Jordan Jonas
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
buildings and roads and airplanes food security and and you know i lived with the natives and i thought to myself a lot like i wonder if not everybody would choose this way of life because it is there's something really rich about just that small group your direct relationship to your needs all that but with the food security and the help you know modern medicine the things that we now have that we take for granted but that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I wouldn't choose that life if we didn't have those things. Otherwise, you're gonna watch your family starve to death or things like that. We so we have so much now, which should lead us to be hopeful. While we try to improve, because there's definitely a lot of things wrong, you know, but but I guess it's, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I do feel like we're sort of watching it walking on a knife's edge, you know, but I guess that's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
the way it is um as the as the tools we build become more powerful yeah exactly it's getting sharper and sharper i i've talked yeah i'll like argue with my brother about that sometimes he takes the more positive view and i'm like i mean it's great we've done great but man more and more people with nuclear weapons and more it's just gonna take one mistake with the more power
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Everybody was half asleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, exactly. Stay awake. See what we've done. Be thankful for it, but then improve it. And then, of course, I appreciated your little post the other week where you said you wanted some kids. That's a very direct way to relate to the future and to have hope for the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I would love it. That'd be fun. Open invite. Let's make it happen. I got some really cool spots I have in mind to take you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
kind of a peak mental experience that is when you really really need something to survive and then it happens it's you can't imagine i mean that's what our all our dopamine and the 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right. Yeah. Well, it was... When I got the moose, I was so happy. The most joy I could almost experience maxed out. But I didn't think I... I didn't think I won at that point. I never thought like, oh, that's my ticket to victory. I thought, holy crap, it's going to be me against somebody else that gets a moose now. And we're going to be here six, eight months, who knows how long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so I can't be here six, eight months and still lose. So I've got to outproduce somebody else with a moose. So I had all that in my head. And I already was, of course, pretty thin. 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
precious to me and i had found a plastic jug and i put a whole bunch of the moose's fat in this plastic jug and set it up on a little shelf i thought you know what if a bear comes i'll probably hear it and i'll come out and be able to shoot it so i went to sleep and i woke up the next morning i went out and i was like where's that jug and then i was like wait a second what are all these prints and i started looking around and it took a second to dawn on me because i haven't interacted with wilder wolverines very often in life and uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I was like, oh, those are Wolverine tracks. And he was just so much sneakier than 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I, again, kind of the pressure came back to, oh no, I got to 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. And so. Yeah, that was pretty intense because those wolverines, they're bold little animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And he was basically saying, no, this is my moose. And I had to counter his claims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, so I'd missed one and I just decided I'm not here to starve. I'm here to 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 day. And it was actually really pleasant just sitting in a berry patch and call moose. But then I also had this whole trap and snare line set out everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I had all these... I was getting rabbits. But I went and I was actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
taking a rabbit out of a snare when i heard a clank because i'd set up kind of an alarm system with with string and cans so it's a brilliant idea yeah another thing that could have not worked but it 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I probably could have waited a little longer and had a perfect broadside shot, but I took the shot when he was, he was pretty close, like 24 yards, but he was quartering towards me, which makes it a little harder to make a perfect kill shot. And so I hit it and it took off running and I just thought, you know, I was super excited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I couldn't believe I actually, you know, it was like, Oh my gosh, got the moose. I think that was a really good shot. You get all excited, but then it plays back in your head. And particularly when you're first learning to hunt, there's always an animal that gets away, you know, and you like, make a bad decision or not a great shot or something. And it's just, it's just part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. I skinned that rabbit that had caught and then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
super nervous, the slowest hour ever. And then I followed it along, ended up losing the blood trail. I was like, no, no. And then I was like, well, if there's no blood, I'm just going to follow the path that I would go if I was a moose, you know, like the least resistance through the woods. So I followed kind of along the shore there. And sure enough, I saw him up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 be like, yes. And then he would stand up and it was like that for, uh, you know, a couple hours that took him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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? Um, so, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
when an animal like that gets hit it had no idea what hit it you know just all of a sudden it's like ah something got it and it ran off and it lays down and it's actually fairly calm and it doesn't really know what's going on and if you can leave it in that state it'll kind of bleed out and as peaceful as possible um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
if you go chase after it that's when you lose an animal because as soon as it knows it's being hunted you know it gets panicked adrenaline and it can just run and run and run and you'll never find it so i didn't want it to see me i knew if i tried to get it with another arrow there's a chance i could have finished it off but there's also a not bad chance that it would see me take off or even attack because moose can be a little dangerous and so uh i just chose to wait it out and at one point it stood up and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 going to starve, you're going to starve. And it got rid of that demon. To be honest, it's one of the happiest moments of my life. It's really hard to replicate that joy because it was just so, so real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You're so directly connected to your needs. It's all so simple. It was a peak experience for sure. And were you worried that it would take many more hours than it would take it into the night? Yeah, I was. I mean, until you actually have your hands on it, I was worried the whole time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
turned the wrong way when you were drawn back or went way behind a tree or you never had a clean shot or whatever it is. And so, um, every time you can see a moment coming, you know, your heart really starts beating and you have to like breathe through it. I can almost, you know, you almost feel the nervousness of it. And then, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 going to go back, touch my face, draw my elbow tight. And then the arrow is going to let loose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's kind of muscle memory. You have a little trigger, like draw that elbow tight. And then, and then, uh, Then it happens, and then you just watch the arrow and see where it goes. Now, with the animal, you try to do it ethically. That is, make as good of a shot as you can. Make sure it is either hit in the heart or both lungs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And when that happens, it's a pretty quick death, which is, death is a part of life. But honestly, for a wild animal, that's probably the best way to go they could have. Now, when an animal's kind of walking towards you, if it's walking towards you, but not directly towards you, that's what you call quartering towards you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You can picture it's actually pretty difficult to hit both lungs because the shoulder blade and all that bone is in the way. So you have to make a perfect shot to get them both. And to be honest, when I took my shot, I was a couple inches or a few inches right. And so it went through the first lung and then it sunk the arrow all the way into the moose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But it allowed that second lung to stay breathing, which meant the moose stayed alive longer. What's your relationship –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, that's an interesting thought because no matter what your relationship to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
however you choose to go through life whether you know whatever you eat whatever you do um death is a part of life you know like every animal that's out there is living off of a dead even plants you know it's all it's all we're all part of this ecosystem i think it's really easy in a particularly in an urban environment but anywhere to think that we're separate from the ecosystem but we are very much a part of it um whether it be you know farming requires you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
all this habitat to be turned into growing soybeans and when you get the plows and the combines, you know, you're losing all kinds of different animals and all kinds of potential habitat. So it's not cost-free. And so when you realize that, then you want to produce the food and the things you need, uh, in an ethical manner. So I, uh, so for me hunting, uh, plays a really major role in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
one of those individuals you know is going to have to feed me and i and particularly like on alone it was very heightened that experience so i shot that one animal and i was so so thankful you know that i wanted to give that big guy a hug and like hey sorry it was you but yeah had to be somebody there's that there's that picture you just almost hugging it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and you you can also think about it the the calories the the protein the fat all of that that that comes from that that will feed you right you're so grateful for it like that the gratitude is is like you know definitely there what about the bow and arrow perspective well when you hunt with a bow you just get so much more up close to the animals you know you you can't just get it from 600 yards away you actually have to sneak in within 30 or so yards and uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But at the same time, that's the only time when you, like, really have those interactions with the animals where you got this –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
bugling bull, you know, like tearing at the trees right in front of you and other cow, elk and animals running around, you know, you get, you 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It has its senses to defend itself and you have your wit to try to, to get over those. And it really becomes, uh, you know, it's not easy. They're not, it becomes kind of that chess game. And those prey animals are always tuned in. It's, you know, slightest stick. They're looking for wolves or for whatever it is. So there's something really pure and fun about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You know, I will say there is an aspect that is fun. There's no denying it. It's like how we're, you know, people have been hunting forever. And I think it speaks to that part of us somehow. And I think bow hunting is probably the most pure form of it and that you get those experiences more often than with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
rifle so i i don't know i i enjoy it a lot and and the way they do regulations and such um kind of the best times to hunt are usually allowed for bow because they're trying to you know keep it fair for the animal and such so so the distance the close distance makes you more in touch with a sort of uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The same thing as the predators do. Exactly. How many times do they snap a stick and watch them run off and be like, darn, my stock was failed. Or, you know, so, yeah, you're just, you're in that situation. in that ecosystem how'd you learn to to shoot the bow yeah I was I didn't grow up hunting I grew up in uh area that a lot of people hunted, but my dad wasn't really into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so I never got into it until I lived in Russia with the natives. It was just such a part of everything we did and a part of our life that when I came back, I got a bow and I started doing archery in Virginia. It was a pretty easy way to hunt because the deer were overpopulated and you could get these urban archery permits. So you had to go out and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You know, every couple of days you'd have an opportunity to shoot a deer that they needed population control. And so there were a lot of them and it gave you a lot of opportunities to learn quickly. So that's what got me into it. And then I found I really enjoyed it. Do you practice with the target also or just practice out? Oh, no, I would definitely practice with a target a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Again, you kind of have an obligation to do your best because you don't want to be flinging arrows into the leg of an animal. And it's a cool way, honestly, to provide quality meat for the family. It's all raised naturally and wild and free until you bring it home into the freezer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, the challenge is that you don't exactly know what your site's opportunities are going to be. So you don't really know, should I bring a fishing net? Am I going to even have a spot to net or not? And things like that. I brought an axe, a saw, a Leatherman wave. A ferro rod, it's like a, makes sparks to start a fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
