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

Jordan Jonas is a wilderness survival expert, explorer, hunter, guide, and winner of Alone Season 6, a show in which the task is to survive alone in the arctic wilderness longer than anyone else. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest competitors in the history on that show. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – HiddenLayer: https://hiddenlayer.com/lex – Notion: https://notion.com/lex – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get $350 off AMA – Submit Questions to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/ama-questions https://lexfridman.com/ama-questions Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/jordan-jonas-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Jordan’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/hobojordo Jordan’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@hobojordo Jordan’s Website: https://jordanjonas.com/ Jordan’s X: https://x.com/hobojordo PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (11:25) – Alone Season 6 (45:43) – Arctic (1:01:59) – Roland Welker (1:09:34) – Freight trains (1:21:19) – Siberia (1:39:45) – Hunger (1:59:29) – Suffering (2:14:15) – God (2:29:15) – Mortality (2:34:59) – Resilience (2:46:45) – Hope (2:49:30) – Lex AMA

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

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

• 0:40Lex Fridman?

  and, most importantly, a great human being with a big heart and a big smile. This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation. Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode, I'll start answering some questions and we'll try to articulate my thinking on some top-of-mind topics. So if that's of interest to you, keep listening after the episode is over. And now, a quick, few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Notion for team collaboration and taking notes,

• 1:24Lex Fridman?

  Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for managing your business, Element for electrolytes, and Eight Sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. I've got a chance to recently visit The GPU cluster that Tesla AI and XAI are building.

• 2:09Lex Fridman?

  And well, first of all, I was extremely impressed by the rapid rate of progress. And there's a lot more to be said about that. Maybe I'll have a conversation with Elon soon. But in general, I just want to comment how humbled I was by just the sheer scale of computation that a GPU cluster is carrying. And it's quickly growing. And just being able to see that in person, it makes it very visceral, very real, that these machine learning models have power. And that we, as a civilization, carry a heavy responsibility to make sure that we use them

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  in a way that doesn't hurt others. And I think security vulnerabilities is the near term way of hurting others. So it's really important to minimize the number of security vulnerabilities. The battle to minimize the number of bugs, the number of attack vectors, the size of the attack vectors on the machine learning models and on software in general is a worthy battle to fight. And so I'm glad Hidden Layer is fighting that battle, especially in the context of machine learning. Visit hiddenlayer.com/lex to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool.

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  I've used it for a long time for note taking, and I think the process of note taking is a science and an art and one I take extremely seriously. Writing is a process that's essential for concretizing your thoughts. Without that, thoughts are a kind of... Amorphous, ephemeral thing that just kinda shows up without a clear structure and leaves before you have a chance to really internalize it. So the process of writing does just that. It makes the thought more permanent. It gives it structure. And so note taking is a process that I think is essential to thinking.

• 4:20Lex Fridman?

  And I use bullet points and nested bullet points and Notion does that extremely well. And so I use Notion to organize my thoughts, but I think they also do an incredible job of collaboration for larger and larger teams. And they integrate an AI assistant into the whole thing that helps you summarize and doing all the LLM things that you now expect, but they do that in a seamless way. So try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.

• 5:02Lex Fridman?

  I've set one up in a few minutes at lexgaming.com/store to sell a few shirts. There's something about the ease and scale and the efficiency of Shopify that always makes me think about the machinery of capitalism. And also because I've been beginning to read the history of human civilization as covered by Will Durant and Ariel Durant.

• 5:25Lex Fridman?

  I suddenly feel humbled by the scale of it all and how capitalism as an idea, the modern version of it, is a relatively recent one, just a handful of centuries, just with the industrial revolution. And we humans have been battling with this idea, whether the means of production should be owned by the state or by the individual. And now everybody's talking like that's such an obvious thing, but it isn't. Every genius idea is obvious in retrospect. And the entire story of humans on earth is a long chain of experiments, successful and failed ones. And from each we'll learn and we always rise.

• 6:10Lex Fridman?

  That's the fascinating thing about us humans. We always survive. We always find a way. That's actually one of the central kernels behind my optimism about the future of humanity. But anyway, back to a store. If you want to set one up, sign up for a dollar per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. And actually, back to capitalism, because once again, business is at the core of the capitalist machine.

• 6:49Lex Fridman?

  I find that there is various communities now that dedicate themselves to rigorously analyzing the failures of capitalism at the edges. But in those communities and in general, we don't often celebrate the positive impacts, the positive metrics over time that capitalism has resulted in in society. And I think just the number of people living in poverty decreasing drastically under regimes that enable free markets should serve as an inspiring notion for anyone who wants to build a business, for the very fact that humans build businesses, that we together keep trying.

• 7:34Lex Fridman?

  It's the craziest thing to start a business is the craziest idea because most likely you're going to fail. It really is the stupidest possible thing, except it is not, except that dream is the very engine that enables progress. So I'm a big fan of startups, of small businesses, and grateful that humans take the risk. And I'm grateful that humans find a way. Anyway, NetSuite is a good tool to manage businesses. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex.

• 8:14Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Element, an electrolyte drink that I love and depend on, especially when I'm taking long distance runs in Austin heat. It's often 95, 100 degree Fahrenheit. And I love it. 10, 12, 15 miles, let's go. But yes, you have to consume a large amount of electrolytes before and after to make sure I'm feeling good. One of these days, I should probably run a marathon. But I don't run for time. I don't run to a destination. I don't run because I have to, or even I don't really run for exercise sake. I run so I can think clearly and contend with the heavier of my thoughts.

• 8:59Lex Fridman?

  Because when I'm out there just by myself, whether no sound or brown noise in my ears, I get to really think. There's something about sort of physical challenges, especially the higher pace, where I start getting uncomfortable and the uncomfortable thoughts rise up. And I get to think. And I get to face those thoughts and either meditate them away or try to figure out what is the kernel of the thing that disturbs me about those thoughts? What is it so uncomfortable? What is the thing that causes anxiety? This could be everything from intellectual, philosophical type thoughts, technical, design, engineering challenges, or just personal life stuff, all of it. So I love running for that reason.

• 9:44Lex Fridman?

  So if you want to join me in the Element deliciousness, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelements.com/lex.

• 9:54Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Asleep. It's Pod 4 Ultra. The Ultra part is the extra thing, the base, that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can morph like gravity does to spacetime, the surface, the shape, the landscape of your bed. So it can put you in a reading position, for example. Now, it's not just the base. Without the Ultra, Pod 4 is still a big upgrade to Pod 3. It doubles the cooling power. It just upgrades a bunch of different stuff. So I love it. It's a sacred place for me for the nap or the full night's sleep. The older I get, the more I understand the power of a good night's sleep. Now, of course, you also want to be flexible and robust to the craziness,

• 10:39Lex Fridman?

  the madness that life brings your way. But when you can, find those hours of sleep, that little quiet escape from the boiling turmoil of the world. Go to aceleve.com/lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.

• 11:00Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Reven podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas.

• 11:25Lex Fridman?

  You won Alone, season six, and I think are still considered to be one of, if not the most successful Survivor on that show. So let's go back, let's look at the big picture. Can you tell me about the show Alone? How does it work?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a show where they take 10 individuals and each person gets 10 items off of the list. You know, basic items would be an axe, a saw, a frying pan, you know, some pretty basic stuff. And then they send them all, drop them off all in the woods with a few cameras. And so the people are actually alone. There's not a crew or anything. And then you basically live there as long as you can, you know? And so the person that lasts the longest, you know, once the second place person taps out, they come and get you and that, and that individual wins. So it's a, it's a pretty legit challenge, you know? They, they drop you off, helicopter flies out and you're not going to get your next

• 12:25Speaker 01

  meal until you make it happen. So.

• 12:27Lex Fridman?

  You have to figure out the shelter, have to figure out the source of food, and then it gets colder and colder because I guess they drop you out in a moment where it's going into the winter.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they typically do it in temperate, colder climates, things like that. And they start in September, October. So time's ticking when they drop you off. And.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the pressure's on. You got it's, you know, you get overwhelmed with all the things you have to do right away. Like, oh, man, I'm not gonna eat again until I actually shoot or catch something. Got to build a shelter. It's pretty overwhelming. Figure your whole location out, but it's interesting because once you're there a little while, you kind of get into a, well, at least for me, it did. There was like a week or maybe not a week, but that I was kind of a little more annoyed with things. You know, it's like, oh, my site sucks.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  And then, and then you kind of accept it. Like, you know what? It is what it is. No, no amount of complaining is gonna do anybody any good. So I'm just gonna make it happen. And so then, or, you know, do my best to. And then I felt like I got in a zone and I felt like I was right back in kind of Siberia or in that headspace. And I, I found I actually really enjoyed it. I'd been a little bit out of, I guess you call it the game because I had had a child and, and so when we had our daughter, we came back to the States and then a bunch of things happened and I just ended up, we didn't end up going back to Russia. So it'd been a couple of years that I was just, you know, raising the little girl and boy then, and then.

• 13:55Lex Fridman?

  You've gotten a little soft.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So I was like, did I got a little soft?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  But then it was fun how like after just some days there, I was like, oh, man, I feel like, I feel like I'm at home now. And then it was like, you're kind of in that flow state and it was.

• 14:08Lex Fridman?

  Actually, there's a few moments like when you left the ladder up. Or with the moose that you kind of screwed up a little bit.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:16Lex Fridman?

  How do you go from that moment of like frustration to the moment of acceptance?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  I mean, the more you put yourself in life in positions that are kind of outside your comfort zone or push your abilities, the more often you're gonna screw up. And then the more opportunity you have to learn from that. And then, to be honest, it's kind of funny, but you almost get to a position where you. Well, you don't feel that uncomfort- it's not unexpected, you know, you kind of expect you're gonna mess up here and there. Yeah, I remember particularly with the, um, the moose, the first moose I saw, I had a great shot at it, but I had a hard time judging distance because it was in a mud flat, which means it's hard to, it's hard to tell yardage, you know, because you're usually typically going by trees or markers, be like, oh, I'm

• 15:04Speaker 01

  probably 30 yards away. This was a giant moose and he was 40 something yards away. And I estimated that he was 30 something yards away. So I was way off and shot and dropped between his legs. And then I realized I had not grabbed my quiver. So I only had one shot and I just watched him turn around and walk off. But I was struck initially with like, I actually noticed how unmad I was. I was like, oh, this is actually, I was like, that was awesome. That was like seeing a dinosaur. That was really cool. And then I was like, oh, what an idiot, how to miss. But then I was like, but it made me that much more determined to make it happen again. It was like, okay, nobody's gonna make this happen except myself. You can't, can't complain. It wouldn't have done me any good to go back

• 15:47Speaker 01

  and mope about it. And so then I was like, I had a thought. I was like, oh, I remember these native guys telling me they used to like build these giant fences and funnel game into certain areas and stuff. And I was like, man, that's a lot of calories, but I have to make that happen again now. So I kind of went out there and tried that. And that was kind of a attempt at something to it could have failed or not worked, but sure enough, it worked and opportunity came again. The moose came wandering along and I was able to get it. But being able to take failure as soon as you can, the better. Accept it and then learn from it is kind of a muscle you have to exercise a little bit.

• 16:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting because in this case, the cost of failure is like, you're not going to be able to eat.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was really interesting. I mean, The, the most interesting thing about that show was how high the stakes felt. Cause it didn't feel, you know, you didn't tell yourself you're on a show. At least I didn't, you just felt like it was, you're going to starve to death if you don't make this happen. And so the stakes felt so high and, and it was an interesting thing to tap into because I mean, so many of our ancestors probably all just dealt with that on a regular basis. But it's something that we're, all the modern amenities and such and food security that we don't deal with. And it was interesting to tap into what a, kind of a peak mental experience that is when you really, really need something to survive.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  And then it happens, it's, you can't imagine, I mean, that's what our, all our dopamine and receptors are tuned for that experience in particular. So it was, yeah, it was pretty awesome, but the pressure felt very on. Like I always felt the pressure of, of providing or starving.

• 17:35Lex Fridman?

  And then there's the situation when you left the ladder up.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:38Lex Fridman?

  And you needed fat and what is it, the ovary needs some of the fat.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, well, it was, when I got the moose, I was so happy. The most joy I could almost experience maxed, maxed out. But I didn't think I, I didn't think I won at that point. I never thought like, oh, that's my ticket to victory. I thought, holy crap, it's going to be me against somebody else that gets a moose now. And we're going to be here six, eight months, who knows how long. And so I can't, I can't be here six, eight months and still lose. So I've got to like, I've got to outproduce somebody else with a moose. So I had all that in my head, not already was of course, pretty thin. And, and so I was just like, man, if somebody else gets a moose, I'm still going to be behind. And so everything felt like precious to me. And I had found a plastic jug and I put a whole bunch of the moose's fat in this plastic jug

• 18:28Speaker 01

  and set it up on a little shelf. And I thought, you know what, if a bear comes, I'll probably hear it and I'll come out and be able to shoot it. So I went to sleep and I woke up next morning and I went out and I was like, where's that jug?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  And then I was like, wait a second, what are all these prints? And I started looking around and it took a second to dawn on me because I haven't interacted with wolverines very often in life. And I was like, oh, those are Wolverine tracks. And he was just so much sneakier than a bear would have been or something. So it kind of surprised me and he took off with that jug of fat. And so then I went from feeling pretty good about myself to like, now I'm losing again against whoever, you know, this other person is with a moose. So I, again, kind of the pressure came back to, oh no, I gotta produce again. You know, it wasn't the end of the world and I think they may have exaggerated a little bit how little fat I had left. You know, I still had, a moose has a lot of fat, but it did make me feel like I was at a disadvantage again.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, that was pretty, that was pretty intense because those Wolverines, they're bold little animals and they, and he was basically saying, no, this is my moose.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  And I had to counter his claims.

• 19:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, they're really, really smart. They figure out a way to get to places really effectively. Wolverines are like fascinating in that way.

• 19:49Lex Fridman?

  So let's go to that happy moment, the moose. You are the first and one of the only contestants to have ever killed a moose on the show, a big game animal with a bow and arrow. So this is day 20. So can you take me through the kill?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'd missed one and I just decided I'm not here to starve. I'm here to like, try to become sustainable. So I was like, I don't care if it's a risk, I'm going to build that fence. I built it. I would just pick berries and call moose every, you know, every day. And it was actually really pleasant to sit in a berry patch and call moose.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  But then I also had this whole trap and snare line set out everywhere. So I had all these, I was getting rabbits. But I went and I was actually taking a rabbit out of a snare when I heard a clank because I'd set up kind of an alarm system with, with string and cans. So.

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  It's a brilliant idea.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's another thing that could have not worked, but it. And it came through and I was like, oh, I heard the cans clink. And I was like, no way. And so I ran over, I didn't know what it was exactly, but something was coming along the fence and I ran over and jumped in the bush next to the funnel exit on the fence. And sure enough, the big moose came running up and you know, your heart gets pounding like crazy. You're just like, no way, no way. I probably could have waited a little longer and had a perfect broadside shot, but I took the shot when he was, uh, he was, he was pretty close, like 24 yards, but he was quartering towards me, which makes it a little harder to make a, a perfect kill shot, you know, and so I hit it and it took off running and I just thought, you know,

• 21:29Speaker 01

  I was super excited. I couldn't believe I actually, you know, I was like, oh my gosh, I got the moose. I think that was a really good shot. You get all excited, but then it plays back in your head and particularly when you're first learning to hunt, there's always an animal that gets away, you know, and you like make a bad decision or not a great shot or something. And it's just, it's just part of it. And so of course you're like, I'm not going to be satisfied until I see this thing. So I followed the blood trail a little while and I saw some bubbly blood, which meant it was hitting the lungs, which meant it's not going to live, you know, you'll get it. And so as long as you don't mess it up. And so I went back to my shelter and waited an hour.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  I skinned that rabbit that had caught and then super nervous, the slowest hour I ever,

• 22:18Speaker 01

  and then I followed it along, ended up losing the blood trail. I was like, no, no. And then I was like, well, if there's no blood, I'm just going to follow the path that I would go if I was a moose, you know, like the least resistance through the woods. So I followed kind of along the shore there and sure enough, I saw him up there. You know, I was so excited, lay down, but, uh, but he hadn't died yet. And so he just sat there and, and he would stand up and I would just like, no, no, no, no. And he would lay back down and go, yes. And then he would stand up and it was like that for, you know, a couple of hours it took him. And then finally at one point, I, uh, you know, and a lot of people have asked, like, why wouldn't you go finish it off?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  So when an animal like that gets hit, it had no idea what hit it, you know, just all of a sudden, it's like, ah, something got it and it ran off and it lays down and it's actually fairly calm and it doesn't really know what's going on. And if you can leave it in that state, it'll kind of bleed out and is as peaceful as possible. If you go chase after it, that's when you lose an animal because as soon as it knows it's being hunted, you know, it gets panicked, adrenaline and it can just run and run and run and you'll never find it. So I didn't want it to see me. I knew if I tried to get it with another arrow, there's a chance I could have finished it off, but there's also a. Not bad chance that it would see me take off or even attack because Moose can be a little

• 23:43Speaker 01

  dangerous. And so I just chose to wait it out. And at one point it stood up and fell over and I could tell it had died and walked over like you actually touch it and you're just like, whoa, no way. Like that whole burden of weeks of you're gonna starve, you're gonna starve. And it got rid of that demon. To be honest, it's one of the happiest moments of my life. It's really hard to replicate that joy because it was just so, so really or so directly connected to your needs. It's all so simple. It was, it was a peak experience for sure.

