#853: Jordan Jonas, Champion of Alone — The Art of Survival, Lessons from Nomadic Tribes, Hardship as the Path to Peace, How to Handle Rogue Wolverines, and Why Not to Photograph Attacking Bears

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45:41So we're going to get back to hopping trains in a second, but you kind of passed over Gulag archipelago and you're like, had an influence, had an impact on me. It seems like that might be an understatement. I don't know. For people who are wondering, this is not a light breezy hundred page read and we're going to come to that in just a second but what did your childhood education look like i was homeschooled so my mom took it real seriously and she was pretty hands-on in teaching us so and i for whatever reason really got into history as a young kid so even probably was 12 i read this big i remember my first real thick book but it was about iwo jima and like world war ii and other battles and then i got really into those memoirs read a bunch of german memoirs from world war ii which were always crazy because they had to go through so much and then the russian ones because i was anyway got in all the memoirs and then somehow came across the gulag archipelago and i was fairly young you know i was probably 17 18 when i first read it and it impacted me in a lot of ways that were relevant to my the little spiritual path that I was on before because a lot of what he talks about is that happiness can't be our ultimate goal in life.

47:03We have to have purpose. Could you, just for people who, and certainly I'm not intimately familiar with it, but what is, what is written about? Alexander Shulzhenitsyn was a guy who's on the front in world war two and wrote a letter back criticizing Stalin or something. And of course he got checked and he got arrested and sent to a gulag, which were the Soviet prison camps that kind of snaked their way all through the Soviet Union. They were particularly harsh on political prisoners as opposed to crime prisoners. So they would send these guys out to basically death camps and have them mine or do the labor, basically.

47:43They kept the thing going. But they were designed to be really brutal and dark places. The fact that even because the political prisoners were the bottom of the rung they allowed the like rapists and those guys to kind of rule the roost and set the rules and so they degraded into some pretty terrible situations but this was all unknown basically to the west and he was a some kind of a brilliant mind and he over his eight or however many years he was in the prison camp had an encyclopedic ability to like remember maybe he wrote down i don't know but all these stories of people who have been through all these situations and when you read it i was just struck by like man there's a little paragraph about this lady that lady should have her own book like that's a crazy amount of tragedy and story and and all the stuff packed in those books another example of something that really stood out was like you know when you get in prison everybody says to themselves i'm gonna survive you know then you add it at any cost to the end almost nonchalantly and then pretty soon you start down this path where you're basically stomping on others to survive because you need to look out for number one survival of the fittest and he was like and everybody basically adopted that mentality he's like except for these occasional the corrupt orthodox church had somehow created these babush guys these old ladies that didn't allow their soul to go down that path and he's like they all died but they all were a light in the darkness on their way and then kind of gets at the point of yeah the lose your life but don't lose your soul and like happiness can't be your ultimate goal that can be taken from you by a health change or by getting thrown in a gulag or by whatever it is you have to have something deeper and so forging a purpose you know i wanted to talk about the homeschooling because not that there is a single mold, but there are certain, I suppose, maybe archetypes that people might have in their heads as to what constitutes like a rugged mountain man effectively.

49:54And I was chatting with my girlfriend last night and she was like, he doesn't really fit my vision of like a rugged mountain man, which is not, She's not saying you're not rugged, but when you're talking about, and I'm sure we'll get to this, like Assyrian history and reading Gulag Archipelago as a 17-year-old, these are not terribly common things that get woven together. How did your mom do the homeschooling? What did a week look like or the lesson plans? Does that make any sense? I'm just wondering, because homeschooling, I think for a lot of people in the United States seems like an aberration, But when you look at some of the people whose books we read, a lot of them had some equivalent of homeschooling.

50:36Yeah. You know what I think it kind of is, is it's a public school. There is a standard and everybody's going to be taught to that standard. And there's kind of a minimum bar in this and that. Homeschooling allows for more divergent options, both on the negative and the positive. You can keep your kid at home and not teach him anything and go on. But also you can really focus on your kid's unique interests and abilities and they can really excel and develop those in a way you wouldn't in kind of the public school realm so because i was yeah really into history you know we leaned into that and i had the time to because honestly in a public school setting you burn up so much time going into reason you know just dinking around whereas i could get done with my actual academic schooling in just a couple hours in the morning a few hours maybe and go on to my interests and so it allows you to do that but and she kind of taught us you know initially she was really hands-on and then the older we got it was more hands-off where we had to be more self-taught and follow this whatever curriculum she had and then the last two years of school so my last junior and senior year i went to a public high school and got that experience got socialized got socialized which was an odd experience i'm not sure what i think of the socialization but prefer i was gonna say prefer to be an indoor cat you're not really an indoor cat no but it so with homeschooling though i think it has a really awesome thing you know i think it's great that it's an option in the country it is one thing if you're homeschooled you have to focus on its weakness which is community and friends and developing that so for people that I think that's an interesting option.

52:20Just know that that's its weakness and then account for that in how you organize. That's what we do with our kids. How do you account for it with your kids? We're really active in trying to be the catalyst for community in our town. We're always ready to hang out and we got them in jujitsu and we got them in gymnastics and got them in all the things and then make phone calls, foster hiking trips with the other families and make sure we're like multiple times a week getting the kids together with their friends and stuff you know you just really put effort and focus on that it also strikes me that the ability to build community and social bonds and therefore socialize but not in some oddly artificial environment is kind of dependent on activities maybe this is particularly true for boys i don't know but what i observed when i was at your house i just remember your kids cousins visiting and they were always outside doing something right which i think is important right they're not just sitting around talking that's not actually natural for most humans including adults to just do that all the time there were shared activities and then when the cousins left i guess it was your middle child who is just crying and is so adorable.

53:46But just such heartfelt deep connections. And similarly, it's like when we were out in the woods and we were sitting around, your brother was there. Maybe he had a thing or two to do with the jiu-jitsu influence. I don't know. Another reason to never start fights. You would not see him and be like, I'm terrified of that guy. And yet, he could absolutely bend you into a pretzel and cause lots of orthopedic life. lung problems. We were out there, it was your brother, a couple of llamas, one with a slightly lopsided head prone to falling over. It's a long story. And just a few guys, two of my close friends and we're all around a fire.

54:27And I can't remember who said it. Maybe it was your brother, maybe it was Mike, but oh, I get it. I see why this is again, not, it's not saying this is a purely gendered thing but this is what he said because it was all guys it was not okay who said now i see why guys like fire so much because they can connect and talk without making eye contact you can just look at the fire having something that is like ancillary no i i thought it was a fun observation i've paid a little more attention to it ever since but it does just give you something a third party to we should have a little start a little fire on the table here for sure having a common activity like that and we are fortunate enough to just be able to live in a place that's really conducive to sending the kids outside and it's something i've obviously tried to foster in them so they do spend a lot of time just running around and being creative and you know they don't have one thing i've avoided a bit is phones and stuff like that and i think it is fairly low-hanging fruit because i mean you can see how they affect us in our everyday life we get distracted and we get kind of disoriented with them i would say and with kids it's even so much more cute so they have to go out and run around and play and have fun well you've also engineered this i mean it's a very fancy term to use but like you've designed that into your life as a deliberate environment and place yeah you could have been in a lot of other places and as for instance i'm training this very large puppy right now although i think i'm being trained a lot more probably in any case very different personality from my other dog probably mixed with anatoline shepherd very stubborn and when you're trying to train a dog like that i remember dog trainer said to me, if you're using treats as an example, you have to tip with 20s because the bar is crowded.