A frying pan, a sleeping bag, a fishing kit, a bow and arrow, trapping wire, and paracord. And so those are my 10 items. Any regrets, any... No major regrets. I, I took, I took the saw kind of, I thought it would be more of a calorie saver than I, I didn't really need it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 um and so it was handy at times and useful but i think it was my if i had to do nine items i would have been just fine without the saw so two nets would just expand your uh food gathering potential yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The snare wire was good. I ran some, you know, I put out, I used all my snare wire. I ran trap line, which is just a series of traps through the woods and brush every place you see sign. Put a snare, put a little mark on the tree so I knew where that snare was and just make these paths through the woods. And I put out, you know, I don't know how many, 150, 200 snares.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
every day i'd get a rabbit or two out of them and then i had a lot of rabbits but uh once i got the moose i actually took all those snares down because i didn't want to catch anything needlessly and oh you come to find out you can't live off of rabbits man cannot live off rabbit alone as it turns out so you set up a huge number of traps you were also fishing and then always on the lookout for uh moose
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You have to be, you have to be really adaptable because everything's gonna, it's always going to look different in 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. What was the plan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Well, I thought I would just catch a bunch of fish because I'm on a really good fishing lake. I'd catch a whole bunch of fish and let them rot for a little while and then just drag them all through the woods into a big pile and then hunt a bear on that big fish pile. That was the plan. And I thought, but when I got there, for one, I had a hard time catching fish off the bat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They didn't come like I was hoping. And then for two, 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. They had all gone to other places where the berries were. And so what I had grown accustomed to growing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
kind of relying on in Siberia wasn't there, there, you know, so in, in Russia, which was a similar environment, it was just grouse and berries and fish and grouse and berries and fish. And then occasionally, you know, you get a moose or something, but I had to reassess, which was part of me being grumpy at the start, like, oh, this place sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 predominant wind was blowing out my scent to the water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I think there's a lot of areas that still have that potential, but you have to figure out what it is. It's usually going to be a combination of fishing, you know, trapping and then hunting. And then once you have some, the fishing and trapping will get you until you have some success hunting. And then that'll buy you three or four months of time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
to continue and you know to keep hunting again and you just have to roll off of that but every you know depends on where you are what opportunities are there so okay so that's the process fishing and trapping until you're successful hunting and then the successful hunt buys you some more time right right just go year and then you just go around like that and that's how People did it forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The pressure, I noticed that, you know, 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 going to have to do this again. And you imagine if you had a family that was going to starve if you weren't successful, you know, this next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And there's just always that pressure, you know, it made me really like appreciate the amount of what people had to deal with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
remarkably less scheduled than anything we deal with schedules are fairly unique to of a modern context so you'd wake up and you just sort of you have a you know confluence of things you want to do things you need to do things you should do and you just kind of tackle them as you see fit as it flows in you know so and that's actually one of the things that your people really that i really appreciate about that lifestyle is it really is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 wonder over and fish and then i'd be like i'm gonna go check the trap line add every day if i add five or ten snares you know you're constantly adding to your productive potential and then uh but nothing's really scheduled you're just kind of flying by the seat of your pants but then there's a lot of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 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 the wind comes like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, you want to be... Yeah, right. And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh ideally you know it depends you're always going to make give and 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 the situation because everybody has a particular you know you got an idea of a shelter you're going to build but then you get there and maybe there's a good cliff that you can incorporate you know or maybe and then you just become creative and that's a really fun process too to just allow your creativity to try to flourish in that what kind of shelters are there
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
there's all kinds of philosophies and shelters which is fun uh people it's fun to see people try different things mine was fairly basic for the simple reason that i'd lived you know winters through winters in siberia in a teepee so i knew i didn't need like anything too robust as long as i had calories i'd be warm and i wasn't particularly worried about the cold um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 gonna be focused on getting calories. And then of course, there's always gonna be downtime. And in that downtime, I can tweak, modify, improve my shelter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And that'll just be a constant process that by the time you're there a few months, you'll have all the kinks worked out. It'll be a really nice little setup, but you don't have to start with that necessarily, because you got other needs you got to focus on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That said, you'll see a lot of people on a loan that really focus on building a log cabin because they want to be secure or incorporating whatever the earth has around, whether it be rocks or whether it be digging a hole. And we've seen some really cool shelters. And I... I'm not going to knock it. Everybody's got different strokes for different folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But my particular idea was to keep it fairly simple, improve it with time, but spend most of my energy. You know, the shelter you really need to think about, it can't be smoky because that'll be miserable. But it is nice to have a fire inside. So you need to have a fire inside that's not going to be dangerous and smoke-free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then also airtight because you're never going to have a warm shelter out there because you don't have seals and things like that. But as long as the air is not moving through it, you can have a warm enough shelter. With a fire. With a fire and dryer socks and stuff. Yeah. How do you get the smoke out of the shelter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If you have good clay and mud and rock, you can build yourself a fireplace, which is surprisingly not that hard. Oh, really? Yeah, it's a fun thing to do. It works well. Take a little hole, start stacking rocks around it, make sure it's opening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and it actually works you know um so that's not as hard as you might think um for me where i was i i kind of came up with it as i was there with my a-frame you know i hadn't built an a-frame shelter like that before and so when i built it and then i had put a bunch of tin cans in the ground so that air would get the fire so it was fed by air which helps create a draft um but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But I realized in an A-frame, the smoke doesn't go out very well. Even if you leave a hole at the top, it collects and billows back down. So then I cut some of my tarp and made this and cut a hole 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, uh, I don't think alone's the proper context for a log cabin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, because it's constantly changing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, we were right near the Arctic Circle. I don't know, it was like... 60 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, so... It was, it's a really cool area, really remote, thousands of little lakes. You know, when you fly over, you're just like, man, it's incredible. There must be so many of those lakes that people haven't been to. You know, it really was a neat area, really remote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And for the show's purpose, I think it was perfect because it did have enough game and enough different avenues forward that I think it really did reward activity. So I think, uh, but it's a special place. It was, uh, Dene, there's a tribe that live there, the Dene people, which interestingly enough, here's a side note.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
When I was in Siberia, I floated down this river called the Padkamanayatunguska, and you get to this village called Sulamai, and there's these Ket people they're called, and there's only 600 of them left. But it 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right. And the remnant stayed back there. It's very interesting to think through history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know what the, I didn't have a thermometer, but I imagine it probably got to negative 30 at the most, you know, like it might've gotten, it would have definitely gotten colder had we stayed longer, but, uh, To be honest, I never felt cold out there. I had that one pretty dialed in. Once you have calories, you can stay warm. You can stay active. You got to dress warm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Then it's really hard to warm back up. It was so annoying. I'd be out going to ice fish or something, and then I would just notice that my feet are cold, and you're just like, ah, dang it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Oh, so you want to be able to feel the cold. Yeah, you want to make sure you're still feeling things and that you're not toughing through it, because you can't really tough through the cold. It'll just get you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What's your relationship with the cold, psychologically, physically? It's interesting. Actually, there's some part of it that really makes you feel alive. I imagine sometime in Austin here, you go out and it's hot and sweaty. You get that kind of saps you. There's something about that brisk cold that hits your face that you're like, wakes you up, makes you feel really alive, engaged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
life-giving just because you feel on an edge you're walking you're on this edge but you have to be alert because even you know some of the natives i lived with the lady had face issues because she let her head get cold when they're on a snowmobile hat was up too high you know that little mistake and then it just freezes this part of your forehead and then the nerves go and then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You got issues when just that wasn't high enough. So you kind of got to be dialed in on stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then all of a sudden you have your little refuge, have a nice warm fire going in your teepee, you know, and then I bet you, you could learn to appreciate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I got shot a rabbit on day one and I snared a couple rabbits on day two and then more and more as the time went. So I actually did pretty well on the food front. Uh, 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 um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I can say on alone, I was not that hungry. I've definitely been really hungry in Russia. There were times when I lost a lot of weight. I mean, I lost a lot more weight in Siberia than I did on alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think I caught like 13 or so. They didn't show a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