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  And were you worried that it would take many more hours than it would take it into the night?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was. I mean, until you actually have your hands on it, I was worried the whole time. It's a pretty nerve wracking period there between when you get it and when you actually recover the animal, get your hands on it. So it took longer than I wanted, but I finally got it.

• 24:40Lex Fridman?

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

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:45Lex Fridman?

  Like what it takes to stay calm, to, to not freak out too much, to like wait, but not wait too long.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, another thing about hunting is that for every animal you get, you probably don't get, you know, nine or 10 that, that this turned the wrong way when you were drawn back or went way behind a tree or you never had a clean shot or whatever it is. And so every time you can see a moment coming, you know, your heart really starts beating and you have to like breathe through it. I can almost, you know, you almost feel the nervousness of it. And then, and then you just try to stay calm, you know, like whatever you do, just try to stay calm, wait for it to come up, draw back. You've practiced shooting a lot. So you have like kind of a technique, like I'm gonna go back, touch my face, draw my elbow tight, and then the arrow's gonna let loose.

• 25:37Lex Fridman?

  Some muscle memory, most.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  It's kind of muscle memory. You have a little trigger, like draw that elbow tight and then, and then.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  And it happens and then you just watch the arrow and see where it goes. Now with the animal, you know, you try to do it ethically. That is like make as good of a shot as you can. Make sure it is either hit in the heart or both lungs. And when that happens, it's a pretty quick death, which is, death is a part of life. And but honestly, for a wild animal, that's probably the best way to go they could, they could have.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Now, when a animal's kind of walking towards you, if it's walking towards you, but not directly towards you, that's what you call quartering towards you. You can picture, it's actually pretty difficult to hit both lungs because the shoulder blade and all that bone is in the way. So you wanna, so you have to make a perfect shot to get them both. And to be honest, when I took my shot, I was a couple inches, a few inches right. And so it went, went through the first lung and then it sunk the arrow all the way into the moose and, but it didn't, it allowed that second lung to stay breathing, which, which meant the moose stayed alive longer.

• 26:45Lex Fridman?

  What's your relationship with the animal in a situation like that? You said, death is a part of life.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an interesting thought because no matter what your relationship to, however you choose to go through life, whether, you know, whatever you eat, whatever you do,

• 27:03Speaker 01

  death is a part of life. You know, like every animal that's out there is living off of a dead, even plants, you know, it's all, it's all, we're all part of this ecosystem. I think it's really easy in a, particularly in an urban environment, but anywhere to think that we're separate from the ecosystem. But we are very much a part of it, whether it be, you know, farming requires, you know, all this habitat to be turned into growing soybeans and da, da, da, da. And when you get the plows and the combines, you know, you're losing all kinds of different animals and all kinds of potential habitat. So it's not cost free. And so when you realize that, then you wanna produce the food and the things you need in an ethical manner. So I, for me, hunting.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Plays a really major role in that. Like, I literally know how many animals a year it takes to feed my family and myself. I actually know the exact number. And it's like, and I know what the cost of that is. And I'm aware of it because I'm out in the woods and I see these like beautiful elk and moose. And I really love the species, love the animals. But there is a fact that one of those individuals, you know, is going to have to feed me. And particularly, like on Alone, it was very heightened, that experience. So I shot that one animal and I was so, so thankful, you know, that I wanted to give that big guy a hug and like, hey, sorry, it was you, but had to be somebody.

• 28:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's that, there's that picture of you just almost hugging it.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  And you, you can also think about it, the, the calories, the, the protein, the fat, all of that, that, that comes from that, that will feed you.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Right. You're so grateful for it. Like, the gratitude is, is like, you know, definitely there.

• 28:52Lex Fridman?

  What about the bow and arrow perspective?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Well, when you hunt with a bow, you just get so much more up close to the animals. You know, you, you can't just get it from 600 yards away. You actually have to sneak in within 30 or so yards. And when you do that, the experiences you have are just, they're way more dragged out. So, you know, your heart's beating longer, you have to control your nerves longer. More often than not, it doesn't go your way and the thing gets away. And, you know, you've been hiking around in the woods for a week and then your opportunity arises and floats away. You're like, no. And then, but at the same time, that's the only time when you like really have those interactions with the animals where you got this bugling

• 29:37Speaker 01

  bull, you know, like tearing at the trees right in front of you and other cow, elk and animals running around you. You know, you get, you get, you end up having. Really, uh, I don't know, dare I say intimate experiences with the animal just because, because you're in it, you're kind of in its world, you're playing its game, it has its senses to defend itself and you have your wit to try to, to get over those and it really becomes, you know, it's not easy, they're not, it, it becomes kind of that chess game and uh, those prey animals are always tuned in, it's, you know, slightest stick, they're looking for wolves or for whatever it is. So, um, there's something really pure and fun about

• 30:21Speaker 01

  it. Uh, you know, I will say that there is an aspect that is fun, there's no denying it. It's like how we're, you know, people have been hunting forever and, and, uh, I think it speaks to that part of us somehow. But, and I think bow hunting is probably the most pure form of it and that you get those experiences more often than with a rifle. So I, I don't know, I, I enjoy it a lot and, and the way they do regulations and such, um, kind of the best times to hunt are usually allowed for bow because they're trying to, you know, keep it fair for the animal and such. So.

• 30:59Lex Fridman?

  So the distance, the close distance makes you more in touch with sort of, uh, the, the natural way of the predator and prey.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:10Lex Fridman?

  You're one of the predators.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:13Lex Fridman?

  Where you have to be clever, you have to be quiet, you have to be calm, you have to, all of that.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:18Lex Fridman?

  And the full challenge and the luck involved in catching it. The same thing as the predators do.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. How many times do they snap a stick and watch them run off and like, darn, my stock was failed. Or, you know, so, yeah, you're just, you're in that, in that ecosystem.

• 31:37Lex Fridman?

  How'd you learn to, to shoot the bow?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I didn't grow up hunting. I grew up in the area that a lot of people hunted, but my dad wasn't really into it. And so I never got into it until, until I lived in Russia with the natives. It was just such a part of everything we did and a part of our life that when I came back, I got a bow and I started doing archery in Virginia. They had, it was a pretty easy way to hunt because the deer were overpopulated and you could get these urban archery permits. So you'd go out and. You know, every couple of days you'd have an opportunity to shoot a deer that they needed population control. And so there were a lot of them and it gave you a lot of opportunities to learn quickly. So that's what got me into it. And then I found I really enjoyed it.

• 32:20Lex Fridman?

  Do you practice with the with the target also or just practice out?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I would definitely practice with a target a lot. You want to, again, you kind of have an obligation to do your best because you don't want to be flinging arrows into like the leg of an animal. And it's a cool way, honestly, to provide quality meat for the family, you know, it's all raised naturally and wild and free until you bring it home into the freezer. So.

• 32:42Lex Fridman?

  So if we step back, what are the 10 items you brought? And what's actually the challenge of figuring out which items to bring?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the challenge is that you don't exactly know what your site's opportunities are going to be. So you don't really know, should I bring a fishing net? Am I going to even have a spot to net or not? And things like that. I brought a axe, a saw, a Leatherman Wave, a Pharaoh Rod, is like a make sparks to start a fire, a frying pan, a sleeping bag, a fishing kit, a bow and arrow, trapping wire and paracord. And so those are my 10 items.

• 33:25Lex Fridman?

  Is there any, any regrets, any?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  No major regrets. I, I took, I took the saw kind of, I thought it would be a more of a calorie saver than I, I didn't really need it. I, in hindsight, if I was doing, you know, season seven instead of six and got to watch, I would have taken the, the net because I, I just planned to make a net, but I would have rather just had two nets, brought one and left the saw because in the northern woods in particular, every tree is, you know, the size of your arm or leg, you can chop it down with an axe and a couple swings. Yeah, yeah, you don't really need the saw. And so it was handy at times and useful, but I think it was my. If I had to do nine items, I would have been just fine without the saw.

• 34:08Lex Fridman?

  So two nests would just expand your.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Food gathering potential.

• 34:15Lex Fridman?

  And then in terms of trapping, you were okay with just the little you brought?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  The snare wire was good. I ran some, you know, I put out, I used all my snare wire. I ran trapline, which is just a series of traps through the woods and brush every place you see sign. Put a snare, put a little mark on the tree. So I knew where that snare was and just make these paths through the woods. And I put out, you know, I don't know how many hundred and fifty, two hundred snares. So every day I'd get a rabbit or two out of them. And then I had a lot of rabbits, but uh, once I got the moose, I actually took all those snares down because I didn't want to catch anything needlessly. And well, you come to find out, you can't live off of rabbits. Man cannot live off a rabbit alone, it turns out.

• 35:03Lex Fridman?

  So you set up a huge number of traps. You were also fishing and then always on the lookout for uh, moose.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:14Lex Fridman?

  So like what, what's in terms of survival, if you were to do it over again, over and over and over and over, like, how do you maximize your chance of having enough food to survive for a long time?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  You have to be, you have to be really adaptable because everything's gonna, it's always gonna look different, your situation, your location. I actually had a, what I thought was a pretty good plan going into alone. And then it just, the, you know, the location didn't allow for what I thought it would.

• 35:42Lex Fridman?

  What was the plan?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Well, I thought I would just catch a bunch of fish because I'm on a really good fishing lake. I'd catch a whole bunch of fish and let them rot for a little while and then just drag them all through the woods and to a big pile. And then hunt a bear on that big fish pile.

• 35:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  That was the plan. And I thought. But when I got there, for one, I had a hard time catching fish off the bat. You know, they didn't come like I was hoping. And then for two, it had burned prior, so there were no berries. And so there were very few berries, which meant there weren't grouse, there weren't bear. There were, you know, they had all gone to other places where the berries were. And so what I had grown accustomed to kind of relying on in Siberia wasn't there, there. You know, so in Russia, which was a similar environment, it was just grouse and berries and fish and grouse and berries and fish. And then occasionally, you know, you get a moose or something, but I had to reassess, which was part of me being grumpy at the start. Like, this place sucks.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And then, and then, once I reassessed and, and, and, you know, right away, I saw that there were moose tracks and such. So I just started to plan for that. I moved my camp into an area that was as removed as I could be from where all the action is, where the tracks were. So that I wasn't disturbing animal patterns. I made sure the wind, the predominant wind was blowing out my scent to see, or you know, to the water. And then really, to be honest, if you want to actually survive somewhere, it's different than alone. But you do have to be active and it has to, you're going to have to, you're not going to live, you're not going to be sustainable by, you know, starving it out. You'd have to unlock the key that is sustainability.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And I think there's a lot of areas that still have that potential, but you have to figure out what is. It's usually going to be a combination of fishing, you know, trapping and then hunting. And then once you have some, the fishing and trapping will get you until you have some success hunting. And then that'll buy you three or four months of time to continue and, you know, to keep hunting again. And you just have to roll off of that. But every, you know, depends on where you are, what opportunities are there.

• 37:54Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, so that's the process, fishing and trapping until you're successful hunting. And then the successful hunt buys you some more time.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Right, right.

• 38:03Lex Fridman?

  Just go year round.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  And then you just go year round like that. And that's how. People did it forever. The pressure was, I noticed that, you know, with the, you got that moose and then you're happy for a week or so and then you start to be like, you know, this is finite. I'm gonna have to do this again. And you imagine if you had a family that was gonna starve if you weren't successful, you know, this next time. And there's just always that pressure, you know, it made me really like appreciate the amount of what people had to deal with.

• 38:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, in terms of being active, like, so you have to do stuff all day. So you get up, so you

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Get up.

• 38:36Lex Fridman?

  And planning.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 38:38Lex Fridman?

  Like, what am I gonna, in the, in the midst of the frustration, you have to figure out, like, what's, what's the strategy? Like, how do you put up all the traps? What's, is that a decision? Like, you know, most people like sit at their desk and have like a calendar or whatever. Are you like figuring out like?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  One thing about wilderness life in general is it's remarkably less scheduled than anything we deal with. Schedules are fairly unique to the modern context. You'd wake up and you just sort of, you have a, you know, confluence of things you wanna do, things you need to do, things you should do, and you just kinda tackle them as you see fit, as it flows in, you know, so, and that's actually one of the things that you're people really, that I really appreciate about that lifestyle is it really is, you're kind of in that flow. And so I'd wake up and be like, maybe I'll go fishing. And then I'll wander over and fish. And then I'd be like, I'm gonna go

• 39:33Speaker 01

  check the trap line, add every day if I add five or 10 snares. You know, you're constantly adding to your productive potential. And then, but nothing's really scheduled. You're just kinda flying by the seat of your pants.

• 39:47Lex Fridman?

  But then there's a lot of instinct that's already looking in.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  So much, yeah.

• 39:51Lex Fridman?

  Like, you already just like wisdom from all the times you've had to do it before. You're just actually operating a lot on instinct. Like you said, where to find, to place a shelter. Like, how hard is that calculation? Where to place a shelter?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  If you're like dropped off and this is all new to you, of course, all those things are going to be things you have to really think through and plan. When you're thinking about a shelter, you have to think of, oh, here's a nice, flat spot, you know, that's a good place. But also, is there firewood nearby? And if I'm going to be here for months, is there enough firewood that I'm not going to be walking a half a mile to get a dry piece of wood? Is the water nearby? Is there, is it, is it somewhat open, but also protected from the elements? Because sometimes you get a beautiful spot, it's great on a calm day, and then wind comes like, and so there's all these factors, you know, even down to taking in what game is doing in the area also, and how that relates to where your shelter is.

• 40:44Lex Fridman?

  You said you have to consider where the action will be, and you want to be away from the action, but close enough to it.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  To see it. Yeah, you want to be, yeah, right. And so ideally, you know, it depends, you're always going to make given takes. And one thing with shelters and location selection and stuff, that's another thing. You just have to trust your ability to adapt in that situation, because everybody has a particular, you know, you got an idea of a shelter you're going to build. But then you get there, and maybe there's a good cliff that you can incorporate, you know, or may, and then you just become creative. And that's a really fun process, too, to just allow your creativity to try to flourish in it.

• 41:19Lex Fridman?

  What kind of shelters are there?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  There's all kinds of philosophies in shelters, which is fun. People, it's fun to see people try different things. Mine was fairly basic for the simple reason that I had lived, you know, winters through winters in Siberia in a teepee. So I knew I didn't need like, anything too robust. As long as I had calories, I'd be warm. And I wasn't particularly worried about the cold. But you'll see. So I kept my shelter really pretty simple with the idea that I built a simple A-frame type shelter. And then most of my energy is going to be focused on getting calories. And then, of course, there's always going to be downtime. And in that downtime, I can tweak, modify, improve my shelter, and that'll just be a constant process that by the, by the time you're there a few months,

• 42:05Speaker 01

  you'll have all the kinks worked out. It'll be a really nice little setup. But you don't have to start with that necessarily, because you got other needs you got to focus on. That said, you'll see a lot of people on a loan that really focus on, you know, building the log cabin because they want to be secure, or incorporating, you know, whatever the earth has around, whether it be rocks, or whether it be digging a hole, you know, and we've seen some really cool shelters. And I, I'm not gonna knock it. Everybody's got, it's all different strokes for different folks. But I, my particular idea was to keep it fairly simple, improve it with time, but spend most of my energy. You know, the shelter, you really need to think about, it can't be smoky, cause that'll be miserable.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  But it is nice to have a fire inside. So you need to have a fire inside that's not gonna be dangerous and uh, smoke-free, and then also airtight. Because you're never gonna have a warm shelter out there, cause you don't have seals and things like that. But as long as the air's not moving through it, you can have a warm enough shelter.

• 43:08Lex Fridman?

  With a fire?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  With a fire and dryer socks and stuff.

• 43:12Lex Fridman?

  How do you get the smoke out of the shelter?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  If you have good clay and mud and rock, you can build yourself a fireplace, which is surprisingly not that hard. You know, you just-

• 43:20Lex Fridman?

  Oh, really?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a fun thing to do. It works well. You know, you take a little hole, start stacking rocks around it, make it, make sure it's opening, and it actually works, you know? So that's not as hard as you might think. Um, for me, where I was, I, I kinda came up with it as I was there with my A-frame. You know, I, I hadn't built an A-frame shelter like that before. And so, when I built it, and then I had put a bunch of tin cans in the ground so that air would get the fire. So it was fed by air, which helps create a draft. But, but I realized in an A-frame, it really doesn't, the smoke doesn't go out very well. Even if you leave a hole at the top, it like collects and billows back down.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  So then I uh, cut some of my tarp and made this, and cut a hole in the, in the A-frame. And then I made like a hood vent that I could pull down and catch the smoke with. And so while the fire was going, it would just billow out the hood vent. And then when it was done burning and it was just hot coals, I could close it, seal it up and keep the heat in. So it actually worked pretty well.

• 44:26Lex Fridman?

  So start with something that kinda works and then keep improving.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:30Lex Fridman?

  I always wondered, I mean, the, the, the log cabin. It feels like that's the thing that takes a huge amount of work before work.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  The difference between a log cabin and a warm log cabin is like an immense amount of work and all the chinking and all the door sealing and, you know, the chimney has to be anyway. So otherwise it's just going to be the same ambient temperature as outside. So I don't think alone is the proper context for a log cabin. I think like a log cabin is great in as a hunting cabin. As you know, if you're going to have something for years, but in a three, six month scenario, I don't know that it's worth the calorie expenditure.

• 45:10Lex Fridman?

  And it is a lot of calories. But that's an interesting sort of metaphor of just like get something that works. You see a lot, a lot of this with companies, like successful companies, they, you know, get a prototype, get a system that's working and improve fast in response to the conditions, to the environment.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's constantly changing. Yeah.

• 45:29Lex Fridman?