56:29There are a lot of distractions. And when I think about kids, and of course, I do not have kids yet. I hope to in the very near future. But if you're sitting in an apartment in the city and you're like, kids, you can't use your phone, what are you offering them as an alternative right it's like what is the alternative that is more compelling and you've deliberately put yourself in an environment where there's you have quite a lot to choose from right right and that has been intentional and obviously that is probably more difficult if you have a small apartment and you live in a city you know i imagine it takes a lot more hands-on going to the park or you know there's a lot of creative outlets in learning to paint learning an instrument learning of this or that that may scratch that itch for me i did have it as a high priority to let the outdoors be a big part of our life so i moved where that was possible and i have you know structured our life such i got the llamas you know we're joking about initially so that i could take the family out on one two week long trips rather than because i just couldn't carry enough gear to take them out for shorter so it's been really intentional it's been great and it's something to work out in a more urban context but it's not what i where i'm at llamas people might be like llamas really are we in the andes what's going on yeah why llamas you know the reindeer history now when i first got back from russia i thought it would be amazing to pack with reindeer in america so i lived in idaho and there was a law against owning reindeer north of a certain border i contacted my legislature or whatever there and oddly responsive pretty soon i was in meetings at the government with the government officials and they overturned the law so now you can own reindeer in north idaho unfortunately part of that was they had to be in a high fence so it kind of ruined the ability of what i was envisioning to like so you couldn't you couldn't back them out yeah i couldn't like load them full of gear and pack up in the woods so you know then your only other options are horses and llamas and i honestly just hadn't grown up with horses and there is quite a learning curve on them they're dangerous you know everybody that does a lot with horses has some kind of stories of getting hurt on them for people who have no idea how big are llamas they're about 350 pounds a lot smaller they're a lot smaller a lot smaller and they i'm sure there are cases where they might but they tend not to kick they're very like safe and you can have like mean angry llamas of course like you can have a bad bitey dog but you know if you have a good llama it's they're oddly chill animals you can go up on the woods and they don't like tear up the ground they sit there quietly the kids can ride them so in that way they're quite nice for kids obviously adults can't but they can pack the gear and I can walk without gear as long as I want to so you know those great advantages of horses and I love them but for me the low maintenance and low risk of a llama just i was like well if you can't have reindeer i guess that's the next closest thing are there any terrain or sure-footedness advantages to llamas i'm thinking about for instance like horses versus donkeys right like it seems like there are some advantages of using donkeys over horses yeah the uh main advantage everybody should follow uh hobo jordo on instagram because you have photos of the aftermath of some horses going yeah cartwheeling down an incline yeah don't want to be caught up in that yeah it's easy to get killed i think yeah this is the common historical theme so-and-so got bucked off the horse in the fourth crusade ended or whatever yeah where were we going advantages of llamas on terrain terrain yeah so they have saw you know like the horse you have a metal shoe on the bottom and metal particularly on rock is pretty slippery and so you'll do a lot of slipping and sliding on rocks the llamas have a soft pad with two little claws they look like little raptor claws in the front and so it's actually quite interesting to see how they work they're very small yeah they're small little paws but they can stick on like a wet rock and that soft paddle grip and they can walk up and down the rocks or if you're in mud or soft dirt you see those two little front claws dig in like a raptor claw and they can climb up that yeah the terrain issues are pretty great the other pack animal people use is goats and those are nice because you can really go over boulders and like rant you know they can hop from this to that they're not they're somewhere in between a horse and a goat as far as their off-roading abilities but sounds like you would have to have a whole caravan of goats for carrying capacity and goats also are always with you like with a llama i can tie them up and go hike up this way and that way.

1:01:25The goats are always with you. You can't tie them up and you can't leave them anywhere. Chaos will ensue. But they're funny little critters, but they weren't my cup of tea. Let's hop to purpose, which I feel like looking back at your family history, looking back, and is it fair just to tie up one loose end with Gulag Archipelago. How analogous is it to Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? Yeah, it's really similar. I think it's like the thicker version of that. It's like Gulag Archipelago light would be that Man's Search for Meaning. Yeah, got it. Okay. Could you give us...

1:02:35a bit of your family history. word yeah there's a kind of i guess you would almost call it the indigenous people of the middle east you know before kind of the arab takeovers and stuff were aramaic speaking assyrians is what they're called so that's what my family was they lived in northwestern iran kind of near a lake called lake ermia and during the chaos of world war one you know there had been the ottoman empire was crumbling and all these people who had been under the ottoman like colonial yoke were seeking out their independence and their freedom and breaking off and in all that chaos basically i think what happened was they it was an easy time to get rid of a entire people group you know like actually anatolia you have an anatolian shepherd was a pretty diverse place up until then after that time it was basically just turks and kurds left you know like the the greeks the assyrians their armenians kind of got all ran out of there in what what were the reasons for running them out it's complicated it's not history's not black and white they were minorities because those groups were christian overall living in you know under the ottoman umbrella and so sporadically at times they would live okay and then at times there would be big massacres and over the course of centuries there were just constant it wasn't a pleasant way to live i guess would be the quick way to put it and so there's sporadic massacres kind of all the time and then so when world war one happened you couldn't blame them for wanting independence you know and so a lot of those christian minorities joined with the british or the russians to try to forge out their new nation states that were forming from the crumbling ottoman empire and at the same time nationalism was really rising and there was a big turkey for the turks movement like we don't want other people here and that was ultimately the movement with the most power and so when the russian empire collapsed from the bolshevik revolution they They kind of left a vacuum in these areas that they'd kind of provided a bit of a defense for.

1:04:52And because of that crazy nationalist fervor that was going on, the Turks decided that they could just kill or expel all the minorities who, you know, of course, some of them had been problematic in that there was like these freedom movements everywhere, collective punishment at a massive scale. and obviously my my grandparents were kind of out of it because they were in iran but when the russian presence left there the turks went into there too and it was basically at that point it was just a kind of a uncontrolled well ultimately it would be a genocide it killed like 750 000 assyrians and millions plus armenians and you know it was quite a disaster so my grandma and grandpa both of them would ultimately be for all practical purposes sole survivors like their families were completely wiped out my grandpa was in a village when they were coming in and burning it down and his dad was in a wheelchair basically put a money belt on him and told him just he was 17 told him just run and don't look back he looked back to see his dad's house on fire you know with his dad in it he never knew what his sister happened to his sister ended up getting taken in by some jesuit priests and kind of raised in that there and then uh my grandma had a different story where they the ottoman empire was still kind of conscious of like trying to put on a image to the world and so instead of i mean there was plenty of just straight up massacres but instead of they called them deportations but they were kind of deportations to nowhere so they just drove people out into the desert and marched them around until they died and so my uh grandma and she had seven siblings and a mom her dad was taken off to be shot and then they just drove him around in the desert until all but the mom my great-grandmother and one sister of my grandma were left you know the baby just had died and the mom fell down he's like i just can't go on anymore and my shalom my grandma and shushan like picked her up like we gotta keep going at some point there they split off from the guards or whatever stumbled through and were were actually ended up being rescued by a british military like outpost type thing and then they were taken to a refugee camp mom and the sister never recovered really from just the trauma and then grandma was sent to baghdad and raised in a refugee camp so these two people kind of lost everything even they're like i mean the assyrian people nation kind of almost vanished like there's aramaic is what they speak it's like almost a gone language now you know it's very just small fragments of it hanging on so they've kind of lost everything and then they met in baghdad somehow you know got married immigrated to france right before world war ii and then you know the nazi invasion happened and there was a whole they have a whole series of stories from you know kind of the deprivation at that time they were already poor immigrants arriving there and then they like go through that whole nazi education and then then they eventually made it to america and actually died not long after so my dad was 10 when his parents died and was raised by his sisters but But what I find something to be that I think about a lot is that they ended up having 11 kids, you know, so they had a really big family.

1:08:34And I would go to all these family unions with my aunts and uncles and my dad and this and that. And they were just the most joyful, fun, so much love and joy and family and all of this. It was a real bright spot in my childhood. And then it was just that Jonas family stuff. And then you almost take it for granted until you step back and you're like, wait a second. We're one generation from like, this is my grandma and her dad, you know, grandpa had their entire families wiped out and lost their whole culture and had to immigrate and give up everything and then had to do that again. And then, but somehow they've raised like a really joyful family, like a full of people and our like conversations were never about like, those people did that to us.

