Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Jordan Jonas (@hobojordo). Jordan grew up on a farm in Idaho, rode freight trains across the US, spent time in remote Russian villages, fur trapped and travelled for several years with nomads in Siberia, and won Alone Season 6, after being the first contestant to truly thrive in the wilderness and harvest big game. He now leads people from all over the world and all walks of life on extraordinary outdoor adventures, facilitating once-in-a-lifetime wilderness expeditions, hunts, family adventures, and team-building events.
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Tim Ferriss: Jordan, great to see you, man.
Jordan Jonas: Good to see you, Tim. Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ve upgraded our interaction to in person because for those who are listening, we had some audio glitches, some technological woes, and we just decided to do it in person. So here we are.
Jordan Jonas: Fun.
Tim Ferriss: And I have twice the number of pooches, meaning two versus one since you last saw me, got a stray adopted a few days ago. We’re also drinking what people might think are ridiculously heavy pours of whiskey, but this is not whiskey. This is Lake Missoula Tea Company, Lake Missoula Breakfast. It is delicious. Just a bit of caffeine, a little bit of a topper, let’s call it.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. We just both arrived in some city we’re not from.
Tim Ferriss: At high altitude.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And we’re just getting back into the groove of the conversation. So we are going to get to Russia, but first I wanted you to, and they just tie together, I suppose, explain what we have here on the table besides the tea. Because you made the joke, even if the interview’s not going very well. Might as well have this —
Jordan Jonas: — the handle this way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the handle is pointed towards you. What are we looking at?
Jordan Jonas: What we’re looking at is an axe. It’s one I’ve kind of designed specifically using the knowledge and experience I have had in Siberia in particular with the native folks and such. It’s got some unique features, some that I’ve really grown to love. So in the forest, first off, just to set the foundation, the one tool you need is an axe to give yourself a chance at survival.
Tim Ferriss: More than a knife.
Jordan Jonas: More than a knife because you can do all the things you can do with a knife. You could get a fire, you could build some traps, you can get through the ice. It just kind of gives you the ability to do everything, maybe not as well as you want. But as the Natives would say, “The one tool you need is an axe,” and I concur. So the problem though is that a lot of people in the States don’t know what a good axe is. And so you’ll go buy one at Lowe’s and go home. It just doesn’t do the job you need. So I designed one that has all the features I like. It’s kind of a Siberian axe head shape with some of the Evenki modifications.
Tim Ferriss: The Evenki being the native people.
Jordan Jonas: The Evenki are the Natives, nomadic folks that I lived with, they live in the woods all the time, so they kind of know what they like. And so some of the features of this axe in particular, most interestingly is it’s sharpened from one side.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a single bevel.
Jordan Jonas: It’s a single bevel grind, which means you have to have a right or a left-handed axe based on what you are. But what that allows you to do is when you’re in the woods, very often you’ll be carving things, whether you’re building a sleigh or building a trap or building whatever it might be. And it really helps it work as a planer and really helps do accurate work that way. It also on most trees that you chop down in the woods, they’re quite narrow. You’re rarely chopping down a giant cedar tree. You’re going to be chopping down things about the size of your arm, and a couple swings with this bevel design and you can slice right through them.
Tim Ferriss: Assuming it is matched to your dominant hand?
Jordan Jonas: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So that it’s sticking instead of deflecting.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly, exactly. So if you picture a bevel hitting against the tree, if it’s ground off on that side, there’s a bit of a deflection. And by grinding it from the opposite side, when it hits that tree, it just bites right in.
Tim Ferriss: I guess you have some experience with deflection.
Jordan Jonas: Deflection. Yes, we do. And yeah, just to finalize a few last points, you’ll notice on a lot of American axes, they have a narrow eye.
Tim Ferriss: And can you describe the eye? The eye is basically — you have the axe — what would you call it?
Jordan Jonas: Blade.
Tim Ferriss: Blade. Right. There’s the hole through which the handle would fit.
Jordan Jonas: On a Siberian axe, it’s quite wide, which allows you in the field to repair it with a solid piece of wood. And you can slide the handle through like a tomahawk. From the top, the handle goes all the way on. That way, when you swing, the pressure is always tightening the head. You don’t need wedges and all that, which is a cool design. There’s a bunch of other little nuances to the design. I don’t want to bore you too long, but Tim knows, he’s been up in the woods with me and we got to use it a bunch. I got to show him how to use it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredible how versatile an axe is. I mean, the number of ways that you used it. Also, just side note, I never really thought about this, but for people who are wondering about this bevel description that I gave, you could think of — there’s certain chef’s knives, especially Western chef’s knives that are double beveled. They’re sharpened from both sides in. So if you buy a cheap knife sharpener, it generally looks like a V. You’re sharpening it from both sides. But if you look at a lot of Japanese chef’s knives, single bevel, given the way they use it in cutting fish kind of horizontally.
And I recall seeing you when we first went out, our first day in the wilderness in Montana and just a quick sidebar, one of my friends, because the forecast was fantastic. It was a bluebird day and it was his first time going out on a real camping trip and he’s like, “I think I might just leave the rain gear at the rental spot.” And I was like, “That is the last thing you — just put it at the bottom. Stick it somewhere.” And then it was torrential downpour.
Jordan Jonas: We got a legit downpour.
Tim Ferriss: We got hammered. And even though it wasn’t particularly cold, you end up feeling cold very, very quickly. And when we arrived at, I suppose, the first camp, which maybe was sort of a premature stop because of the cold and the rain.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was pretty chilly.
