#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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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. Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode, I'll start answering some questions and we'll try to articulate my thinking on some top of mind topics. So if that's of interest to you, keep listening after the episode is over.

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the GPU cluster that Tesla AI and XAI are building. And well, first of all, I was extremely impressed by the rapid rate of progress. And there's a lot more to be said about that. Maybe I'll have a conversation with Elon soon. But in general,

I just want to comment how humbled I was by just the sheer scale of computation that a GPU cluster is carrying and it's quickly growing. Just being able to see that in person, it makes it very visceral, very real that these machine learning models have power and that we as a civilization carry a heavy responsibility

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There's something about the ease and scale and the efficiency of Shopify that always makes me think about the machinery of capitalism. And also because I've been beginning to read the history of human civilization as covered by Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I suddenly feel humbled by the scale of it all and how capitalism as an idea, the modern version of it, is a relatively recent one, just a handful of centuries ago.

just with the Industrial Revolution. We humans have been battling with this idea, whether the means of production should be owned by the state or by the individual. Now, everybody's talking like that's such an obvious thing, but it isn't. Every genius idea is obvious in retrospect. The entire story of humans on Earth is a long chain of experiments, successful and failed ones, and from each we'll learn, and we always rise.

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This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. And actually, back to capitalism, because once again, business is at the core of the capitalist machine. I find that there is various communities now that dedicate themselves to rigorously analyzing the failures of capitalism at the edges. But in those communities and in general, we don't often celebrate the positive impacts, the positive outcomes.

metrics over time that capitalism has resulted in in society. And I think just the number of people living in poverty decreasing drastically under regimes that enable free markets should serve as an inspiring notion for anyone who wants to build a business for the very fact that humans build businesses.

that we together keep trying. It's the craziest thing. To start a business is the craziest idea, 'cause most likely you're going to fail. It really is the stupidest possible thing, except it is not. Except that dream is the very engine that enables progress. So I'm a big fan of startups, of small businesses, and grateful that humans take the risk, and I'm grateful that humans find a way.

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Because when I'm out there just by myself, whether no sound or brown noise in my ears, I get to really think. There's something about sort of physical challenge, especially the higher pace, where I start getting uncomfortable and the uncomfortable thoughts rise up and I get to think. And I get to face those thoughts and either meditate them away or try to figure out what is the kernel of the thing that disturbs me about those thoughts.

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- This is the Lex Riven Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. 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 ax, 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 so the people are actually alone. There's not a crew or anything. And then you...

basically live there as long as you can. And so the person that lasts the longest, once the second place person taps out, they come and get you and that individual wins. So it's a pretty legit challenge. They drop you off, helicopter flies out, and you're not going to get your next meal until you make it happen. So 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 the 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 going to eat again until I actually shoot or catch something. Got to 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, no amount of complaining is going to do anybody any good. So,

I'm just going to 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. Cause I had had,

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. So you've gotten a little soft. So I was like, did I got a little soft? You have to figure that out.

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 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 you're going to 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 you usually typically go and buy 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 to miss but then I was like, but it made me that much more determined to Make it happen again. It was like, okay, I

nobody's going to 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 Nate, the 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 yeah,

I have to make that happen again now. So I kind of went out there and tried that. And that was kind of a attempt at something too. It could have failed or not worked, but sure enough, it worked. And yeah,

The opportunity came again. The moose came wandering along and I was able to get it. But being able to take failure as soon as you can, the better. Accept it and then learn from it is kind of a muscle you have to exercise a little bit. Well, it's interesting because in this case, the cost of failure is like you're not going to be able to eat. Yeah, that was really interesting. I mean.

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 so high. And 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. You can't imagine. I mean, that's what all our dopamine and receptors are tuned for that experience in particular. So it was, yeah, it was pretty awesome. But the pressure felt very on. Like I always felt the pressure of...

providing or starving. And then there's the situation when you left the ladder up and you needed fat and what is it, the ovary needs some of the fat? Yeah, well, it was when I got the moose, I was so happy. The most joy I could almost experience maxed out. But I didn't think I...

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 going to be me against somebody else that gets a moose now. And we're going to 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 outproduce 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 moose's 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 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 wilder wolverines very often in life and uh

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, I, again, kind of the pressure came back to, oh no, I got to,

produce again. It wasn't the end of the world. And I think they may have exaggerated a little bit how little fat I had left. A moose has a lot of fat, but it did make me feel like I was at a disadvantage again. And so, yeah, that was pretty intense because those wolverines, they're bold little animals. And 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. Yeah, yeah. 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. Yeah.