1:09:18and like this is what happened you know it was never hate was never the common language it was always love and family and and now there's like some old grainy videos of grandma and grandpa and and they're just laughing and eating you know they raised rabbits and eating rabbit around the table and laughing and you think well that's so interesting i don't know what cross they bore and i know my dad said his dad used to always sit in his closet and pray and he's like you know i'm sure he had like a lot to deal with but they didn't pass it down one generation which is impressive you know and they not only did they not pass it down they built and put into the world something really beautiful which is my family including my dad and so leading into what you're talking about dad it's something that i think about regularly more than you would think because maybe i have a history and orientation but just the fact that that's a legacy that i have that we all have you know shared humanity but what a thing to be able to live up to like i don't have to be defined by the hardship and the tragedy in a negative way it's like you can expect you can see how other people have risen to that occasion and come out of it and created and so when i find myself in a hard situation in the past or now or whatever you know you can you have that to look at hang on to having a choice yeah you have a choice of how to relate to it i mean there were so many people and i they're just like you have every right to be fully traumatized and never recover you know what i mean like there's no judgment on my front for that but on the other hand it's like what about those few people that did somehow recover or well you know i don't know what you would call it but they somehow built something in the world in spite of the like unimaginable horrors you know watching your family get killed and raped and all the things that went on and then just being able to build a loving family is pretty impressive yeah well let's talk about your dad i mean whether by nature or nurture or both he made seemingly some pretty remarkable choices as well yeah so he grew up as a obviously a son of immigrants in america and they was raised by mostly his sister out on you know and so he all i think he really wanted was a family and stability and wanted to work hard and you know his most joyful moments as when i was growing up was just when he'd come home from work and we'd run out and give him a hug i think that was his like life most fully lived was just being a provider and being able to you know he was an engineer so he was a smart guy and you know they're like just create a family that's really what he wanted he was very family oriented but then it was interesting because when he had also had childhood diabetes and polio so he had some health issues and he wasn't great at managing his diabetes well so when he was probably about i mean i was pretty young i guess you know he's still a teenager probably he started to you know get the sores on your feet that you get and then basically because of the degrading situation with his feet he lost his job and all of a sudden he had to watch as my mom had to go back to school which was something that was very difficult for her because he's just not academic but no longer could dad be the provider he was basically somebody we had to care for because he ended up losing his foot and this and that it was like a 12 year process of his health degrading and it was really hard for him like he had to you know his mom's going to school and we had to go to the food bank and i remember him just like crying like oh i failed like the one thing he wanted to do yeah brutal i remember and then his foot finally recovered and he and i went out in the woods and we were splitting wood and he like crushed his foot into the log splitter oh and it was oh deflate yourself so then they just amputated his other foot and so basically he lost his ability his physical ability to to pursue his purpose in the world that was really difficult for him to do he had to watch his family suffer and this and that and then but then it was interesting over the years to watch him well so from my perspective as a son from my mom's perspective ever as a wife we never lost sight of his purpose you know like we we knew who he was in our lives it was never about the money he was bringing home or this or that it was like man he what an encourager and you know what a joyful person and all that and we never lost sight of that he did but then it was interesting to see over the course of those 12 years of health degradation how it was almost like he had to refine his purpose and he did and then when his health was at its worst then he was on dialysis and in tons of pain and stuff was in a way when his like spiritual giftings or something were at their peak like he was really able to i could hear him at night crying in pain and like oh and then in the morning he would oh jordan you're you know doing great and this and that and let's read this psalm together let's do this you know he was very much he refound his purpose in pouring into us and into facing the loss of his health and his own death with joy and that's what he did he found he was like finally he was like man it's i'm in too much pain it's too degrading you know to have me rolling him off the bed and i take him to dialysis he's like i'm just gonna stop going to dialysis and that was a hard decision for him but when he did it was just like all right let's just party for the next two weeks you know he's diabetic so finally he could eat all the crap food he wanted we all had tons of laughs and he was kind of full of joy right up until the end and you're like what a cool legacy to see someone face all that and see purpose not in their life even but even in how to face death and the way he did that we're all going to be in the same position where we lose our whether our health or whatever inevitable suffering is coming down the hatch i now have a template for how to face that in a way that i'm still putting into the world some kind of light because i could see that it's not only possible but you know i could see the template for doing that so it's interesting having seen that it really makes you grateful for the like the blessing i have now and that i do know what i love to do and that i have an opportunity to share it with others i know my even like my purpose now as it is but i also know that's going to have to evolve with inevitabilities of aging and everything else and so it's interesting to make sure your priorities now are in such a way that as you have to shift directions that you'll be able to make that adjustment like they should rhyme it's not going to be something completely different that's just going to evolve into a little bit different angle when you think of your dad's purpose changing over those 12 years is one way to view it as him going from prioritizing how he acted in the world like how he does things in the world to how he then supports and teaches the rest of you in the family i mean was he taking on more of a teacher role?

1:16:41Was it a supporter role? I mean, maybe not explicitly, but definitely implicitly. His gifting was that he really was an encourager and was really joyful and, you know, people enjoyed being around him. And he was able to lean into those skills, those gifts, in spite of the fact that he couldn't walk or that he didn't have hands or whatever. And so I think you lean into those giftings that you have that are not dependent on what you're on your ability to produce you know which is great while you have it after he stopped dialysis how long did he last after that it was about a week it wasn't as long even as we expected you know like i might be up to two weeks or whatever i had about i think about a weekend his temperature just spiked and then that was it we were all around and did you at the time understand his decision to be honest i actually he was really struggling with it because you know he was also a man of faith and i remember him reading you know he was like because he really was having a hard time hanging on you know because it's the pain the amount of pain he was in and stuff but he was like it says here you know the lord will never give you more than you can bear and i remember actually in conversation with him well, that's actually not true, dad.

1:18:01Like everybody that's died was given more than a bear. It says it won't tempt you beyond your ability to bear, which is a different thing. You know, you're kind of on a different realm. And so we had that conversation. So it's not that I was, I wanted him to hang on as long as possible, but I also wanted him to have the freedom. We talked a lot about how it's weird in the modern world where you have this choice that we've never had in the past where you have to now choose when to stop going to dialysis or stop doing this or that. or you can just drag on your inevitable downfall kind of forever.

1:18:35And so I think it was ultimately, it just came down to the fact that he wasn't ever going to get better. He recognized that he was in a lot of pain. And I think he wanted to free in a final act, you know, you kind of free us up to probably something. I'm going to use the, some of the kind of promises and perils of modern healthcare. And like you said, to extend the runway, sometimes in cases where the quality of life just entails so much suffering or lack of awareness that it just it raises a lot of ethical questions right that we didn't have to face 200 years ago 300 years ago just to take a closer look at modern living and specifically where i want to go with that is uh maybe we could take it to our trip in the mountains because particularly since we weren't doing any hunting if you're hunting then you have to time your rhythm with your quarry and it's a different situation but i remember asking you at one point i was like so when are we waking up tomorrow and you're like well we want to wake up and i suppose the and this comes back to the venki as well and living in a settlement where you are managing someone else's property or an employee of the government versus having more flexibility in the way you structure your life in your days right i would just love you to hear you riff on sort of over structure versus too little structure versus where humans kind of naturally fall the first glimpse i got of this way of life that we've lost in the modern context was actually riding trains where it's like you wake up in the morning.

1:20:24I don't have anything you have to do. I just got to figure out where to get food and water. And that's basically it. Can you give us like a minute or two of just like how on earth did you end up hopping trains? The quick minute or two of that was that my brother had for whatever reason done it for years. He hitchhiked and didn't like relying on people to pick them up. Somehow he heard about riding trains, jumped on one and probably a lot to do with this freedom that we're about to discuss. Just loved it. And you know, and in 10 years, he basically, or seven or eight or 10, however many years, he just rode trains.