Tim Ferriss: And it was incredible how quickly, number one, my friend Mike and I both were having trouble zippering our jackets, even though it was not even winter. And then watching you use the axe to, maybe you could describe this, but when you take a larger stick, people think of fire building and they think of perhaps having like the fat wood and then you have some type of cotton ball or tinder, but when you’re out in the woods, you’re not necessarily sure you could pack these things, but if you’re improvising, what blew me away was how you use the axe to create feathers. Can you explain what that is?
Jordan Jonas: You want a really sharp axe once you get control of it, they’re dangerous. We’ll go to the deflection story. But once you’re a master of the axe, you can go in a downpour, torrential downpour, chop down a dead standing tree because you might see dead trees on the ground, but it’s amazing, particularly in the spring when they’ve spent a whole winter absorbing moisture, it’s amazing how wet they will be. And so dead standing, find something, chop it down, and then split it, chop a smaller piece out of the middle, and then split that open. And once you’ve got it split open, you’re to that dry wood, and it never gets wet because it was standing. And so you then split that piece open a couple of times, you get a nice edge on it. And then with the axe, you can just run your axe down that wood with the right amount of control and practice and make some really fine curls that’ll catch a spark. So you don’t even need a lighter or you don’t need anything like that.
Tim Ferriss: And what was also counterintuitive to me is you don’t even have to take those off of the split piece of this internal wood.
Jordan Jonas: Easier if you don’t. It’s easier if you leave a big bundle of this curled wood.
Tim Ferriss: So imagine guys, if you would, you have, let’s just for simplicity’s sake, right? Say that you have a fully intact log of wood that’s about the thickness of your arm, and there are very particular ways to do this safely, like leaning it against a larger fallen tree.
Jordan Jonas: There’s a lot of nuance here.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of nuance, but you split that in half. So now you have, if you’re looking kind of down the barrel of each of these split pieces, they’re half circles. And then you chop those into even quarters, let’s say. Then you stand one up and you’re using the axe, which takes a lot of fine motor control to kind of shave down these thin pieces of wood that then curl as you’re pushing it down and then you go a little bit higher, you do the same thing, you do it again, you do it again. You end up with all of these — it almost looks like a fiddle head fern or something where they’re all rolled together and then —
Jordan Jonas: And then in fire making too, in survival in the woods, it’s great to have a lighter. It’s great to have matches. They all make it so much easier to start a fire, but they’ll occasionally fail you and they’ll fail you when you need them the most. And so I always carry also just a ferro rod, which is very — it just makes sparks, basically. You scrape it and it makes sparks. But with that, you need a fine paper thin material to catch the sparks and light it up. And that’s what you’re making with the axe curls.
And so we were in a big downpour and even that can be difficult because when it’s really raining, you got to be really careful that you’ve made all these curls, that they don’t get soaked before you get the spark on them. So we made a quick tripod, draped a tarp over it and tucked under that to actually build our fire, made a few sparks and got that burning. You can then make some not so fine curls, make some really quick rough ones and throw that on top. It catches, and pretty soon you have a fire, which is amazing how life-giving it is in those situations. Everybody’s depressed and wet.
Tim Ferriss: Particularly like soaking wet, hands aren’t really functioning, and then the fire, once you get a critical mass and you’re able to warm your hands, my buddy Mike, I remember he said, he’s like, “Yeah, no wonder we’ve worshiped fire for so long.” Obvious. All right, so this axe, and I’m thrilled to have one of these, and we’ll put up an additional shorter video on my YouTube channel, which is just Tim Ferriss. What is your YouTube channel?
Jordan Jonas: Hobo Jordo, actually.
Tim Ferriss: And we will explain why.
Jordan Jonas: I have an Instagram at that too, which I also put videos up on.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll put up some videos of the axe and maybe have you demo some of the more non-obvious ways of using it. Before we get to the rewind and looking at how on Earth you ended up in Russia, let’s not let go of the loose end of the deflection story. So what does it look like if you get over-enthusiastic and you don’t quite have the control yet?
Jordan Jonas: An axe has a learning curve, especially when you have a really well-made axe and you’re swinging it hard to get the jobs you need done, done. When I did go to Russia, I was a little in over my head. I had grown up on a farm and used an axe more than probably your typical American, but not like they do over there by any means.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, these axes are as sharp — they’re sharper than most kitchen knives you would find in an Airbnb. I mean, they’re very, very sharp.
Jordan Jonas: Yep. And so they just use them way more than I would. And I was trying to keep up, I was trying to be productive and in doing so I was in a hurry. So this is going to take a slight bit of a backstory, but the Natives over there will build these huge 30 kilometer circumference fences out of only logs interlocking. They have no nails, nothing up there because there are none around. And so there’s a specific technique to doing that. Partly that involves chopping a tree down and then you step your foot on it and then you split that tree on that cut end. So you’re taking a big swing and swinging right where your foot sort of is. And that tree is not flat like it was cut with a saw. It’s got an angle like it was cut with an axe. And so there’s a real deflection possibility there if you don’t have it down.
And so I’m trying to keep up, smack, hitting my boot. And we’re in the middle of Siberia. I can’t get another rubber boot. We’re working in swamps. It was very disappointing. Went home, had a cut on my foot, back to home which is a tipi, had a cut on my foot, kind of bandaged it up, tried to patch my boot as best I could. Go back out next day, same thing. And then make a long story short, I chopped the heck out of my boots. And then finally one of the native guys was like, “Hey, you know what, Jordan? I think five years ago I left a boot upside down on a stump, five miles that way.” And so we spent a whole day, we got our reindeer, packed them up, rode these reindeer up and over the mountain. Sure enough, there’s a stump with a boot upside down on it. And these are natural rubber boots. And so I could like, it was smaller than my foot, but I could squeeze my foot in there and I was like, “Great, this is awesome.”