So this is day 20. So can you take me through the kill? Yeah. So 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 going to build that fence. I built it. I would just pick berries and call moose every, you know, every day. And it was actually a really pleasant to sit in a berry patch and call moose. But then I would 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, um,

a clank because I had set up kind of an alarm system with string and cans. It was a brilliant idea. Yeah, another thing that could have not worked, but it did. And it came through. And I was like, oh, I heard the cans clank. 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 he was 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 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 satirizing

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 to live. You 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 there's 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, uh, but he hadn't died yet. And so he just sat there and, 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, you know, a couple hours that took him. And then finally at one point, you know, and a lot of people have asked, like, why wouldn't you go finish it off? So when an animal like that gets hit, it had 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 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 because moose can be a little dangerous and so 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 one 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 you know it was

It was a peak experience for sure. And were you worried that it would take many more hours than 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 this 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, drop back. You've practiced shooting a lot. So you have like kind of a technique, like I'm going to go back, touch my face, draw my elbow tight, and then the arrow is going to 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 a wild animal, that's probably the best way to go. They could they could have. Yeah.

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 want to, 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 da da da da. And when you get the plows and the combines, you know, you're losing all kinds of different animals and all kinds 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 in an ethical manner. So I, 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 right totally

and you you can also think about it 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 that 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 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. 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, I don't know, 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 know, it's not easy. They're not, it becomes kind of that chess game. And,

Those prey animals are always tuned in. It's, you know, slightest stick. They're looking for wolves or for whatever it is. So there's something really pure and fun about it. 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 I think it speaks to that part of us somehow. And I think bow hunting is probably the most fun.

pure form of it and that you get those experiences more often than with a rifle so i i don't know i 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 a sort of uh

The natural way of the predator and prey. Yeah, 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. And the full challenge and the luck involved in catching it. The same thing as the predators do. Exactly. How many times do they snap a stick and watch them run off and be like, darn, my stock was failed. Or, you know, so, yeah, you're just, you're in that situation.

in that ecosystem. How'd you learn to shoot the bow? Yeah, I didn't grow up hunting. I grew up in an area that a lot of people hunted, but my dad wasn't really into it, and so I never got into it 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. 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 a 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

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

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 Leatherman wave, a

Pharaoh 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 there any regrets? No major regrets. I took the saw kind of, I thought it would be more of a calorie saver than I've

I didn't really need it. In hindsight, if I was doing season seven instead of six and got to watch, I would have taken the net because I just planned 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 the size of your arm or leg. You can chop it down with an axe and a couple swings. Yeah, you don't really need the saw. 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, I used 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 once I got the moose, I actually took all those snares down because I didn't want to catch anything needlessly. And 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...

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 maximize your chance of having the 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 then 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 and to a big pile and then hunt a bear on that big fish pile. 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 growing

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, 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 an 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 wind the predominant wind was blowing out my scent to sea and or you know to the water and then really to be honest if you want to actually survive somewhere is different than alone but you do have to be active and it has to you're gonna have to you're not gonna live

You're not going to be sustainable by 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, 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 at successful hunting and then the successful hunt buys you some more time right right just go year round and then you just go around like that and that's how people did it forever the pressure was i noticed that 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 was finite. I'm going to have to do this again. And you imagine if you had a family that was going to starve if you weren't successful, you know, this next time. And there's just always that pressure, you know, made me really 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 planning. Like, what am I going to, in the midst of the frustration, you have to figure out.

Like what's the strategy? Like how do you put up all the traps? Is that a decision like, you know, most people like sit at their desk and have like a calendar or whatever. 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 the modern context. 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 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? Is 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 given 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, which is fun. 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, you know,

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 different strokes for different folks. But 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 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 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? Yeah.

If you have good clay and mud and rock, you can build yourself a fireplace, which is surprisingly not that hard. 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 sure it's opening, and it actually works. So that's not as hard as you might think. For me, where I was, 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. 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 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 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 is like an immense amount of work and all the chinking and all the door sealing and, you know, the chimney has to be... Anyway, so otherwise it's just going to be the same ambient temperature as outside. So...