1:20:58And at some point when I was 18 or so invited me to go along. And, and so I did, which was probably a fork in my road, just from having a job and doing the stuff to all of a sudden, pretty, pretty wide fork. But while you glimpse what I think is the appeal there is that that rhythm of life that humans are designed for that we've lived for as long long as humans have been around then i would really get immersed in again living with the natives later where yeah you wake up and you have a things you have to do but there's no particular schedule they're all directly tied to your existence right now you know you're not working to make money to put in your 401k so that later this you know it's just all very direct it's like oh let's go catch some fish today we're hungry or the reindeer might be getting away let's go heard them back and you know you kind of have these uh activities that are directly related to your life and in that you would know the proper terminology but it feels like your dopamine and your serotonin all that kind of stuff is just lined up properly well you're living the way that we have evolved to live exactly and so you're in the right mold basically for that and i've described it before but when you're successful on a hunt or when you're like get into some good fish you're in that rhythm so you just couldn't be more joyful than that there's just no more that's it that's your max human experiences this is amazing yeah you know and we didn't have to earn a bunch of money and it's just a it's just so much more accessible in a way well it also makes me think about sorry to jump in but when you were talking about your brother and his german shepherd who had never done any herding and a couple of goats like running amok and your brother started trying to gather them and the german shepherd just clicked into what it is artificially evolved to do and boom it was off to the races rhythm of life knew exactly what it needed to do and humans are not that different no we're not and we have so many layers on top of that simplicity that sometimes it gets it's all feels like hacks you know as we know like even you look on your phone oh i got seven likes just a little hack of our berry picking reception but it's not you never quite fully get there it was always a little bit hard to articulate i was like i just life feels just more realistic you're more like in the world but it's a little bit difficult to articulate well it seems very tangible in the sense that like you're dealing with fewer layers of abstraction yeah you're not like i'm gonna do this thing to then ensure this other thing that will give me more happiness in the future it's like i know i'm gonna need to eat in a few hours or i'd prefer to eat you don't need to eat in a few hours you get fast but you're like yeah i kind of like to eat yeah i'd like to be warm yeah okay i'd like to sleep tonight so it's like okay when cause and effect are very related it's very easy to track and not just track but like have the gratification of individual cause and effect yeah and that's very tangible and it was so much so that this is only a working hypothesis but when i was living with the natives you know i had the issue that i it wasn't my native language and as much as they were you know i love those people and they're my friends it wasn't like my family it wasn't the people that you grow up with you know but i was like i wonder if everybody would choose this way of life if it was in a little bit more pleasant climate and with the too modern with the too modern a little bit maybe a negative 20 and not negative 50 modern medicine and food security are amazing and so aside from that it's like i wonder if people wouldn't choose this way of life even people that just have no idea that they might like the outdoors can i give like a sidebar experience that sometimes comes along with this you were talking about a little bit earlier today but can you talk about the bear incident specifically that you're mentioning earlier with your friend with the gun we had that we were this is a time where we'd kind of gone out in the woods and a bunch of we'd taken a bunch of the younger dudes that were living in the village and kind of drinking and my fur trapping buddy has his big fur trapping territory and he was like oh you should get these kids out there and just like spend the summer you know and have them living off the land and just because i'm curious is this sable or what are they sables what they fur trap so we were out it's been a summer out on that territory invited a handful of these guys and it was great we had a horse out there and you know cutting hay with for it and all that with the sigh and living off the land basically all that we fished and hunted well one day we came out i heard my buddy was sleeping and he woke up and he was like and you could hear the dogs barking like crazy well we woke up and i thought man that dumb dog just barks at every squirrel this or that and so i didn't get up and look well my buddy goes out to brush his teeth and runs back he's a bear out there i jumped up and we look out and a bear just 150 yards you know not far at all from our cabin had killed a moose what kind of bears are we talking about these are brown bears just some kind of brown bear in siberia and they uh bigger than a black bear yeah bigger than a black bear some kind of a grizzly so we come out and the bear like took off up in the woods they're like what is that laying over there and you know here enough it's a big fresh warm moose right oh no way so we it was a windfall for us so of course like cut it up and take it back to camp we dug a big pit into the permafrost you know as a makeshift fridge and threw the meat in there and then a few days later that bear came back with a vengeance like he's not pleased he was not pleased he came back first sign was one of our dogs just ran into the little cabin and under the bed or whatever and then the other one we started hearing barking outside and then the bear was it was a lot of tall brush in the area so we could just hear i could just hear the bear just through the ripping through the brush and then ripping this way and that i was like oh it was pretty intense right off the bat i was like holy crap so i grabbed the sks which is like a assault rifle is basically what they use to hunt over there and run out of the cabin and like go kind of towards where the dog's barking i figure the bear was over there so i'm walking over towards this bark and then yorka one of the younger guys was behind me and when we just hear this the bear was right behind us and snorted like whoa like flip around and then it just charged through the alders and we're like oh well that was crazy like what's the dog barking and so then you could hear this kerfuffle out in the woods i was like i'll hear you take the gun i'm gonna take the my little three megapixel camera i had at the time and i love that that's your reflex let me take some photos it seems like a great perfect time it was a bad choice in the end but anyway I gave the gun to Yurka same thing we're like kind of paying attention to where we last heard the chaos and again the bear was behind us like move and snorted again and Yurka just took off running with the gun and he full on ran and disappeared from my sight I had had my knee issues we discussed earlier so I actually couldn't run nor would I want to from a predator so I kind of just stood there I was like oh my gosh I'm just here now what do i do with my stupid 3.5 megapixel camera and so anyway he was gone a long it felt like a very long time it was right at 30 seconds to a minute like a good enough long time that i was like what in the world and then finally he comes back in his knees he's like i can't do this my knees are shaking and i was like i was like you got the gun like don't run and then right as i said that the bear like stood up in front of us and he just boom boom boom boom boom and filled this old magazine into it and it took off and you know we ended up getting it which we you know then we were i was laughed at him because we were joking around but they had always been telling me like you know us a vinky one shot one kill and then it was like vietnam but then uh it was a crazy you know it's pretty intense and then it was also interesting because i was the first bear that I was with them with when they killed and they had this whole ritual of how they honored the bear.

1:29:32The word, the Avenki word for bear is grandpa. A maca. And then they take the eyeballs out. They took the eyeballs out and put them under a rock so that when the spirit of the bear came back, it wouldn't see who did what to it. And then the funny, the better part was they took the intestines and threw them in the river. So when it did come back, it would be the neighboring village. that the intestines floated to that caught the wrath. But yeah, that was a pretty intense little moment there. We're going to do one more story. I mean, these are all going to be stories. We're going to do one more story.

1:30:08Some of the native hunters are better than others. I'm going to put QU. Also involves moose, if I'm not mistaken. Canoe? Oh, this is great. Yeah, this is another hilarious story. There were these two mid-60s women that were going to come out to the tribe. So there's the village, the native village, 500 people. It was about a 12-hour float from a place that's a common stop that the nomads often stop. So they had found out that we were going to be there. So these old ladies are going to come out and visit the tribe. It's just a 12-hour float. so you don't really need much to get there at the end of the day and can eat when you get there so all they brought as you any native did would be an axe and so they untied their rope it was an aluminum boat and jumped in the boat and they're just floating along well picture two you know senior citizen women floating down and there's a moose swimming across the the the lake and as As you do, we got to kill this thing.

1:31:15We'll be the heroes or whatever. So they rode up next to it. And with the rope that was attached to the front of their boat, they lassoed over the, I don't know, the antlers or the neck of this thing. But at the same time, they had the axe. They pictured themselves like chopping it in the neck and trying to kill it. But of course, got traction on the shore and on the water before they were able to pull that off and took off into the woods and skied these ladies in this boat. behind them like several hundred yards up into the woods before it finally went through these two trees and snapped the rope off and it disappeared and those ladies like no just were gone for a few days they had to like sit by the side of the river till the next people they couldn't carry their boat so they just sat there until finally somebody floated by that could help them drag their boat back to the water and the lady they made it out the lady was very funny because we then had to get back to the village eventually.

1:32:13It was like, you know, by land, it was like a 30-kilometer reindeer ride. And that poor lady and I had the same problem. I would always fall off the reindeer, but she was the only other person that apparently had that problem because they just put the saddle on loosely. It's not like a horse saddle where you kind of cinch it up. They just throw it on, and it kind of wobbles, but they get used to it, and so they can kind of ride along. and it took me a long time to use to, but obviously it took her also a long time. And I was walking, but we were in the rain, and that poor lady, every time we crossed a river or a puddle or anything, there was a swoosh.

1:32:50I kept lifting her back on, but it was very funny. That was a great, great story. They're a different breed of people that when grandma sees the moose swimming across the river, decide to hatch it in the neck. accent at all. All right. So I'd be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about Alone, which is probably the only let's call it reality TV show that I've watched two full seasons of in the last. Which were they? Decades. Six and seven. Oh, yeah. The word on the street, otherwise known as the internet, was that season six, which you were a part of, and season seven were kind of two of the highlights.

1:33:32Yeah, yeah, yeah. with some insane fucking events that transpire in these two seasons. If you ever have to, you know, I had to, well, had to, I chose after elbow surgery to do hyperbaric oxygen treatments for a host of reasons. Um, sidebar on that. If you're going to do that needs to be hard shell medical grade, you know, typically like two to 2.5 atmospheres. Don't do any soft shell stuff. It's a waste of time, but what do you do? you're just sitting there and especially in a hard chill you can't bring anything in but they set up tvs and so so my guilty pleasure turned into watching these multiple seasons of alone of alone so for the season that you were a part of the format of the show changed a bit over time but it was referred to along the lines of kind of the the super bowl of survival right right and In your particular season, season six, what was the format?