Back at it another day or two and swing, I chopped it. And I was so frustrated. I mean, it was annoying that I cut my boot open. I got mad and I swung with one hand at the tree and then here comes — it deflects off and rips right into my knee and I hammered my knee. In the long run, I went and got checked out many months later, but I mostly severed the MCL, split the bone. It was quite a gnarly injury and I was stuck out there. I had to crawl back to the tipi. I knew I was kind of in shock. So I was like, “I got to get back to the tipi before I feel this,” which was a couple kilometers away. So I kind of just bailed out, told everybody like, “Hey, I’m going back to tipi.”
And then I got there and man, it was a lot of pain. I had had surgery on my other knee not long before, so that was my good leg I chopped. And then I was stuck in that tipi for several days. I couldn’t even move. Even to poop, I had a plastic bag, I had to go in that and then roll to the edge of the tipi and stuff it out. I couldn’t even stand on either leg. It was pretty miserable. And they were out building that fence. So it was a few days later, they finally came back and I was still recovering on the tipi floor.
Tim Ferriss: What did you do or what did they do in terms of “first aid?” They’re like, “Here’s a poultice made of God knows what, slap it on, walk it off, you’ll be fine.”
Jordan Jonas: Which is mostly what it was. It was very simple. We went over to a spruce tree that was bleeding a bunch of sap out and went over there and scraped a bunch of that sap off with the axe and then just put that on my wound. This is right at the start, right when I got it, packed the wound with that sap. Then I went back and shockingly enough, we’re out in the woods and the dirt and the rusty axe or whatever, it never got infected at all. Healed up as best it could. A few days later when they came back, Andrei, one of the native guys, brought me a little cane he carved for me, which was nice. And so then the next couple of days I caned around and then got to where I could get back out on the fence again and help out. But it was quite a lesson. That was my first time with them and yeah, I was in over my head a little bit, high learning curve.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a memorable lesson.
Jordan Jonas: Memorable lesson. I was pretty miserable in that tipi for a few days.
PREROLL?
Tim Ferriss: So it sounds like you got close to quite a few of the locals and can you describe, hopefully this is enough of a cue because you told me about this when we were out in the woods in the mountains, but it involves the — we picked up a few Russian words on this trip and I think one of them was durak. So if that’s enough of a cue, in terms of warm welcome, what was your first arrival like?
Jordan Jonas: This was probably 2005 or ’06, and I was heading over to Russia the first time and didn’t know what to expect, but we land in the Moscow airport and instead of having like a bus or something come up to our airplane, it was like a farm tractor, this blue farm tractor and a wooden trailer. And I was like, “No way!” We get off the plane and we’re climbing into this trailer. And so of course I took a picture and this officer standing over there, durak, which means, like, idiot. That was the first greeting in Russia. Came over to my phone, made me delete it, and welcome to Russia. So that was fitting, fitting start.
Tim Ferriss: I guess it’s not that different from how you would probably get treated at JFK.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, totally started taking pictures. Fair enough. Fair enough. A little bit of cultural ignorance.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So let’s go back then to the impetus, the catalyst, just as a skeletal backstory that we’re going to dive into, but where’d you grow up?
Jordan Jonas: I grew up in Idaho, on a farm in North Idaho for the most part.
Tim Ferriss: So did you grow up learning Russian from family members, then studying in school and then going to Russia?
Jordan Jonas: No, I never thought particularly a lot about Russia, although I was really into history. And so I had read a lot about World War II, Russian war memoirs, all this I’d read and really was impacted by The Gulag Archipelago. So I had a familiarity with Russia, but it was never a destination that I had thought about. And lived a fairly typical beginning of life, got a job when I was 13, worked, work, worked. And then when I was about 18, my brother invited me to ride freight trains, so that kind of sent me on that path.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to skip forward from there and come back to why —
Jordan Jonas: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: — Hobo Jordo.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So what on Earth happened that led to actually getting on a plane?
Jordan Jonas: I grew up in a Christian household and I had seen the fruit of that path in my life. I’d seen it in people around me, my family history, I really valued it and it was really meaningful to me. But as I was a teenager and growing up, I had a lot of questions that I hadn’t had satisfactorily answered.
And so I found myself, although I really valued Christianity and saw it as very good, I found myself in a place where I was struggling to connect with it on any level. And so I was in a fairly dark place as a young man there. And I remember at that time I had read this particular verse and it basically said, “He who follows the path of righteousness and is in the darkness continue.” And that struck me at the time because like, okay, there’s people that try to do the right thing and are still in darkness and that, so that’s okay. But it didn’t answer a lot of the questions I had and I didn’t want to bulldoze it all because I had seen that it was good. And I also knew I was young and ignorant.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by bulldoze it?
Jordan Jonas: Well, I didn’t want to take my faith and Christianity and everything that it meant and just —
Tim Ferriss: Discard it.
Jordan Jonas: Say I’m going to discard it and go my own way as an 18-year-old or whatever.
Tim Ferriss: What types of questions did you have?
Jordan Jonas: They were actually fairly simple. And this goes to the next answer, but my two main questions were one, like surely, though, your Earth is not 6,000 years old? And then two was I just had a hard time matching up Old Testament ethics with Christ’s message and I just didn’t know how to do those things. And so I had a lot of what I would call cultural baggage. There was a lot of baggage with my faith, but because I recognized it as good, I was like, “I’m going to try to stick with it, but I have to separate the baby from the bath water.” And that’s kind of a daunting task because it’s kind of a lifelong journey of faith, but I was given a great boost by the fact that actually Jesus did, He said in one part of the New Testament, He says, to give a summary, “But what’s the point of the law and the prophets? What is all this for?” And He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”
And so I was shocked when I read it because I was like, “Wow, wait a second. He takes all the bath water and throws it out for you and leaves you the baby, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” That was the whole point of the law and the prophets and everything else. And so I didn’t have to figure everything else out at the time and I was okay with seeing if that would play out. And like I said, I’d seen enough fruit that I didn’t want to bulldoze it.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of fruit had you seen for yourself?
