see up in the mountains when i'm up in the woods is that thing just surviving through the winter scraping by it's tough tough existence what do you think it would take to break you let's say mentally. Like if you're in a survival situation.
I mean, I think it would have, mentally, it would have to be. Well, we talked about that earlier, I guess.
The thing that I've confronted that I thought I knew was that if I knew I was the last person on earth, I wouldn't do it. But maybe you're right.
Maybe I would think I wasn't. But I think, you know, I can't imagine.
I can't imagine we're so blessed in the time we live. But I can't imagine what it's like to lose your kids, something like that.
It was an experience that was so common for humanity for so much of history. Would I be able to endure that? I would have at least a legacy to look back on of people who did, but God forbid I ever have to delve that deep.
You know what I mean? I could see that breaking somebody. And I mean, in your own family history,

there's people who have survived that.

Right. And maybe that would give you hope.

I mean, I think that's what I would have to somehow hold on to.

But in a survival situation, there's very few things that...

I don't know what it would be.

So on alone, I knew...

I wasn't going to...

And ultimately, it is a game show.

So it's like, ultimately, I wasn't going gonna kill myself out there it's like but so if i hadn't been able to procure food and i was starving to death it's like okay i'm not i'm gonna go home you know but like if you put yourself in in that situation but it's not a game show and haven't been there to some degree like i will say i wasn't even close like i don't even know yeah yeah i hadn't got it hadn't pushed my mental limit at all yet i would say or on the scale but that's not to say there isn't one i know there is one and but i have a hard time i know i've dealt with you know i've dealt with enough pain and enough discomfort in life that i know i can deal with that i think i think it gets difficult when you start to when there's a way out and you start to wonder if you shouldn't take the way out as far as like uh if there's no way out i don't know what, that's interesting. I mean, that is a real difficult battle when there's an exit, when it's easy to quit.
Right. Why am I doing this? Yeah, that's a thing that gets louder and louder the harder things get.
Totally. It're doing like you know if you think you're doing permanent damage to your body you would be smart to quit you should just not do that on a when it's not necessary um because health is kind of all you have in some regards so well dude i don't blame anyone then they quit because of that reason it's a good but uh but if you're in a situation and it's you don't have the option to quit is knowing that you're doing permanent that's not going to break that won't break me you know it is you just have to get through it i'm not sure what my mental limit would be outside of like the family suffering in the way that i described earlier when it's just you it's you alone there's the limit uh you don't know what the limit is i don't know injuries injuries like physical stuff is annoying though oh that could be isn't it weird how like i mean i can be have a good life happy life and then you have a bad back or you have a headache.
And it's amazing how much that can overwhelm your experience. Um, then again, that was something I saw in dad that was like, interesting.
How can you find joy in that when you're just steeped in that all the time and people I'm sure listening, there's a lot of people that do. And it's so and and talk about the cross to bear and the like hero journey to be like good for you for trying to find what you can what your way through that there was a lady in russia uh tanya and she had had cancer and recovered but always had a pounding headache and she was really joyful and really fun to be around.
And I just like, man, I mean, you just have to have a really bad headache for today. Know how much that throws a wrench in your existence.
So, so all that to say, if you're not right now suffering with blindness or a bad back, or it's like, just count your blessings. Cause it is all, it's so easy to have easy to have it's it's amazing how complex we are how well our bodies work and when they go out of whack it can be very overwhelming and they all will at some point and so that's an interesting thing to think ahead on how you're going to confront it when it does keeps you humble like you said it's inspiring that people figure out a way with migraines that's a hard one though if you have headaches it's so hard oh man because those can be really painful and it's like and dizzying and all this oh that's inspiring that's inspiring that you found there's not nothing in that you know i mean it's you can find somehow you can tap into purpose even in that pain i guess i would just speak from like right my dad's experience i saw somebody do it and i benefited from it so thanks to him for seeing the higher calling there you uh you wrote a note on your blog in 2012 you You spent five weeks-ish in the forest alone.
I just thought it was interesting because this is in contrast to on the show alone. You were really alone.
You're not talking to anybody. And you realize that...
You're right. I remember at one point after several weeks had passed, I wandered into a particularly beautiful part

of the woods and exclaimed out loud,

wow, it struck me that it was the first time

I had heard my own voice in several weeks

with no one to talk to.

What,

where,

did your thoughts go into some like deep place?

Yeah, I'd say my mental life was really active you know what you what you end up when you're that long alone i'll tell you what you won't have is any skeletons in your closet that are still in your closet like you will be forced to confront every every person even the one not i mean it's one thing if you've cheated on your wife or something, but you'll be confronted with the random dude you didn't say thank you to.