1:34:36The quick summary of the show is, yeah, 10 people go out in the woods all by yourself. You self-film, and you get to pick 10 basic tools like an axe and a ferro rod and a sleeping bag and a few things like that. And then they drop you all off in different areas in the wilderness, and the person that lasts the longest wins. and hypothetically, you know, indefinitely, I think maybe there was a year cut off, but hypothetically a year plus you might stay out there if people really get into a groove. So, so yeah, that was the format of the season. It's a fairly simple concept. What was the location?

1:35:10Northwest Territories, Canada. So we're just south of the Arctic Circle, right? Yeah. Right at the... Not warm. Not warm, not warm, but conveniently very similar parallel to where I was in Siberia. yeah yeah it's very i mean the the it seems like having watched two seasons and some other shows also that were i mean alone is my favorite i mean you learn so much if you're into any um degree of this is a great show honestly you really learn a lot because you get to see a lot of different approaches and what seems to work and what doesn't and there are multiple approaches that seem to work yeah right like just don't build a cabin yeah just do i mean no seriously don't try to build like abraham lincoln log cabin that image in your mind don't try to do that but then you got like stone house in season seven like i mean i probably wouldn't have tried to do it because i'd be afraid of like blowing a gasket for sure but it worked yeah uh very different from the shelter that you built yeah yeah let's talk about the tools for a second because there were things that would not be obvious to someone watching the show that I found interesting.

1:36:18For instance, when we were out in the woods, you showed me, this is going to require a little explanation, so you'll have to explain what basic paracord could be used for. Yeah, right, right. But you've got this, looks like a transatlantic cable of paracord. Which was not allowed on the show. It was not allowed. Yeah, you had to have basic paracord. But it's a single cord that has fishing line and filament and all sorts of things yeah super handy i've never seen it what is that called survival cord and it has uh you know a tinder material inside of it you can pull out it's kind of a wax coated thing uh catches spark well and then it has a snare like kevlar cable so you make a snare and then it has a fishing line and then the regular string that usually comes in the paracord and paracord is just a string that has an outer sheath and then a bunch of little inner strands that are more like individual strings and they're kind of twisted together and make for a strong rope or you can break it down into useful bits turn into a gill net yeah turn into a gill net which is which proves to be seems to be one of the winning yeah gill net's hard to beat it's such a passive way of collecting food and they're what is a gill net a gill net is a it's just a big net that you throw in the water and set in the water in such a way that fish swimming by get caught in it fish can't back up so when they swim into a net if it's sized properly to their body and gills they'll get caught in it and then they just sit there so just for definition of terms snare kind of similar right in the sense that you're trying to get a given animal around the neck yeah and you have to size it properly yeah so snaring is another uh in an actual survival situation it's kind of the not the golden ticket but incredibly important you know it's also usually illegal in most places because it's really effective but if you're really starving it would be yeah you size to what you're trying to catch so like a hair would be about the size of your fist you make a piece of wire or if you only have string a loop about that big set it on the trail and do some things to try to sorry i'm laughing because another story just came to mind

1:38:34so in another example of footage you're not going to see on the show so i give them points a medical team would come out right and check on participants and i can't remember the exact parameters but if you're like losing too much body weight or they'd schedule occasional visits to get your SD cards, give you new batteries, and then just make sure you're not critically in danger with your health. Of Oregon failure or something like that. Now, I think you were telling me that at one point when they were doing a medical check for you that you'd set up, remind me of what this is called, for squirrel.

1:39:12A squirrel pole. A squirrel pole. The squirrels like to run up things and then across something else. You never have a power line in front of your house. So what is, yeah, explain how you just roughly, how you build this thing yeah whatever reason squirrels are they just love running up things and then across things and so you know that's why you see them running on the power lines and everywhere and so you can take advantage of that to catch them by clearing all the branches off of a couple trees and then running a pole between those two trees and then throwing a couple snares along that pole and eventually some squirrel will run up and zip across especially if you see one in area what does that look like when a when a medical check is being done right behind it was kind of funny because it was early on it was like you know maybe the second week or something and they they still had this crew member guy who i thought was hilarious because they really you know of course it's alone so they try to be really stoic they don't want to give you like actual human interaction but this one guy was just like whoa hell yeah this is awesome i liked what what's going on out there but they all come walking in for the you're a setup yeah for the medical check and scared a squirrel and it ran up and hung itself and it was like sitting there kicking while the guys walked by but he was that one british guy in particular oh hell yeah thanks guys and so that was kind of funny but the they accidentally helped me cheat there and so how long how long did you ultimately last 77 days 77 days and is it fair to say that last is the wrong word to use because my understanding in conversations with you is that it was of course television has to be edited in such a way that everyone is going through this crucible with right coming close to glancing off the breaking point and so on right right right But it doesn't seem like it was that hard for you.

1:41:08Yeah, it really wasn't. It could have been like, you know, it's the woods. You never know what's going to happen. But man, that was going really well. I actually, you know, I snared a bunch of rabbits, had like 20 something plus rabbits before I got the moose, which I got a moose at day 20. And then from then on, I really nailed the fishing and I just was piling up food like crazy. And just because of my previous experience for, you know, years at a time in Russia, I wasn't a couple, few, three, four months there. Just didn't seem like a long time away from the family because I knew our relationship was strong and generally could handle it.

1:41:45And I'd come back and we'd catch up and it'd all be good. But I bore a lot of stress because I didn't know how long the show would last. So I was. Which is something that changed in season seven. Yeah, it was a big difference in season seven. But in the next season, they capped it at 100 days, which had that been my season would have been interesting because i once you get the moose i could have just basically partied and you know enjoyed myself but because i got this moose it was a lesson i learned a lesson that i learned that was the first large mammal harvest yeah on the show right yeah yeah and something that i really noticed out there was i should have been more present in the moment because i did allow myself to stress about this future you know i was like okay i got a moose now i'm getting fish surely somebody else is so man we're gonna be out here at six eight months and i lost some fat so now i'm gonna lose so i had like so i can't be out here eight months and lose so i was uh bearing a lot of stress because i didn't actually as much as i would advise myself if i were to go on again like just be in the present you know don't worry about that future what happened is yeah i was gunning for 140 days before i even thought it might end and hadn't even allowed the thought to cross my mind that it would had a lot of food to get there and then it ended at day 77.

1:43:04I can't say I ever thought I was going to win. Like I didn't, I went out there to win because I wasn't like trying to prove anything, but I was just, you know, you try to keep going stride, keep, just see what happens. I'm just going to go out there and see if I can be sustainable. But I was genuinely shocked when it ended and thought it was going to go quite a bit longer. So let me tackle a couple of things because there are a number of details that I think might be instructive to get into so first let's talk about the basic tools i'm amazed i don't want to give too many spoilers but like one of your competitors made a shocking decision which was to not bring a ferro and that was that was that was that was a very risky maneuver ended up making it work but in part he's very good with something called bow drill look up bow drill online we but it's using friction to create a fire.

1:44:00But if you're accustomed to using softer wood and then you go into Alpine territory and it's much, much, much harder wood, you got a problem on your hands. Yeah, he was able to find a cedar board which doesn't grow up there. Yeah. You're allowed to use anything that you find. So tin cans or barrels or whatever it might be. Effectively human garbage or things that have been washed up on the shore. So 10 basic tools. What did you choose to bring? I took an axe, a saw, a Leatherman, which is like a multi-tool. It's a knife and pliers and stuff. And a frying pan and a ferro rod, a sleeping bag, a bow, an arrow.

1:44:47You get like bows and arrow. A fishing kit, trapping wire, and paracord. and trapping wire was just a thin gauge solid stainless steel wire and then you could create the gill net out of the paracord yeah so i got the i've thought about bringing a gill net but then i just thought i'll bring a paracord i can make a gill net and the paracord will come in handy for other things too so what are some common mistakes if you look at what people choose to bring what are certain things they choose to bring let's leave aside a gill net right because you already covered that you can create that yeah what are some other would you say mistakes i mean i always with my own biases always think when someone doesn't bring an axiom on really you know but i have my own you know how you're gonna get through the ice and how are you just they're so handy but i brought a saw which in hindsight i probably should have just brought a gill net and had two instead of making the one and have you know anyway i do think not bringing a fire starter is a poor choice because it's just so much stress you know you have to bear so much stress of not letting your fire go out and everything's harder so you have to be really conscious of the fact that things like staying hydrated is super important and so if there's an extra step to hydration you're going to drink a little bit less water just to be clear if you're drinking out of a natural source you want to boil that water yeah you typically you'll want to boil it so if you're gonna boil it and then you have to like start a bow drill fire to boil your water then all of a sudden you're also burning a lot of calories yeah it just becomes a stressor you don't want your fire to go out at night because you got to wake up so i think that's a big one some people are really good with bow drills but i still think it's not worth a trade off yeah well i was really into bringing a bow i mean you do need practice with a bow to be effective with it but i can't tell you how much time i spent enjoying myself just hiking through the woods because I could maybe shoot a squirrel or maybe get a grouse.