Jordan Jonas: My mom, for one, was like a real woman of faith and we’d always had like single moms come over and live at the house and she would always work to give gifts, Christmas gifts to prisoners’ children that are out. Always had her acting in the world in love. And in my own life, as a young man, you’ve got this thing, this ideal that’s pushing against your natural lust and this and that. It kind of throws a wrench into your natural tendencies, whether that be to anger or to — it overlays your life with a love ideal. And I saw that as good.
I chose at that time with those two bits of information that like continue even in the darkness and that I can like put everything else on pause, the only thing I need to, like, accept or not accept is like, love the Lord, that core. And I was like, “I’m okay with accepting that.” And then I had this really deep prayer that like someday I just wish I had the faith to match, but I didn’t actually know if I per se believed it. I just knew that I’m going to do it anyway.
In that time I was also traveling and going to New York and going to Virginia and running all around and I had heard of this opportunity to go to Russia and build an orphanage. So that was the first thought of Russia. And again, it was distant and I didn’t think much of it, but I did pray, “Well, if you want me to go Lord, you’re going to have to give me a sign because I don’t have any reason to go.” And then I went to New York, it was kind of a flippant prayer, I think. I went to New York and met a Russian there and she had offered to give me Russian lessons because the topic came up. And I did, and I don’t know what it was, but I think it was maybe either putting a face to a vague idea or an act of God or whatever you want to call it, but for some reason it hit me really emotionally.
I went back to my apartment there, my sister’s apartment and just would cry like, “Oh, man.” I felt like a heavy burden for — it wasn’t even directed at her, it was directed at this vague idea of going. And I couldn’t tell. Even at the time, I was like, “This could just be…” I couldn’t quite explain it, but it could be explicable, but also I could just accept it as the kick that I prayed for. And so I kind of did. And again, I still didn’t have the faith to match. Then I remember going, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go. I’m taking it as an answer.” I bought a ticket for a year and headed over to — I didn’t even really know where. And there was a guy over there, Justus Walker, awesome dude. He was heading up that orphanage building project. And so that was my only connection.
And then I remember on the train, it was hard for me to go because I had a girl I had to crush on and I wanted to pursue my education and maybe become an officer in the Marines, all these things I had ideas for. And then I was on this train and had given all that up on the Trans-Siberian Railway chugging across. And I remember just like, “Lord, if I could have one thing, someday give me faith to match my willingness to sacrifice.”
Anyway, so that was my kick into Russia, kind of open-ended and I just had one thing I was grasping, like, love your neighbor as yourself. Let me see if I can implement this in the world in whatever place I am. I wasn’t trying to per se do anything other than that. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Tell me if this is a fair read. I’ve often said to myself and to other people, and I absolutely borrowed it from someone else, I did not come up with this. But the general maxim that it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting, so act as if.
Jordan Jonas: Act as if. That’s very much so.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Jordan Jonas: And I think particularly when you’re dealing with something like apathy or love, or like how do you relate in the world? Like one thing that was clear is like, oh, well actually if you’re going to actually love things, it’s an action and so if we’re going to do this, let’s try to — you can’t be stagnant in that orientation, but I think that’s a good summary. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: How did you go from orphanage to Evenki?
Jordan Jonas: I went over to help Justus Walker build this orphanage, super — and that was neat, but it was just me. And he needed a lot of groundwork laid and wells dug, but he eventually had a crew lined up that was going to come over and actually frame the thing and put the thing up and do all that. So I was there kind of doing the groundwork. We dug a well and did all this stuff, but it was still pretty preliminary. And I was there for a few months. I really enjoyed being in Russia, but I was struck by the fact that I actually really want to live with Russians. And so I told that to Justus and he was like, “Well, let’s call the neighboring village.” He called him up and the guy was like, “Whoa, yeah, absolutely send the American over. My wife’s in the hospital and I need someone to watch my kids.”
Tim Ferriss: How long had you been there at that point?
Jordan Jonas: About three months, I would guess.
Tim Ferriss: How much Russian did you speak at that point?
Jordan Jonas: Very little, very little. I was trying to pick it up, but that was part of the problem is Justus was so much — he’s one of the most well-read people I’ve ever been with, so it was so fun to just talk to him and so —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot easier than working on your ABCs.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, exactly. And so I was not doing it to the — and when you first go to a country, you’re so struck by how much you can communicate non-verbally and then you all of a sudden hit a wall. Okay. I wanted to get past that as fast as possible. So I went to that little village and was fully immersed in Siberian village life right there. It was pretty funny because I hadn’t dealt with kids before or anything like that. Yura had to go back to his lumber mill job. And so he was a big Russian dude with a big handshake, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.” And showed me around and here’s the kids, a five-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, introduce, have some tea. Then the next day he’s already off to work. He pointed me where the grocery store is. So I was in the deep end trying to take care of these two kids. I’d never done that before, grocery shop for him. I didn’t even know the language. And yeah, that was my splash into Russia proper, I guess, in that regards.
Tim Ferriss: And then how do you get into reindeer territory?
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah. So then these guys would all — Yura had been to prison before and his —
Tim Ferriss: Who was that?
Jordan Jonas: Sorry, the Russian guy.
Tim Ferriss: The guy with the big hand.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the big Russian — and his neighbor’s name was Igor and he had also been to prison. And these are all guys in Siberia with pretty storied pasts. They really enjoyed having me over there. For one, I was really trying to just work hard and, it was so random for them to have an American that they would kind of tug-of-war me back between their two houses.
Tim Ferriss: Pet American?