13 of those big fish. I caught a couple that were small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I was thought, you know, in the... In hindsight, again, when I was out there, I never let myself think you might win. I just was going to be out there as long as I could and tried to remain pessimistic about it. But then I remember a thought that I was like, I wonder if they're going to be able to make this look hard. I did have that thought at one point. Yeah. Cause it went pretty well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I was definitely, it was, it was hard psychologically because I didn't know when it was going to end. Like I thought this could go, you know, like I said, six months, it could go eight months, a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then you start to cause, you know, I had a two and a three year old and you start to weigh in the, is it worth it if it goes a year and it's not worth it if it goes eight months and I still lose. So I feel like I had this pressure and it was psychologically difficult for that reason. Physically, it wasn't too bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You know, and I'll add that for sure, though, that it's, it's the woods it's nature you never know how it's gonna go you know what i mean it's like every time you're out there it's a different scenario so yeah whatever hallelujah it went well so you uh you won after 77 days how long do you think you could have lasted When I left, I weighed what I do right now. So I just weighed my normal weight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I had, you know, a couple hundred pounds of moose. I had at least, you know, a hundred pounds of fish. I had, you know, a pile of rabbits, a wolverine. You know, I had all this stuff and I know I hadn't gotten cold yet. I just thought, But in my head, I thought if I get to day 130 or 140, even if someone else has big game, I had a pretty good idea they might quit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Because it would be long, cold, dark days. And how miserable is that? It's so boring. It's freezing. And so I thought... the only time I thought I could think about winning is when I got to day 130 or 40. And I definitely had that, um, with what I had, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
now maybe i would have got you know i probably would have gotten more i had caught that big 20 something pound pike on the last day i was there maybe catch some more of those you know i don't you know and i don't know like i don't know how many calories i had stored but i had a lot and so how long would that have lasted me assuming i didn't get anything else it definitely would have i would definitely would have reached my goal of 130 or 40 days
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then after that, I thought we were just going to push into the, you know, then it's just to see how much, who has what reserves and we'll go as far as we can. And that would get me through January into February. And I just thought, man, that's going to be miserable for people. And you were like, I can last. And I knew I could do it. What aspect of that is miserable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The hardest thing for me would have been the boredom because it's hard to stay busy when it's all dark out, when the ice is, you know. three, four foot thick. You can't fish. And, um, I just think, I think it would have just been really boring. He would have had to been a real Zen master to push through it, but because I had experienced it to some degree, I knew I could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then I think things that might, you know, you start thinking about family and this and that in those situations. And I just knew that those, because I'd gone to all these trips to Russia for a year at a time, the time context was a little broader for me than I think for some people. Cause I,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I knew I could be gone for a year and come back, catch up with my loved ones, bring what I got back, whether that be psychological or whatever it is, and we'd all enrich each other. And once it's in hindsight, that year would have been like that, talking about it. So I had that perspective. So I knew I wasn't going to tap for any other reason other than running out of food someday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So that was my stressor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and accept the passing of time just let it pass you know for me i'm gonna act fairly act i like to be active and so i would try to think of creative ways to keep my brain busy you know we saw the like dumb rabbit first skit but then i did a whole bunch of like elaborate normandy reinvasion you know there was like a there was a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Every day I would think, I got to 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 to a couple, few hours fishing. And then you spend a few hours, you know, whatever you're doing. Would you do that without a camera? Yeah. Oh, no, the skits. Funny question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's a good question. I don't know. I actually don't know. I will say that was one of the advantages of being on the show versus in Siberia. So no, because I didn't in Siberia just do skits by myself. But I didn't film it. And so... It was quite nice to have this camera that made you feel like you weren't quite as alone as if you were just in the woods by yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. So that was, I just chose to look at it that way. And it was an advantage because you could do stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It is. It really is. That 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
you're sharing it gives you a lot of strength to go through and and having that camera just as it makes it that much more vivid because you know you're not just going to be sharing a vague memory but an actual experience i think if you're the last person on earth you would actually convince yourself first of all you don't know for sure there's always going to be hope dies last yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Because here I was having a good time, having fun fishing, plenty of food. But if I knew I was the last person on earth, I don't know that I would even bother.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But now if that was for real, would I bother? That's the question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right, right. The power of hope might be more stronger than I accounted for in that situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It would be. Wow. Maybe delving into the dredges, the depths of something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's, you know, one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking to you, things I appreciate about you, is you're always, not out of naivety, but you always choose to look at the positive. You know what I mean? And I think that's a... a powerful mindset to have. I appreciate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If you want to get rid of the competitive side of it, I would just say I'm pretty dang sure I had more pounds of food. And I didn't have the advantage of knowing when it would end, which I think would have been a great psychological. It would have made it really easy. Once I got the moose, I could have shot the moose and just not stressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That would have been like a... And so that was a big difference between the seasons that I felt like I mean, I felt like the psychology of season seven, they kind of messed up by doing a hundred day cap because for my own experience, that was the hardest part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That was for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I didn't know how to ration my food. I didn't know if I was going to lose after six months and then it was all going to be for naught. I didn't know if it, you know, I just, there's so many unknowns. You don't know, like I said, if I shot a moose and it was 100 days, done. If I shot a moose and you don't know, it's like, crap, I could still lose to somebody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But it's going to be way in the future. Yeah. So anyway, that for me was definitely the hard part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That was the most genuine shock I could have. I hadn't even like entertained the thought yet. I didn't even think it was, you'd hear the helicopters, And I just assumed there was other people out there. I just hadn't... I thought... You know, and for one, the previous person that had gone the longest had gone 89 days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I just knew whoever else was out here with me, somebody's got that in their crosshairs. They're going to get to 90. And they're not going to quit at 90. They're going to go to 100. You know, I just figured we can't start thinking about the end until a couple months from when it ended. So I was just... shocked. And they tricked me pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They know how to make you think you're not, you know, that you're not. So they want you to do the surprise. Yeah, they want it to be a surprise. You really weren't. I mean, you have to do that, I guess, for survival. Don't be counting the days. No, I think that would be, then, you know, you see that on some of the people do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
For myself, that would be bad psychology because then you're just always disappointing yourself. You have to be resettled with the fact that this is going to go a long time and suck. Once you come to peace with that, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you're not gonna be constantly disappointed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I was trying to eat the thing. The more the moose is hanging out there, the more the critters, every critter in the forest is trying to peck at it or mice trying to eat it and stuff. So one of the ways you can protect the food is by eating it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I was having three good meals a day and then I'd like cook up some meat and go to sleep and then wake up in the middle of night because they're long nights and like have some meat at night, eat a bunch at night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I'd usually have a 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 14 hours and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
wake up and eat and dink around and go back to sleep is it okay that i was pretty low carb situation yeah i actually felt really good i tried to i tried to i think i would have felt better if i would have had a higher percentage of fat because you know it's still over more protein than if you're on a keto diet you want a lot of fat and so i didn't i didn't try to mix in like nature's carbs different like reindeer lichen and things like that but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Honestly, I felt pretty good on that diet, I will say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, a lot of times, you know, in a typical situation in the woods hunting, you'll raise it up in a tree in a bag, put it in, like, a game bag so the birds can't peck at it, and hang it in a tree so that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
cools you got to make sure first to cool it because it'll spoil so you cool it by whatever means necessary hanging it in a cool place letting the air blow around it um and then you'll notice that every forest freeloader in the woods is going to come steal your food yeah and it was just fun i mean it was it was crazy to watch you know like it's all the jay all the camp jays pecking at it or everything i did you know was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
was there was something that could get to it. If put on the ground, the mice get on and they poop on it and they kind of mess it up. So I ultimately kind of just dawned on me, shoot, I'm going to have to build one of those Venky like food caches. So I did and I put it up there and I thought I kind of solved my problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
to be honest the venky then so they would have taken a page out of like they would have mixed me in roland's solution they build this tall stilt shelter and then put a box on the top that's enclosed and then the bears can't get to it the mice can't poop on it the birds the wolverine you know it's safe and i never finished it in hindsight i don't actually know why i think i was just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
the way it timed like i didn't think something was going to be up there then it did and then i you know you're like counting calories and stuff i should have in hindsight just boxed it in right away but to get ready for the long for the long haul yeah yeah yeah is a rabbit starvation a real thing yeah so you can't just live off protein and rabbits are almost just protein i'd kill a rabbit eat the innards and the brain and the eyes and then everything else is just protein and so uh it takes more calories to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I was wondering if I'm catching a ton of rabbits. I wonder if I can last what, six months on rabbits, but no, you just starve as fast as everybody else. And so I had to kind of learn that on the fly and adjust. I wonder what to make of that. So you need fat to survive, like fundamentally. Yeah, that's the, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What do you like eating when you're like, when you can eat whatever you want? What do you feel best eating? What do I feel best? I just try to eat clean, I think. I'm not like super strict or anything, but I think when I eat less carbs, I feel better. Meat and vegetables. I like, we eat a lot of, you know, I eat a lot of meat. So basically everything you ate on loan plus some veggies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Plus veggies. I'll throw in some buckwheat. I like buckwheat. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Hobo Jordan is a bit of an overstep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, the real hobos, those guys are out there doing it for years on end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