1:46:47Well, that's something that stood out to me is that, and I think one of the stronger competitors in season seven did something very similar where it wasn't that you would necessarily go out on a dedicated large mammal, or let's just say, you wouldn't go out on a dedicated hunt, but if you went out to do anything, you just bring the bow. Take the bow, yeah, because it's like on your way to your fishing spot or on your way to get firewood, and it just gives you always something to do, and it gives you always that, oh, is there a rabbit or is there, so you're kind of having more, you're more engaged.

1:47:18Whereas if I didn't have, hadn't taken the bow, it would have been a lot of time where it's like, boy, what do I do? How many arrows are you allowed to bring? Nine. Nine. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know why. Seems like a lot or a little. I don't know if they chose nine. Committee had a long debate that landed on nine. But that's actually decent. Substantial number of arrows. I never had an issue with them. What type of tips did you bring? So I brought blunt tips, which are judo points, except they weren't specifically judo points. You're right, right. But yeah, you don't want a sharp blade when you're shooting small game because you don't want to just shoot right through the animal.

1:47:54You want to hit it in blunt force, kind of knock it out and kill it. And so for small game, I had five of those, and then I had four broadheads, which are just sharp blades. What type of, how many blades? Two blade. they were vpa like just solid steel rod heads no just so that they were tough and i could yeah resharpen them on the fly and all that so the moose corralling or fencing i mean fencing gives people an image that maybe is not exactly the right image right right but animals are really good at taking the path of least resistance right right right this is a it's something you employ when you're trying to snare them when you're trying to do anything to catch an animal you just take advantage of the fact that we all take the path of least resistance so what do you what do you do so i was actually out there you know i'd done a lot of calling a lot of placing my shelter in the proper wind location and doing all this to make try to make a moose encounter happen and i had set up a trip wire that would signal a tin can so that it would like if a moose came by i would know and then i went out had a 40 yard shot at a moose and i missed and long story short It was a big fail on my part, but I remember watching that moose run away.

1:49:12Just like, oh, you idiot. Like, how'd you do that? You know, you get used to screwing up and failing when you're in the woods like that by yourself. Whining isn't going to help. There's nobody else you can blame anything on. It's like you literally better solve your problem or you're screwed. So I was like, I was disappointed. I missed the moose. But at the same time, I was immediately it's still running away. I was like, how do I make this happen again? like i got like it just made me more determined to learn from what i just did and then as i was watching it run away it just kind of dawned on me that there's i mean i don't know how far apart but say 500 yards you know there's just kind of hills two hills it's not like there were cliffs or anything but hills animals are going to go through the low point there because it's easy and then i just remember oh we built those fences in russia like should i really because what had happened is it'd come on a kind of unexpected path so i wasn't really quite set up to get them but i I was like, well, I guess I'm not here to starve.

1:50:06I'm here to make it happen. I'm an action-oriented person in that way. So I went over there and decided to try to build one of those fences and funnel. Because I remember even the natives saying before guns, they used to funnel animals with fences like that. So can you explain when you say fence, that might involve chopping down some saplings and kind of knocking them over. Yeah, it's a real basic, yeah. so that you're creating obstacles something like a moose does not want to have to step over or navigate so they go kind of where you intend them to go yeah yeah so i had kind of set up the same tin can alarm system and then i had found a nice shooting bush that i could shoot from and get to with relative cover and then i built a fence but again it was just i hadn't even finished it when it ended up working but it was just uh you know in the with the natives we do four rows so four rows of you know arm thick logs kind of stacked in such a way that they hold up into a fence look okay so it did look like it did look like a fence when it's done but i just initially did one rung you know like so the first rung and ran it all the way across how long did that take to create probably a couple days i was gonna say sounds like yeah yeah it was a lot of work and i was like it was a calorie risk and expenditure but it was clear i wasn't going to win if i was starving and so i was just i wanted like get food and so i uh built that funnel and then actually then not long after i was out pulling uh again i hadn't even finished it yet i was pulling a rabbit out of a snare of all things and i heard that can clank i was like oh what is something's coming no way ran over there stuck up to the bush and that moose just came strolling along my fence to the opening where i was and it worked amazingly well you know it was the morning after i'd spent the whole evening calling the moose and was able to put an arrow in it and uh what was the distance on that like 24 yards see i mean that's like right that's the payoff 40 yards i mean look i yeah i mean i do a lot of recurve and i would not put money on myself for a shot on a moving target nor would i but when you're starving yeah oh yeah you know if you have a couple shots it's actually doable you can kind of correct but in my miss i had only had one arrow with me at the time so yeah so i hit it and it was actually felt like a really good shot but he took off so you know i'm gonna wait an hour let him kind of just calmly you know if you're bow hunting one thing you realize it's like a lot of times the animal doesn't see you when you shoot it and it's quiet and it gets hit it doesn't know what happened so it's gonna run away over somewhere and like lay down it doesn't feel good and so usually when that first place it lays down because it doesn't think it's getting chased per se it just lays there and then it slowly bleeds out and it's you know about as calm of a way you can probably go as a wild animal but what happens if you get too eager and start running after this animal you put an arrow in is it'll if it sees you it'll then know it's getting chased and they'll get this second wind and just take off and run and by then they'll no longer be bleeding as much and very often people lose animals like that so fortunately i was aware of that waited a good long time you waited a while also i mean more than more than an hour ultimately about an hour and then i well and then i started tracking it and that great blood trail and then it just started to dry up and the ground had been like an old burn and so it was hard and they weren't tracked and i was like no way am i gonna lose this mood you still get stressed like no way and i had that lost its blood trail and it was just sitting there thinking as well the last thing i can do is it's going to take the path of least resistance once again particularly when it's wounded so i just i did it a few times where i stood in the woods and then you just kind of walk through as if you were gonna go where does it take you you know and go with the flow and sure enough you know 500 yards up or whatever there was laying there oh no way duck down and it was still alive and so i was 50 something yards away and it's like man i can either try to stick another arrow in it in which case it's either gonna run away maybe i kill it or maybe it charges me and you got a 30 chance of each so as my best bet is to just watch it and let it calmly finish its process and so that was a very long couple hours honestly watching it it would stand up and i'd my heart would sink like no no no and then it would lay back down like ah yes it was stand up it's a very emotional roller coaster and finally it stood up and tipped over and we were talking about earlier but the joy that i felt is was irreplaceable and i could you almost can't match it i just that demon of starvation that for three weeks now just chewing out you're gonna starve you're gonna starve slayed that how much meat do you get off a moose like oh it was hard to say i probably had i'd be a little bit guessing maybe four or five hundred pounds i don't know it's a big yeah big animal and then you have all the bone marrow and the brain and you know organ stuff talk about i don't know if people like eating liver but i got myself sick of it you got a liver the size of my body you know and i got there's no way to preserve it so you got to eat that thing first why can't you preserve the liver versus other things usually things that are really bloody you know like you have a lot of blood in them spoil fast so same with like fish if you catch a fish there's a blood line in there that you want to scrape out or it'll spoil okay and the gills carry blood so you want to rip those out or it'll spoil any animal that you're going to preserve you just want to make sure it's bled really well and liver for whatever reason is just saturated saturated and there's no way to drain it you know so no man plenty of vitamins there for a while god i'm just thinking of the od of vitamins that you know yeah it's a little bit of a concern yeah for you uh adventure seeders out there don't eat a polar bear liver in one sitting yeah yeah that's fatal vitamin a will do you in uh so you mentioned you had some fat stolen noticed some very unique earrings on your wife this morning these may tie together yeah what just so happens that yeah what were the what were the earrings man so you get you know you're out there and you're things are going well but you're still living on the edge you know and little mistakes can be the difference between surviving or not and so you know even the process of keeping yourself hydrated like we talk about is is elaborate and involved and thought out walk into your fishing hole it's like oh i better take some ash so i can sprinkle on the really icy spots and you know everything's thought out and so the last thing you need is this whole extra variable coming in and adding a bunch of difficulty well one morning i went out and i'd set my meat out on a shelf with this like kind of half-hearted not half-hearted but you know maybe a bear will come and if a bear comes I can shoot that from my shelter so I could maybe double up and get it almost like a ready-made bait pile but I hadn't even really thought about the fact is that there's wolverines up there and that they might show up and I might not hear it or notice it as much and so I came out one morning and I stored probably 90 ,000 calories worth of fat in this gallon jug I don't know how much is in a gallon but full gallon of fat and I came out and there's like the day i was like okay i'm gonna render that fat and i come and i started looking around like what are these tracks like huh that's interesting like and then it just you slowly start to have something dawn like no and then i noticed my jug was gone and then i was like oh those are wolverine tracks and like oh no it was like ran down the tracks you know pointless that thing's long gone and so i came back and i was like oh no i'm like got a wolverine here one thing you notice about the woods when you have meat every forest freeloader knows you have the meat and so like all the jays and all the you know the wolves were coming around and the wolverine now and just everybody's coming to get your meat and that wolverine they're known as being some of the most ferocious animals you know on earth and just they're like that honey badger video everybody's seen but they're much larger and on steroids it's like a i guess it's technically in the weasel it's like if you took a weasel and put it on every performance enhancing drug imaginable like uh dolf lundgren and rocky four and and gave it on top of that just like a very irritable combative demeanor like i mean they're not huge like 40 pounds or whatever but they fight off wolf packs they take down full-grown moose yeah so just think about that for a second guys 40 pound animal how much does a moose weigh yeah like a thousand pounds i mean that's insane you just grab on and there's been stories of them holding onto a moose's neck for days until the thing suffocates of blood loss and die just like so terrifying and so they make up for their size and just being aggressive and i was my first time of really dealing with one like that and so and i was he kept surprising me with how bold he was you know kind of figure okay that'll take care of it and then all of a sudden whoa right in front of me you know he run by and grab a chunk of meat and run off you know no way and so basically there were they came down to the fact that it was either me or him on this island and that was very clear and he was claiming my meat and this and that and i made a long trip wire again for him and with the can which proved to be a really useful tool and then uh yeah one night i heard that thing clank came out of my shelter this was after the previous night of the similar situation happening and i didn't take a shot at the wolverine because he was behind a bush and so this next night i was like i'm just if i get a chance i'm gonna take it came out and he was behind a bush i could see his eyes glowing and i just sent an arrow in there and it ricocheted through and hit him but i could see him spinning around and know what was exactly how i had hit him so i just grabbed the axe and ran over there and i got over there and he lunged at me and i could still i can see like pinned him to the ground yeah but he had like been pinned to the ground and the part of the arrow was stuck in the ground and part of it was hung up in the alders so it like caught his lunge and i swung and it eviscerated him and then he spun around and was like grabbing at his own injury and then i swung again and again you know but but i definitely have this mental image of his teeth and his jump right at me like to see his face yeah it was good it was pinned i mean i i think i would have still won but it would have been a lot more of a we would have both suffered a lot more i think you would have suffered a lot more i was hoping i would win but no it was uh it was intense it was a very primal moment that's all i had to say about it like i was the moose was so thoughtful and the and the wolverine was just one of those things where you're like what just happened like that was crazy i can't believe that just happened anyway it solved this problem that had been harrowing me for weeks by that point it was pretty liberating claws have been turned into your and so i had to make some earrings out of those claws and gift them to my wife they're pretty nice so to bring in something that was I don't think people would pick up on watching season six.