And the like, and the issue that you didn't resolve, you know, all this stuff that was long gone will come up and then you'll work through it and you'll think how you should make it right.

And, uh, I had a lot of those thoughts while I was out there and it was, it was so interesting to see what you would just brush over and then, uh, and confront it because in our modern world, when you're always distracted, you just never, ever going to know until you take the time to be alone for a considerable amount of time. Spend time hanging out with yeah i recommend it so you said you guide people what what are your favorite places to go to well if i tell them then is everybody gonna go i like how you actually have a it might be a youtube video or your instagram post where you give them a recommendation of like the best fishing hole in the world.
And like you give detailed instructions how to get there. But it's like a journey of life.
It's like a Lord of the Rings type of journey. Right, right.
No, I love the, I love the like in the, you know, there's a region that I definitely love in the States. It's special to me.
I grew up there. Stuff like that.
Idaho, Wyoming, Montana.

Those are really cool places to me.

I like the small town vibes they're still maintaining and stuff there.

A mix of like mountains and forests.

But you know, another really awesome place that blew my mind was New Zealand.

That South Island of New Zealand was pretty incredible.

As far as just stunning stuff to see, I was pretty high up there on the list, but there's all these places have such kind of unique, unique things about Canada became like where they did alone. It's not typically what you'd say because it's fairly flat and cliffy and stuff but it really became beautiful to me because i could

tapped into the richness of the land you know or or you know the fishing hole thing it's like that's

a special little spot you know something like that and and you see the beauty and then you start to

see the beauty on this in the smaller scale like oh look at that little meadow with that it's got

an orange and a pink and a blue flower right next to each other that's super cool you know and

there's a million things like that have you been back there yet uh back to where the alone show was no we're going back this uh summer i'm gonna take guide a trip up there take a bunch of people i'm really looking forward to being able to enjoy it without the pressure what what advice would you give to people in terms of how to be in nature so like a hikes to take or journeys to take out of nature where it could it could take you to that place where the busyness and the madness of the world can dissipate and you can be with it like how long does it take for you for people usually to just like yeah i think you need a few days probably to really tap into it but you know maybe you need to work your way there like it's awesome to go out on a hike go see some beautiful little waterfall or go see some old tree or whatever it is you know like um but i think just doing is it you know everybody thinks about doing it you really you just really do do it like go out and then plan to go overnight don't be so afraid of all the potentialities that you delay it inevitably you know like it's actually one of the things that i've enjoyed the most about guiding people is, is giving them the tools so that now they have this ability into the future. You can go out and feel like I'm going to pick this spot on the map and go there.
And that's a tool in your toolkit of life that is, I think, really valuable because I think everybody should spend some time in nature. I mean, I think it's been pretty proven healthy.
Yeah, I mean, camping is great. And solo, she has to do it solo.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, that's cool you did.
Yeah, it's cool. And I recorded stuff, so that helped.
Oh, good, yeah. So you sit there and you record the thoughts.
Actually, for having to record the thoughts, I had to like, it forced me to really think through what I was feeling

to convert the feelings into words, which is not a trivial thing

because it's mostly just feeling.

You feel a certain kind of way.

That's interesting.

You know, I felt like the way I met my wife was like, you you know we met at this wedding and then i went to russia basically and we kept in touch via email for you know that year and and a similar thing it was really interesting to be have to be so thoughtful and purposeful about what you're saying and things like i think it's probably healthy good thing to do what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on the uh the future of human civilization if we talk you know we talked about gratitude earlier like look at what we have now that could give you hope like look at what we've the world we're in we live in in such an amazing time with you know buildings and roads and buildings and roads

food security and and you know i lived with the natives and i thought to myself a lot like i wonder if not everybody would choose this way of life because it is there's something really rich about just that small group your direct relationship to your needs all that but with the food security and the health, you know, modern medicine, the things that we now have that we take for granted, but that I wouldn't choose that life if we didn't have those things. Otherwise, you're gonna watch your family starve to death or things like that.
We so we have so much now, which should lead us to be hopeful while we try to improve because there's definitely a lot of things wrong you know but but i guess it's there's a lot of room for improvement and i do feel like we're sort of watching it walking on a knife's edge you know but i guess that's the way it is um as the as the tools we build become more powerful. Yeah, exactly.

That knife's edge is getting sharper and sharper.

I'll argue with my brother about that sometimes.

He takes the more positive view.

I mean, it's great.

We've done great.

But man, more and more people with nuclear weapons.