I don't think alone is the proper context for a log cabin. I think like a log cabin's great as a hunting cabin, as you know, if you're gonna have something for years, but in a three, six month scenario, I don't know that it's worth the calorie expenditure. - And it is a lot of calories. But 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 then improve fast in response to the conditions, to the environment. - Yeah, 'cause it's constantly changing. - And you end up being a lot better if you're able to learn how to respond quickly.

versus like having a big plan that takes a huge amount of time to accomplish. - Right, and forcing that through the pipeline whether or not it fits. - Can you just speak to like 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 was, it's a really cool area, really remote thousands of little lakes. You know, when you fly over, you're just like, man, that'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 note when I was in Siberia I floated down this river called the Padgamonayatunguska 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 in the middle of Siberia not unlike the Pacific coast and

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 people's 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

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 got to dress warm. You know, you don't never let, oh, there's a good one. If 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 go again i wouldn't ignore that you know 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 tough and through it because you can't really tough through the cold it'll just get you so what's your relationship with the cold um psychologically physically

Oh, that'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 go out and it's hot and sweaty and you're like, ugh. You get that kind of, kind of saps you. There's something about that brisk cold that hits your face that you're like, boo, wakes you up, makes you feel really alive, engaged. 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 walking 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're on a snowmobile 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 one just hat wasn't high enough so you gotta kind of gotta 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... Yeah, 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, maybe your time in Siberia, or do you gravitate towards it? I wonder what that is because I really don't like survival in the cold. I think a little bit of it is learned. You almost learn not to fear it. You learn to kind of appreciate it. And a big part of that is, I mean, to be honest, it's like dressing warm, being good. It's not that...

you know, there's no secrets to that is you just can't beat the cold. So you just need to dress warm than they did, 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 then you, 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 a hundred degree heat and I

I go out there with a smile on my face and 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. A hundred percent. I mean, you're right. It does make you feel alive that it like, maybe that's the thing that,

that I struggle with is the time passes slower because it does make you feel alive. 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

When I lost a lot of weight. I mean, I lost a lot more weight in Siberia than I did on the loan. 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, too. Well, 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 was thought, you know, in the...

In hindsight, again, when I was out there, I never let myself think you might win. I just was going to be out there as long as I could and tried to remain pessimistic. No, but then the, but then I remember a thought that I was like, I wonder if they're going to 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 could go eight months a year. And then you start to cause you know, 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, it wasn't too bad. This is 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 you know and i'll add that for sure though that it's it's the woods it's nature you never know how it's gonna go you know what i mean it's like every time you're out there it's a different scenario so yeah whatever hallelujah it went well so you uh 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 i

had you know a couple hundred pounds of moose i had at least you know 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 140

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 to day 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, 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 have 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 I,

It's hard to, it's hard to stay busy when it's all dark out, when the ice is, you know, three, four foot thick, you can't fish. And, um, I just think, I think it would have just been really boring. He would have had to 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.

back whether that be psychological whatever it is and we'd all enrich each other and 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 gonna tap for any other reason other than running out of food someday so that was my stressor and then see 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 stuff like it was like there was a every day i would think it's i gotta think of something to make me laugh you know and then do some stupid skit and then that would be that would fill a

spend an hour to 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 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 as like this is an awesome opportunity to share with people a part of me that most people don't get to see you know because no so that was i just chose 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's an actual tool in survival. 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 can be a powerful tool just sharing your experience. I definitely had the thought. So going back to your earlier discussion.

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 gonna be sharing a vague memory but an actual experience. - I think if you were 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 guys last yeah hope hope really does does that unless you really don't know you really you really hope to find i mean if you're like an apocalypse happens i think your whole life will be coming about finding the other person 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, because here I was having a good time, having fun fishing, plenty of food. But 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 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 stronger than I accounted for in that situation. Also, if you are indeed the last person, you might want to be documenting it for once you die, an alien species 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 something. Yeah, I mean, there is going to be existential dread. Mm-hmm.

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 look forward to talking to you i think i appreciate value is you you're always not out of naivety but you always choose to look at the positive you know what i mean and i 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, Rockhouse 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 rid of the competitive side of it, I would just say I'm pretty dang sure I had more pounds of food. Yeah.

And I didn't have the advantage of knowing when it would end, which I think would have been a great psychological. It would have made it really easy. Once I got the moose, I could have shot the moose and just not stressed. That 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 for my own experience, that was the hardest part. But Roland's a beast. So for people who don't know, they put a hundred day cap on. So it's whoever can survive a hundred days for that season. It's interesting to hear that for you, the uncertainty, not knowing when it ends. That was for sure. It's the hardest. That's true. It's like you wake up every day. I do.

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 naught. 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 shot a 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. Yeah.