2:01:48There's a point where as I think you put it to me when we were out in the woods, you were like, in effect, up to that point, you'd been... making plans, executing the plan, sort of living on offense if that makes sense but you kill a wolverine and so there's this kind of mystery in the show people might not immediately pick up on which is not the only wolverine around right we were allowed to kill one wolverine well that's the thing right yeah you had like tags you have to follow these rules not something that is yeah yeah yeah artfully omitted from the final cut i only had about a day of relief before i heard another wolverine i was like no but this time i was in defense and it just so happened to line up with the time of year where i had this very tangible mental shift that went from me being in that you know when you're in fight or flight i was in fight i was in like a proactive mode like you say making plans making things happen well now the ice was freezing on the lake and i couldn't go out and fish and so couldn't fish at least in the normal way yeah in the normal way i couldn't even go walk on the ice to ice fish yet right so there's a couple week period there where it's just hard to fish and then i uh had all the rabbits i needed honestly i had so much protein with the moose that there's no reason for me to go kill or snare rabbits so i didn't do that also aka toilet paper right yeah what did you use for toilet paper the rabbit feet it was quite luxurious okay continue your imaginations can carry the rest of it and then this wolverine came and i had to only play defense and it was a very tangible shift that i went from being in control of my own destiny to all of a sudden being on this what felt like a downhill trajectory it's like i've collected everything i can collect and now i just see what happens and try to defend against the wolverine and all i can do is wait for the ice you know it felt like a very different frame of mind and and that was a you know a more difficult period to get i mean all these animals have optimized to steal food right yeah that's all they do scavengers and so especially something like wolverine it's like you can take the bark off of the right pillars holding up your elevated platform but yeah i made a cool platform the event you had showed me you know i built a bunch of them with the natives and uh participant but you know he's almost killed himself trying to copy that yeah there's a certain technique to how to build them which was useful to know to do it safely but you're also calculating like not using unnecessary calories and so i should have finished it there's actually a you box in that raised platform and then you build a box on top and it's pretty everything proof but of course again that wolverine kept surprising me so i had built the platform done a few tricks to try to keep it from getting up there and then it got up there and by then it was like shoot i should have built the thing but you know anyway so yep learning on the fly and trying to react accordingly most people in modern life they have their i'm making this up right random meal but then like salmon or chicken breast some veggies maybe some pasta or sweet potato who knows but but you mentioned the fat being stolen oh yeah and people can look up something called a rabbit starvation too but how important is fat yeah you learn that really fast also and that was the first time just solely living off the land that i had where i didn't have any noodle backup or any anything like that and so for an extended period of time so i uh i was curious how long you could live off a rabbit i was curious you know all this kind of stuff and what i learned quite quickly was your body needs fat right away and every day you're burning your fat reserves or fat you're bringing in the protein it's actually more attainable out there there's a lot of little animals and a lot of things even mushrooms have protein in them but the fat is the bottleneck of survival for sure and so that's why we love it i guess but it was uh it just proved and it was so interesting to observe the animals is how honed everybody was in on just the fat the wolverine the crows the jays everything would just try to get the fattiest part of your fish or eyeballs brain skin and they would leave the chunks of meat like a big fish they'd strip to strip the skin off eat kind of the fatty belly area the eyes do the same thing too right like when they're grabbing salmon if so you can learn plentiful enough they eat the brain leave leave all the meet yeah it's pretty interesting so yeah that's the fuel of the forest out there all right so let's talk about some new projects well first of all it's not really first of all but lest i forget where can people get one of these incredible axes yeah i have one people do not you know just run around your living room swinging this like a toy it's not a toy but it's a tool but it's a it's a uniquely designed i don't want to say all in one but multi-purpose tool yeah i think if like people take the time to learn it and learn its nuances you'll love it but there's a learning curve to it because it is like a kind of a finely tuned machine but the uh jordanjonas.com i have a website jordanjonas and jordanjonas.com slash axe.

2:07:31There's two versions. This is a little bit smaller version. It's easier to carry when you're backpacking and stuff. Then I have the fuller bigger version that if you're on the farm or car camping, things like that, has a little more heft. Then if people, and you and I have to book some time before this goes live so that I don't screw myself here. If people want to experience what it's like to go into the wilderness with you, which I highly recommend. If you can do it, guys, you will learn a ton. It is, you will not be able to absorb everything. Like there's going to be a lot that you pick up and are able to practice, which was so fun.

2:08:15Not just some of the finer details of fundamental survival skills, but learning how to use a relatively simple tool like a tankara rod. right like just learning how to utilize a simple tool well right same with the axe so how can people learn more about yeah same same deal it's like you know the instagram the follow along youtube jordan jonas also instagram yeah jordanjonas.com is where i have access to sign up for courses and sign up for you know there's hunts available there and stuff that people can guide you on But yeah, they do book pretty quick. Like this season's booked, but it's like, I'm all about taking people out on private trips and stuff.