Jordan Jonas: They both became like families to me. They both had kids and both were a lot of fun in different ways. But Igor, the second family there, had been in prison with a native fur trapper from the far north. And they were really close because they’d found God in prison together and this and that. And so he was always telling me, “You’ve got to go north and meet my fur-trapping buddy.” So after that year of living in Russia, right at the end of it, Yura, the trapper came through town to sell furs and we met and he invited me up to live with him. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to go home to America, renew my visa, earn some money, and then I’ll come back.” And so I went back and headed straight north, more or less. And then I was in even more over my head.
Tim Ferriss: So what was the first day like when you land, first day, first week, when you land in the far north? Now this is in Siberia proper?
Jordan Jonas: Well, we’ve been in Siberia the whole time. But it was just incrementally further north in kind of central Siberia.
Tim Ferriss: How cold does it get in the northernmost region?
Jordan Jonas: Well, far north where I would end up being with the nomads, it’d get to negative 58, negative 60s, like kind of the cutoff, but chilly. But it was — oh, first getting to the north was funny. Well, one thing I was struck by, honestly, when I got to Russia was there’s a lot of drinking and every bit I went further north. Every time I would get used to it at one place, I remember driving in a village in the first village I was with Justus and we were just cruising along on a cold winter day in the bus and it swerves around this guy laying in the road, but we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I was like, “Whoa, it’s cold out. We’ve got to stop.” And the lady across from me and I could make out with my bad Russian. He’s like, “Ah, he’s a drunk. He’s dead.” I was like, “Whoa.” Stop.
And so it was kind of intense, but you kind of recalibrate at the new norm. And when I went to the next northern village, it restruck me again. I was like, “Oh, there’s chaos.” And that first week was that because I was with Yura and he was showing me around. And we go to this first house and I think even — it might have been even on the way from the airport, but pick up some random drunk guy and he holds up his phone, “Listen to this.” And just his wife just chewing him out and cussing him out. He’s like, “That’s the fury of a Russian woman,” because he’s been missing for who knows how long.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. How can I summarize some of what we were talking about at dinner last night?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Correct me if I get anything wrong. Like in the Evenki, you have these sustenance hunters, trappers, et cetera, with encyclopedic knowledge —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I’m aware of that.
Tim Ferriss: — and wherewithal.
Jordan Jonas: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just mind-boggling, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it is.
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t had an opportunity to spend time in that region of the world, but certainly in Central and South America, and Africa, and so on. When you start to look at, let’s just say, Shanghain trackers in South Africa, there are levels, and then the Kalahari bushmen, and then there are levels, and it’s unbelievable how fluent they are in their environment.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: And at the same time, many of these groups have an Achilles heel —
Jordan Jonas: That’s what it feels like.
Tim Ferriss: — which is alcohol. And to put it in perspective, what is the percentage of deaths attributable to homicides, suicide, or alcohol-related accidents?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the statistic I heard for the northern native villages was 30 percent of people die from homicide, suicide, or — it’s really, and having lived there a long time. Like actually I appreciate you stepping back a little bit because I don’t want to air dirty laundry, and not put the proper context. I love those people, and they’re my friends. And many of my friends have that issue. But it has really tangible consequences when it’s at that level, and it’s —
But yes, it was amazing, because these people — you’d go in the village, and they’d be on the ground drunk for weeks on end. Just binges that could only be broken by taking them back out in the woods. But when they get in the woods and sober up, these are like the coolest, most knowledgeable people. And then, people that you would say are happy, and living a fulfilled life, and also just really open, and pleasant, and quick to become family, basically.
But it’s almost explicable, just in the cultural tumult that they’ve had to endure over time, because it was just in the ’30s that, basically, the Soviet Union and Stalin really grabbed a hold of what had been long before just the traditional way of life, that continued forward alongside Russian fur trappers. And they grabbed hold of it with an iron fist. Force collectivized that all the people that were spiritual leaders of any kind, Shamans and everybody else got sent to prison camps. Anyone that was really productive. So anyone that had more than 500 reindeer were sent to prison camps as Kulaks.
And so they just gutted the intellectual and spiritual soul from them, and then built these villages they forced them to be in. And then instead of them having reindeer, and being people existing freely out in the wilderness, they turned them into collective farms. So now, you’re hired as a reindeer herder to herd the government’s reindeer. And your wife might be hired as a tipi worker to live in the tipi. And so they just restructured the life. The kids now, don’t live with you in the woods. They go to boarding school. Separated the families, and then somehow, they actually made that work. And to some degree, the reindeer, while less independent than they were prior, they flourished in that they had big herds of reindeer. And people were productive and alcohol was banned. So they were quite productive.
And then the Soviet Union collapsed, and overnight all the reindeer just became for the highest bidder. So the Russians, and people from out of town that had a lot of money, just came in and bought all these reindeer that were grandpa’s and grandma’s blood and sweat, and just butchered them, and sent them to the meat shops. And the reindeer herders scraped together what little bit of money they could, and bought a few reindeer, and went back into the woods. The family I lived with — Evon Victorovich was the old man when I first got there, and he was blind, but he was the guy that had gotten some of these reindeer. Took his sons out of the boarding school, and raised them in the woods.
Jordan Jonas: It gave me a real appreciation also for the traditional ways of life, because I could see it in villages where reindeer herding hadn’t been hung onto, and they just felt like black holes. Like everybody was just drinking, and there was nothing to do. They don’t have an outlet to flourish with something they’re proud of in their native ways. So it felt pretty dead-end, but the village with the reindeer herding, it had this whole thing. And the reindeer herders out there, because of that, even the people that don’t do it, are proud to be reindeer herders. And they have a place to send their kids in the summer, and people have this — there’s a little bit of cultural momentum that’s really enriching.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s unpack this word, and this animal, and the significance of reindeer.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because it’s come up a ton, and people are like, “What is up with these magical reindeer problem?” So first of all, just to paint a picture for folks — and this might not help, but how similar are reindeer to caribou for people?