  And you end up being a lot better if you're able to learn how to respond quickly versus like having a big plan that takes a huge amount of time to accomplish.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Right. And forcing that through the pipeline, whether or not it fits.

• 45:43Lex Fridman?

  Can you just speak to like the place you were, the Canadian Arctic? It looked cold.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were right near the Arctic Circle. I don't know. It was like 60 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. So it was, it's a really cool area, really remote, thousands of little lakes. You know, when you fly over here, you're just like, man, that's incredible. There must be so many of those lakes that people haven't been to, you know, it really was a neat area, really remote. And for the show's purpose, I think it was perfect because it did have enough game and enough different avenues forward that I think it really did reward activity. So I think, but it's a special place. It was a Dene, there was a tribe that lived there, the Dene people, which interestingly enough, here's a side note, when I was in Siberia,

• 46:30Speaker 01

  I floated down this river called the Padkamanaya Tunguska, and you get to this village called Sulamai, and there's these Kett people they're called, and there's only 600 of them left.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  But in, this is in the middle of Siberia, not in like the Pacific coast. But their language is related to the Dene people. And so somehow, you know, that connection was there thousands of years ago. Super interesting, but.

• 46:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So language travels somehow.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Right. And the remnants stayed back there. It's very interesting to think through history.

• 47:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Within languages contains a history of peoples. And it's interesting how that evolves over time and how wars tell the story. Like language tells the story of conflict and conflict shapes language. And we get, we get the result of that.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Right. So fascinating.

• 47:20Lex Fridman?

  And the barriers that language creates is also the thing that leads to wars and misunderstandings and all this kind of stuff. It's a fascinating tension. But it got cold there, right? It got real cold.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know what the, I didn't have a thermometer. I imagine it probably got to negative thirty at the most. You know, like it might've gotten, it would've definitely gotten colder had we stayed longer. But, uh, yeah, I, to be honest, I was, I said, I never felt cold out there. I was pretty, I had that one pretty dialed in. And then once you have calories, you can stay warm, you can stay active. You can, you know, you gotta dress warm. You know, never let, oh, there's a good one. If you're in the cold, never let yourself get too cold. Because what happens is you'll stop feeling what's cold and then frostbite and then issues. And then it's really hard to warm back up. So every, I, it was so annoying. I'd be out going to ice fish or something.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And then I would just notice that my feet are cold and you're just like, ah dang it. I just turn around, go back, start a fire, dry my boots out, make sure my feet are warm and then go again. I wouldn't ignore that, you know?

• 48:28Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you want to be able to feel the cold?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. You want to make sure you're still feeling things and that you're not toughing through it. Cause you can't really tough through the cold. It'll just get you. So.

• 48:38Lex Fridman?

  What's your relationship with the cold? Psychologically, physically?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Uh, it's interesting. Well, I actually, there's some part of it that really makes you feel alive. You know, I imagine sometime in Austin here, you come, go out and it's hot and sweaty and you're like, uh, you get that kind of, kind of saps you. There's something about that brisk cold that hits your face that you're like, boo, wakes you up, makes you feel really alive, engaged, you know, it feels like the margins of air are smaller. So you're alert and engaged a little more. There is something that's a little bit life giving, just because you feel on an edge. You're walking, you're on this edge, but you have to be alert because even, you know, some of the natives I lived with, the lady had face issues because she let her head get cold when they're on a snowmobile, hat was up too high, you know, that little mistake.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And then it just freezes this part of your forehead and then the nerves go. And then you got issues when just hat wasn't high enough. So you kind of, kind of got to be dialed in on stuff.

• 49:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a psychological element to just, I mean, it's unpleasant. If I were to think of what kind of unpleasant would I choose? You know, fasting for long periods of time, going without food in a warm environment is way more pleasant than, uh,

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Being fed in a cold.

• 49:54Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. Like if you were to choose.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I'd choose the opposite.

• 49:58Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. I wonder if that's, I wonder if you're born with that or if that's developed in maybe your time in Siberia, like you, or, or do you gravitate towards, I, I wonder what that is because I really don't like survival in the cold.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  I think a little bit of it is learned. He like almost learned not, he learned not to fear it. He learned to kind of appreciate it. And a big part of that is, I mean, to be honest, it's like dressing warm, being in good. It's not that, you know, there's no secrets to that. As you just can't beat the cold. So you just need to dress warm, the native, you know, all that fur, all that stuff. And then all of a sudden you have your little refuge, have a nice warm fire going in your teepee. You know, and then you I bet you you could learn to appreciate it.

• 50:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think some of it is just opening yourself up to the possibility that there's something enjoyable about it like. Here, I run in Austin all the time in like a hundred degree heat. And I go out there with a smile on my face and like and learn to enjoy it.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:05Lex Fridman?

  And so you're just like, I look kind of like you do in the cold. I don't think I enjoy the heat, but you just allow yourself to enjoy it.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I do feel that way. I mean, I I don't mind the heat that much, but I I think you could get to the place where you appreciated the cold. It's probably just a lack of. It's kind of scary when you haven't done it and you don't know what you're doing and you go out and you feel cold. It's like not fun, but I bet you could. You'd enjoy it. You'll have to come out sometime.

• 51:33Lex Fridman?

  Hundred percent. Yeah, I mean, you're right. It does make you feel alive that it like, maybe that's the thing. That I struggle with is the time passes slower because it does make you feel alive. You get to feel time. But then the flip side of that is you get to feel every moment and you get to feel alive in every moment. So that. It's it's both scary when you're inexperienced and and beautiful when you are experienced. Were there times when you got hungry?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I got shot a rabbit on day one and I snared a couple rabbits on day two and then.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  More and more as the time went. So I actually did pretty well on the food front. The other thing is when you have all those berries around and stuff, you do have an ability to like fill your stomach. And so you don't really notice if you're getting thinner or if you're losing weight.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  So I can say on alone, I was not that hungry. I've definitely been really hungry in Russia. There were times when. When I lost a lot of weight. I mean, I lost a lot more weight in Siberia than I did on alone.

• 52:38Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. Okay, we'll have to talk about it. So you caught a fish. Caught a couple.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  I think I caught like thirteen or so. They didn't show a lot of them.

• 52:48Lex Fridman?

  You caught thirteen fish?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Thirteen of those big fish, dude. Well, I caught a couple that were small.

• 52:55Lex Fridman?

  This is like a meme at this point.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a.

• 52:57Lex Fridman?

  You're a perfect example of a person who was thriving and surviving.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  I was thought, you know, this is in the, in hindsight, again, when I was out there, I never let myself think you might win. I just was gonna be out there as long as I could and tried to remain pessimistic about it. No, but then the, but then I remember a thought that I was like, I wonder if they're gonna be able to make this look hard, you know? I did have that thought at one point and, cause it went pretty well. And I was definitely was, it was hard psychologically because I didn't know when it was gonna end. Like, I thought this could go, you know, like I said, six months, it could go eight months, a year. And then you start to ca, you know, I had a two and a three year old and you start to weigh in the, is it worth it? If it goes a year and it's not worth it if it goes eight months and I still lose.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  So I feel like I had this pressure and it was psychologically difficult for that reason. Physically, that wasn't too bad.

• 53:54Lex Fridman?

  This is a off mic, we're talking about Gordon Ryan competing in jujitsu. And maybe that's the challenge he also has to face is to make things look hard. Cause he's, he's so dominant in the sport that, in terms of the drama and the entertainment of the, of the sport. And in this case of survival, it has to be difficult.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  You know, and I'm, I'll add that for sure though, that it's, it's the woods, it's nature. You never know how it's gonna go. You know what I mean? It's like every time you're out there, it's a different scenario. So, yeah, whatever. Hallelujah. It went well.

• 54:29Lex Fridman?

  So you, you won after seventy seven days. How long do you think you could have lasted?

• 54:35Speaker 01

  When I left, I weighed what I do right now. So I just weighed my normal weight. I had, you know, a couple hundred pounds of moose. I had at least a, you know, a hundred pounds of fish. I had, you know, a pile of rabbits, a wolverine. Yeah, I had all this stuff. And I know I hadn't gotten cold yet. I, I just thought.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  But in my head, I'd thought if I get to day one hundred and thirty or forty, even if someone else has big game, I had a pretty good idea they might quit because it would be long, cold, dark days. And how miserable is that? Just it's so boring. It's freezing. And and so I thought the only time I thought I could think about winning is when I got to day one hundred and thirty or forty. And I definitely had that with what I had.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Now, maybe I would have got, you know, I probably would have gotten more. I had caught that big twenty something pound pike on the last day I was there. Maybe catch some more of those, you know, I don't, you know, and I don't know, like, I don't know how many calories I had stored, but I had a lot. And so how long would that have lasted me, assuming I didn't get anything else? It definitely would have, I would definitely would have reached my goal of one hundred thirty or forty days. And then after that, I thought we were just gonna push into the, you know, then it's just to see how much, who has what reserves and will go as far as we can. And that would get me through January into February. And I just thought, man, that's gonna be miserable for people.

• 56:05Lex Fridman?

  And you were like, I can last.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And I knew I could do it.

• 56:09Lex Fridman?

  What what aspect of that is miserable?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  The hardest thing for me would have been the boredom, because it's hard to, it's hard to stay busy when it's all dark out, when the ice is, you know, three, four foot thick, you can't fish. And I just think, I think it would have just been really boring. You would have had to been a real zen master to push through it. But because I had experienced it to some degree, I knew I could. And then I think things that might, you know, you start thinking about family and this and that in those situations. And I just knew that those, because I'd gone to all these trips to Russia for a year at a time, the time context was a little broader for me than I think for some people, because I, I knew I could be

• 56:54Speaker 01

  gone for a year and come back, catch up with my loved ones, you know, bring what I got back, whether that be psychological, whatever it is, and we'd all enrich each other. And and once it's in hindsight, that year would have been like that, talking about it. So I had that perspective. And it, so I knew I wasn't gonna tap for any other reason other than running out of food someday. So that was my stressor.

• 57:16Lex Fridman?

  See, you're able to, given the boredom, given the loneliness, kind of zoom out. And accept the passing of time.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 57:24Lex Fridman?

  Let it pass.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  You know, for me, I'm an act fairly act. I like to be active. And so I would try to think of creative ways to keep my brain busy. You know, we saw the like dumb rabbit first skit. But then I did a whole bunch of elaborate Normandy re-invasion, you know, invasion enactments and stuff like. There was like, there was a, every day I would think of, I gotta think of something to make me laugh, you know, and then do some stupid skit. And then that would be, that would fill a couple hours of my time. And then I'd spend an hour or two, a couple, a few hours fishing. And then you spend a few hours, you know, whatever you're doing.

• 57:58Lex Fridman?

  Would you do that without a camera?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, no, the, the, the skits. Funny question. That's a good question. I don't know. I actually don't know. That, uh, I will say that was one of the advantages of being on the show versus, uh, in Siberia. So no, because I didn't in Siberia just do skits by myself. But I didn't film it. And so it was, it was quite nice to have this camera that made you feel like you weren't quite as alone as if you were just in the woods by yourself. And I think for me, I was able to, it was a pain. It was part of the cause of me missing that moose. You know, there's issues with it, but I just chose to look at it as like, this is an awesome opportunity to share with people a part of me that most people don't get to see.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  You know, because, no, so that was, I just chose to look at it that way. And it was an advantage because you could do stuff like that.

• 58:49Lex Fridman?

  I think there's actual power to doing this kind of documenting, like talking to a camera or an audio recorder. Like that, that's an actual tool in survival. Because I, I had a little bit of an experience of being out alone in the jungle and just being able to talk to a thing.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 59:07Lex Fridman?

  Is much less lonely.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  It is. It really is. It's a, it's can be a powerful tool, just sharing your experience. I had the, I definitely had the thought. So going back to your earlier comment, but I definitely had the thought, if I knew I was the last person on earth, I wouldn't even bother. Like, I wouldn't do that. Like, I would just probably not, I'd just give up, I'm sure. Because even if I had a bunch of food and this and that. But because I knew you're, you know, you're a part, you're sharing. It gives you a lot of strength to go through and and having that camera just is makes it that much more vivid because you know, you're not just going to be sharing a vague memory, but an actual experience.

• 59:45Lex Fridman?

  I think if you're the last person on earth, you would actually convince yourself. First of all, you don't know for sure. There's always going to be.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Hope dies last.

• 59:55Lex Fridman?

  Hope, hope really does die. You really don't know. You really, you really hope to find. I mean, if you're like an apocalypse happens. I think your whole life will become about finding the other.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  It would be. And there's a chance. I mean, I guess I'm saying if you knew you were for some reason, knew you were the last, I wonder if you would. I wonder if that was a thought I had. If I knew I was the last person, like, because here I was having a good time, having fun fishing, plenty of food. But like, if I knew I was the last person on earth, I don't know that I would even bother. But now if that was for real, would I bother? That's the question.

• 1:00:29Lex Fridman?

  No, no, I think if you knew, if somebody, some, some way you knew for sure, I think your mind will start doubting it. That whoever told you you're the last person, whatever was lying.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Right, right. The power of hope might be more stronger than I accounted for in that situation.

• 1:00:48Lex Fridman?

  Also, you might, if you are indeed the last person, you might want to be documenting it for once you die, you know, an alien species comes about because whatever happened on earth is a pretty special thing. And if you're the last one, you might be like the last person to tell the story of what happened. And so that's going to be a way to convince yourself that this is important. And so the days will go by like this, but it would be lonely. Boy, would that be lonely.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  It would be. Well, you're delving into the dredges, the depths.

• 1:01:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, there is going to be existential dread. But also, I don't know. I think hope will burn bright. You'll be looking for other humans.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  That's, you know, one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking to you, things I appreciate about you is you're, you're always, not out of naivety, but you're always choose to look at the positive. You know what I mean? And I, and I think that's a powerful mindset to have. I appreciate it.

• 1:01:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That'd be a pretty cool survival situation, though, if you're the last person on earth.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  If you could share it.

• 1:01:55Lex Fridman?

  If you could share, yeah. Like I said, many people consider you the most successful competitor on Alone. The other successful one is Roland Welker, rock house guy.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:08Lex Fridman?

  This is just a fun, ridiculous question, but head to head, who do you think survives longer?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  If you want to get me the competitive side of it, I would just say, well, I'm pretty dang sure I had more pounds of food.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  But, and I didn't have the advantage of knowing when it would end, which I think would have been a great psychological.

• 1:02:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  It would have made it really easy. Once I got the moose, I could have shot the moose and just not stressed. That would have been like a, and so that was a big difference between the seasons that I felt like.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I felt like the psychology of season seven, they kind of messed up by doing a hundred day cap. Because for my own experience, that was the hardest part, but Roland's a beast.

• 1:02:52Lex Fridman?

  So for people don't know, they put a hundred day cap on, so it's whoever can survive a hundred days. For that season, it's interesting to hear that for you, the uncertainty, not knowing when it ends.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  That was for sure.

• 1:03:06Lex Fridman?

  It's the hardest. That's true. It's like you wake up every day.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  I didn't know how to ration my food. I didn't know if, if I was going to lose after six months and then it was all going to be for naught. I didn't know if, you know, I just, there's so many unknowns. You don't know, like, like I said, if I shot a moose and it was a hundred days, done. If I shot a moose and you don't know, it's like crap, I could still lose to somebody else, but it's going to be way in the future.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  So anyway, that for me was definitely the, the hard part.

• 1:03:37Lex Fridman?

  And when you found out that you won and your wife was there, it was funny because you're really happy. There's great sort of moment of you reuniting, but also there's a state of shock of like.

• 1:03:50Lex Fridman?

  You look, you look like you were ready to go much longer.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  That was the most genuine shock I could have. I hadn't even like entertained the thought yet. I didn't even think it was, you'd hear the helicopters. And I just assumed there was other people out there. I just hadn't, I thought. Like, you know, and for one, the previous person that had gone the longest had gone eighty nine days. So I just knew whoever else was out here with me, somebody's got that in their crosshairs. They're gonna get to ninety and they're not gonna quit at ninety. They're gonna go to a hundred. You know, I just figured we can't start thinking about the end until a couple of months from when it ended. So I was just shocked and, and they tricked me pretty good. They know how to make you think you're not, you know, that they're, you're not.

• 1:04:34Lex Fridman?

  So they want you to do the surprise.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they want it to be a surprise.

• 1:04:37Lex Fridman?

  You really weren't, I mean, you have to do that, I guess, for survival. Don't be counting the days.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  No, I think that would be, then, you know, you see that on some of the people do that. For myself, that would be bad psychology because then you're just always disappointing yourself. You have to be settled with the fact that this is gonna go a long time and suck. Once you come to peace with that, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you're not gonna be constantly disappointed.

• 1:04:59Lex Fridman?

  So what was your diet like? Like, what was your eating habits like during that time? Like, how many meals a day?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I was trying to eat the thing. I was like, not trying to, the more the moose is hanging out there, the more the critters. Every critter in the forest is trying to pack at it or mice trying to eat it and stuff, so.

• 1:05:22Lex Fridman?

  So one of the ways you can protect the food is by eating it.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  So I was having three good meals a day and then I'd like cook up some meat and go to sleep. And then, uh, wake up in the middle of night because they're long nights and like have some meat at night. Eat a bunch at night and then, so I'd usually have a fish, fish stew for lunch and then mousse for breakfast and dinner. And then have some for a nighttime snack because the nights were long. So you'd be in bed like fourteen hours and wake up and eat and dink around and go back to sleep.

• 1:05:54Lex Fridman?