For me, what it felt like was a bit of a rite of passage experience, which is kind of missing, I think, in modern life. I did this thing that was a huge unknown. Ben kind of was there with me, my brother, for most of it. We traveled around, got pushed my boundaries in every which way, you know, froze at night and did all the stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then at the end, I actually wanted to go back and go back home. And so I went on my own and went from Minneapolis back, you know, up to Spokane on my own, which was my first stint of time by myself for like a week, which was interesting. Alone with your own thoughts. With your own thoughts. It was my first time in my life having been like that, you know. And so it was powerful at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 there's a really sense of freedom you get that is hard to replicate elsewhere. And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh that was eye-opening to me and i think once i did that i went back so i went back to my old job at the salad dressing plant and uh there's this old cross-eyed guy and he was all hobo giordo's back and that's kind of where i got it but that freedom always was very important to me i think from that time on what'd you learn about the united states about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You're in an interesting context when you're on trains, because the trains always end up in the crappiest part of town. And you're always outside interacting. Oh, the interesting things. Every once in a while, you'll have to hitchhike to get from one place to another. One interesting thing is you notice you always get picked up by the poor people. They're the people that empathize with you. Stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Pick you up. You go to whatever ghetto you end up in, and People are really, oh, what are you guys doing? Real friendly and relatable. It kind of broadened my horizons for sure from being just an Idaho kid and then meeting all these different people and just seeing the goodness in people and this and that. It's also a lot of drugs and a lot of people with mental issues that you're –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
friends with, dealing with, you know, all that kind of stuff. Any memorable characters? Well, there's a few for sure. I mean, a lot of them I still know that are still around, but Rocco was one guy we traveled with. He's become like a brother, but he's, he was, he traveled with my brother for years because they were the two sober guys kind of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
He, rather than traveling because he was hooked on stuff, did it to escape all that. And so he was kind of, Sober and straight edge and he always five seven Italian guy that was always getting in fights and he has his own sense of ethics that I think is really interesting because he's super honest, but. but he expects it of others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so it's funny in the modern context, the thing that pops in my head is when he got a car for the first time, which wasn't that long, you know, he's in his thirties or something. And he registered it, which he was mad about that he had to register. But then the next year they told him he had to register again. And he's like, what did you lose my registration? Went down there to the DMV.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
chewed him out that he had to re-register because he already registered where's the paperwork and but just kind of views the world from a different lens i thought but on everything he's the character now he just lives by digging up bottles and finding treasures in them but he uh notices the injustices and 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 and and then there was like you know devo comes to mind because he was such a unique character as far as just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
For one, he would have lived to be 120 because the amount of chemicals and everything else he put into his body and still, hey, man, you know, one of those guys. You can always get a dime, you know, always spare dime, spare dime, and you have bum change. And I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
see him sometimes and i'd be gone and then go to new york to visit my sister or something and sure enough there's devo on the street what do you know i didn't uh you go visit him in the hospital because he got bit by 20 you know 27 hobo spider bites you know he's just always rough but uh charismatic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
There's something about enduring difficulty that makes you able to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
experiences and stuff help create the person you will be in the future. Doing things that you think like, oh, I don't want to do that. I'm a little scared of that. I mean, that's what you got to do. You just get out of your comfort zone and you will grow as a person and you'll go through a lot of wild experiences along the way. Say yes to life in that way. Say yes to life, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I love the boredom of it. Freight train riding is very boring. And you'll wait for hours for a train that never comes, and then you'll go to the store and come back, and it'll be gone. And you're like, no! But I remember we went to jail, we got out, and then... How'd you end up in jail? Oh, you know, it was trespassing on a train. But we were riding a train, and my brother...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
woke up and they had a dead owl land on his head and he hit the train and fell on him and we were like woke up and we were laughing that's got to be some kind of bad omen and then we were like looking out of the train and we saw a train worker look and saw us and he went like oh we know that's a bad omen anyway sure enough the police stopped the train somebody had seen us on it and they searched it got us and threw us in jail it was not a big deal we were in jail a couple days and then they uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 we're 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
horns coming out every which way and loops and just sitting there and it was at night and some minivan pulled up to this train that was going by we're like entertaining yourself with whatever you can poor lady was terrified so hitchhiking was tough i didn't like hitchhiking just because you're
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
depending on the other people and it is not i don't know why you just want to be independent but if you do meet really cool people a lot of times there's really nice people that pick you up and and that's cool but i just personally actually didn't do it a lot um and i wasn't you know if you're on the streets for 10 years you'll end up doing it a lot more because you need to get from point a but we just tried to avoid it as much as we could because it didn't appeal to us as much
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Then I was just like, Hey, how's it going? And she's like, my husband just died. And then, and then just all, and I got diagnosed with cancer and this and that, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Cause 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how. But the long story short was I had a brother that's adopted. And when he grew up, He wanted to find his biological mom and just tell her thanks. And so he did. And when he was probably 20 or something, he found his biological mom, told her thanks. Turns out he had a brother that was going to go over to Russia and help build this orphanage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And that brother was about my age. I mean, I remember at that time I read this verse that said, if you're in the darkness and see no light, just continue following me, basically. I was like, okay, I'm going to take that to the bank, even though I don't know if it's true or not. And then the only glimpse of light I got in all that was when I heard about that orphanage, to go build that orphanage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I prayed about it. And I felt, and I can't explain, it brought me to tears. I felt so strongly that I should go. And so I was like, well, that's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
found myself in that little russian village just 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 were really close because they found god in prison together and and stayed to get uh you got out and stayed connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And, uh, so I'd bounce backs between those two families and they used to always tell me about their third buddy they'd been in prison with, who was a native fur trapper now in the North. And so they'd go, you gotta go meet our buddy up North. And, uh, one day that guy came through to sell furs in the city and he like invited me to come live with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And my visa was about to expire, but I was like, when I come back, I'll come. And so I, uh, went back home, earned some more money and did some construction or whatever, then went back. And, uh, headed north to hang out with Yura and fur trap and that started a whole new, opened a whole new world that I didn't know about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was like, it was darkness in that I didn't know how to parse you know, what is this thing that's my faith and, and what, and what is, what's the wheat and what's the chaff and how do I get through it? And, um, I basically just clung to keeping it really simple. And oddly enough, in my Christian path, God was actually defined in a certain way. God is love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I was just like, that's the only thing I'm going to cling to. And I'm going to try to express that in my life in whichever way I can. And... And just trust that if I do that, if I act like I, you know, I've heard this lately, but if you just act like you believe, over time that world kind of opens to you. When I said I would go to Russia, I prayed. I was like, Lord, I don't see you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I don't know. But I got this, what I felt like was a clear call. I have only one request, and that is that you would give me the faith to match my action. You know, I'm choosing to believe. Like, I could choose not to because, you know, whatever. But I'm going to choose to act, and I just ask to have faith someday. And then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and then and honestly the whole first year i went through that was a very crazy time for me learning the language being isolated being misunderstood 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
requests that i could come up with and somehow that had been answered so through that year you were just like first of all you couldn't speak the language that's really tough that's 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 uh alone at that time at certain times in that journey
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I was really intentional about trying to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
about that that was i don't know why i'm here i just know that i you know that that's my call is to love one another and so i would just try to like well and then it meant digging people's wells it might mean just going and visiting that old late babushka at the house that's lonely and that was really cool i got to talk to some fascinating ladies and stuff and then what go to that village help those families i'm gonna be like cut the hay be the most the hardest worker i can be because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It was super interesting. I think... I had the thought while I was learning it, one, that it was way too hard. Like if I would have just learned Spanish or German, I would be so much farther. But here I am a year in and I'm like, how do you say I want cheese properly? And then, but at the same time, it was really cool to learn a language that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that I thought in a lot of ways was richer than English. It's a very rich language. I remember there was a comedy act in Russian, but he was saying, you know, one word you can't have in English is, meaning like, I didn't drink enough to get drunk, you know, that type thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But it's just that you can make up these words using different prefixes and suffixes and like blend them in a way that is quite unique and interesting and honestly would be really good for poetry because it also doesn't have sentence structure in the same way English does. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
but slightly different. You could, like, and it would change the meaning if you took ya out and just said lublu tibia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
There's like a different emphasis or maybe, or ya tibia lublu or something, you know, like all these different. Or just tibia lublu also. Right, exactly. So it is rich, and it was interesting coming from an English context and getting a glimpse of that, and then wondering about all those Russian authors that we all appreciate that, oh, we actually aren't getting the full deal here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