Jordan Jonas: Very similar. They’re almost — you probably wouldn’t recognize the difference, but they do have a slight genetic, just from separation. So reindeer are technically in the old world, and caribou are the similar animal, but in the new world — so Canada. And they can breed with each other, but the results turn out poorly. They get the worst traits of both. And then, in the old world, more so than — well, in the old world, the reindeer were domesticated very long ago, like 10,000 years ago. So there’s actually become a bit of a domestic strain of reindeer. Like the Natives now can’t domesticate the wild ones. And if a wild one comes in and breeds with theirs, then it’s always going to be wild. So it’s been a way of life long enough that there’s some even genetic separation between the wild, and the semi-domesticated.
Tim Ferriss: What is the role of the reindeer? Why are they so important? Is it analogous to say bison for some of the Plains Indians in North America? Is it different?
Jordan Jonas: Well, if it’s analogous —
Tim Ferriss: I guess it is actually — it’s different because of the domestication.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. I was going to say, it’s analogous in that their whole cultural stories and everything are all connected with the reindeer, like with the bison. But it does differ, because the reindeer, actually, practically make living in the woods in the taiga, and those remote northern forests, a thing. It makes it possible to exist out there year round, and have transportation. So they ride the reindeer like you would horses. And then, they also, in the wintertime, ride them with sleighs. They provide meat when the hunts don’t go well. They provide the furs that — so they provide everything. They also provide the cultural context. Like you could go out there, sure, and set up a tipi, and live, and bring in noodles, and it’d be just fine, but it would feel fairly dead without the rhythms of life that are created by the reindeer. So they’re really core to that.
Tim Ferriss: Sort of the rhythms.
Jordan Jonas: To the rhythms. But also they’re very practically — I always hated snowmobiles, because they’re going to break down, and then you’re going to be stuck 40 kilometers from camp. And like you said, your hands aren’t working. You got to try to work on this little thing. When you had a reindeer and a sleigh, no problem. And so, you can — they really make — and this is a point that is interesting to make, that I learned living in the woods for a while is, you’re home. You’re just already home, wherever you are. And so, when you have your reindeer, you’re not lost, you’re home. Where you are is home, and you’re able to take that, and really embody it, and become a part of the wilderness in that way.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to get back to hopping trains in a second, but you passed over Gulag Archipelago.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re like, “It had an influence. It had an impact on me.”
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: It seems like that might be an understatement. I don’t know? For people who are wondering, this is not a light, breezy, 100-page read. And we’re going to come to that in just a second, but what did your childhood education look like?
Jordan Jonas: I was homeschooled. So my mom took it real seriously, and she was pretty hands-on in teaching us. And I, for whatever reason, really got into history as a young kid. So even — probably, was 12, I read this big — I remember it was my first real thick book, but it was about Iwo Jima in World War II, and those battles. And then, I got really into those memoirs. Read a bunch of German memoirs from World War II, which were always crazy, because they had to go through so much. And then, the Russian ones, because I was — anyway, got into all the memoirs, and then, somehow came across The Gulag Archipelago. And I was fairly young. I was probably 17, 18 when I first read it. And it impacted me in a lot of ways that were relevant to my little spiritual path that I was on before, because a lot of what he talks about is, that happiness can’t be our ultimate goal in life. We have to have purpose.
Tim Ferriss: Could you, just for people who — and certainly I’m not intimately familiar with it, but what it’s written about?
Jordan Jonas: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a guy who was on the front in World War II, and wrote a letter back criticizing Stalin. And of course, he got checked, and he got arrested, and sent to Gulag, which were the Soviet prison camps that snaked their way all through the Soviet Union. And they were particularly harsh on political prisoners, as opposed to crime prisoners. So they would send these guys out to, basically, death camps, and have them mine, or do the labor basically, that kept the thing going.
But they were designed to be really brutal and dark places, just the way — the fact that even because the political prisoners were the bottom of the rung, they allowed the rapists, and those guys, to rule the roost, and set the rules. And so, they degraded into some pretty terrible situations. But this was all unknown, basically, to the West. And he was a brilliant mind, and over his eight or however many years he was in the prison camp, had an encyclopedic ability to like remember. Maybe he wrote down, I don’t know, but all these stories of people who had been through all these situations.
And when you read it, I was just struck by it. Like, “Man, there’s all these little paragraphs about this lady. That lady should have her own book.” That’s a crazy amount of tragedy, and story all packed in those books.
Another example of something that really stood out was like, when you get in prison, everybody says to themself, “I’m going to survive.” And then, that’s just like a little — then you add, at any cost to the end, almost nonchalantly. And then, pretty soon you start down this path where you’re, basically, stomping on others to survive, because you need to look out for number one. Survival of the fittest. And everybody, basically, adopted that mentality. He’s like, “Except for these occasional…”
The corrupt Orthodox church had somehow created these babushkas. These old ladies that didn’t allow their soul to go down that path. And he’s like, “They all died, but they all were a light…”
Tim Ferriss: In the darkness.
Jordan Jonas: “…in the darkness on their way.” And then, it gets at the point of, yeah, you could lose your life, but don’t lose your soul. And happiness can’t be your ultimate goal. That can be taken from you by a health change, or by getting thrown in a gulag, or by whatever it is. You have to have something deeper, and so forging a purpose.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to talk about the homeschooling, because you don’t — not that there is a single mold —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — but there are certain, I suppose maybe, archetypes that people might have in their heads, as to what constitutes a rugged mountain man, effectively. And I was chatting with my girlfriend last night, and she was like, “He doesn’t really fit my vision of like a rugged mountain man.” Which is not — she’s not saying you’re not rugged, but when you’re talking about — and I’m sure we’ll get to this. Like Assyrian history, and reading Gulag Archipelago as a 17-year-old, these are not terribly common things that get woven together. How did your mom do the homeschooling? What did a week look like, or the lesson plans? Does that make any sense?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just wondering, because homeschooling, I think, for a lot of people in the United States, seems like an aberration. But when you look at some of the people whose books we read, a lot of them had some equivalent of homeschooling.