  Is it okay that I was pretty low carb situation?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually felt really good. I tried to, I tried to, I think I would have felt better if I would have had a higher percentage of fat. Because, you know, it's still over more protein than if you're on a keto diet, you want a lot of fat. And so I didn't, I didn't try to mix in like nature's carbs, different like reindeer lichen and things like that, but. Honestly, I felt pretty good on that diet. I will say. How did you, uh, what's the secret to like protecting food? What are the different ways? Yeah, there's a lot of times, you know, in a typical situation in the woods hunting, you'll raise it up in a tree in a bag, put it in like a game bag so the birds can't peck at it and hang it in a tree so it cools.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  You gotta make sure first to cool it because it'll spoil. So you cool it by whatever means necessary, hanging it in a cool place, letting the air blow around it. And then you'll notice that every forest freeloader in the woods is gonna come and steal your food. Yeah. And it was just fun. I mean, it was, it was crazy to watch, you know, like it's all the Jay, all the camp Jays pecking at it or everything I did, you know, was, was, uh, there was something that could get to it. If put on the ground, the mice get on it and they poop on it and they kind of mess it up. So I ultimately, it kind of just dawned on me, shoot, I'm gonna have to build one of those Avinki like food caches.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  So I did and I put it up there and I thought I kind of solved my problem. To, to be honest, the Avinki then, so they would have taken a page out of like, they would have mixed me and Roland's solution. They build this tall stilt shelter and then put a box on the top that's enclosed. And then the bears can't get to it, the mice can't poop on it, the birds, the Wolverine, you know, it's safe. And I never finished it. I mean, in hindsight, I don't actually know why. I think I was just, the way it timed, like I didn't think something was gonna get up there, then it did. And then I, you know, you're like counting calories and stuff. I should have in hindsight, just boxed it in right away, but. To get ready for the long, for the long. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is a rabbit starvation a real thing?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you can't just live off protein and rabbits are almost just protein. I'd kill a rabbit, eat the innards and the brain and the eyes and then everything else is just protein. And so, uh, it takes more calories to.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  You know, process that protein than you're getting from it without the fat. So you actually lose, I lost, I had, you know, a lot of rabbits in the first 20 days. I had 28 rabbits or something, but I was losing weight at exactly the same speed as everybody else that didn't have anything. So that's interesting. Yeah, and I'd never tried that before. So I was wondering if I'm catching a ton of rabbits. I wonder if I can last, what, six months on rabbits? But no, you just starve as fast as everybody else. And so I had to kind of learn that on the fly and adjust.

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what to make of that. Like, so you need fat to survive, like fundamentally.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, yeah. And you'll notice when the Wolverine came or when animals came, they would eat the skin off of the fish. They would eat the eyes, you know, they'd steal the moose fat. They'd leave all the meat. Yeah, like behind the eyes is a bunch of fat. So, yeah, you can kind of observe nature and see what they're eating and know where the gold is.

• 1:09:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you like eating when you're like, when you can eat whatever you want? What, what do you feel best?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  What do I feel best? I just try to eat clean. I think, I'm not like super strict or anything, but I think when I eat less carbs, I feel better. Meat and vegetables. I like, we eat a lot of, you know, eat a lot of meat.

• 1:09:26Lex Fridman?

  So basically everything you ate on alone, plus some veggies?

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Plus veggies. Throw in some buckwheat, I like buckwheat.

• 1:09:34Lex Fridman?

  Let's step to the, uh, the early days of Jordan.

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, your Instagram handle is Hobo Jordan. So early on in your life, you hoboed around the US on freight trains. What's the story behind that?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  My brother, when he was 17 or so, he just decided to go hitchhiking and he hitchhiked down to Reno from Idaho, wherever we were. And, uh, ended up loving traveling, but hated being dependent on other people. So he ended up jumping on a freight train and, and just did it. He honestly, he pretty much got on a train and traveled the country for the next eight years on trains. Lived in the streets and everywhere, but, uh, you know, he was sober. So it gives you a different experience than a lot. But at one point when I was, I guess, yeah, 18, he invited me to come along with him. He'd probably been doing it five or so, four or five years and, uh, Or more and I said, sure. So I quit my job and went out with them.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Hobo Jordan is a bit of an overstep. I feel self-conscious about that because I rode, I rode trains across the country, up and down the coast, back. You know, spent the better part of the year running around riding trains and all the staying in places related to that. But all the people, you know, the real hobos, those guys are out there doing it for years on end. But it was such a, for me, what it felt like was a, it felt like a bit of a rite of passage experience, which is kind of missing, I think, in modern life. So I did this thing that was a huge unknown. I'd been, kind of was there with me, my brother for most of it. We traveled around, got pushed my boundaries in every which way, you know, froze at night and did all the stuff.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  And then, and then at the end, I actually wanted to go back and go back home. And so I went on my own and went from Minneapolis back, you know, up to Spokane on my own, which was my first stint of time by myself for like a week, which was interesting.

• 1:11:36Lex Fridman?

  Alone with your own thoughts.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  With your own thoughts is my first time in my life having been like that, you know, and, and so it was, it was powerful at the time. You know what it did too, is it gave me a whole different view of life because I had gotten a job when I was 13 and then 14, 15, 16, 17. And then I was just in the normal run of things, kind of. And then that just threw a whole different path into my life. And then I realized some of the things while I was traveling that I wouldn't experience again until I was living with natives and such. And that was, you know, you wake up, you don't have a schedule. You literally just have needs and you just somehow have to meet your needs. And so it's, it's a, there's a really sense of freedom you get that is hard to replicate elsewhere.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  And so that was eye opening to me. And I think once I did that, I went back. So I went back to my old job at the salad dressing plant.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  There's this old cross that guy and he was, oh, Hobo Jordan is back. And that's kind of where I got it. But that freedom always was very important to me, I think, from that time on.

• 1:12:43Lex Fridman?

  What'd you learn about the United States, about the people along the way? Because I took a road trip across the US also, and there was a, there's a romantic element there too of like, of the freedom of the.

• 1:12:59Lex Fridman?

  Or maybe for me not knowing what the hell I'm gonna do with my life, but also excited by all the possibilities and and then you meet a lot of different people and a lot of different kinds of stories. And also like a lot of people that support you for traveling. Cause there's a lot of people kind of dream of experiencing that freedom, at least the people I've met. And they usually don't, they usually don't go outside their little town. They have a thing and they have a family usually and they, they don't explore, they don't take the leap. And you could do that when you're young. I guess you could do that at any moment. Just say fuck it and leap into the abyss of being on the road.

• 1:13:44Lex Fridman?

  But anyway, what'd you learn about this country, about the people in this country?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  You're in an interesting context when you're on trains, because the trains always end up in the crappiest part of town, you know? And you're always outside interacting. Oh, the interesting things, you know, every once in a while I'll have to hitchhike to get from one place to another. One interesting thing is you notice you always get picked up by the, you know, the poor people or, you know, they're the people that empathize with you, stop, pick you up. You go to whatever ghetto I remember you end up in and people are really, oh, what are you guys doing? You know, real friendly and, and, and relatable, it kind of, you know, broaden your, my horizons for sure from being just an Idaho kid. And then meeting all these different people and, and just seeing the goodness in people and this and that.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  It's also very, you know, a lot of drugs and a lot of people with mental issues that you're friends with, dealing with, you know, all that kind of stuff. So.

• 1:14:43Lex Fridman?

  Any memorable characters?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Well, there's a few for sure. I mean, a lot of them I still know that are still around, but the. Rocco was one guy we traveled with. He's become like a brother, but he's um, he was, he traveled with my, my brother for years because they were the two sober guys, kind of he, rather than traveling because he was hooked on stuff, did it to escape all that. And so he was kind of sober and straight edge and he always, he's a five, seven Italian guy that was always getting in fights and like he has his own sense of uh, ethics that I think is really interesting because he's super honest, but, but he expects it of others. And so it's funny in the modern context, the thing that pops in my head is

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  when he got a car for the first time, which wasn't that long, you know, he's in his thirties or something. Uh, and he registered it, which he was mad about that he had to register, but then the next year they told him he had to register again and he's like, what? Did you lose my registration? Went down there to the DMV, chewed him out that he had to re-register because he already registered. Where's the paperwork? And but you just kind of views the world from a different lens. I thought, uh, but on everything, he's a character. Now he just lives by digging up bottles and finding treasures in them.

• 1:16:01Lex Fridman?

  But he notices the injustices and

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  He notices in a very interesting and speaks up and he's always like, why doesn't everybody else speak up about their car registration?

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  And, and then there was like, you know, Devo comes to mind because he was such a unique character as far as just, for one, he would have lived to be a hundred and twenty because the amount of chemicals and everything else you put into his body and still, hey, man, you know,

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  you could always get a dime, you know, always spare dime, spare dime and you have bum change and uh, I'd see him sometimes and I'd be gone and then go to New York to visit my sister or something and I'd, sure enough, there's Devo on the street. What do you know? And uh, you go visit him in the hospital because he got bit by twenty, you know, twenty seven hobo spider bites. You know, he's just always rough, but uh, charismatic, vital, like the vitality of life was in him, but it was just so permeated with drugs and alcohol too.

• 1:16:54Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if, because I've met people like that. They're like, they're just, yeah, joy permeates the whole way of being. And they're like, they've been through some shit. They have scars. They've got, they're rough, but they're always got a big smile. There's a guy I met in the jungle named Pico. He lost a leg and he uh,

• 1:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Drives a boat and he just always has a big smile, even given that like the hardship he has to get. Everything requires a huge amount of work, but he's just big smile and there's stories in those eyes.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Something about, yeah, enduring difficulty that makes you able to appreciate life and look at it and smile.

• 1:17:33Lex Fridman?

  Any advice for to take a road trip again, or if somebody else is thinking of hopping out of a freight train?

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  It's way easier now because you have a map on your phone. You're kind of cheating now.

• 1:17:44Lex Fridman?

  It's not about the destination, because the map is about the destination.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:47Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but here is like, you don't really give a damn.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Trains, where are you going? You're not going anywhere.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  I say do it, like go out and do things, especially when you're young. Experiences and stuff help create the person you will be in the future, putting, doing things that you think like, oh, I don't want to do that. I'm a little scared of that. I mean, that's what you gotta do. You just get out of your comfort zone and you will grow as a person and you'll go through a lot of wild experiences along the way.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Say yes to life in that way.

• 1:18:17Lex Fridman?

  Say yes to life, yeah. I love the boredom of it.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Freight train riding is very boring. And like you'll wait for hours for a train that never comes and then you'll go to the store and come back and it'll be gone. You're like, no. And, but I remember we went to jail, we got out and then, uh.

• 1:18:35Lex Fridman?

  How'd you end up in jail?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, it was.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  Things.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Trespassing on a train, but we were, we were riding a train and my brother woke up and they had a dead owl land on his head and he hit the train and fell on him and we were like, woke up and we were laughing. That's gotta be some kind of bad omen.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  And then we were like looking out of the train and we saw a train worker look and saw us and he went, like, oh, we know that's a bad omen. Anyway, sure enough, the police stopped the train. Somebody had seen us on it and they searched it, got us and threw us in jail. It was not a big deal. We were in jail a couple of days and then they, uh, but when we got out, of course, they put us, we were in some podunk town in Indiana and we didn't know where to catch out of there. And so we were at some factory and we just abandoned factory and we were right there for like four days. No train that was going slow enough that we could catch. And then we found this big old roll of aluminum foil. And now I gotta apologize to this woman because we were so bored just sitting there. We built these like hats, you know, like horns coming out every which way and loops and

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  just sitting there and then it was that night and some minivan pulled up to this train that was coming by. We're like

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  circle their car. Entertaining yourself with whatever you can. The poor lady was terrified.

• 1:19:50Lex Fridman?

  So hitchhiking was tough.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  I didn't like hitchhiking just because you're depending on the other people and it is not. I don't know why. You just want to be independent, but you do meet really cool people. A lot of times there's really nice people that pick you up and, and that's cool. But I just personally actually didn't do it a lot. And I wasn't, you know, if you're on the streets for 10 years, you'll end up doing it a lot more because you need to get from point A to point B, but we just tried to avoid it as much as we could because it didn't appeal to us as much.

• 1:20:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, the one downside of hitchhiking is people talk a lot.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Oh, they do.

• 1:20:27Lex Fridman?

  So it's, it's both the pro and the con.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:30Lex Fridman?

  Because they'll, you know, sometimes you just want to be sort of alone with your thoughts or it's, there is a kind of lack of freedom in having to listen to a person that's giving you a ride.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  It's so true. And then you don't know how to react. I mean, I was young, remember I got picked. I was probably 19 or something. And then I was just like, hey, how's it going? And she's like, I'm fine. My husband just died. And then, then there's all, and I got diagnosed with cancer and this and that, but, and pretty bitter and all that, and understandably so. But you're just like, I have no idea how to respond here. And so then you're young and you had to be nice. And I, and I remember that ride being interesting because I didn't really know how to respond. And she was angry and going through some stuff and, and dumping it out. She didn't have anyone else to dump it out on. I was like, wow.

• 1:21:16Lex Fridman?

  I'm going to take the freight train next time. So how'd you end up in Siberia?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Um, uh, I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how. But I, but the long story short was I had a brother that's adopted. And when he grew up, he wanted to find his biological mom and just tell her thanks. And, and, uh, so he did. And when he was, he was probably 20 or something. He found his biological mom, told her thanks. Turns out he had a brother that was going to go over to Russia and, uh, help build this orphanage. And that brother was about my age. I mean, I remember at that time I read, I read this verse that said, if you're in the darkness and see no light. Just continue following me. Basically, I was like, okay, I'm gonna take that to the bank, even though I don't know if it's true or not. And then the only glimpse of like

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  light I got in all that was when I heard about that orphanage, you go build that orphanage. And, and I prayed about it and I felt, and I, and I can't explain like it brought me to tears. I felt so strongly that I should go. And so I was like, well, that's a clear call. I'm just gonna do it. Yes, I just bought a ticket, got a visa for a year and then I went and helped build an orphanage and we got that built and I wanted, but he was an American and I wanted to live with Russians to learn a language. And so he sent me to a neighboring village to live with a couple Russian families that needed a hand and somebody to watch their kids and cut their hay and milk the cow and all that. So, uh, I found myself in that little Russian village, just

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  getting to know these two guys and their families. It was a, it was pretty fascinating. And of course I didn't know the language yet and they were two awesome dudes. Both of them had been in prison and met each other in prison. And like, we're really close because they had like found God in prison together and, and stayed to get, uh, you got out and uh, stayed connected. And, uh, so I'd bounce backs between those two families and they used to always tell me about their third buddy they'd been in prison with, who was a native fur trapper now in the north. And so they'd, you gotta go meet our buddy up north. And, uh, one day that guy came through to sell furs in the city and he like invited me to come live with them. And my visa was about to expire, but I was like, when I come back, I'll come. And so

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  I, uh, went back home, earned some more money, did some construction or whatever, then went back and, uh,

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  headed north to hang out with Yura and Fur Trap and, and that started a whole new, you know, opened a whole new world that I didn't know about.

• 1:23:54Lex Fridman?

  Before we talk about Yura and fur trapping, let's actually rewind and would you describe that moment when you were in the darkness as a crisis of faith?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was like, uh,

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  it was darkness in that I, I, I didn't know how to parse,

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  you know, what is this thing that's my faith and, and what, and what is, what's the wheat and what's the chaff and how do I get through it? And, um,

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  I basically just clung to keeping it really simple. And oddly enough, in my Christian path, God was actually defined in a certain way. God is love. And I was just like, that's the only thing I'm gonna cling to. You know, and I'm gonna try to express that in my life in whichever way I can. And, and just trust that if I do that, if I act like I, you know, we've, I've heard this lately, but if you just act like you believe, over time, that world kind of opens to you. When I said I would go to Russia, I prayed and I was like, Lord, I don't see you. I don't know, but I got this, what I felt like was a clear call.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  I have only one request, and that is that you would give me the faith to match my action. You know, I'm choosing to believe, like, I could choose not to because, you know, whatever. But I'm gonna choose to act, and I just ask to have faith someday. And then, and then, and honestly, the whole first year I went through, and that was a very crazy time for me, learning the language, being isolated, being misunderstood. And then, but then trying to approach all that with a loving, open heart. And then I came back and I realized that that prayer had kind of been answered. That wasn't the end of my journey, but it was, I was like, whoa. That was like my deepest request that I could come up with, and somehow that had been answered.

• 1:25:49Lex Fridman?

  So through that year, you were just like, first of all, you couldn't speak the language. That's really tough.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  It's tough because it's unlike on Alone where, because not only can you not speak and you feel isolated, but you're also misunderstood all the time. So you seem like an idiot and all that. And so that was tough. I felt very alone at that time, at certain times in that journey.

• 1:26:13Lex Fridman?

  But you were sort of radiating, like you said, leads with love. So you were radiating this kind of camaraderie.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  I was really intentional about trying to.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  That that was, I don't know why I'm here. I just know that I, you know, that that's my call is to love one another. And so I would just try to like, and then it meant digging people's wells. It might meant just going and visiting that old lady babushka up at the house. It's lonely. Or go, and I was really cool. I got to talk to some fascinating ladies and stuff and then what go to that village, help those families. I'm gonna be like, cut the hay, be the most, the hardest worker I can be because that's my goal here. I didn't have any other agenda or anything, except to try to live a life of love and I couldn't define it beyond that.

• 1:26:59Lex Fridman?

  What was it like learning the Russian language?