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

You know, and for one, the previous person that had gone the longest had gone 89 days. So I just knew whoever else was out here with me, somebody's got that in their crosshairs. They're going to get to 90 and they're not going to quit at 90. They're going to go to 100. You know, 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 on some of the people do that. For myself, that would be bad psychology because 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... I...

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 did, 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, what's the secret to like protecting food? What are the different ways? Yeah. A lot of times, you know, in a typical situation in the woods hunting, you'll raise it up in a tree and a bag, put it in like a game bag so the birds can't peck at it and hang it in a tree so that,

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 um and then you'll notice that every forest freeloader in the woods is going to come steal your food yeah and it was just fun i mean it was it was crazy to watch you know like it's all the jay all the camp jays pecking at it or everything i did you know was

was, uh, there was something that could get to it. They've put on the ground, the mice get 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 going to have to build one of those Avenki 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 Avenki, uh,

So they would have taken a page out of like, they would have mixed me and Roland's 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. 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, you know, you're counting calories and stuff. I should have, in hindsight, just boxed it in right away. To get ready for the long haul. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is 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 so 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. And so I had 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...

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. 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 like super strict or anything. But I think when I eat less carbs, I feel better. Meat and vegetables. We eat a lot of meat. So basically everything you ate on loan plus some veggies. Plus veggies. Throw in some buckwheat. I like buckwheat. Let's step to the...

The early days of Jordan. So your Instagram handle is HoboJordo. So early on in your life, you hoboed around the US 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 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 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 them um hobo george is a bit of an overstep i feel self-conscious about that because i rode i rode trains across the country 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

It felt like a bit of a rite of passage experience, which is 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, got 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 my first stint of time by myself for like a week, which was interesting. Alone with your own thoughts. With your own thoughts. It was my first time in my life having been like that, you know, and so it was powerful at the time. You 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 uh it's it's a there's a really uh

sense of freedom you get that is hard to replicate elsewhere. And so, uh, that was eyeopening 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, uh, there's this old cross-eyed guy and he was all hobo. Gordo's back. And that's kind of where I got it. But that freedom always was very important to me. I think from that time on, what'd you learn about the United States about, uh,

the people along the way. Cause 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, and then you meet a lot of different people, a lot of different kinds of stories. And also like a lot of people that support you for traveling and,

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 their little town they have a thing and they they have a family usually and they 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 any moment just say it and

leap into the abyss of being on the road. But anyway, what did you learn 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 stuff 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? Real friendly and relatable. It kind of broadened 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 you know all that kind of stuff so any memorable characters well there's a 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 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 five, seven Italian guy that was always getting in fights. And he has his own sense of 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 thirties or something 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 registration? Went down there to the DMV, chewed him out that he had to re-register because he already registered. Where's the paperwork? But just kind of views of 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 the

But he notices the injustices in the world and speaks up. He notices them and speaks up. And he's always like, why doesn't everybody else speak up about their car registration? 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 divo 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 i wonder what 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 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 and

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 know 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. 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 in that way. Say yes to life, yeah. I love the boredom of it. Freight train riding is very boring. And 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. And you're like, no! But I remember we went to jail, we got out, and then... How'd you end up in jail? Oh, you know, it was trespassing on a train. But we were riding a train, and my brother...

woke up and they had a dead owl land on his head and he hit the train and fell on him and we were like woke up and we were laughing that's got to be some kind of bad omen and then we were like looking out of the train and we saw a train worker look and saw us and he went like 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 days and then they uh

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 ran in factory and we were waiting there for like four days. No train that was going slow 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 we're like 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, and that's cool. But I just personally actually didn't do it a lot. Um, 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 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 or it's there is a kind of lack of freedom and having to listen to a person that's giving you a ride it's so true and then you don't know how to react i mean i was young remember i got picked up by 19 or something and

Then I was just like, hey, how's it going? She's like, my husband just died. And then I got diagnosed with cancer and pretty bitter and all that. And understandably so. But you're just like, I have no idea how to respond here. And 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 and dumping it out she didn't have anyone else to dump it out on i was like wow i'm gonna take the freight train next time so how'd you end up in siberia

Um, uh, I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how, but I bet the long story short was that a brother that's adopted. And when he grew up, he wanted to find his biological mom and just tell her thanks. And, and, uh,