Jordan Jonas: You know what I think, it is like a — public school, there is a standard, and everybody’s going to be taught to that standard; there’s a minimum bar. Homeschooling allows for more divergent options, both on the negative and the positive. You keep your kid at home, and not teach him anything, and go on. But also, you can really focus on your kids’ unique interests and abilities, and they can really excel and develop those in a way you wouldn’t in the public school realm. So because I was really into history, we leaned into that, and I had the time to, because honestly, in a public school setting, you burn up so much time going to recess, just dinking around. Whereas, I could get done with my actual academic schooling in just a couple hours in the morning, a few hours maybe. And then, go on to my interests.
And so it allows you to do that. And she taught us — initially, she was really hands-on, and then the older we got, it was more hands-off, where we had to be more self-taught, and follow whatever curriculum she had. And then, the last two years of school, so my last junior and senior year, I went to a public high school, and got that experience too.
Tim Ferriss: Got socialized.
Jordan Jonas: Got socialized. Which was an odd experience. I’m not sure what I think of the socialization.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, prefer to be an indoor cat here. Not really an indoor cat.
Jordan Jonas: No, so with homeschooling though, I think it has a really awesome thing. I think it’s great that it’s an option in the country. The one thing if you’re homeschooled you have to focus on, its weakness, which is like community, and friends, and developing that. So for people that think that’s an interesting option, just know that that’s its weakness, and account for that in how you organize. So that’s what we do with our kids.
Tim Ferriss: How do you account for it with your kids?
Jordan Jonas: Well, we’re really active in trying to be the catalyst for community in our town. We’re always ready to hang out, and we’ve got them in jiu-jitsu, and we got them in gymnastics, and got them in all the things. And then, make phone calls, crew foster hiking trips with the other families, and make sure we’re, multiple times a week, getting the kids together with their friends. You just really put effort and focus on that.
Tim Ferriss: It also strikes me that the ability to build community and social bonds, and therefore socialize, but not in some oddly artificial environment is dependent on activities. And maybe this is particularly true for boys, I don’t know? But what I observed when I was at your house, I just remember your kids’ cousins visiting, and they were always outside doing something, which I think is important, right? They’re not just sitting around talking. That’s not actually natural for most humans, including adults, to just do that all the time. There were shared activities. And then, when the cousins left, I guess it was your middle child who was just crying, and it was so adorable, but just such heartfelt, deep connections.
And similarly, it’s like when we were out in the woods, and we were sitting around, your brother was there. Maybe he had a thing or two to do with the jiu-jitsu influence. I don’t know? Another reason to never start fights. You would not see him, and be like, “Oh, I’m terrified of that guy.” And yet, he could absolutely bend you into a pretzel, and cause lots of orthopedic lifelong problems. So we were out there, it was getting your brother, a couple of llamas, one with a slightly lopsided head, and prone to falling over. It’s a long story. And then, just a few guys, right? Two of my close friends, we were all around a fire, and I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was your brother, maybe it was Mike. But oh, I get it. I see why. This is, again, it’s not saying this is a purely gendered thing, but this is what he said, because it was all guys.
Jordan Jonas: Mike, I know it was a good point.
Tim Ferriss: Mike probably. And he said —
Jordan Jonas: No, it was Matt.
Tim Ferriss: It was Matt—okay—who said, “Now I see why guys like fires so much, because they can connect, and talk without making eye contact.” You can just look at the fire. Having something that is ancillary.
Jordan Jonas: I thought it was a fun observation of — paid a little more attention to it ever since, but it does just give you something, a third party to, “Hey, we should start a little fire on the table here. That might be a…” Yeah, for sure. Having a common activity like that. And we are fortunate enough to just be able to live in a place that’s really conducive to sending the kids outside. And it’s something I’ve obviously tried to foster in them. So, they do spend a lot of time just running around, and being creative. And they don’t have — one thing I’ve avoided a bit is phones, and stuff like that. And I think it is fairly low hanging fruit, because you can see how they affect us in our everyday life. We get distracted, and we get disoriented with them, I would say. And with kids, it’s even so much more cute. So they have to go out, and run around and play, and have fun.
Tim Ferriss: While you’ve also engineered this — I mean, that’s a very fancy term to use, but you’ve designed that into your life as a deliberate environment and place.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s been intentional.
Tim Ferriss: You could have been in a lot of other places.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And as for instance, I’m training this very large puppy right now. Although, I think I’m being trained a lot more probably. In any case, very different personality from my other dog. Probably, mixed with Anatolian Shepherd; very stubborn. And when you’re trying to train a dog like that, I remember a dog trainer said to me, “If you’re using treats,” as an example, right? “You have to tip with 20s, because the bar is crowded, right? There are a lot of distractions.” And when I think about kids, and of course, I do not have kids yet, I hope to in the very near future.