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  It was super interesting. I think, uh, I had the thought while I was learning it, one, that it was way too hard. Like if I would have just learned Spanish or German, I would be so much farther. But here I am. A year in and I'm like, how do you say I want cheese properly? And then, uh, but at the same time, uh, it was really cool to learn a language that, uh, that I thought in a lot of ways was richer than English. It was, it's a very rich language. I remember there was a, uh, comedy act in Russian, but he was saying, you know, one, one word you can't have in English is ne dopyri pilsa, meaning like, I didn't drink enough to get drunk, you know, that type thing. And but it's just a, you can make up these words using

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  different prefect, you know, prefixes and suffixes and like blend them in a way that is quite unique and interesting. And honestly, it would be really good for poetry because it also doesn't have sentence structure in the same way. English does. The words can be jumbled in a way.

• 1:28:01Lex Fridman?

  And somehow in the process of jumbling, some humor, some, some, uh, musicality comes out. It's interesting. Like you can be witty in Russian much easier than you can in English, like witty and funny and and also with poetry, you can say profound things by messing with words and the order of words, which is hilarious because, uh,

• 1:28:23Lex Fridman?

  You had a great conversation with Joe Rogan. And on that program, you talked about, you know, how to say I love you in Russian. It's hilarious. It was for me, the first, um, I don't know why. It's you were a great person to articulate the flexibility and the power of the Russian language. That's really interesting. Cause you were saying like, я люблю тебя, я тебя люблю, тебя я люблю, тебя люблю я. You could say every single order, every single combination of ordering of those words that is, has the same meaning, but slightly different.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  You could like, and it would change the meaning if you took я out and just said люблю тебя.

• 1:29:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  There's like a different emphasis or maybe, or я тебя люблю or something, you know, like all these different.

• 1:29:14Lex Fridman?

  Or just тебя люблю also.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So it is rich and that, and it was interesting coming from an English context and getting a glimpse of that. And then wondering about all those, you know, Russian authors that we all appreciate that, oh, we actually aren't getting the full, the full deal here.

• 1:29:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh yeah, definitely. I've recently become a fan, actually, of Larisa Volokonsky and Richard Pever. They're these world famous translators of Russian literature. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Bostanak. They've helped me understand just how much of an art form translation really is. Some authors do that are more translatable than others, like Dostoevsky is more translatable. But then you can still spend a week on one sentence.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 1:30:01Lex Fridman?

  Like just how do I exactly capture this very important sentence? Uh, but I think what's more powerful is not, uh, like literature, but conversation, which is one of the reasons I've been, I've been carrying and feeling the responsibility of.

• 1:30:20Lex Fridman?

  Having conversations with Russian speakers. Because I can still see the music of it. I can still see the wit of it. And in conversation comes out like really interesting kinds of wisdom. You like you, when I listen to like world leaders that speak Russian, speak. And I see the translation and it loses, it loses the irony. The like in between the words. If you translate them literally, you you lose. The reference in there to the history of the peoples.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I've definitely seen that on like, you know, and if you listen to. I think it probably was a Putin speech or something. And you just see that, oh, wow, something major is being lost in translation. You can actually see it happen. I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case with the. You know, that whole greatest tragedy is the fall of the Soviet Union. I hear him being quoted as saying all the time, I bet you there's. Something in there that's being lost in translation that is interesting.

• 1:31:25Lex Fridman?

  I think the thing I see the most lost in translation is the humor.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I'll just say that that was the hardest. That was the tangibly the hardest part about learning the language is that humor comes last. And you have to like, wait, you have to wait that whole year. You know, or however long it takes you to learn a language to be able to start getting the humor. You know, some of it comes through, but you miss so much nuance and it. And and that was really difficult in interaction with people to like, just be the guy. We know when that, when there's humor going on and you're totally oblivious to it.

• 1:31:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, everybody's laughing and you're like.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Lex Fridman?

  Trying to laugh along. What did they make of you?

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  To be honest.

• 1:32:06Lex Fridman?

  This person that came from, descended upon us. All full of love.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  If I had a nickel for every time I heard like, oh, Americans suck. But you're a good American. You're like, the only good American I've ever met. But then, of course, they never met.

• 1:32:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  But. You know, I think because I was just, I tried to work hard, tried to be more useful than I was a drain, all that. They all, I think, I think it was pretty appreciated me out there. I've definitely heard that a lot. And so that's nice.

• 1:32:39Lex Fridman?

  Can you talk about their way of life? So like when you, when you're doing fur trapping?

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  As a fur trapping was an interesting experience. You, you, basically what you do in October or something, you'll go out to your hunting cabin. And you'll have there, you'll have like three hunting cabins. You'll go stock them with noodles or whatever it is. And then for the next couple of months or however long you'll go from one cabin, usually the guys are just out there doing this on their own. So they'll go out and they'll go from one cabin and each cabin will have five or six trap lines going out of it. Every day it'll take a half a day to walk to the end of your trap line, open all the traps and a half a day to get back. And they'll do that. And so they'll spend a week at a cabin, open up all the traps and then it'll take a day to hike over to the other cabin.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Go to that one, open up all those traps and then there, and then like three weeks later. So they'll end up back at the first cabin and then check all the traps. And so it's kind of that rhythm and they'll do that for, you know, a couple, few months during the winter. And you're trapping sable, they're called sable, like pine marten is what we would have the equivalent of over here. And uh,

• 1:33:45Lex Fridman?

  What is it?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  It's like a weasel, a furry little weasel and they make coats out of it. And so when I went, he showed me how to open the trap, showed me the ropes, gave me a topographical map. There's one cabin, there's the other, and we parted ways for like five weeks. We did run into each other once in the middle there. Uh, at a cabin, but other than that, you're just off by yourself, hoping to shoot a grouse or something to add to your noodles and make your meal better, catch a fish and then. Working really hard, trying not to get lost and stuff.

• 1:34:18Lex Fridman?

  How do you get from one trapping location to the next?

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  That's funny, cause like it was both basically by landmarks and feel like I didn't have a compass and things like that.

• 1:34:28Lex Fridman?

  By feel.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  I got myself into trouble once and I, the first time I went to one cabin, I got myself into trouble. First time I went to the other cabin, I nailed it. And so I had two different experiences on my first trip. But the, the one that I nailed it, I remember I had to go and it's like a day hike. I was like, well, I know the cabin's south. And so if I just walk south, you know, the left, the sun should be on the left in the morning and right in front of me in the middle of the day. And by evening, it should like end up at my right. And just kind of guess what time it is and, and follow along and, and it, you know, it takes all day. And I kid you not, I ended up like a hundred yards from the cabin. I was like, whoa, this is the trail and that's the cabin. Like, oh, amazing.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  And then the other time I went out and I, heading over the mountains and I thought, you know, hours had passed. I probably had gotten slightly lost. And then I thought I was halfway there. So I thought, okay, I'm going to sit down and cook some, cook some food, get a drink. I'm thirsty. So I sat down and went to start a fire and my matches had gotten all wet because the snow had fallen on me and soaked me. And I didn't have them wrapped in plastic. I was like, oh no, I can't drink water, you know? So I was like, well, I'm just going to power through. I'm halfway there. I kept hiking and then I realized it was getting night. And, and then I realized I was at the halfway point because I saw this rock that I was like, oh no, that's the halfway point.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I was like, I can't do this. And so I need to go get water. I ended up having to divert down the mountain and head to the water. I ended up, you know, there was a whole ordeal. I had to take my skis off because I was going through an old forest fire burn. So they were all really close trees, but then the snow was like this deep. So I was just trudging through and just wishing a bear would eat me. Get it over with. But I finally made it down to the water, chopped the hole through the ice, was able to take a sip.

• 1:36:20Lex Fridman?

  So you're severely dehydrated.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Severely dehydrated and

• 1:36:23Lex Fridman?

  Exhausted.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Exhausted, cold, like, you know, you feel sort of nervous, you're in over your head. And then I, and then I got down to the river, chopped the whole nice drink it, hiked up the river and eventually got to the other cabin. It was probably three in the morning or something.

• 1:36:36Lex Fridman?

  He chopped a hole in the ice.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  To get some water.

• 1:36:42Lex Fridman?

  It was, this gotta be like the, one of the worst days of your life.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  You know, it was a bad day for sure. I've had a few. It was a bad day and it here's what was funny is I got to the cabin at like three in the morning and I brushed over a lot of the like the misery that I felt. And I laid down, I was about to go to sleep and then Europe charges in from from the I was like, whoa, dude, Europe, what are you doing? And I was like, how's it going? He's like, oh, it sucks. And you laid down and just fell asleep. I fell asleep and I was like, oh, that's funny. The last few weeks that we've been apart. Who knows what he went through? Who knows why he was there at that time at night? All just summarized and it sucked and we went to sleep and the next morning we parted ways and who knows?

• 1:37:25Lex Fridman?

  And you didn't really tell him.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Never knew, neither of us said what happened. It's just like, oh, that's interesting.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And he probably was through similar kinds of things.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Who knows? Yeah.

• 1:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Like, what gave you strength in those in those hours when you're,

• 1:37:41Lex Fridman?

  you know, just going to waste high snow?

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Lex Fridman?

  All of that. You're laughing, but like, that's hard.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know that Russians, that phrase, glazab, byatsaruki, deal?

• 1:37:55Lex Fridman?

  Eyes are afraid, hands do. I'm sure there's a poetic way to translate that.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Right. It's kind of like, you know, just put one foot in front of the other. You know, when you think about what you have to do, it's really intimidating and but you just know, if I just do it, if I just do it, if I just keep trudging, eventually I'll get there. And pretty soon you realize, oh, I've covered a couple kilometers or a and so when you're really in it in those moments, I guess you're just you're just putting your head down and getting through.

• 1:38:21Lex Fridman?

  I've had similar moments. There's wisdom to that.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:24Lex Fridman?

  Like once, just take it one step at a time.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  One step at a time. I think that a lot. Honestly, I tell myself that a lot when I'm about to do something really hard, just you know, glazab, byatsaruki, deal it one step at a time. I'm just gonna get, don't like sit there and think, oh, that's a long ways. Just go and then you'll look back and you covered a bunch of ground.

• 1:38:42Lex Fridman?

  One of the things I've realized was helpful in the jungle. That was one of the biggest realizations for me. Is like, it really sucks right now.

• 1:38:53Lex Fridman?

  But when I look back, at the end of the day, I won't really remember exactly how much it sucked. I'll, I have a vague notion of it sucking and I'll remember the good things. So being dehydrated, I'll remember drinking water. And I won't really remember the hours of feeling like shit.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  That's absolutely true. I gotta tell you, it's so funny how like this awareness of that, having been through it and then being aware of it means next time you face it, you can be like, you know what? Once this is over, I'm gonna look back on it and it's gonna be like that and nothing. And I'll actually laugh about it and think it was, it's a thing I'll remember. You know, I remember that story of that miserable day going down to the ice. And I can smile about it now. And now that I know that, I can be in a miserable position and realize that that's what the outcome will be. Once I'm, once it's over, it's just gonna be a story.

• 1:39:42Lex Fridman?

  If you survive though.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  If you survive and that can be.

• 1:39:47Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned you've learned about hunger during these times. Like, when was like the hungriest you've gotten?

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  It was the first time, so to continue the story slightly, I went for trapping with that guy. And then it turned out all his cousins were these native nomadic reindeer herders. And after I like earned his trust and he liked me a lot, he, he took me out to his cousins who were all these, you know, nomads living in teepees. I was like, this is awesome. I didn't even know people still lived like this. And they were really open and welcoming because their cousin just brought me out there, you know, and vouched for me. But it was during fencing season and fencing in Siberia for those reindeers, like an incredible thing. You take an axe, you go out and you just build these 30 kilometer loop fences with just logs interlocking.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  It's tons of work and all these guys are more efficient bodies, they're better at it. And I'm just like working less efficiently and also a lot bigger dude. But we're all just on the same rations kind of. And, and, and I got down, I was like 155 pounds, you know, getting down pretty dang skinny for my six, three frame and just working really hard. And then it's in the spring in Siberia, there's no like, there's not much to forage. You know, in the fall, you can have pine nuts and this and that. But in the spring, you're just stuck with whatever random food you've got. And so. That's where I lost the most weight and felt the most hungry and had a lot of other issues. You know, I was new to that type of work and so working as hard as I could, but also making mistakes,

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  chopping myself with the axe and and getting injured, all kinds of stuff, you know.

• 1:41:27Lex Fridman?

  So injuries plus very low calorie intake.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Low, yeah.

• 1:41:32Lex Fridman?

  And exhausted.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  I remember if you got, you were this poor son of a gun to get stuck slicing the bread, you know, like you're here cutting the bread and somebody throws all the spoons and drops the pot of soup there. And it's like before you can even done slicing, you slice all the meats like gone from the bowl. Everybody else was grabbed the spoon in midair and you're just like, ah, hoping this one little noodle is going to give me a lot of nourishment.

• 1:41:56Lex Fridman?

  Wow. So everybody gets, I mean, yeah, first come, first serve, I guess.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Cause it's like all the dudes out there working on the fence.

• 1:42:03Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned the axe and you gave me a present. This is probably the most badass present I've ever gotten. Uh, so tell me the story of this, of this axe.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  So the natives, when I got there, I thought, you know, I grew up on a farm. I thought I was pretty good with an axe, but they do tons of work with those things. And, um, and I really grew to love their type of axe, their style of axe and just an axe in general. They'd always say it's the one tool you need to survive in the wilderness and, and I agree. And, uh, so this one has certain, yeah, design features that the natives, uh, that was unique to the Avengki, to the natives I was with. One is with these Russian heads or the Soviet heads, whatever they had, they're a little wider on top here, meaning you can put the handle through from the top like a tomahawk. And it, uh, that means you're not dealing with a wedge. And if it ever loosens and you're swinging, it only gets tighter.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  It doesn't fly off. And so that's something that's kind of cool.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Then they have what's, what they do that's unique.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Is so you can see there's the Wolverine axe. So it's got the little Wolverine head in honor of that Wolverine I fought on the show.

• 1:43:17Lex Fridman?

  So you have actually two axes. This is one of the small.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  This is a little smaller. I didn't want to make it too small because you need a something to actually work out there. You need something kind of serious. But then they sharpen it from one side. So if you're right handed, you sharpen it from the right side. And that means when you're in the woods and living, there's a lot of times where you're whether you're making a table or a sleigh or an axe handle or whatever you're doing, that you're holding the wood and doing this work. And it makes it really good for that planing. The other thing it is, especially in northern woods, all the trees are like this big, you know, that you're never cutting down a big giant tree. And so when you swing with a single sided axe like this, sharpen from the one side, it really with your right hand swing like this, it really bites into the wood and gives you a

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  because with that, if you can picture it, that angle is going to cause deflection. And without that angle on your right handed swing, it just like bites in there like crazy. And so, uh, that there's other little divine, you know, the handle was made by some Amish guys in Canada. This is all hand forged by.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's hand forged.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  And so it's a pretty sweet little.

• 1:44:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  There's other thing, you know, like I slightly rounded this pole here. It's just a little nuance because when you pound a stake in, if you picture it, if it's, if it's convex, when you're pounding it, it's going to blow the fibers apart. If it has just a slight concave, it helps hold the fibers together. And so it's a little nuanced, not too flat because you want to still be able to use the back as you would.

• 1:44:49Lex Fridman?

  What kind of stuff are you using the axe for?

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Oh, so the axe is super important to chop through ice in a winter situation, which you probably hopefully won't need. But what I use an axe all the time for is when I'm. When it's wet and rainy and you need to start a fire. Like it's it's hard to get to the middle of dry wood if just a knife or a saw. And so you can, I can go out there, find a dead tall tree, you know, dead standing tree, chop it down, split it apart, split it open, get to the dry wood on the inside, shave it some little curls and have a fire going pretty fast. And so if I have an axe, I feel always confident that I can get a quick fire in whatever weather. And I wouldn't feel the same without it in that regard. So that's the main thing.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Of course, you can use it, I use it if you're taking an animal apart or if you're, you know, all kinds of, what else, building a shelter, skin and TP poles or whatever you're doing. What's the use of a saw versus an axe? I greatly prefer an axe. A saw, though, has, its value goes up quite a bit when you're in hardwoods. Like when you're in a hardwood, oaks and hickory and things like that. It's, they're a lot harder to chop. So a saw is pretty nice in those situations, I'd say. In those situations, I'd like to have both. In the northwoods and in like more coniferous forests, I don't think there's enough advantages that a saw encourages.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  With a good axe, now you'll see people with little like camp axes and stuff and they just don't think they like axes. It's like, well, you haven't actually tried to try a good one first and get good with it. The one thing about an axe, they're dangerous, so you need to like practice, always control it with two hands, make sure you're not, you know where it's gonna go, it doesn't hit you. Or when you're chopping, like say you're creating something, that you're not doing it on rocks and stuff, so that it's, you're doing it on top of wood, so that when you're hitting the ground, you're not dulling your axe. You know, there's, you gotta be a little bit thoughtful about it. Have you ever injured yourself on an axe in the early days? Oh, yeah. That first, so I'd gotten a knee surgery and then about three months later, I had torn my ACL and I went over to Russia and I was like, well, I got a good knee, it's okay. And then that's when I was building that fence that first time.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  And at one point I chopped my rubber boot with my axe because it reflected off and I was new to them and, and I was really frustrated because I'd done it before and. And the native guy was like, oh, you know, we got, I think there's a boot we left, you know, la- you know, a few years ago, we left a boot like four kilometers that way. So we got the reindeer, took him, rode him over. Sure enough, there's a stump with a boot upside down. Pull it off, put it on. I was like, sweeping back in business. Went back a couple of days later, ping, chum, chopped it, cut your foot, cut my rubber boot. And I was just like, dang it. And I was mad enough that I just grabbed the axe and swung it at the tree and it just one handed and like deflects off and bam, right into my-

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, I fell down. I was like, oh my gosh, because you get your axe really like razor sharp and then just swung it into my knee. I didn't even want to look. I was like, oh no. I looked and it wasn't a huge wound because it had hit right on the bone of my knee, but it split the bone, cut a tendon there. And I was out in the middle of the woods. So I literally like, I knew I was in shock because I'm just going to go back to TP right now. So I like ran back to TP, laid down. And honestly, I was stuck there for a few days. I was in so much pain and my other knee was bad. It was like rough. I had to, I couldn't even, I literally couldn't even walk at all or move. I had to like, there was a plastic bag. I had to like poop in it and like roll to the edge of the TP, like shove it under the moss. It's like I was just totally immobilized.