It's just going to take one mistake with the more power. I think there's something about the sharpness of the knife's edge.
It gets humanity to really like focus and like step up and not, not screwed up. There is just like you said, with the cold going out into the extreme cold, it like wakes you up.
And I think the same thing when nuclear weapons is just like wakes up humanity like everybody was half asleep exactly and then we keep building more and more powerful things to make sure we stay awake yeah exactly stay awake see what we've done be thankful for it but then improve it and then you know of course uh i appreciated your little post the other week where you said you wanted some kids, you know, that's a, that's a very direct way to relate to the future

and to have hope for the future. I can't wait.
And, uh, hopefully I also get a chance to go out

in the wilderness with you at some point. I would love it.
That'd be fun. Open invite.
Let's make

it happen. I got some really cool spots of it.
Have in mind to take you. Awesome.
Let's go.

Thank you for talking today, brother. Thank you for everything you stand for.
Thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Jonas.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me try a new thing where I try to articulate some things I've been thinking about, whether prompted by one of your questions or just in general.
If you'd like to submit a question, including an audio and video form, go to lexfriedman.com slash AMA. Now, allow me to comment on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th.
First, as I've posted online, wishing Donald Trump good health after an assassination attempt is not a partisan statement. It's a human statement.
And I'm sorry if some of you want to categorize me and other people into blue and red bins. Perhaps you do it because it's easier to hate than to understand.
In this case, it shouldn't matter. But let me say once again that I am not right-wing nor left-wing.
I'm not partisan. I make up my mind one issue at a time and I try to approach everyone and every idea with empathy and with an open mind.
I have and will continue to have many long-form conversations with people both on the left and the right. Now, on to the much more important point.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump should serve as a reminder that history can turn on a single moment. World War I started with the assassination

of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

And just like that, one moment in history

on June 18th, 1914,

led to the death of 20 million people,

half of whom were civilians.

If one of the bullets on July 13th

had a slightly different trajectory, where Donald Trump would end up dying in that small town in Pennsylvania, history would write a new dramatic chapter, the contents of which all the so-called experts and pundits would not be able to predict. It very well could have led to a civil war.
Because the true depth of the division in the country is unknown. We only see the surface turmoil on social media and so on.
And it is events like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, where we, as a human species, get to find out what the truth is of where people really stand. The task then is to try and make our society maximally resilient and robust to such destabilizing events.
The way to do that, I think, is to properly identify the threat, the enemy. It's not the left or the right that are the quote enemy.
Extreme division itself is the enemy. Some division is productive.
It's how we develop good ideas and policies. But too much leads to the spread of resentment and hate that can boil over into destruction on a global scale.
So we must absolutely avoid the slide into extreme division. There are many ways to do this, and perhaps it's a discussion for another time.
But at the very basic level, let's continuously try to turn down the temperature of the partisan bickering and more often celebrate our obvious common humanity. Now, let me also comment on conspiracy theories.
I've been hearing a lot of those recently. I think they play an important role in society.
They ask questions that serve as a check on power and corruption of centralized institutions. The way to answer the questions raised by conspiracy theories is not by dismissing them with arrogance and feigned ignorance, but with transparency and accountability.
In this particular case, the obvious question that needs an honest answer is why did the Secret Service fail so terribly in protecting the former president? The story we're supposed to believe is that a 20-year-old untrained loner was able to outsmart the Secret Service by finding the optimal location on a roof for a shot on Trump from 130 yards away, even though the Secret Service snipers spotted him on the roof 20 minutes before the shooting and did nothing about it. This looks really shady to everyone.
Why does it take so long to get to a full accounting of the truth of what happened? And why is the reporting of the truth concealed by corporate government speak? Cut the bullshit. What happened? Who fucked up and why? That's what we need to know.
That's the beginning of transparency. And yes, the director of the U.S.
Secret Service should probably step down or be fired by the president. And not as part of some political circus that I'm sure is coming, but as a step towards uniting an increasingly divided and cynical nation.
Conspiracy theories are not noise, even when they're false. They are a signal that some shady, corrupt, secret bullshit is being done by those trying to hold on to power.
Not always, but often. Transparency is the answer here, not secrecy.
If we don't do these things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to singular moments that turn the tides of history. Empires do fall.
Civil wars do break out and tear apart the fabric of societies.

This is a great nation, the most successful collective human experiment in the history of Earth.

And letting ourselves become extremely divided risks destroying all of that.

So please ignore the political pundits, the political grifters, clickbait media,

outrage-fueling politicians on the right and the left who try to divide us.

What is the most who try to divide us. We're not so divided.
We're in this together. As I've said many times before, I love you all.
This is a long comment. I'm hoping not to do comments this long in the future and hoping to do many more.

So I'll leave it here for today.

But I'll try to answer questions and make comments on every episode.

If you would like to submit questions, like I mentioned, including audio and video form, go to lexfreeman.com.

And now, let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.