yeah for sure and i've definitely seen that on like you know and if you listen to i think it probably was a putin speech or something and you just see that oh wow something major is being lost in translation you can actually see it happen i wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case with the you know that whole greatest tragedy is the fall of the soviet union that i hear him being quoted as saying all the time i bet you there's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Something in there that's being lost in translation that is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I'll just say that that was the tangibly the hardest part about learning the language is that humor comes last. And you have to wait that whole year or however long it takes you to learn a language to be able to start...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
getting the humor you know some of it comes through but you miss so much nuance and it and and that was really difficult in interaction with people to like just be the guys you know when when there's humor going on and you're totally oblivious to it yeah everybody's laughing and you're all yeah trying to laugh along what do they make of you
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If I had a nickel for every time I heard like, oh, Americans suck, but you're a good American. You're like the only good American I've ever met. But then, of course, they never met. Yeah, exactly. You're the only one. But I think because I was just – Tried to work hard, tried to be more useful than I was a drain, all that. They all, I think it was pretty appreciated me out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I've definitely heard that a lot. So that's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, so fur trapping was an interesting experience. Basically what you do in October or something, you'll go out to your hunting cabin and you'll have like three hunting cabins. You'll go stock them with noodles or whatever it is. And then for the next couple months or however long, you'll go from one cabin. Usually the guys are just out there doing this on their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So they'll go out and they'll,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh go from one cabin and each cabin will have five or six trap lines going out of it every day it'll take a half a day to walk to the end of your trap line open all the traps and a half a day to get back and they'll do that this will spend a week at a cabin open up all the traps and then it'll take a day to hike over to the other cabin go to that one open up all those traps and then there and then like three weeks later so they'll end up back at the first cabin and then check all the traps
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so it's kind of that rhythm, and they'll do that for, you know, a couple few months during the winter. And you're trapping sable. They're called sable, like Pine Martin is what we would have the equivalent of over here. What is it? It's like a weasel, a furry little weasel, and they make coats out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so when I went, he showed me how to open the trap, showed me the ropes, gave me a topographical map. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's funny because it was basically by landmarks and feel. I didn't have a compass and things like that. By feel. Okay. I got myself into trouble once and I... The first time I went to one cabin, I got myself into trouble. First time I went to the other cabin, I nailed it. And so I had two different experiences on my first trip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. And then the other time I went out and, uh, I, heading over the mountains and I thought, you know, hours had passed. I probably had gotten slightly lost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then, uh, I thought I was halfway there. So I thought, okay, I'm going to sit down and cook some, cook some food, get a drink. I'm thirsty. So I sat down and, uh, went to start a fire and my matches had gotten all wet because the snow had fallen on me and soaked me and I didn't have them wrapped in plastic. I was like, Oh no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 uh and then i realized i was at the halfway point because i saw this rock that i was like oh no that's the halfway point i was like i can't do this and so i need to go get water i ended up having to divert down the mountain and head to the water i ended up you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
it 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 so you're severely dehydrated severely dehydrated and exhausted exhausted cold like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You feel sort of nervous. You're in over your head. And then I got down to the river, chopped a whole nice drink, hiked up the river, and eventually got to the other cabin. It was probably 3 in the morning or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
you know it was a bad day for sure i've had a few it was a bad day and it here's what was funny is i got to the cabin at like three in the morning and i should have brushed over a lot of the like the misery that i felt uh and i laid down i was about to go to sleep and then europe charges in from from there 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Who knows what he went through? Who knows why he was there at that time at night? All just summarized and it sucked. And we went to sleep and the next morning we parted ways and who knows what happened. And you didn't really tell them. Neither of us said what happened. It's just like, oh, that's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You're laughing, but that's hard. Yeah. Yeah. You know that Russian phrase, .
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right. It's like just put one foot in front of the other. When you think about what you have to do, it's really intimidating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
but you just know if i just do it if i just do it if i just keep trudging eventually i'll get there and pretty soon you realize you'll have covered a couple kilometers or a um and so when you're really in it in those moments i guess you're just you're just putting your head down and getting through i've had similar moments there's wisdom to that like once just take it one step at a time one step at a time i think that a lot honestly i tell myself that a lot when i'm about to do something really hard just you know one step at a time just gonna get
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Don't sit there and think, oh, that's a long ways. Just go. And then you'll look back and you've covered a bunch of ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's absolutely true. It's so funny how this awareness of that, having been through it and then being aware of it, means next time you face it, you'll be like, you know what? Once this is over, I'm going to look back on it. And it's going to be like that and nothing. And I'll actually laugh about it and think it's the thing I'll remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I remember that story of that miserable day going down to the ice. And I can smile about it now. And now that I know that, I can be in a miserable position and realize that that's what the outcome will be once it's over. It's just going to be a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If you survive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
when was like the hungriest you've gotten it was the first time so to continue the story slightly i unless 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 ax, you go out and you just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
build these 30 kilometer loop fences with just logs interlocking it's tons of work and all these guys are more efficient bodies they're better at it and i'm just like working less efficiently and also a lot bigger dude but we're all just on the same rations kind of and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and and i got down that was like 155 pounds you know getting down pretty dang skinny for my six three frame and just working really hard and 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Working as hard as I could, but also making mistakes, chopping myself with the ax and getting injured, all kinds of stuff, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Low, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I remember if you got, you were this poor son of a gun to get stuck slicing the bread, you know, like you're here cutting the bread and somebody throws all the spoons and drops the pot of soup there. And it's like before you can even slice, all the meat's like gone from the bowl. Everybody else has grabbed the spoon in midair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And you're just like, oh, hoping this one little noodle is going to give me a lot of nourishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Because it's like all the dudes out there working on the fence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 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 I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And this one has certain design features that the natives...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that was unique to the evenki to the natives i was with one is with these russian heads or the soviet heads whatever they had they're a little wider on top here meaning you can put the handle through from the top like a tomahawk and it uh that means you're not dealing with a wedge and if it ever loosens and you're swinging it only gets tighter it doesn't fly off and so that's something that's kind of cool um then they have what's what they do that's unique
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
is so you can see there's the wolverine axe so it's got the little wolverine head in honor of that wolverine i fought on the show so you have actually two axes this is one of the small this is a little smaller i didn't want to make it too small because you need a something to actually work out there you need something kind of serious um but then they sharpen it from one side so if you're right-handed you sharpen it from the right side and that means when you're in the woods and living there's a lot of times where you're whether you're making a table or a sleigh or an axe handle or whatever you're doing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 because with that if you can picture it that angle is going to cause deflection
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And without that angle on your right handed sling, it just like bites in there like crazy. And so That, there's other little, you know, the handle was made by some Amish guys in Canada. This is all hand forged. Oh, it's hand forged. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so it's a pretty sweet little. Yeah, it's amazing. There's other things, you know, like I slightly rounded this pole here. It's just a little nuance because when you pound a steak in, if you picture it, if it's convex. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so it's a little nuanced, not too flat because you want to still be able to use the back as you would.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 ax, I feel always confident that I can get, a quick fire in whatever weather. And I wouldn't feel the same without it in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So that's the main thing. Um, of course you can use it. I use it if you're taking an animal apart or if you're, uh, you know, all kinds of, uh, What else? Building a shelter, skinning teepee poles or whatever you're doing. What's the use of a saw versus an axe? I greatly prefer an axe. A saw, though, its value goes up quite a bit when you're in hardwoods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Like when you're in a hardwood, oaks and hickory and things like that, 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 north woods and in more coniferous forests, I don't think there's enough advantages that a saw incurs. With a good axe, you'll see people with little...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
camp axes and stuff and they just don't think they like axes it's like well you haven't actually tried to try a good one first and get good with it the one thing about an axe they're dangerous so you need to like practice always control it with two hands make sure you're not you know where it's gonna go it doesn't hit you or when you're chopping like say you're creating something that you're not doing it on rocks and stuff so that it's you're doing on top of wood so that when you're hitting the ground you're not dulling your axe you know there's you gotta be a little bit thoughtful about it have you ever injured yourself on an axe in the early days oh yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that first so i'd gotten a knee surgery uh and then about three months later i'd torn my acl i went over to russia and i was like well i got a good knee it's okay and then that's when i was building that fence that first time and uh at one point i chopped my rubber boot with my axe because it reflected off and i was new to them and uh and i was really frustrated because i'd done it before and uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And the native guy was like, oh, you know, I think there's a boot we left. You know, a few years ago, we left a boot like four kilometers that way. So we got the reindeer, took them, rode them over. Sure enough, there's a stump with a boot upside down. Pull it off, put it on. I was like sweeping back in business. Went back a couple days later, chopped it, cut your foot, cut my rubber boot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 deflected off and bam, right into my knee. Oh, no. And I was like, oh, I fell down. I was like, oh, my gosh. Because you get your axe really like razor sharp. And then just swung it into my knee. I didn't even want to look. I was like, oh, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I looked and it wasn't a huge wound because it had hit me. 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. I was like, I'm just going to go back to teepee right now. So I, like, ran back to teepee, laid down, and honestly, I was stuck there for a few days. That was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's so much pain, and my other knee was bad. It was rough. I literally couldn't even walk at all or move. There was a plastic bag. I had to poop in it and roll to the edge of the teepee, shove it under the moss. I was just totally immobilized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