• 1:48:32Lex Fridman?

  I guess that should teach you to not act when you're in a state of frustration or anger.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  There you go. I mean, it's such a lesson too. There were so many of those. And it was always, I was always in a little bit over my head, but like I said, you kind of do that enough and you're, make a lot of mistakes, but every time you learn, I'm like, now it's like an extension of my arm. That's not going to happen because I just know how it works now.

• 1:48:55Lex Fridman?

  Uh, you mentioned wet wood. Uh, how you start a fire when everything's around you is wet?

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends on your environment, but I will say in most of the forests that I spend a lot of time in, in all the north woods, the best thing you can do is find a dead standing tree. So it can be downpouring rain and you chop that tree down. And then when you, when you split it open, no matter how much it's been raining, it'll be dry on the inside. So chop that tree down, chop a piece, you know, a foot long piece out and then split that thing open and then split it again. And then you get to that in inner dry wood. And then you try to do this maybe under a spruce tree or under your own body so that it's not getting rained on while you're doing it. Make a bunch of little curls that'll like catch a flame or light.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  And then you make a lot, a lot more kindling and little pieces of dry wood than you think. Cause what will happen, you'll light it and it'll burn through and it's like dang it. So just be patient, you're gonna be fine, you know, like. And make a nice pile of curls that you can light or spark. And then get a lot of good dry kindling. And then don't be afraid to just boom, boom, boom, pile a bunch of wood on and make a big old fire. Get warm as fast as you can. It's amazing how much that of a recharge it is when you're cold and wet.

• 1:50:12Lex Fridman?

  You can throw relatively wet wood on top of that.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  Once you get that going, yeah, then it'll dry as it goes. But you need to be able to split open and get all that nice dry wood on the inside.

• 1:50:23Lex Fridman?

  I saw that you mentioned that you look for fat wood. What's fat wood?

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  So on a lot of pine trees, a place where the tree was injured when it was alive, it like pumped sap to it. And then this is a good point because I use this a lot.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  It pumps that tree full of sap and then years later, the tree dies, dries out, rots away. But that sap infused wood. It's, it's like turpentine in there, you know, it's oily. And so if it gets wet, it does, you can still light it. It repulses water. And so if you can find that in a rainstorm, you can just make a little pile of those shavings. Get the crappiest spark or quickest light and it'll just sit there and. And burn like a, like a factory fire starter. You know, it's really, really nice. So it's good to spot. It's a good thing to keep your eye out for.

• 1:51:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's really fascinating. And then you make this thing.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  That's just to get the sauna going fast.

• 1:51:23Lex Fridman?

  What was that? That was oil?

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Oh, it was used motor oil I had, if you mix it with some sawdust and then. No, sauna's going just like. It's kind of like homemade fat wood.

• 1:51:34Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how many times I've watched Happy People, A Year in the Taiga by Wanda Herzog. You've, you've talked about this movie. Where, where is that located relative to where you were?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  So there's this big river called the Yenisei that feeds through the middle of Russia. And there's a bunch of tributaries off of it. And one of the tributaries is called the Pudkam in the Tunguska. And I was up that river and just a little ways north is another river called the Bacht. And that's where that village is where they filmed Happy People. So in Siberian terms, we're neighbors.

• 1:52:08Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  Similar environment, similar place, the fur trapper that I was with knew the guy, you know, in the films.

• 1:52:16Lex Fridman?

  What would you say about their way of life? Maybe in the way you've experienced it and the way you saw in happy people?

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  There's, there's something really, really powerful about spending that much time being independent, you know, depending on, well, we talked about a little earlier, but you're putting yourself in these situations all the time where you're uncomfortable, where it's hard, but then you're rising to the occasion, you're making it happen, there's nobody, when you're fur trapping by yourself, there's nobody else to look at, to blame for anything that goes wrong, it's just yourself that you're reliant on and, and, and there's something about the natural rhythms that you are in when you're, when you're that connected to the natural world that really is, does feel like that's what we're designed for.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  And so there's a, there's a psychological benefit you gain from spending that much time in that realm. And for that reason, I think that, you know, people that are connected to those ways are able to tap into a particular, I noticed it a lot with the natives. So if I met the natives in the village, I would think of them as like unhappy people, like, like they drink a lot, they, uh, they're always fighting, the murder rate is through the roof, the suicide rate's through the roof. But when you meet those same people out in the woods, living that way of life, I thought these are happy people. And it's kind of, it's an interesting juxtaposition to be the same person. But, um, but then, you know, I lived in a native village that had the reindeer herding

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  going on around it and everybody kind of benefited because of that. I also went to a native village that they didn't hold those ways anymore. And so everybody was just in the village life and it just felt like a dark place. Whereas the other native village, it was rough in the village because everybody drank all the time, but it had that escape and it had that escape valve. And then once you're out there, it's just a whole different world and, uh, That was such an odd juxtaposition.

• 1:54:13Lex Fridman?

  It's funny that the people that go trapping experience that happiness.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:21Lex Fridman?

  And still.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:54:23Lex Fridman?

  Don't have a self-awareness to like stop themselves from then drinking and doing all the dark stuff when they go to the village. It's it's strange that you're not able to, you're in it, you're happy, but you're not able to sort of reflect on that, the nature of that happiness.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  That's it's really weird. I've thought about that a lot and I don't, I don't know the answer. It's like, there's a huge draw to comfort. There's a huge. And it's all multifaceted and somewhat complex because, you know, you can be out in the woods and have this really cool life. I will say. It's a little bit different for men than women because the men are living like the dream as far as like what I would like. So you're hunting and fishing and you know, managing reindeer and you got these, all these adventures. So what ends up happening is that a lot more guys than girl, young men out there in the woods. And so there's a draw also, I think, to go to the village, probably to find. A woman and then there's a draw of like technology and the new things. And I think it, but then once they're there, honestly, alcohol becomes so overwhelming that everything else kind of just.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Fiddles away and I just.

• 1:55:25Lex Fridman?

  But it's funny that that the comfort you find, there's a draw to comfort.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:55:30Lex Fridman?

  But once you get to the comfort, once you find the comfort, within that comfort, you become the lesser version of yourself.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:55:39Lex Fridman?

  It's weird.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  What a lesson for us.

• 1:55:42Lex Fridman?

  Like we, we need to keep struggling.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of times you have to force yourself in that. So like if we took them as an example. I mean, a lot of times you'd drag this drunk guy into the woods, literally just drag him into the woods. And then he'd sober up and then he was like a month blackout drunk and now he's sobered up and now boom, back into life, back into being a knowledgeable. Um, capable person and because comfort's so available to us all, you almost have to force yourself into that situation. Plan it out. Okay, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do that.

• 1:56:14Lex Fridman?

  Hard thing.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  And do that hard thing and then deal with the consequences when I'm there.

• 1:56:18Lex Fridman?

  What do you learn from that on the nature of happiness? What does it take to be happy?

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Happiness is interesting because it's like, it's complex and multifaceted. It includes a lot of things that are out of your control and a lot of things that are in your control. And um, and it makes, it's quite the moving target in life. You know what I mean? So.

• 1:56:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Uh, I. One of the things that really impacted me when I was a young man and I read the Gulag Archipelago was don't pursue happiness because the ingredients to happiness can be taken from you outside of your control, your health, but pursue like a spiritual fullness, pursue, pursue, I think he words it duty, and then happiness may come alongside or it may not. But so he gave the example that I thought was really interesting in the prison camps. Everybody's trying to survive and they've made that their ultimate goal. I will get through this. And then, and they've all basically turned into animals in pursuit of that goal and like lying and cheating and stealing. And then he was like, somehow the corrupt

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  Orthodox church produced these little babushkas who were like candles in the middle of all this darkness because they did not allow their soul to get corrupted. And he's like, what they did do is they died. They all died, but they were lights while they were alive and lost their lives, but they didn't lose their souls. So for myself, that was really powerful to read and realize that the pursuit of happiness wasn't exactly what I wanted to aim at. I wanted to aim at living out my life according to love, like we talked about earlier. Trying to be that candle. Trying to be that candle. Yeah. Make that your ideal. And then in doing so, it was interesting. So when I, for me personally, my personal experience of that is I thought when I went to Russia that I kind of gave up. I was like, I'm like in my twenties,

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  I spent my whole twenties living in teepees and doing all this stuff that I thought I should be getting a job. I should be pursuing a career. I should get an education of some sort. Like, what am I doing for my future? But I felt I knew where my purpose was. I knew what my calling was. I'm just going to do it. And it, it sounds glamorous now when I talk about it, but it sucked a lot of the times. And there was a lot of, a lot of loneliness, a lot of like giving up what I wanted, a lot of watching people I cared about. You know, you put all this effort in and you just see the people that you could put all this effort in and just die and this and that. And then it was that happened all the time. And then the other thing I thought I gave up was like a relationship because you couldn't, you know, I wasn't going to find a partner over there. And so.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Interestingly enough, now in life, I can look back and be like, whoa, weird. Those two things I thought I gave up is where I've been like almost provided for the most in life. Now I have this, this career guiding people in the wilderness that I love. Like I genuinely love it. I find purpose in it. I know it's healthy and good for people. And then I have an amazing wife and an amazing family. Like, how did that happen? But I didn't exactly aim at it. I like, I consciously, in a way, I mean, I hoped it was tangential, but I aimed at something else, which was those lessons I kind of got from the Gulag Archipelago.

• 1:59:26Lex Fridman?

  So you, you have, uh, just cause you, you mentioned Gulag Archipelago, I gotta go there. You have some suffering in your family history, uh, whether it's the Armenian Assyrian genocide or the Nazi occupation of France.

• 1:59:46Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you could tell the story of that. What, um, this, the survival thing, it runs in your blood, it seems.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  I love history. Like I find so much richness in knowing what other people went through and find so much perspective in my own place in the world. I have the advantage of in my direct family, my grandparents, yeah, they went through the Armenian genocide. They were Assyrians, which was a, you know, like a Christian minority indigenous people in the Middle East. They lived in northwestern Iran and, uh, during the chaos of World War One, you know, and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and it had all kinds of issues and it, one of its issues was it had a big minority group and it thought it would be a good time to get rid of it. And, uh, and, you know, they can justify it in all the ways you can.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Like there were some people that were rebelling or this or that, but ultimately it was just a big collective guilt and extermination policy against the Armenians and the Assyrians. And the, uh, my grandparents, my grandma was 13 at the time and my grandpa was 17, which is interesting because it happened almost a hundred years ago, but our gender, just my dad was born when my mom was, my grandma was pretty old. So, um, but.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  My grandmother, her dad was taken out to be shot. You know, the Turks were coming in and rounding up all the men and they took them out to be shot. And then they took my grandma and her, she had seven brothers and sisters and her mom and they like drove her out into the desert.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Basically, she, her dad got taken out to be shot. So his name was Shalman Yumar or whatever, took him out. They were all tied up, all shot. He needs to say the quick prayer before they shot him, but he fell down and he uh found he wasn't hit. And usually, of course, they'd come up and stab everybody or finish him off. But there was some kind of an alarm and all the soldiers rushed off and he found himself in the bodies and was able to untie himself. They were naked and, you know, hungry and all that. And he ran out of there, escaped, went into a building and found a loaf of bread wrapped in a shirt and was able to escape, fled. He never saw his family for, so to continue the story, my grandma got taken with her,

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  with her mother and brothers and sisters and all just, they just drove them into the desert until they died, basically, and run them around in circles and this and that. And then all the raping and pillaging that accompanies it. And um, uh, at one point, her mom had the baby and the baby died and her mom just collapsed and said, I just can't go any further. And, and my grandma and her sister like picked her up to tea. We gotta keep going and like picked her up and they left the baby along with the other, everybody else had died. It was just the three of them left. And somehow they bumbled across this British military camp and were rescued. Uh, my, neither the sister nor my great grandmother ever really covered as far, you

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  know, recovered from what I understand. But my grandma did. Um, at the same, at the same time, in another village in north, in Iran there, the Turks came in and were. Burning down my grandpa's village and they caught and my grandpa's dad was in a wheelchair. He had like some money belt and he stuffed all his money in it and told it gave it to grandpa and just told him to run and don't turn back and they came in the front doors. He was running out the back and they he never saw his dad again, but he said he turned around and saw the bill, you know, the house on fire. Never knew what happened to his sister. She then, so he was just alone. He ran. Yeah. At some point he uh, I can't remember. He like lost his money belt and like he took his jacket off, forgot it was in there. Something happened.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  Um, anyway, so he got, he was in a refugee camp. He ended up getting taken in by some Jesuit missionaries. So anyway, both of them had lost basically everything. And then at some point they met in Baghdad. Started a family immigrated to France and then it just so happened to be right before World War Two. And so then the Nazis invaded my aunt. She's still alive, but she uh, she actually met a resistance fighter, you know, for the French and under a bridge somewhere and they, and they fell in love and she got married. So she had kind of an in on the, on the French Resistance. At one point and of course they were all hungry. They'd recently immigrated, but also had

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  this Nazi occupation and all that. And so the Uncle Joe, the resistance fighter guy told him like, hey, we're going to storm this noodle factory. Like come. And so they stormed the noodle factory and all my aunts around in there and we're like throwing out noodles into wheelbarrows and everybody was running. Uh, then the Nazis came back and took it back over and like shot a bunch of people and everything and, and uh, grandpa, cause he had already come from where he came from was paranoid. So he buried all the noodles out in the garden. And then my two aunts got stuck in that factory overnight with all the Nazi guards or whatever. And then the the Nazi guards went all from house to house to find everybody that had had noodles and, you know, punish them.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  But they didn't find my grandpa's. Fortunately they searched his house, uh, but not the garden. And then uh, so they had noodles and somehow it must've been in the same factory or something, but a bit of olive oil. And they just lived off of that for the whole, all the whole war years. My aunts ended up getting out of that. They hid behind boxes and crates overnight and stuff. And the resistance stormed again in the morning and this they got away and stuff, but. Anyway, chaos. So when they moved to America, I will say the most patriotic family everywhere ever. They loved it. Paradise here.

• 2:05:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's a, that's a lot to go through. What lessons do you, do you draw from that on perseverance?

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Look, I'm one, I'm just one generation away from all that suffering. Like my aunts and uncles and dad and stuff were the kids of these people. And somehow I don't have that. Like what, what happened to all that trauma? Like I, it's like somehow my grandparents bore it. And then they were able to build a family, but not just a family that, but a happy family. Like I knew all my aunts and uncles and I didn't know them, they died before me, but um, they were, it was so much joy. The family reunions were the best thing ever at the Jonas's and they uh, and it's just like, how in one generation did you go from that to that? And, and it must've been a great sacrifice of some sort to not pass

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  that much like resentment or like, what did they do to, to break that chain in one generation?

• 2:06:36Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it works the other way? Like where their ability to escape genocide, to escape

• 2:06:44Lex Fridman?

  Nazi occupation gave them a gratitude for life? It's not a trauma in the sense like you're forever bearing it. It, it, the flip side of that is just gratitude to be alive when you know so many people did not survive.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it must be because the, the only footage I saw of my grandma was like they were all the kids and stuff. And they were cooking up a rabbit that they were raising or whatever. And they uh, but a joyful woman, you could see it in her. And she must've been so, she must've understood how fortunate she was and been so grateful for it. And so thankful for every one of those 11 kids she had. So I recognize it again in my, in my dad, because my dad went through a really slow, kind of painful decline in his health. And he had diabetes, ended up losing one leg. And so he lost his job. He had to watch his ma, or my mom go to school. Long, all he wanted to do was be a provider and be like a family man.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  I bet the best time in his life was when his kids ran to him to give him a hug. But then all of a sudden, he found himself in a position where he couldn't work and he had to watch his wife go to school, which was really hard for her and, and become the breadwinner for the family and he just felt like a failure. And I watched him go through that. After all these years of letting that foothold heal, we went out first day and we were splitting firewood with the splitter and he was just.

• 2:08:05Lex Fridman?

  So good to be back out, Jordan. It's so nice.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  And he crushed his foot in the log splitter and you're saying, no. And so then they just amputated it. We've got both legs amputated.

• 2:08:14Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  And then his health continued to decline. He lost his movement in his hands. So he was like incapacitated to a degree and in a lot of pain. I would hear him at night in pain all the time. And I delayed a trip back to Russia and just stayed with my dad for those last six months. And it was so interesting, having had lost everything. I've watched him wrestle with it through the years, but then he found his joy and his purpose just in being almost, I mean, a vegetable. I'd have to help him pee, roll him onto the cot, take him to dialysis and, and, but we would laugh. He would like, I'd hear him at night crying or like in pain like, ah. And then in the morning, he'd have like encouraging words to say and, and that's at, and I was like,

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  wow, that's how you face loss and suffering. And, and he must've gotten that from it somehow from his parents. And then, you know, I find myself on this show and I had a thought like, why is this easy to me in a way like, you know, why is this thing that's, and I was like, and it just felt like this gift that it kind of handed down and now would be my duty to hand down, you know, like, but it's kind of an interesting.

• 2:09:22Lex Fridman?