So he did. And when he was, 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, like 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. Yes, 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, uh, 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 like, we're really close because they had found God in prison together and stayed together and got out and

stayed connected and uh so i'd bounce backs between those two families and 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 and so they'd go you gotta 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 uh headed north to hang out with yura and fur trap and and that started a whole new you know opened a whole new world that i didn't know about before we talk about your unfair 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 a

It was darkness in that I didn't know how to parse, you know, what is this thing that's my faith and what's the wheat and what's the chaff and how do I get through it? And I basically just clung to keeping it really simple. And oddly enough, in my Christian path, God was actually defined in a certain way. 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, we've, 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, I 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, uh, I'm going to choose the acting and I just asked to have faith someday. And then, um,

And then, and honestly, the whole first year I went through, that was a very crazy time for me, learning the language, being isolated, being misunderstood, blah, blah. And then, 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 it was, 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 where, 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,

alone at that time at certain times in that journey but you were sort of radiating like you said lead with love so you were 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 well and that have meant digging people's wells it might mean just going and visiting that old late babushka up at the house it's lonely or go and that was really cool i got to talk to some fascinating ladies and stuff and then what go to that village help those families i'm gonna be like cut the hay be the most the hardest worker i can be because i

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 uh

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? And then, 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 but you know that type thing and but it's just a you can make up these words using different prefect you know prefixes and suffixes and like 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 some uh

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 I 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. And it was, for me, the first time, I don't know why, you were a great person to articulate that.

the flexibility and the power of the Russian language. That's really interesting. - Oh, interesting. - 'Cause you were saying like, . You could say every single order, every single combination of ordering of those words has the same meaning.

but slightly different you could like and it would change the meaning if you took ya out and just said lu blue tibia yeah there's like a different emphasis or maybe or ya tibia lu blue or something you know like all these different or just tibia lu blue also right exactly so it is rich and that and it was interesting coming from an english context and getting a glimpse of that and then wondering about all those you know russian 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 Volkonsky and Richard Previer. 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 are 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. When I listen to like world leaders that speak Russian speak and I see the translation and it loses, it loses the irony. Like in between the words, if you translate them literally, 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 that 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 that was really difficult in interaction with people to like just be the guy, you know, when there's humor going on and you're totally oblivious to it. Yeah, everybody's laughing and you're all trying to laugh along. What did they make of you? To be honest. This person that came from, descended upon us. Totally.

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, uh,

tried to work hard tried to be more useful than i was a drain all that they all i think 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 uh so like when you when you're doing fur trapping as a bird trapping was an interesting uh experience you you basically what you do in

October or something, you'll go out to your hunting cabin and 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

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 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 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

really hard trying not to get lost and stuff. How do you get from one trapping location to the next? That's funny because it was basically by landmarks and feel. I didn't have a compass and things like that. By feel. Yeah.

I got myself into trouble once. The first time I went to one cabin, I got myself into trouble. The first time I went to the other cabin, I nailed it. I had two different experiences on my first trip. The one that I nailed, I remember I had to go. It's like a day hike.

I was like, well, I know the cabin 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 all day and a kid, you know, 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, okay, I'm going to 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, uh,

I was like, well, I'm just going to 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. Cause 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 in over your head. And then I got down to the river, chopped a whole nice drink, hiked up the river, and eventually got to the other cabin. It was probably 3 in the morning or something. He chopped a hole in the ice to drink. To get some water. This has got to be like 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 here's what was funny is I got to the cabin at like 3 in the morning and I should have brushed over a lot of the misery that I felt. And I laid down. I was about to go to sleep. And then Europe charges in from there. I was like, whoa, dude, Europe, 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 and you didn't really tell him never knew neither of us said what happened it's just like oh that's interesting yeah and he probably was through similar kinds of things yeah like what gave you strength in those in those hours when you're

you know she's going to waste high snow yeah all of that you're laughing but like that's hard yeah you know that russian 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 it

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. And so when you're really in it in those moments, I guess 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, one step at a time. I'm just going to get...

Don't sit there and think, oh, that's a long ways. Just go. And then you'll look back and you've covered a bunch of ground. One of the things I've realized that was helpful in the jungle, that was one of the biggest realizations for me, is 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 good things. So being dehydrated, I'll remember drinking water.

and i won't really remember the hours of feeling like that's absolutely true like i told 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 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 the 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. So you mentioned you've learned about hunger during these times.