There you go. It's such a lesson, too. There were so many of those. And I was always in a little bit over my head, but like I said, you kind of do that enough and you make a lot of mistakes. But every time you learn, now it's like an extension of my arm. That's not going to happen because I just know how it works now. You mentioned wet wood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
How do you start a fire when everything around you is wet? I mean, it depends on your environment, but I will say in most of the forests that I spend a lot of time in, in all the north woods, the best thing you can do is find a dead standing tree. So it can be downpouring rain and you chop that tree down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then when you split it open, no matter how much it's been raining, it'll be dry on the inside. So chop that tree down, chop a piece, you know, a foot long piece out and then split that thing open and then split it again. And then you get to that inner dry wood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and then you try to do this maybe under a spruce tree or under your own body so that it's not getting rained on while you're doing it make a bunch of little curls that'll like catch a flame or light and then you make a lot a lot more kindling and little pieces of dry wood than you think because 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 you can throw relatively wet wood on top of that once you get that going yeah then it'll dry as it goes but you need to be able to split open and get all that nice dry wood on the inside
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What's fat wood? So on a lot of pine trees, a place where the tree was injured when it was alive, it like pumped sap to it. And this is a good point because I use this a lot. It pumps that tree full of sap. And then years later, the tree dies, dries out, rots away. But that sap-infused wood, it's like turpentine in there. You know, it's oily. And so if it gets wet, you can still light it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 factory fire starter. You know, it's really, really nice. That's good to spot. It's a good thing to keep your eye out for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then you make this thing. That's just to get the sauna going fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh, it's a used motor oil I add if you mix it with some sawdust. And then the sauna's going just like that. It's kind of like homemade fatwood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 Podkomenyatunguska. And I was up there. That river, and just a little ways north is another river called the Bachta, and that's where that village is where they filmed Happy People. So in Siberian terms, we're neighbors. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Similar environment, similar place. The fur trapper that I was with knew the guy in the films.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
something really really powerful about uh spending that much time being independent you know depending on what we talked about a little earlier but you're putting yourself in these situations all the time where you're uncomfortable where it's hard but then you're rising to the occasion you're making it happen there's nobody when you're fur trapping by yourself there's nobody else to look at to blame for anything that goes wrong it's just yourself that you're reliant on and and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And there's something about the natural rhythms that you are in when you're that connected to the natural world that really does feel like that's what we're designed for. And so there's a psychological benefit you gain from spending that much time in that realm. And for that reason, I think that people that are connected to those ways are able to tap into a particular realm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I noticed it a lot with the natives. So if I met the natives in the village, I would think of them as like unhappy people. Like they drink a lot. They're always fighting. The murder rate is through the roof. The suicide rate is through the roof. But if you meet those same people out in the woods living that way of life, I thought – These are happy people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And it's kind of it's an interesting juxtaposition. It'd be the same person. But but then, you know, I lived in a native village that had the reindeer herding going on around it and everybody kind of benefited because of that. I also went to a native village that they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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's drunk all the time but well 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 It was such an odd juxtaposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
them as an example i mean a lot of times you drag us drunk guy into the woods literally just drag him into the woods and then he'd sober up and then he was like a month blackout drunk and now he's sobered up and now boom back into life back into being a knowledgeable um capable person and because comfort's so available to us all you almost have to force yourself into that situation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
plan it out, okay, I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna do that hard thing and then deal with the consequences when I'm there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Happiness is interesting because it's complex and multifaceted. It includes a lot of things that are out of your control and a lot of things that are in your control. And it's quite the moving target in life. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
yeah it's a show where they take 10 individuals and each person gets 10 items off of the list you know basic items would be an axe a saw a frying pan you know some pretty basic stuff and then they send them all drop them off all in the woods with a few cameras and uh so the people are actually alone there's not a crew or anything and then you uh basically live there as long as you can, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 the ingredients to happiness can be taken from you outside of your control your health your but pursue like a spiritual fullness pursue um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then he was like, somehow the corrupt Orthodox Church produced these little babushkas who were like candles in the middle of all this darkness because they did not allow their soul to get corrupted. And he's like, what they did do is they died. They all died, but they were lights while they were alive and lost their lives, but they didn't lose their souls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So 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 in my 20s. I spent my whole 20s living in teepees and doing all this stuff that I thought I should be getting a job. I should be pursuing a career. I should get an education of some sort. Like what am I doing for my future? But I felt I knew where my purpose was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I knew what my calling was. I'm just going to do it. And it sounds glamorous now when I talk about it, but it sucked a lot of the times. And it was a lot of, a lot of loneliness, a lot of like, giving up what I wanted, a lot of watching people I cared about. You know, you put all this effort in and then you just see the people that you could put all this effort and just die and this and that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 interestingly enough, now in life, I can look back and be like, whoa, weird. Those two things I thought I gave up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 i consciously in a way
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I love history. 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, they went through the Armenian Genocide. They were Assyrians, which was a Christian minority, indigenous people in the Middle East. They lived in northwestern Iran. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and you know they can justify it in all the ways you can like there's some people that were rebelling or this is that but ultimately it was just a big collective guilt and extermination policy against the armenians and the assyrians and the uh my grandparents my grandma was 13 at the time and my grandpa was 17 which is interesting because it happened almost 100 years ago but our gender just my dad was born when my mom was my grandma was pretty old so um but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Basically, her dad got taken out to be shot. So his name was Shalman Umar or whatever, took him out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so the person that lasts the longest, you know, once the second place person taps out, they come and get you in that, in 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 meal until you make it happen. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They were all tied up, all shot. He said a quick prayer before they shot him, but he fell down and he 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
ran out of there, escaped, went into a building and found the loaf of bread wrapped in a shirt and was able to escape. He fled. He never saw his family for, so to continue the story, my grandma got taken with her, with her mother and brothers and sisters and all just, they just drove them into the desert until they died basically and run them around in circles and this and that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then all the raping and pillaging that accompanies it. And, um, uh at one point her mom had the baby and the baby died and her mom just collapsed and said i just can't go any further and and my grandma and her sister like picked her up to tea we got to keep going and like picked her up they left the baby along with the other everybody else had died it was just the three of them left
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And somehow they bumbled across this British military camp and were rescued. Neither the sister nor my great-grandmother ever really recovered from what I understand. But my grandma did. At the same time, in another village in Iran there, the Turks came in and were burning down my grandpa's village and they caught...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And my grandpa's dad was in a wheelchair and he had like some money belt and he stuffed all his money in it and told it, gave it to grandpa and just told him to run and don't turn back. And they came in the front doors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
He was running out the back and they, uh, he never saw his dad again, but he said he turned around and saw the bill, you know, the house on fire, never knew what happened to his sister. She then, so he was just alone. He ran. Yeah. At some point he, uh, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 II. And so then the Nazis invaded my aunt. She's still alive, but she, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
this nazi occupation and all that and so the uncle joe the resistance fighter guy told him like hey we're gonna storm this noodle factory like come and so they stormed the noodle factory and all my aunts around in there and we're like throwing out noodles into wheelbarrows and everybody was running
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh then the nazis came back and took it back over and like shot a bunch of people and everything and and uh grandpa because he had already come from where he came from was paranoid so he buried all the noodles out in the garden and then my two aunts got stuck in that factory overnight with all the nazi guards or whatever and then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The Nazi guards went all from house to house to find everybody that had noodles and, you know, punish them. But they didn't find my grandpa's. Fortunately, they searched his house, but not the garden. And then, uh, so they had noodles and somehow it must've been in the same factory or something, but olive oil. And they just lived off of that for the whole, all the whole war years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
My aunts ended up getting out of the, they hid behind boxes and crates overnight and stuff. And the resistance stormed again in the morning and they got away and stuff. But yeah, Anyway, chaos. So when they moved to America, I will say the most patriotic family everywhere ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's like paradise here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Look, I'm just one generation away from all that suffering. Like my aunts and uncles and dad and stuff were the kids of these people. And somehow I don't have that. Like what happened to all that trauma? Like 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. Yeah. Yeah, the pressure's on. You get overwhelmed with all the things you have to do right away. Like, oh man, I'm not going to eat again until I actually shoot or catch something. Got to build a shelter. It's pretty overwhelming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, and it's just like, how in one generation did you go from that to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And, and it must've been a great sacrifice of some sort to not pass that much like resentment or like, what did they do to, to break that chain in one generation? Do you think it works the other way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But a joyful woman, you could see it in her. And she must have been so, she must have understood how fortunate she was and been so grateful for it and so thankful for every one of those 11 kids she had. So I recognize it again in my dad, because my dad went through a really slow, kind of painful decline in his health. And he had diabetes, ended up losing one leg. And so he lost his job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