2:09:02You just have to kind of get in early or wait for my schedule to come out for next year and try to squeeze in. I love them, man. It's been such a cool way to share what I love. I talked about it earlier with the purpose. It's kind of, I have this stage of my life. The purpose is defined and trying to share the lessons that I've gained with others. And I really enjoy it, find it meaningful. and I know people get a lot out of it. So I would love to see some folks out there. So speaking of purpose, the book. Oh, yeah. What are you up to? Why write a book? My wife and I talk about it fairly often that it's like we have a life that is very good, very full and on a lot of levels, I would say like emotionally, spiritually on the family.

2:09:48It's a big blessing. When I was on alone too, it kind of struck me. I was like, this is a, well, how's this situation that's so difficult or i mean even life-changing for people it just kind of felt like another trip to russia or like it felt very normal for me i was like i wonder what prepared me in life to make uh this kind of unusual situation seem normal and just to provide the counter to that i mean people break on this show right yeah in a lot in a lot of different ways sometimes a very dramatic fashion and so i made me a little bit introspective about what had prepared me for it well and in doing thinking about those things i was like man there really are some patterns of my being that have created you know and tim if you guys listen know he's really good at naming things and putting a place but have created like a reservoir of resilience that I can tap into and that is well exercised.

2:10:50And I just thought it would be really interesting to share with people through the story of my life and all these kind of fun stories, but also some of the keys to living a life well, really, but by building a resilience that'll help that. And what is interesting is you want to build that resilience before you find yourself in the situation. Because once you find yourself in the situation, it's often a little little late and so the key is to come through hard times and trials you know anybody can get through it but you want to get through it and be positive and be putting light into the world so it's me trying to help like your grandparents like my grandparents like my dad it's me trying to help people learn the lessons that i've learned that might help make their reservoir of resilience you know fill up so that uh they're you know able to confront things as they come so it's a fun project i got harper collins and i partnered up on it and it'll be what i work on this year so it's been fun starting what's the tentative pub date plan any idea early i started 2027 yeah it's exciting yeah it is exciting first book so it's a fun new project yeah i'm gonna for people who i really encourage people to watch season six and seven there's a reddit thread titled, quote, can we agree that Jordan from season six is the best contestant to ever play the game?

2:12:16And it just goes on and on and on and on. You'll find some disagreement. Yes, I mean, it's Reddit. It's Reddit, so of course, there's plenty of disagreement. But you mentioned hardship, and earlier this morning we were chatting because I was in Tennessee and was with a very, very skilled podcaster and kind human, Sean Ryan, and found this folded up piece of paper in the chair I was sitting in, and it ended up being a copy of the Serenity Prayer. And I have long been a fan of the Serenity Prayer, in part because it has echoes of and reinforces a lot of my reading and stoicism. What I didn't realize is that what I thought was the serenity prayer is actually just a small piece of it.

2:13:12Are you able to pull it up in your phone by chance? Yeah, it's a great prayer. I'll read the full thing here. It says, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Then it goes on. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time accepting hardships as the pathway to peace taking as he did this sinful world as it is not as i would have it trusting that he will make all things right if i surrender to his will so that i may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with him in the next has a lot of interesting concepts there's you know the everyone not everyone but most people are familiar with the start the very beginning the next one is like living one day at a time enjoying one moment at a time there was that lesson i got slapped with on alone whereas i'm worried about the future and worried that ended up not coming and then accepting hardship as the pathway to peace as we were discussing this morning you know it's a quite a profound bit of wisdom and there's a lot in there yeah right it's just it's wild i mean some of my favorite maybe concepts maxims from buddhist philosophy from stoicism it is so neatly wrapped into the serenity stoicism it's so beautifully put and it just kind of blew my mind that i had such a partial understanding of it yeah yeah because i only knew i think like most people the very beginning and not the rest.

2:14:48Jordan, people can find you at jordanjonas.com, J-O-N-A-S. They can find you on Instagram and YouTube at hobojordan. Makes me laugh every time I say it. Is there anything else you'd like to say? Anything you'd like to add? Ask of my audience. We've all been noticing lately that the political division is ramping up more and more. I've been thinking a lot about the idea that so many people I know and love over the years have vastly diverging political opinions. But when you filter each other through politics, you're really likely to see people as avatars of an ideology rather than as fellow humans.

2:15:28And I see that right now with, it seems like with immigration is the hot topic at the moment. Of course, I believe we should keep track of immigration and who comes in and people who take advantage of the system shouldn't because there's a social contract. and a trust that has to be shared and maintained in a society but at the same time i have a personal belief based on my faith that i should help those in need when i have the ability so in my personal life i've chosen to take on for example in my case a couple who was who were russian asylum seekers didn't want to go to the front in ukraine so they fled but i don't expect others to be forced via the government and taxation to live out my morality and i don't judge or think ill of those who don't because i know there is a genuine sacrifice there so i don't use politics to vicariously fulfill my moral obligations that i feel good about myself without having to make the personal sacrifices that a personally lived out ethic in the world requires if i have the government fulfill my morality it costs me nothing and i can even find myself in a situation where i'm judging people who might actually practically be doing more to bear the actual burden of what i think is right in the world so i think if more people approach their morality on a personal level actively but also taking responsibly for it in their lives the reality has a way of tempering the extremes and it cuts in every direction if someone on the right has a really strong opinion about abortion it's like the foster children adopt support single moms if someone on the left has a really strong opinion about wanting an open border well take in an immigrant family support them you know using your own means and social connections get to know the complexity that comes when you do all that and you'll find you're you'll actually understand people that don't because it is a sacrifice and you'll be less judgmental and probably less self-righteous so some i've been thinking about a little bit lately working that out is my favorite part of my spiritual path of christianity it's like i don't have a law like i don't know what i'm supposed to do usually i'm supposed to filter like the real world through this ideal of love your neighbor as yourself love the Lord your God and in doing so I'm constantly like what does it mean to love your enemy that's not realistic, what does it mean to give to everybody that's not realistic but it makes me wrestle with this thing and in that I actually have that it all comes to life whereas I could have chosen to throw it out at some point and throw all that wrestling out with it but I would have lost a lot of what provides meaning and value in my life also and yeah so I don't know working that out in your life is super valuable.

2:18:33It strikes me, I mean, this framing of wrestling with God. And look, I know I'm getting over my skis here a bit, but it's the people who wrestle with X who foster a type of introspection that I think often leads to decisions that are better aligned with their truest of true values. Right, right, right. Yeah, it gets a little dangerous when you know for sure. And so it's erased that struggle, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I don't know attribution, but it's like, admire the seeker of the truth, beware the person who has found the truth. Yeah, right, right. I mean, there are times when it's like to have solid values or principles that you choose to live your life by, but at the same time to wrestle.

2:19:23And to ask questions, you know, under what circumstances would this not be right? and to cross-examine. It's asking a lot of people, I recognize. It's asking a lot of anyone. Because it's easy to just have a formula to follow. The highest path is to work it out. Well, I admire how you have tried to work it out. I think it's a very thoughtful approach. It's not an easy approach. And I just love what you do in the world, man. I feel like you're reintroducing people to a lot of core evolved sensitivities that make humans human. And when you do that, the abstractions and the concepts that people are willing to go to blows over on social media just fall away as what they are, which is typically some type of artificial line in the sand that people have chosen and been encouraged to take on as some type of team identity.

2:20:31And that just falls away when you simplify things and put people in an environment where they can see that. I think it's really beautiful and people don't have to live in Montana to do that. There are ways to seek it out. So I appreciate you taking time on the show man it's great to see him it's been fun getting to know you and hanging out with you in the woods and yeah and really enjoyed it it's an honor i'm excited man i can't wait to pack in my own acts now next time and make absolutely sure i don't stick it into my foot so i said it'd be continued thanks jordan yeah and for people listening we'll link to all sorts of things in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast just search jordan and there may be one other Jordan and you can certainly search Jonas.

2:21:22There's not going to be another Jonas. He'll pop right up. Until next time, as always, just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, yes, but also to yourself. To quote Jack Kornfield, if your compassion does not include yourself, then your compassion is incomplete. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

2:21:59Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

2:22:39If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Back in the day, this was 2004 maybe, I had someone approach me in a coffee shop and say, good day, mate, and introduce himself. Who was that? It turned out to be founder of AG1. Believe it or not, way back in the day. And people often ask me, what has survived after 20 plus years of testing every supplement under the sun? Just about. what actually has stayed in the rotation, in the toolbox. This episode's sponsor, AG1, is at the top of that very, very short list.

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