When was like the hungriest you've gotten? It was the first time. So to continue the story slightly, I went fur 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 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 and vouched for me. But it was during fencing season and fencing in Siberia for those reindeers, like an incredible thing. You take an ax, 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

six, three frame and just working really hard. And then in the spring in Siberia, there's no like, there's not much to forage. You know, in the fall, you can have 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 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 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 this 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, all the meat's gone from the bowl. Everybody else has grabbed the spoon in midair. And you're just like, oh, hoping this one little noodle is going to give me a lot of nourishment. 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 probably the most badass present I've ever gotten. Yeah.

So tell me the story 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 acts or style of acts 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 does 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 that means 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 X. 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, there's a little smaller. I didn't want to make it too small because you need a something to actually work out there. You need something kind of serious. Um,

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 you're never cutting down a big giant tree

And so when you swing with a single sided ax 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 going to cause deflection. And without that angle on your right hand, it's something that just like bites in there like crazy. And so, uh,

That, there's other little, you know, the handle was made by some Amish guys in Canada. This is all hand forged. 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 because when you pound a steak in, if you picture it, if it's convex, right?

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 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. It's hard to get to the middle of dry wood if just a knife or a saw. And so I can go out there, find a dead tall tree, 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 pretty fast. And so if I have an axe, 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. Of course you can use it. I use it if you're taking an animal apart or if you're, 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 it's 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 gotta be a little bit thoughtful about it have you ever injured yourself on an axe 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'd

chopped my rubber boot with my axe because it reflected off and i was new to them 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 a few years ago we left a boot like four kilometers that way so we got the reindeer took them rode them over sure enough there's a stump with a boot upside down pull it off put it on i was like sweet and back in business went back

A couple of 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 ax and swung it at the tree. And it just one handed and I deflected off and bam, right into my... Oh no. And...

I was like, oh, I fell down. I was like, oh my gosh, because you get your axe really 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. I was out in the middle of the woods. I literally knew I was in shock. I was like, I'm just going to go back to teepee right now. I ran back to teepee, laid down, and honestly, I was stuck there for a few days. I was...

It's so much pain. And my other knee was bad. It was 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. I had to like poop in it and like roll to the edge of the teepee, like shove it under the moss. Like it 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 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 what would, uh, how you start a fire when everything's around you is wet. Yeah.

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 northwoods, the best thing you can do is find a dead standing tree. So it can be downpouring 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, a foot long piece out and then split that thing open and then split it again. And then you get to that 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 catch a flame or light. And then you make a lot more kindling and little pieces of dry wood than you think because what will happen, you'll light it and it'll burn through and it's like, dang it. So just be patient. You're going to be fine. You know, like 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 that 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

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 pumped sap to it. And then there's a good point because I use this a lot. Um,

it pumps that tree full of sap and then years later the tree dies dries out 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 oil? Oh, it's a used motor oil. I add, if you mix it with some sawdust and then now the 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 Werner Herzog. You've talked about this movie. Where is that located relative to where 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 Podkamennyatunguska. And I was up there.

That river and just a little ways north is another river called the Bachta. 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's...

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 that connected to the natural world that really does feel like that's what we're designed for. And so there's a psychological benefit you gain from spending that much time in that realm. And for that reason, I think that people that are connected to those ways are able to tap into a particular realm.

I noticed it 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're always fighting. The murder rate is through the roof. The suicide rate is through the roof. But if 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 a, it's an interesting juxtaposition. It'd be the same person. But, um, but then I, 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'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 from then drinking and doing all the dark stuff when they go to the village.

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 the nature of that happiness. It's really weird. I've thought about that a lot, and I don't know the answer. It's like there's a huge draw to comfort, and it's all multifaceted and somewhat complex because 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 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 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 us 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 hard thing and 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, um, and it makes, it's quite the moving target in life. You know what I mean? So, uh, I've,

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. But pursue like a spiritual fullness. 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 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 going to do it. And 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 like giving up what I wanted, a lot of watching people I cared about. You know, you put all this effort in and then you just see the people that you put all this effort and just die and this and that. And then 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...

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 almost provided for the most in life. Now I have this career opportunity.

guiding people in the wilderness that I love. 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. 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, this 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. Um, I 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 I, 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 Arminians 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 a hundred years ago, but our gender, just 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 him 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 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 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 my grandma and her sister like

picked her up to tea. We got to keep going. And like picked her up and 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, you know, recovered from what I understand. But,

My grandma did. At the same time, in another village in Iran there, the Turks 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 doors. 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 at some point. He,

I can't remember. He like lost his money belt and like he took his jacket off, forgot it was in there. Something happened. 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 II 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 fell in love and she got married. So she had kind of an in 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 going to 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 because 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 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 the, 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,

That's a lot to go through. What lessons do you draw from that on perseverance? Look, 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 it's like somehow my grandparents died.