He had to watch his mom or my mom go to school. All he wanted to do was be a provider and be like a family man. I bet the best time in his life was when his kids ran to him and gave him a hug.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
all of a sudden he found himself in a position where he couldn't work and he had to watch his wife go to school which was really hard for her and and become the breadwinner for the family and he just felt like a failure and i watched him go through that after all these years of letting that foot heal we went out first day and we're splitting firewood with the splitter and he was just so good to be back out jordan is so nice and he crushed his foot in the log splitter and you're like no
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so then they just amputated it. Got both legs amputated. And then his health continued to decline. He lost his movement in his hands. So he was like incapacitated to a degree. And in a lot of pain. I would hear him at night in pain all the time. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I watched him wrestle with it through the years. But then he found his joy and his purpose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 just add another wow that's how you face loss and suffering and and he must have gotten that from him somehow from his parents and then you know i find myself on this show and i had a thought like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
why is this easy to me in a way? Like, you know, why is this thing that's, and I was like, and it just felt like this gift that had kind of handed down and now it'd be my duty to hand down, you know, like, but it's kind of an interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It rhymes. It rhymes, and it's so simple. The lessons are simple, and so we can take them and apply them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Figure your whole location out. But it's interesting because once you're there a little while, you kind of get into a... Well, at least for me, it did. There was like a week or maybe not a week, but that I was kind of a little more annoyed with things. You know, it's like, oh, my site sucks. And then you kind of accept it. Like, you know what? It is what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Um, it's interesting that it's really easy, right? It's really easy. You can almost see it, sense it in yourself to justify, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
to justify a little bit of evil or see yourself cheer a little bit when the enemy gets knocked back in some way um it's really in the way it's just perfectly naturalist for us to feed that hate and feed that tribalism in group out group we're on this team um and i think that can happen i think it just happens slowly like one justification at a time one step at a time you uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
you hear something and it makes it makes you think then that you are in the right to perform some kind of you know you're justified and create you know break a couple eggs to make an omelet type thing and then but all of a sudden that takes you down this whole train to where pretty soon you're justifying what's completely
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh unjustifiable this is gradual yeah it's a gradual process of a little bit at a time i think that's why like for me like having a path of faith is like works as like a mooring because it can help me shine that light on myself you know it's like something else because if you're just looking at yourself and looking within yourself for for your compass in life it's really easy to get that thing out of whack but you kind of need
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
perspective from which you can step out of yourself and look into yourself and judge yourself accordingly and am i walking in line with that ideal you know and then and i think without that check your your subject you know it's easy to ignore the fact that you might be able to commit those things but we live in a pretty easy comfortable society like what if
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You know, what if we pictured yourself in the position of my grandparents and then all of a sudden you got the upper hand in some kind of a fight? What are you going to do? You know, you definitely picture becoming evil in that situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, that's so true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It really is. It's so inherent and so natural in us to justify ourselves. It's really... I mean, I think it's almost... I mean, just understanding history, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
No amount of complaining is going to do anybody any good. Yeah. I'm just going to make it happen. And so then, or, you know, do my best to, and then I felt like I got in a zone and I felt like I was right back in kind of Siberia or in that headspace. And I, I found I actually really enjoyed it. I had been a little bit out of, I guess you call it the game. Cause I had had, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And just on down the line that something like that rose in the world into a position where we all kind of accept those ideals, I think is really remarkable and worth appreciating. That said, a lot of that gets wrapped up in what is so natural. It just becomes another instrument for tribalism or another justification for wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so I even myself am self-conscious sometimes talking about matters of faith because I know when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about something else other than what someone else might think of when they hear me talking about it. So it's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
take seriously and apply in your life and when you live it then there's some clarity there but that it has to be kind of defined like it's like it's and that's where you come in with the religion and the stories because if you leave it completely undefined i don't know really know where you go from there i actually isn't it funny to speak to that i did mushrooms have you ever done those before mushrooms yeah uh i've done them a couple times but one time was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
didn't do that many the other time more. And I had a really profound experience in helping couch all this in the 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 them and I couldn't quite picture the kids, but I could feel the love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then I started asking all the deepest existential questions I could, you know, and it felt like I was just one answer, another answer, another answer. Everything was being answered. And I felt like I was communing with God, whatever you want to say. But I was very aware of the fact that that communing was just peeling back the tiniest corner of the infinite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh 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's been a couple years that i was just you know we're raising the little girl and boy then and then so you've gotten a little soft so i was like did i got a little soft
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, why did you reveal to me yourself? Why did you use the story of Jesus to reveal yourself? And then... That infinite amorphous thing had to somehow take form for us to be able to relate to it. It had to have some kind of a form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then all of a sudden I could picture my children as the children rather than this amorphous feeling of love. It was like, oh, there's Ilana and Altai and Zaya. But then they were bounded. And then once they're bounded, you're subject to the death and to the misunderstanding and to all that. Like, you know, I picture the amoeba or the cell. And then when it dies, it turns into a unformed thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so we need some kind of form to relate to. So instead of always just talking about God completely intangibly, it kind of gave me a way to relate to it. And I was like, oh, wow, that's... That was really powerful to me, and putting it in a context that was applicable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
right right and then that was always you know all my a lot of my family and loved ones and friends have completely left the faith but and i totally i on the way i get it like i understand but i also really see the baby that's being thrown out with the bath water and i want to cherish that in a way, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, and I'm glad you say that because I found a lot of comfort in that because I feel somewhat inarticulate a lot of the times and unable to articulate my thoughts, especially on these matters. Mm-hmm. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then what I also am struck with right away is I can't because you can't love everybody. You can't love your enemies and you can't. But as placing that in front of you as the ideal is so important to put like a check on your human instincts, on your tribalism, on your 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But then it was fun how like after just some days there, I was like, oh man, I feel like I'm at home now. And then it was like you're kind of in that flow state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Almost, you almost won't observe it happening, you know, but, uh, And so I so much appreciate all the me striving. And that's where, you know, I grew up in a Christian family. So I had these like cliches that I didn't really understand, like a relationship with God. Like, what does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But but in that struggle, in that wrestling match is where I actually sense that relationship. And then it's and that's where it kind of gains life and. How that, and I'm sure that relates to what Jordan Peterson is getting at in his metaphor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
One thing I noticed really tangibly on Alone was that because I had so many people that were close to me kind of just leave it all together, I was like, I could do that. I actually understand why they do. or I could not, you know, I do have a choice. And so I had to choose at that point to, to maintain that ideal. And cause I could add enough time on alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The one nice thing is you don't have any distractions. You have all the time in the world to go into your head. And, uh, I could play those paths out in my life and not only in my life, but I feel like societally and for generationally, like I throw it all away and everybody start from square one, or we can try to, you know, redeem what's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, the more you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It isn't, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
put yourself in life in positions that are kind of outside your comfort zone or push your abilities the more often you're going to screw up and then yeah the more opportunity you have to learn from that and then to be honest it's kind of funny but you almost get to a position where you well you don't feel that uncomfortable it's not unexpected you know you kind of expect you're going to mess up here and there you know i remember particularly with the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Shout out to the grandmas. Seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right, right. Yeah, it's so true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, it's amazing to listen to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, he does an incredible job with it. Have you seen the full version? Have you watched the four-part full version? You should. It's in Russian, and so you'll get the fullness of that. And it's... He had to fit it into a two-hour format. And so I think what you lose in those extra couple hours is worth watching. I think you'll like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 uh it's not as it's it's it's not as russellian as we'd like to think you know it is You know, things must die for things to live, like you said. And that's just played out all the time. And it's indifferent to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Doesn't care if you live or die. And doesn't care how you die or how much pain you go through while you die. You know, it's like, it's pretty brutal. So it's interesting that he taps into that. And I think it's valuable because it's easy to idealize in a way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
don't know what to make of it there isn't a difference it's a bit scary it's a bit lonely you're just a cog in the in the machine of nature i think that doesn't really care about you totally i think that's something i sat with a lot on on that show is another part of the depths of your psychology to delve into but it and that's when i thought like i could i could
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I understand that deeply, but I could also choose to believe that for some reason it matters. And then I could live like it matters, and then I could see the trajectories, and that was another fork in the road of my path, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 our reciprocity. 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 Dlini.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