  And be the beacon of that, represent that kind of perseverance in the, in the simpler way that something like survival in the wilderness shows.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:32Lex Fridman?

  It's the same. It's, it, it rhymes.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  It rhymes and it's so simple, like the lessons are simple and so we can take them and apply them.

• 2:09:40Lex Fridman?

  So that's on the survivor side. What about on the people committing the atrocities? What do you make of the Ottomans, what they did to Armenians or the Nazis, what they did to the Jews, the Slavs and basically everyone? What, what do you, why do you think people do evil in this world?

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  It's interesting that it's really easy, right? It's really easy. You can almost see it, sense it in yourself to justify,

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  to justify a little bit of evil or see yourself cheer a little bit when the enemy gets knocked back in some way. It's really in a way, it's just perfectly naturalist for us to feed that hate and feed that tribalism in group, out group, we're on this team. And I think that can happen.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  I think it just happens slowly, like one justification at a time, one step at a time. You, uh, you hear something and it makes, it makes you think then that you are in the right to perform some kind of,

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  you know, you're justified and create, you know, break a couple of eggs to make an omelet type thing. And then, but all of a sudden that takes you down this whole train to where pretty soon you're justifying what's completely unjustifiable. It's gradual. Yeah. It's gradual process of a little bit at a time. I think that's why, like for me, like having a path of faith is like, works as like a mooring because it can help me shine that light on myself. You know, it's like something else. Cause if you're just looking at yourself and looking within yourself for, for your compass in life, it's really easy to get that thing out of whack. But you kind of need a perspective from which you can step out of yourself and look into

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  yourself and judge yourself accordingly. And am I walking in line with that ideal, you know? And then, and I think without that check, your, your subject, you know, it's easy to ignore the fact that you might be able to commit those things, but we live in a pretty easy, comfortable society. Like what if, you know, what if we pictured yourself in, in the position of my grandparents? And then all of a sudden you got the upper hand in some kind of a fight. What are you going to do? You know, you could, you'd definitely picture becoming evil in that situation. I think one thing.

• 2:12:11Lex Fridman?

  Faith in God can do is humble you before these kinds of complexities of the world. And humility is a way to avoid the slippery slope towards evil, I think. Humility that you don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And you defer that to sort of bigger powers to try to understand that.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:37Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a kind of, I mean, a lot of the atrocities were committed by people who are very sure of themselves being good.

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so true.

• 2:12:48Lex Fridman?

  It is sad that religion is at times used as a way to kind of just, as yet another tool for justification.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:13:00Lex Fridman?

  Which is a sad application of religion.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  It really is. It's so inherent and so natural in us to justify ourselves. It's really, it's really, I mean, I think it's almost, I mean, just understanding history, you read history. It blows my mind that, and I'm super thankful that somehow, and this has been missed you so much, but somehow this ideology arose that love your enemies, forgive, forgive those that persecute you. And just on down the line, that something like that rose in the world into a position

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  where we all kind of accept those ideals, I think is really remarkable and worth appreciating. That said, a lot of that gets wrapped up in what you're talking, you know, what is so natural just becomes another instrument for tribalism or another justification for wrong. And so I even myself am self-conscious sometimes talking about matters of faith because I know when I'm talking about, I'm talking about something. Else other than, you know, there everybody within what someone else might think of when they hear me talking about it. So it's interesting.

• 2:14:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've been listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this. He has a way of articulating things which are sometimes hard to understand in the moment, but when I like read it carefully afterwards, it starts to make more sense. I've heard him talk about religion and God as a kind of base layer, like a metaphorical substrate from which morality of our sense of what is right and wrong comes from and just our conceptions of what is beautiful in life. All these kinds of higher things that are like fuzzy to understand that their religion helps create the substrate from which we as a species, like as a civilization can come up

• 2:14:56Lex Fridman?

  with these notions and without it, you are lost at sea. I guess for him, morality requires that substrate.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Like you said, it's kind of fuzzy. So I've only been able to get clear vision of it when I live it. It's not something you profess or anything like that. It's something that you take seriously and apply in your life. And when you live it, then there's some clarity there. But that it has to be kind of defined. Like it's like it's, and that's where you come in with the religion and the stories, because if you leave it completely undefined,

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  I don't really know where you go from there. Actually, the funny, to speak to that, I did mushroom. Have you ever done those?

• 2:15:41Lex Fridman?

  Mushrooms, yeah.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  I've done them a couple of times, but one time was, didn't do that many, the other time more. And I had a, I had a really profound experience in helping couch all this in a proper context for myself. So I, when I did it, I remember I was sitting on a swing and I could see my, everything was so blissful, except I could see my black hands like on these chains, like on the swing, but everything else was blissful and kind of amorphous. And I could see the outline of my kids and I could just feel the love for them. And I was just like, man, I just feel the love. It's so wonderful. Like, you know, But then I would, you know, at times I would try to picture him and I couldn't quite picture the kids, but I could feel the love. And then, um, and then I started asking all the deepest

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  existential questions I could, you know, and it felt like I was just one answer, another answer, another answer. Everything was being answered. And I felt like I was communing with God, whatever you want to say. And, but I was very aware of the fact that that communing was just peeling back the tiniest corner of the infinite. And it just dumped me with every answer I felt like I could have. And it kind of blew me away. So then I asked it, well, if you're the infinite, like, why did you reveal to me yourself? Why did you use like the story of Jesus to reveal yourself? And, and then that infinite, um, amorphous thing had to somehow take form for us to like, for us to be able to relate

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  to it. It had to have some kind of a form. And, but whenever you create a form out of something, you're like boxing it in and subjugating it to boundaries and stuff like that. And then that subject to pain and subject to the brokenness and all that. And I was like, oh, wow. And then, but when I had that thought, then all of a sudden I could relate my like dark hands on the chains to the rest of the experience. And then all of a sudden I could picture my children as the children rather than this amorphous feeling of love. It was like, oh, there's Elan and Altai and Zion. And, but, but then they were bounded. And then once they're bounded, you're subject to the death and to the misunderstanding and to the all that. And I was like, you know, I picture the amoeba or the cell. And then

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  when it dies, it turns into a unformed thing. And, uh, so we need some kind of form to relate to. So instead of always just talking about God completely intangibly, it kind of gave me a way to relate to it. And I was like, oh, wow, that's, that was really powerful to me. And, and putting it in a context that was applicable.

• 2:18:17Lex Fridman?

  But ultimately, God is sort of the thing that's formless, that is unbounded.

• 2:18:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:27Lex Fridman?

  But we humans need.

• 2:18:30Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's the the the purpose of stories. They resonate with something, you know. But when you need the sort of the bounded nature, the constraints of those stories.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:18:39Lex Fridman?

  Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to like.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Can't relate to it.

• 2:18:42Lex Fridman?

  Can't relate to it.

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:44Lex Fridman?

  And and then when you look at the stories, literally, where you just look at them just as they are, it seems silly.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:18:55Lex Fridman?

  It's too simplistic.

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  Right, right. And then that was always, you know, a lot of my family and loved ones and friends have completely left the faith. But and I totally, in a way, I get it. I understand. But I also really see the baby that's being thrown out with the bathwater. And I want to cherish that in a way, I guess.

• 2:19:14Lex Fridman?

  And it's interesting that you say that the way to know what's right and wrong is if to live it. Sometimes it's it's probably very difficult to articulate, but in in the living of it, do you realize it?

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm glad you say that because that's I found a lot of comfort in that because I feel somewhat inarticulate. A lot of the times I'm unable to articulate my thoughts, especially on these matters. And then you just think it's I just have to, but I do have to, I can live it. I can try to live it, you know. And then what I also am struck with right away is I can't because you can't love everybody. You can't love your enemies and you can't.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  But as placing that in front of you as the ideal is so important to put like a a check on your human instincts, on your tribalism, on your, I mean, you can very quickly, like we're talking about with evil. You know, it can really quickly take its place in your life. Almost you almost won't observe it happening, you know, but

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  and so I so much appreciate all the the me striving. And that's where, you know, I grew up in a Christian family, so I had these like cliches that I didn't really understand, like a relationship with God, like, what does that mean? But then I realized when I struggled with trying with taking, I actually did try to take it seriously and struggle with what does it mean to live out a life of love in the world? But that's like a wrestling match because it's not that simple. It doesn't sound, it sounds good, but it's really hard to do. And then you realize you can't do it perfectly. But, but in that struggle, in that wrestling match is where I actually sensed that relationship.

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  And then it's, and that's where it kind of gains life and how that really, and I'm sure that relates to what Jordan Peterson is, you know, getting at in his metaphor.

• 2:21:08Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  One thing I noticed really tangibly on Alone was that because I had so many people that were close to me, kind of just leave it all together. I was like, I could do that. I actually understand why they do. Or I could not, you know, I do have a choice. And so I had to choose at that point to,

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  to maintain that ideal and because I could add enough time on Alone, one nice thing is you don't have any distractions. You have all the time in the world to go into your head and I could play those paths out in my life. And not only in my life, but I feel like societally and for, and generationally, like I'd throw it all away and everybody start from square one. Or we can try to, you know, redeem what's valuable in this and wrestle with it and struggle. And so I, it just, I chose that path.

• 2:22:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, I do think it's a, it's a kind of wrestling match because I'm, you mentioned Gulag Archipelago. I'm very much a believer that we all have the capacity for good and evil. And striving for the ideal to be a good human being is not a trivial one. You have to find the right tools for yourself to be able to be the candle, as you mentioned before.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 2:22:33Lex Fridman?

  And then for that, religion and faith can help. I'm sure there's other ways, but I think it's grounded in understanding that each human is able to be a really bad person and a really good person. And that's like a choice. It's a deliberate choice. And it's a choice that's taken every moment and builds up over time.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  And and the hard part about it is you don't know. You don't always have the clarity using reason to understand what is good and what is right and what is wrong. You have to kind of live it with humility and constantly struggle. Cause then, yeah, you have to, you have, you might wake up in a society where um you're committing genocides. And you think you're the good guys. And I think you have to have the the courage to to realize you're not. It's not always obvious.

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  It isn't, man.

• 2:23:32Lex Fridman?

  And only history has the clarity to show who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  Right, you gotta wrestle with it. It's like that quote, you know, the line between good and evil goes through the heart of every man. And we push it this way and that. And our job is to work on that within ourselves.

• 2:23:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the part that's uh what I like. Sort of the the full quote talks about the the fact that it moves. It moves from the line moves moment by moment, day by day. We have the uh the freedom to uh move that line. So it's like it's very deliberate thing. It's not like you're born this way and that's it.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I agree.

• 2:24:20Lex Fridman?

  And and especially in, you know, in in conditions where there are like war and peace.

• 2:24:29Lex Fridman?

  In the case of the camps, you know, absurd levels of injustice in the face of all that. When everything is taken away from you, you still have the choice to to be to be the candle, like the grandmas. By the way, grandmas in like all parts of the world are like the strongest.

• 2:24:51Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what it is. I don't know. They have this like wisdom uh that comes from patients and have seen it all. Have seen all the bullshit of the people that come and gone, all the abuses of power, all of this. I don't know what it is. And they just keep going.

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so true.

• 2:25:14Lex Fridman?

  What do you think of uh?

• 2:25:17Lex Fridman?

  As we've gotten a bit philosophical, what do you think of Werner Herzog's style of narration? I kind of wish he narrated my life.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing to listen to.

• 2:25:27Lex Fridman?

  Because that documentary is actually in Russian. I think he took a longer series. Yeah. And then put narration over it. And that narration can transform like a story.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does an incredible job with it. I will say, have you seen the full version? Have you watched the four part full version? You should, you'd like it. It's in Russian and so you'll get the fullness of that. And it's a, he had to fit it into a two hour format. And so I think what you lose in those extra couple hours is worth watching. I think you'll like it, so.

• 2:26:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they always go, they always go pretty dark.

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Do they?

• 2:26:09Lex Fridman?

  He has a very dark sense about nature that has violence and it's murder.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  I think that's important to recognize because it's really easy. I mean, especially with what I do and what I talk about. And I see so much of the value in nature. Gosh, you know, I also see like a beautiful moose and a calf running around. And then next week I see the calf ripped to shreds by wolves. And you're just like, oh, and it's a, it's not as, it's, it's, it's not as Rousseauian as we'd like to think, you know? It is, it, you know, things must die for things to live, like you said. And that's just played out all the time. And it's indifferent to you, doesn't, doesn't care if you live or die.

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  And doesn't care how you die or how much pain you go through while you, you know, it's like, it's pretty brutal. So that it's interesting that he taps into that. And I think, I think it's valuable because it's easy to idealize in a way, but.

• 2:27:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the indifference is. I don't know what to make of it. There isn't a difference. It's a bit scary. It's a bit lonely.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:27:20Lex Fridman?

  You're just a cog in the, in the machine. Of nature. I think that doesn't really care.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  Totally. I think that's something I've sat with a lot on, on that show. Another part of the depth of your psychology delve into, but it, and that's when I thought like, I could, I could, I understand that deeply, but I could also choose to believe that for some reason it matters. And then I could live like it matters. And then I could see the trajectories and the kind of that was another fork in the road of my path, I guess.

• 2:27:51Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the connection to the animals? So in that, in that movie, it's with the dogs. And with you, it's the other domesticated, the, the reindeer.

• 2:28:02Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about that human animal connection?

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  In the context of that indifference, isn't it interesting that we assign so much value and love and appreciation for these animals? And in some degree, we get that back in a reciproc- I think right now you just said the reindeer. I think of the one they gave me because he was long and tall, so they named him Dlinny. And, and I just remember Dlinny and just watching him eat the leaves and go with me through the woods and trust him to take me through rivers and stuff. And, uh, and it really is special. It's really enriching, you know, to have that relationship with an animal. And I think it also puts you in a proper context. One thing I noticed about the natives who live with those animals all the time is they relate to life and death a little more naturally.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  It feels, you know, we feel really removed from it. It's particularly in urban settings. And I think, I think when you interact with animals and you have to confront the life and the death of them and the responsibility of in a symbiotic relationship you have, um, I think it opens a little bit awareness to your place in the, in the puzzle. And puts you in it rather than above it.

• 2:29:16Lex Fridman?

  Have you been able to accept your own death?

• 2:29:19Speaker 01

  I wonder, you know, you wonder when, when it actually comes, what you're going to think, but I, I did have, you know, I did have my dad to watch

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  confronted in as positive a manner as you could. And I, and that's a big advantage. And so I.

• 2:29:38Speaker 01

  I think when the time comes that I will be ready, but I think it, but I think that's easy to say when the time feels far off, you know, it'll be interesting if you got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow and stage four, it's like, be heavy.

• 2:29:51Lex Fridman?

  Did you ever confront death while in survival situations? I mean, when you're, I mean, you're in.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  I did, I did have a time, I had a time where I thought I might, I was gonna die. I had a lot of situations that could have gone either way and a lot of injuries, broken ribs and this and that, but the one that, that I was able to be conscious through a slowly evolving experience that I thought I might die in was at one point we were siphoning gas out of a barrel and it was almost to the bottom and I was like, so sucking really hard to get the gas out. And then I didn't, I didn't get the siphon going, so I like waited and then while I was sitting there, Europe put the, a new canister on top and put the hose in and I was, didn't see. And so then I went to get another, you know, siphon and I went, like sucked as hard as I couldn't, it just instantly like a bunch

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  of gas filled my mouth and I couldn't like spit it out. I had to go like that and I just full mouthful of gas that I just drank and I was just like, oh, like what is that gonna do? And, um, and he and my friend were gonna go on this fishing trip and so was I and I was just like, oh, I might just stay. And I was in this little Russian village and, uh, and they're like, all right, well, Euro was like, man, I had a buddy that died doing that with diesel a couple of years ago, you know, and I was, oh, man. And so anyway, I made my way to the hospital and by then, you know, you're really out of it because, and then, uh, and it was, they put me in this little dark room. It almost sounds

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  like unrealistic, but it's actually how it happened. They put me in a little, a little room with a toilet and they gave me a cold, you know, galvanized bucket and then like they set a cold water faucet and they're just like, just chug water, puke into the toilet and just flush your system as much as you can. But they only had a cold water faucet. So I was just sitting there like chug, chug, chug, chug until like you puke and chug until you're puking. I'm in the dark and I, and I was like, started to shiver because I was so cold, but I said to like, still like get this thing up to me and chug until I puked. I was picturing, I remember reading, you know, about the Japanese torture where they would put a hose in somebody and then make them drink water until they puke. Anyway, the, uh,

• 2:32:00Speaker 01

  And I, and I just felt so, the only way I can express it, I felt so possessed, like demon possessed. Like I was just permeated with gas. I could feel it was coming out of my pores and I like wanted to like rip it out of me and I couldn't. I'd like puke into the toilet and then couldn't see, but I was wondering if it was like rainbow. And then, and then I just remember like I could tell I was going out pretty soon and um. And I remember looking at my hands up close, I could see them a little bit and I was like, oh, that's how dad's hands looked, you know, they were alive, alive and then. And I was like, interesting, is it, are my hands gonna look like that in a few minutes or whatever? So then I wrote down like to my family what I thought, you know, like I love you all, like feel at peace, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:32:46Speaker 01

  And then I passed out and I woke up, but I didn't think, I actually thought, when I went to pass out, I thought it was, there was a coin toss for me. So I really felt like I was confronting the end there.

• 2:32:59Lex Fridman?

  What are the hardest conditions to survive in on earth?

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  Well, there are places that are just purely uninhabitable, but I think as far as places that you have a chance.

• 2:33:09Lex Fridman?

  You have a chance, that's a good way to put it.