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 they were it was so much joy the family reunions were the best thing ever at the Jonas's and they and it's just like how in one generation did you go from that to that and and it must have been a great sacrifice of some sort to not pass and

that much resentment? What did they do to break that chain in one generation? Do you think it works the other way, where their ability to escape genocide, to escape Nazi occupation,

gave them a gratitude for life. 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. But a joyful woman, you could see it in her and she must have been so

She must have 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 dad because 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'd 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 he 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

go to school, which was really hard for her 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're 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 and,

just in being almost i mean a vegetable i'd have to help him pee 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 have 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 it'd be my duty to hand down, you know, like, but it's kind of an interesting. And be the beacon of that, represent that kind of perseverance in the,

In the simpler way that something like survival in the wilderness shows. Yeah. It rhymes. It rhymes, and it's so simple. 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? It's interesting that it's really easy, right? It's really easy. You can almost sense it in yourself to justify evil.

to justify a little bit of evil or see yourself cheer a little bit when the enemy gets knocked back in some way. It's really, in a way it's just perfectly natural 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 sense.

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, bring 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 wrong.

- This is gradual. - Yeah. - It's a gradual process of a little bit at a time. - I think that's why for me, having a path of faith works as like a mooring because it can help me shine that light on myself. It's like something else, 'cause 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,

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 definitely picture becoming 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. 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. It's really, I mean, I think it's almost,

I mean, just understanding history, 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 those that persecute you, right?

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, I'm talking about something wrong.

Other than 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 read 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...

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 that are like fuzzy, understand? That their religion helps create the substrate for which we as a species, 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 of 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 mushrooms have you ever done those mushrooms yeah uh i've done them a couple 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 can, 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 on these 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, um, 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,

And I felt like I was communing with God, whatever you want to say. And, 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, and then that infinite, uh,

um, 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 and, 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. And then, but when I had that thought, then all of a sudden I could,

relate my like 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 and but

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 a 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 putting it in a context that was applicable. But ultimately, God is sort of the thing that's formless, that is unbounded. Right. 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 or you just look at them just as they are, it seems silly. It's just 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, I get it. I understand. But I also really see the baby that's being thrown out with the bathwater. 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 you have to live it. Sometimes it's probably very difficult to articulate. Right.

Mm-hmm. In the living of it, do you realize it? Yeah, and 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,

But as placing that in front of you as the ideal is so important to put like 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. Almost, you almost won't observe it happening, you know, but, uh,

And so I so much appreciate all 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 life.

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 the one nice thing is you don't have any distractions you have all the time in the world to go into your head and uh I could play those paths out in my life and not only in my life but I feel like societally and for in generationally like I throw it all away and everybody start from square one or we can try to you know redeem what's

valuable in this and wrestle with it and so i just i chose that path well i do think it's a it's a kind of wrestling match because i'm 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. 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 is good and what is right and what is wrong you have to kind of live it uh with humility and constantly struggle because then yeah you have to you have you might wake up in a society where um you're committing genocides and you think you're the good guys and i think you have to have the 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 got 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.

sort of the full quote talks about the fact that it moves. It moves from, 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 and

In the case of the camps, you know, 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 like all parts of the world are like the strongest. Shout out to the grandmas. Seriously. It's like, I don't know what it is. I don't know. They have this like wisdom thing.

that comes from patience and have seen it all, have 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. Yeah, it's so true. What do you think of, as we've gotten a bit philosophical, what do you think of Werner Herzog's style of narration? I kind of wish he narrated my life. Yeah.

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. Have you seen the full version? Have you watched the four-part full version? You should. It's in Russian, and so you'll get the fullness of that. And it's...

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. 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 the shreds by wolves and you're just like, oh, and it's it's not as it's 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 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 machine of nature that doesn't really care about you. Totally. I think that's something I sat with a lot on that show. It was another part of the depths of your psychology to delve into. And that's when I thought, like, 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 the kind of, 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, 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 that indifference isn't it interesting that we assign so much value and love and appreciation for these animals and in some degree we get that back in a reciprocity 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 dleeny and and i just remember dleeny 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

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...