um, the moose, the first moose I saw, I had a great shot at it, but I had a hard time judging distance because it was in a mud flat, which means it's hard to, it's hard to tell yardage, you know, because you usually typically go in by trees or markers and be like, oh, I'm probably 30 yards away. This was a giant moose and he was 40 something yards away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I just remember Dlini and just watching him eat the leaves and go with me through the woods and trust him to take me through rivers and stuff. Yeah. And it really is special. It's really enriching to have that relationship with an animal. And I think it also puts you in a proper context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, we feel really removed from it, particularly in urban settings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I think when you interact with animals and you have to confront the life and the death of them and the responsibility of a symbiotic relationship you have, I think it opens a little bit of awareness to your place in the puzzle and puts you in it rather than above it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I wonder, you know, you wonder when it actually comes, what you're going to think. But I did have, you know, I did have my dad to watch confronted in as positive a manner as you could. And that's a big advantage. And so I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, uh, be heavy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, when you're, I mean, you're in, I did, I did have a time at a time where I thought I might, I was going to die. I had a lot of situations that could have gone either way and a lot of injuries, broken ribs and this and that, but I,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The one 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 sucking really hard to get the gas out. And then I didn't get the siphon going. So I waited. And then while I was sitting there, Yura put a new canister on top and put the hose in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I didn't see. And so then I went to get another siphon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
you know siphon and i went like sucked as hard as i couldn't just instantly like a bunch of gas filled my mouth and i couldn't like spit it out i had to go like that and i just full mouth full 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And they're like, all right, well, you're always like, man, I had a buddy that died doing that with diesel a couple of years ago, you know, and I was, oh man. And so anyway, I made my way to the hospital and by then, you know, you're really out of it because, and then, uh, and it was, they put me in this little dark room. It almost sounds like unrealistic, but it's actually how it happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They put me in a little, a little, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
room with a toilet and they gave me a cold you know galvanized bucket and then like they just had a cold water faucet and they're just like just chug water and puke into the toilet and just flush your system as much 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I estimated that he was 30 something yards away. So I was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I started to shiver because I was so cold, but I still had to get this thing up to me and chug until I puked. I was picturing, I remember reading about the Japanese torture where they would put a hose in somebody and then make them drink water until they puked. Anyway, the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and i and i just felt so the only way i can express 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 rain and then and then i just remember like i could tell i was going out pretty soon and um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I remember looking at my hands up close. You'd see them a little bit. And I was like, oh, that's how dad's hands looked. You know, they were alive, alive. And then, you know, interesting. Are my hands going to look like that in a few minutes or whatever? And so then I wrote down like to my family what I thought, you know, like, I love you all. I feel at peace, blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then I passed out and I woke up. I didn't think... I actually thought... When I went to pass out, I thought there was a coin toss for me. So I really felt like I was confronting the end there. What are the harshest conditions to surviving on Earth? Well, there are places that are just purely uninhabitable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But I think as far as places that you have a chance... You have a chance is a good way to put it. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But there are Inuit that, you know, natives that live up there, but that's a hard life, you know, and the population's never grown very big because you're scraping by up there, and you picture... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The food sources are limited, but the fact that some people can live there means it is possible. You know, they've figured out ways to catch seals and do things to survive, but it's by no means easier to be taken for granted or obvious. I think it's a harsh, probably a harsh place to try to live.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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, it's that thing just surviving through the winter scraping by. It's tough. Tough existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, I think it would have mentally, it would have to be Well, we talked about that earlier, I guess. The thing that I've confronted that I thought I knew was that if I knew I was the last person on earth, I wouldn't do it. But maybe you're right. Maybe I would think I wasn't. But I think, you know, I can't imagine. I can't imagine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 um would i be able to endure that i would have at least a legacy to look back on of people who did but God forbid I ever have to delve that deep. You know what I mean? I could see that breaking somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, I think that's what I would have to somehow hold on to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So on alone, I knew if I wasn't going to... And ultimately, it is a game show. So it's like ultimately... i was gonna kill myself out there it's like but so if i hadn't been able to procure food and i was starving to death it's like okay i'm not i'm gonna go home you know but like if you put yourself in in that situation but it's not a game show
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And having been there to some degree, I will say I wasn't even close. I don't even know. 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. But I have a hard time. I know I've dealt with enough pain and enough discomfort in life that I know I can deal with that. I think it gets difficult when you start to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
nobody's gonna make this happen except myself you can't can't complain it wouldn't have done me any good to go back and mope about it and so then i was like i had a thought i was like oh i remember these native the native guys telling me they used to like build these giant fences and funnel game into certain areas and stuff and i was like man that's a lot of calories but i have to make that happen again now so i kind of went out there and tried that and that was kind of a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
when there's a way out and you start to wonder if you shouldn't take the way out as far as like, if there's no way out, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right. How am I doing this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's not insignificant. If you think you're doing permanent damage to your body, you would be smart to quit. You should just not do that on a, when it's not necessary. Um, because health is kind of all you have in some regards. So, well, I don't blame anyone. Then they quit because of that reason. It's like good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But, uh, but if you're in a situation and it's, you don't have the option to quit is knowing that you're doing permanent, that's not going to break. That won't break me. You know, it is, you just have to get through it. I'm not sure what my mental limit would be outside of like, the family suffering in the way that I described earlier. When it's just you, it's you, you're alone, there's the limit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that could be isn't it weird how like i mean i can be have a good life happy life and then you have a bad back or you have a headache yeah 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 like and and talk about the cross to bear and the like hero journey to be like good for you for trying to find what you can what your way through that there was a lady in russia uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
tanya and she had had cancer and recovered but always had a pounding headache and she was really joyful and really fun to be around and i just like man i mean you just have to have a really bad headache for today 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that's inspiring that's inspiring that you found there's not nothing in that you know i mean it's you can find somehow you can tap into purpose even in that pain i guess i would just speak from like right my dad's experience i saw somebody do it and i benefited from it so thanks to him for seeing the higher calling there
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
attempt at something too it could have failed or not worked but sure enough it worked and the opportunity came again the moose came wandering along and i was able to get it but being able to take failure as soon as you can the better accept it and then learn from it is kind of a muscle you have to exercise a little bit well it's interesting because in this case the cost of failure is like you're not going to be able to eat yeah yeah that was really interesting i mean
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, I'd say my mental life was really active. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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 they're like, and the,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
issue that you didn't resolve you know all this stuff that was long gone will come up and then you'll work through it and you'll think how you should make it right and uh i had a lot of those thoughts and while i was out there and it was it was so interesting to see what you would just brush over and then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and confront it because in our modern world, when you're always distracted, you're just never, ever going to know until you take the time to be alone for a considerable amount of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, exactly. I recommend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Well, if I tell them, then is everybody going to go there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Right, right. No, I love the... You know, there's a region that I definitely love in the States. It's special to me. I grew up there. Stuff like that. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Those are really cool places to me. I like the small town vibes they're still maintaining and stuff there. A mix of like mountains and forests. But, you know, another really awesome place that blew my mind was New Zealand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's South Island of New Zealand was... pretty incredible as far as just stunning stuff to see i was pretty high up there on the list but there's all these places have such kind of unique unique things about canada became like where they did a loan
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And, and you see the beauty and then you start to see the smooth beauty on the, in the smaller scale, like all of 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
No, we're going back this summer. I'm going to take a guided trip up there. Take a bunch of people. I'm really looking forward to being able to enjoy it without the pressure. It's going to be a fun trip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Like how long does it take for you for people usually to just like... Yeah, I think you need a few days probably to tap into it. But, you know, maybe you need to work your way there. Like it's awesome to go out on a hike, go see some beautiful little waterfall or go see some old tree or whatever it is. You know, like... But I think just doing is it. You know, everybody thinks about doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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. It's actually one of the things that I've enjoyed the most about guiding people 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that's a tool in your toolkit of life that is i think really valuable because i think everybody should spend some time in nature i mean i think it's been pretty proven healthy yeah i mean camping camping is great and solo i've got a chance to do it solo it's pretty cool
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The most interesting thing about that show was how high the stakes felt. Because it didn't feel... You know, you didn't tell yourself you're on a show. At least I didn't. You just felt like it was... You're going to starve to death if you don't make this happen. And so the stakes felt so high. And it was an interesting thing to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
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.