• 2:33:11Speaker 01

  Well, maybe Greenland, I think of Greenland because I think of, you know, those Vikings that settled there were rugged, capable dudes. And they didn't make it, but there are Inuit that, that, you know, natives that live up there, but. It's a hard life, you know, and the population's never grown very big because they're, you're scraping by up there and you picture. And the, and the Vikings that did land there, you know, they just weren't able to quite adapt. And the fact that they all died out is just a symbol to that must be a pretty difficult place to live.

• 2:33:45Lex Fridman?

  What would you say that's, that's primarily because just the food sources are limited?

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  Food sources are limited, but the fact that some people can live there means it is possible, you know, they, they've figured out ways to. Catch seals and do things to survive, but it's by no means. Easier to be taken for granted or obvious. I think it's a harsh, probably a harsh place to try to live.

• 2:34:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, it's fascinating, not just humans, but to, to watch how animals have figured out how to survive. Watching like a documentary on polar bears, like they just figure out a way and they get, and they've been doing it for generations and they, they figure out a way, they travel. Like hundreds of miles to like.

• 2:34:27Lex Fridman?

  To the, to the water to get fat and then they travel a hundred miles like for whatever other purpose, because it, because they want to stay on the ice. I don't know. But it's like, there's, there's a process.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Lex Fridman?

  They figure it out against the long odds and some of them don't make it.

• 2:34:43Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It's what a, what tough things, man. You just think every little, every animal you see up in the mountains, when I'm up in the woods, is that thing just surviving through the winter scraping by? It's tough, tough existence.

• 2:34:59Lex Fridman?

  What do you think it would take to break you? Let's say mentally.

• 2:35:06Lex Fridman?

  Like if you're in a survival situation.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it would have mentally, it would have to be.

• 2:35:16Speaker 01

  Well, we thought, we talked about that earlier, I guess. The thing that I've confronted that I, that I thought I knew was that if I knew I was the last person on earth, I wouldn't do it. Like I thought, but maybe you're right. Maybe I would think I wasn't. But I think, you know, I can't imagine, I can't imagine. We're, we're so blessed in the time we live, like, but I can't imagine what it's like to lose your kids, something like that. It was an experience that was so common for humanity, for so much of history.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  Would I be able to endure that? I would have at least a legacy to look back on of people who did, but God forbid I ever have to delve that deep. You know what I mean? That I could see that breaking somebody.

• 2:36:02Lex Fridman?

  And I mean, in your fam, in your own family history, there is, there's people who have survived that.

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:07Lex Fridman?

  Maybe that would give you hope.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

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

• 2:36:12Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  I don't know what it would be like. So on a loan, like on a loan, I, I knew if I wasn't gonna, and ultimately it is a game show. So it's like, ultimately I wasn't gonna kill myself out there. It's like, but

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

  so if I hadn't been able to procure food and I was starving to death, it's like, okay, I'm not, I'm gonna go home. You know, but like, if you put yourself in a, in that situation, but it's not a game show.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  And having been there to some degree, like I will say, I wasn't even close. Like, I don't even know.

• 2:36:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hadn't got, it hadn't pushed my mental limit at all yet, I would say, or on the scale. But that's not to say there isn't one. I know there is one. And but I have a hard time.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  I know I've dealt, you know, I've dealt with enough pain and enough discomfort in life that I know I can deal with that. I think, I think it gets difficult when you start to, when there's a way out and you start to wonder if you shouldn't take the way out as far as like,

• 2:37:21Speaker 01

  if there's no way out.

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:37:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's interesting. I mean, that is, that is a real difficult battle. When there's an exit, when it's easy to quit.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, why am I doing this?

• 2:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, I, that's the thing that like, it gets louder and louder, the harder things get. That voice.

• 2:37:43Speaker 01

  It's not insignificant. Like, if you think you're doing, like, you know, if you think you're doing permanent damage to your body, you would be smart to quit. You should just not do that on a, when it's not necessary. Um, because health is kind of all you have in some regards. So, well, I do, I don't blame anyone. Then they quit because of that reason. It's like, good, but,

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  but if you're in a situation and it, you don't have the option to quit, is knowing that you're doing permanent, that's not going to break, that won't break me, you know, it just, you just have to get through it. I'm not sure what my mental limit would be outside of like, the fam, family suffering in the way that I described earlier.

• 2:38:25Lex Fridman?

  When it's just you, it's you, you're alone, there's the limit. Uh, you don't know what the limit is.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:38:32Lex Fridman?

  Injuries, injuries, like, physical stuff is annoying, though.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:38:37Lex Fridman?

  That could be.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Isn't it weird how like, I mean, I can be, have a good life, happy life, and then you have a bad back or you have a headache.

• 2:38:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:44Speaker 01

  And it's amazing how much that can overwhelm your experience. Um, then again, that was something I saw in dad that was like, interesting, how can you find joy? In that, when you're just steeped in that all the time and people I'm sure listening, there's a lot of people that do and it's so, and talk about the cross to bear and the like hero journey to be like, good for you for trying to find what you can, what your way through that. There was a lady in Russia, Tanya, and she had had cancer and recovered, but always had a pounding headache. And she was really joyful and really fun to be around.

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  And I just like, man, I mean, you just have to have a really bad headache for today to know how much that throws a wrench in your existence. So, so all that to say, if you're not right now suffering with blindness or a bad back, or it's like, just count your blessings because it is all, it's so easy to have, it's, it's amazing how complex we are, how well our bodies work. And when they go out of whack, it can be very overwhelming and they all will at some point. And so that's an interesting thing to think ahead on how you're going to confront it when it does. Keeps you humble, like you said.

• 2:40:01Lex Fridman?

  It's inspiring that people figure out a way with migraines. That's a hard one though. If you have headaches.

• 2:40:06Speaker 01

  It's so hard.

• 2:40:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man. Cause those can be really painful and it's like, and dizzying and all of this. That's inspiring. That's inspiring that you found.

• 2:40:21Speaker 01

  There's not nothing in that. You know, I mean, you can find somehow you can tap into purpose even in that pain. I guess I would just speak from like, right? My dad's experience. I saw somebody do it and I benefited from it. So, thanks to him for seeing the higher calling there.

• 2:40:39Lex Fridman?

  You, you wrote a note on your blog. In 2012, you spent five weeks ish in the forest alone. I just thought it was interesting because this is in contrast to on the show alone. You're really alone, where like you're not talking to anybody and you realize that, you're right. I remember at one point after several weeks had passed, I wandered into a particularly beautiful part of the woods and exclaimed out loud, wow. It struck me that it was the first time I had heard my own voice in several weeks with no one to talk to. What?

• 2:41:18Lex Fridman?

  Where, what, did your thoughts go into something like deep place?

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say my mental life was really active, you know, I, what you, what you end up, when you're that long alone, I'll tell you what you won't have is any like skeletons in your closet that are still in your closet. Like you will be forced to confront every, every person, even the one not, I mean, it's one thing if you've cheated on your wife or something, but you'll be confronted with the random dude you didn't say thank you to and the like, and the issue that you didn't resolve, you know, it's all this stuff that was long gone will come up and then you'll work through it and you'll think how you should make it right. And I had a lot of those thoughts while I was out there

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  and it was, it was so interesting to see what you would just brush over and then, uh, and confront it because in our modern world, when you're always distracted, you're just never ever gonna know until you take the time to be alone for a considerable amount of time.

• 2:42:22Lex Fridman?

  Spend time hanging out with the skeletons.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I recommend it.

• 2:42:28Lex Fridman?

  So you said you guide people. What, what are your favorite places to go to?

• 2:42:35Speaker 01

  Well, if I tell them, then is everybody gonna go there?

• 2:42:38Lex Fridman?

  I like how you actually have a, it might be a YouTube video or your Instagram post where you give them a recommendation of like the best fishing hole in the world and like you give detailed instructions how to get there, but it's like a journey of life. It's like a Lord of the Rings type of journey.

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  Right, right. No, I, I love the, I love the like in the,

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  you know, there's a region that I definitely love in the States. It's special to me. I grew up there. Stuff like that. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Those are really cool places to me. I like the small town vibes they're still maintaining and stuff there.

• 2:43:12Lex Fridman?

  A mix of like mountains and forests.

• 2:43:15Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. But you know, another really awesome place that blew my mind was, uh, New Zealand, that South Island of New Zealand was pretty incredible. As far as just stunning stuff to see, that was pretty high up there on the list. But there's all these places have such kind of unique.

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  Unique things about Canada became like where they did alone. It's not typically what you'd say. Because it's fairly flat and cliffy and stuff, but it really became beautiful to me because I could tapped into the richness of the land, you know, or, or. You know, the fishing hole thing is like, that's a special little spot, you know, something like that. And, and you see the beauty and then you start to see the beauty on this in the smaller scale. Like, oh, look at that little meadow with that. It's got an orange and a pink and a blue flower right next to each other. That's super cool, you know, and there's a million things like that.

• 2:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Have you been back there yet? Uh, back to where the alone show was?

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  No, we're going back this, uh, summer. I'm going to take guide a trip up there, take a bunch of people. I'm really looking forward to being able to enjoy it without the pressure of.

• 2:44:21Lex Fridman?

  What, what advice would you give to people in terms of? How to be in nature? So like hikes to take or journeys to take out of nature where it could, it could take you to that place where? The busyness and the madness of the world can dissipate and you can be with it. Like, how long does it take for you for people usually to just like?

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you need a few days probably to really tap into it. But, uh, you know, maybe you need to work your way there. Like it's awesome to go out on a hike, go see some beautiful little waterfall or go see some. Old tree or whatever it is, you know, like, um.

• 2:45:04Speaker 01

  But I think just doing is it, you know, everybody thinks about doing it. You really, you just really do do it, like go out and then. Plan to go overnight. Don't be so afraid of all the potentialities that you delay it inevitably. You know, like, it's actually one of the things that I've enjoyed the most about guiding people is. Is giving them the tools so that now they have this ability into the future. You can go out and feel like, I'm going to pick this spot on the map and go there and. That's a tool in your toolkit of life that is, I think, really valuable because I think everybody should spend some time in nature. I mean, I think it's been pretty proven.

• 2:45:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, camping camping is great and solo. A guy who has to do it solo is pretty cool.

• 2:45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cool. You did.

• 2:45:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's cool. And I recorded stuff, so that that that helped.

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 2:46:00Lex Fridman?

  So you sit there and you record the thoughts. Actually, for having to record the thoughts, I had to like, it forced me to really think through what I was feeling to convert the feelings into words, which is not a trivial thing because it's mostly just feeling.

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:19Lex Fridman?

  You feel a certain kind of way.

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  That's interesting. You know, I felt like the way the way I met my wife was like, you know, we met at this wedding and then I went to Russia, basically. And we kept in touch via email for, you know, that year. And and a similar thing. It was really interesting to be have to be so thoughtful and purposeful about what you're saying and things like, I think it's probably healthy, good thing to do.

• 2:46:46Lex Fridman?

  What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on?

• 2:46:50Lex Fridman?

  The the future of human civilization?

• 2:46:52Speaker 01

  If we talk, you know, we talked about gratitude earlier, like, look at what we have now. That could give you hope. Like, look at what we've the world we're in. We live in such an amazing time with, you know.

• 2:47:03Lex Fridman?

  Buildings and roads.

• 2:47:04Speaker 01

  Buildings and roads.

• 2:47:05Lex Fridman?

  Airplanes.

• 2:47:05Speaker 01

  Food security. And and, you know, I lived with the natives and I thought to myself a lot, like, I wonder if not everybody would choose this way of life because it is, there's something really rich about this that small group, your direct relationship to your needs, all that. But with the food security and the help, you know, modern medicine, the things that we now have that we take for granted, but that I wouldn't choose that life if we didn't have those things. Otherwise, you're going to watch your family starve to death or things like that. We so we have so much now, which should lead us to be hopeful. While we try to improve, because there's definitely a lot of things wrong, you know,

• 2:47:48Speaker 01

  but but I guess it's, there's a lot of room for improvement. And I do feel like we're sort of watching, walking on a knife's edge, you know, but I guess that's. The way it is.

• 2:48:00Lex Fridman?

  As the, as the tools we build become more powerful.

• 2:48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exactly. The knife's edge is getting sharper and sharper. I've talked, yeah, I'll like argue with, with my brother about that sometimes. He takes the more positive view and I'm like, I mean, it's great. We've done great, but man, more and more people with nuclear weapons and more. It's just gonna take one mistake with the more power.

• 2:48:27Lex Fridman?

  I think there's something about the sharpness of the knife's edge. It gets humanity to really like focus and like step up and not, not screwed up. There is, just like you said with the cold, going out into the extreme cold, it like wakes you up. And I think the same thing with nuclear weapons is just like wakes up humanity like.

• 2:48:48Speaker 01

  Everybody was half asleep.

• 2:48:50Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. And then we keep building more and more powerful things to make sure we stay awake.

• 2:48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Stay awake, see what we've done, be thankful for it, but then improve it. And then, you know, of course, uh, I appreciated your little post the other week where you said you wanted some kids. You know, that's a, that's a very direct way to relate to the future and to have hope for the future.

• 2:49:11Lex Fridman?

  I can't wait. And hopefully also get a chance to go out in the wilderness with you at some point.

• 2:49:16Speaker 01

  I would love it.

• 2:49:17Lex Fridman?

  That'd be fun.

• 2:49:18Speaker 01

  Open invite. Let's make it happen. I got some really cool spots. I have in mind to take you.

• 2:49:23Lex Fridman?

  Awesome. Let's go. Thank you for talking today, brother. Thank you for everything you stand for.

• 2:49:28Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:49:30Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Jonas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me try a new thing where I try to articulate some things I've been thinking about, whether prompted by one of your questions or just in general. If you would like to submit a question, including an audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama.

• 2:49:57Lex Fridman?

  Now, allow me to comment on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th. First, as I've posted online, wishing Donald Trump good health after an assassination attempt is not a partisan statement, it's a human statement. And I'm sorry if some of you want to categorize me and other people into blue and red bins. Perhaps you do it because it's easier to hate than to understand. In this case, it shouldn't matter, but let me say once again that I am not right wing, nor left wing, I'm not partisan. I make up my mind one issue at a time, and I try to approach everyone and every idea

• 2:50:40Lex Fridman?

  with empathy and with an open mind. I have and will continue to have many long-form conversations with people both on the left and the right. Now, on to the much more important point. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump should serve as a reminder that history can turn on a single moment. World War I started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and just like that, one moment in history on June 18th, 1914, led to the death of 20 million people, half of whom were civilians.

• 2:51:20Lex Fridman?

  If one of the bullets on July 13th had a slightly different trajectory, where Donald Trump would end up dying in that small town in Pennsylvania, history would write a new dramatic chapter, the contents of which all the so-called experts and pundits would not be able to predict. It very well could have led to a civil war, because the true depth of the division in the country is unknown. We only see the surface turmoil on social media and so on, and in these events, like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, where we, as a human species, get to find out what the truth is of where people really stand.

• 2:52:02Lex Fridman?

  The task then is to try and make our society maximally resilient and robust as such to stabilizing events. The way to do that, I think, is to properly identify the threat, the enemy. It's not the left or the right that are the "enemy." Extreme division itself is the enemy. Some division is productive. It's how we develop good ideas and policies. But too much leads to the spread of resentment and hate that can boil over into destruction on a global scale. So we must absolutely avoid the slide into extreme division. There are many ways to do this, and perhaps it's a discussion for another time.

• 2:52:45Lex Fridman?

  But at the very basic level, let's continuously try to turn down the temperature of the partisan bickering and more often celebrate our obvious, common humanity. Now, let me also comment on conspiracy theories. I've been hearing a lot of those recently. I think they play an important role in society. They ask questions that serve as a check on power and corruption of centralized institutions. The way to answer the questions raised by conspiracy theories is not by dismissing them with arrogance and feigned ignorance, but with transparency and accountability. In this particular case, the obvious question that needs an honest answer is, why did

• 2:53:28Lex Fridman?

  the Secret Service fail so terribly in protecting the former president? The story we're supposed to believe is that a 20-year-old, untrained loner was able to outsmart the Secret Service by finding the optimal location on a roof for a shot on Trump from 130 yards away, even though the Secret Service sniper spotted him on the roof 20 minutes before the shooting and did nothing about it.

• 2:53:56Lex Fridman?

  This looks really shady to everyone. Why does it take so long to get to a full accounting of the truth of what happened? And why is the reporting of the truth concealed by corporate government speak? Cut the bullshit. What happened? Who fucked up and why? That's what we need to know. That's the beginning of transparency. And yes, the director of the US Secret Service should probably step down or be fired by the president and not as part of some political circus that I'm sure is coming, but as a step towards uniting an increasingly divided and cynical nation. Conspiracy theories are not noise, even when they're false.

• 2:54:37Lex Fridman?

  They are a signal that some shady, corrupt, secret bullshit is being done by those trying to hold on to power. Not always, but often. Transparency is the answer here, not secrecy. If we don't do these things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to singular moments that turn the tides of history. Empires do fall. Civil wars do break out and tear apart the fabric of societies. This is a great nation, the most successful collective human experiment in the history of Earth. And letting ourselves become extremely divided risks destroying all of that.

• 2:55:19Lex Fridman?

  So please ignore the political pundits, the political grifters, clickbait media, outrage fueling politicians on the right and the left who try to divide us. We're not so divided. We're in this together. As I've said many times before, I love you all. This is a long comment. I'm hoping not to do comments this long in the future and hoping to do many more. So I'll leave it here for today, but I'll try to answer questions and make comments on every episode. If you would like to submit questions, like I mentioned, including audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama.

• 2:56:00Lex Fridman?

  And now let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.

• 2:56:12Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

• 2:56:17Lex Fridman?

  (Music)