I did have my dad to watch confronted in as positive a manner as you could and that's a big advantage. And so I think when the time comes that I will be ready, but I think that's easy to say when the time feels far off. It'll be interesting if you got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow and stage four is like,

be heavy did you ever confront death while in survival situations i mean when you're i mean 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

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, Oh,

like sucked as hard as i couldn't 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 uh

And they're like, all right, well, you're always like, man, I had a buddy that died doing that with diesel a couple of years ago, you know, and I was like, 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, uh,

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 puke into the toilet and just flush your system as much as 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 I puked. I was picturing, I remember reading, you know, about the Japanese torture where they would put a hose in somebody and then make them drink water until they puked. Anyway, the...

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 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 rain. 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 up 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 surviving on earth? Well, there are places that are just purely uninhabitable. But I think as far as places that you have a chance. You have a chance, that's a good way to put it. Maybe Greenland. I think of Greenland because I think of

you know, those are Vikings that settled. There were rugged, capable dudes and they didn't make it, but there are Inuit that, that, you know, natives that live up there, but it'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. 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 a harsh, 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. 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 travel like hundreds of miles to like,

to the to the water to get fat and they travel 100 miles to like for whatever other purpose okay because it because they want to stay on the ice i don't know but it's like there's there's a process yeah and they figure it out against the long odds and some of them don't make it it's incredible it's what a what 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 women winter scraping by it's tough tough existence what do you think it would take to break you let's say mentally um like if you're in a survival situation i mean i think it would happen mentally it would have to be um

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. 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 you're there's very few things that i don't know what it would be like so on alone like on alone i i knew if i wasn't gonna and ultimately it is a game show so it's like ultimately i wasn't 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 going to, I'm going to go home, you know? But like, if you put yourself 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 we're on the scale, but that's not to say there isn't one. I know there is one.

But I have a hard time. I know I've dealt with enough pain and enough discomfort in life that I know I can deal with that. 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, if there's no way out, I don't know. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, that is a real difficult battle to,

When there's an exit, when it's easy to quit. Right. How am I doing this? Yeah. That's a thing that gets louder and louder the harder things get. That voice. It's not insignificant. If you think you're doing permanent damage to your body, you would be smart to quit. You should just not do that when it's not necessary because health is kind of all you have in some regards. Yeah.

Well, I don't blame anyone. Then they quit because of that reason. It's like, good. But if you're in a situation and 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, 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.

You don't know what the limit is. I don't know. Injuries, like physical stuff, is annoying though. Isn't it weird? I can have a good life, happy life, and then you have a bad back or you have a headache. It's amazing how much that can overwhelm your experience. Again, that was something I saw in Dad that was 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, I, 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 because it's so easy to have. 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, 'cause those can be really painful. - It's overwhelming. - And dizzying and all of this. That's inspiring, that's inspiring that you found it. - There's not nothing in that. Somehow you can tap into purpose even in that pain. I guess I would just speak from 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 wrote a note on your blog in 2012, you spent five weeks-ish in the forest alone. I just thought it was interesting, 'cause this is in contrast to on the show alone. You were really alone, like 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. Did your thoughts go into some deep place? Yeah, I'd say my mental life was really active. 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. 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 they're 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 confront it because in our modern world, when you're always distracted, you're 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 the skeletons. Yeah, exactly. I recommend it. So you said you guide people. What are your favorite places to go to? Well, if I tell them, then is everybody going to go there?

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 on 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, 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, that was pretty high up there on the list. But all these places have such kind of unique things about Canada. Like where they did a loan, it's not typically what you'd say, right?

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 smooth 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? Back to where the Alone show was? No, we're going back this summer. I'm going to take a guided trip up there and take a bunch of people. I'm really looking forward to being able to enjoy it without the pressure. It's going to be a fun trip. What advice would you give to people in terms of how to be in nature? So like hikes to take or journeys to take out in nature where 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 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...

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 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 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 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 such an amazing time with, you know,

buildings and roads and airplanes 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 help 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 it's getting sharper and sharper i i've talked yeah i'll like argue with my brother about that sometimes he takes the more positive view and i'm like i mean it's great we've done great but man more and more people with nuclear weapons and more it's just gonna take one mistake with the more power

I think there's something about the sharpness of the knife's edge that gets humanity to really focus and step up and not screw it up. There is, just like you said with the cold, going out into the extreme cold, it wakes you up. I think the same thing with nuclear weapons. It just wakes up humanity. 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, I appreciated your little post the other week where you said you wanted some kids. You know, that's a very direct way to relate to the future and to have hope for the future. I can't wait.

And hopefully I'll 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, onto 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 "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 US 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. 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 slash AMA. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.