But if you’re sitting in an apartment in the city, and you’re like, “Kids, you can’t use your phone.” What are you offering them as an alternative? It’s like, what is the alternative that is more compelling, and you’ve deliberately put yourself in an environment where you have quite a lot to choose from.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right. And that has been intentional. And obviously, that is a — so, it’s probably more difficult if you have a small apartment, and you live in a city. I imagine it takes a lot more hands-on going to the park, or there’s a lot of creative outlets in learning to paint, learning an instrument, learning of this or that, that may scratch that itch. For me, I did have it as a high priority to let the outdoors be a big part of our life. So I moved where that was possible, and I have structured our life as such. I got the llamas we were joking about initially, so that I could take the family out on one, two-week-long trips rather than — because I just couldn’t carry enough gear to take them out for shorter. So it’s been really intentional, and it’s been great, but it’s something to work out in a more urban context. Yeah, but I guess it’s not where I’m at.
Tim Ferriss: Llamas. People might be like, “Llamas, really? Are we in the Andes? What’s going on?”
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why llamas instead of —
Jordan Jonas: That’s a great question.
Tim Ferriss: — instead of horses?
Jordan Jonas: You know the reindeer history now, when I first got back from Russia, I thought it would be amazing to pack with reindeer in America. So I lived in Idaho, and there was a law against packing — against owning reindeer north of a certain border. I contacted my legislature there, and oddly responsive. Pretty soon I was in meetings with the government officials, and they overturned the law. So now you can own reindeer in North Idaho. Unfortunately, part of that was, they had to be in a high fence. So it ruined the ability of what I was envisioning to hike around with them.
Tim Ferriss: So you couldn’t pack them out?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I couldn’t load them full of gear, and pack up in the woods. So then, your only other options are horses, and llamas. And I honestly just hadn’t grown up with horses, and there’s quite a learning curve on them. They’re dangerous. Everybody that does a lot with horses has some kind of stories of getting hurt on them.
Tim Ferriss: For people who have no idea, how big are llamas?
Jordan Jonas: They’re about 350 pounds.
Tim Ferriss: They’re a lot smaller.
Jordan Jonas: They’re a lot smaller. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: They’re a lot smaller, and I’m sure there are cases where they might, but they tend not to kick.
Jordan Jonas: They’re very safe, and you can have mean angry llamas, of course. You can have a bad, bitey dog. But if you have a good llama, they’re oddly chill animals. You go up in the woods, and they don’t tear up the ground. They sit there quietly. The kids can ride them. So in that way, they’re quite nice for kids. Obviously, adults can’t, but they can pack the gear, and I can walk without gear as long as I want to. There’s great advantages of horses, and I love them, but for me, the low maintenance, and low risk of a llama, just — I was like, “Well, if I can’t have reindeer, I guess that’s the next closest thing.”
Tim Ferriss: Are there any terrain, or sure-footedness advantages to llamas? I’m thinking about, for instance, like horses versus donkeys. It seems like there are some advantages of using donkeys over horses.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. The main advantage of llamas —
Tim Ferriss: Everybody should follow Hobojordo on Instagram, because you have photos of the aftermath of some horses going —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they’re sketchy, man.
Tim Ferriss: — cartwheeling down an incline.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t want to be caught up in that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It’s easy to get killed, I think. This is a common historical theme. So-and-so got bucked off the horse, and the fourth Crusade ended, or whatever it was.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Jonas: But the — where were we going with that?
Tim Ferriss: Advantages of llamas on terrain.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, on terrain. Yeah. So with a horse, you have a metal shoe on the bottom. And metal, particularly on rock, is pretty —
Tim Ferriss: Slippery.
Jordan Jonas: — slippery. And so, you’ll do a lot of slipping and sliding on rocks. The llamas have a soft pad with two little claws. They look like little raptor claws in the front. And so, it’s actually quite interesting to see how they work.
Tim Ferriss: They’re very small.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they’re small little paws, but you can stick on a wet rock, and that soft pad will grip, and they can walk up and down the rocks. Or if you’re in mud or soft dirt, you see those two little front claws dig in like a raptor claw, and they can climb up that. And that way, they’re — yeah, the terrain issues are pretty great. They’re not quite — the other pack animal people use is goats. And those are nice, because you can really go over boulders, and they can hop from this to that. They’re somewhere in between a horse and a goat, as far as their off-roading abilities.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like you would have to have a whole caravan of goats for carrying capacity.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, and goats also are always with you. With a llama, I can tie them up, and go hike up this way, and that way. The goats are always with you. You can’t tie them up, and you can’t leave them anywhere. Chaos will ensue, but they’re funny little critters, but they weren’t my cup of tea.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s hop to purpose, which I feel like looking back at your family history, looking back — and is it fair just to tie up one loose end with Gulag Archipelago, how analogous is it to Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s real similar. I think it’s the thicker version of that. Gulag Archipelago light would be that Man’s Search for Meaning.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Okay. Could you give us a bit of your family history? And you can go back to your grandmother, you could kind of start wherever you want. The purpose specifically made me think of your dad, and the reinvention of purpose, which I think is a pressing need for a lot of people in a fast moving modern environment where they feel like they’re on very unstable ground perhaps in a lot of ways. But let’s go back. I threw out this term Assyrian, but most people don’t. It’s not a familiar word.
Jordan Jonas: There’s a kind of, I guess you would almost call it the indigenous people of the Middle East before kind of the Arab takeovers, and stuff where Aramaic speaking Assyrians is what they’re called. So, that’s what my family was. They lived in Northwestern Iran, kind of near a lake called Lake Urmia. And during the chaos of World War I, there had been the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, and all these people who had been under the Ottoman like colonial yolk were seeking out their independence, and their freedom, and breaking off. And in all that chaos, basically I think what happened was it was an easy time to get rid of a entire people group. Actually Anatolia, you have an Anatolian Shepherd was a pretty diverse place up until then. After that time, it was basically just Turks, and Kurds left. The Greeks, the Assyrians, the Armenians kind of got all ran out of there in what —
Tim Ferriss: What were the reasons for running them out?
Jordan Jonas: It’s complicated. History’s not black and white. They were minorities because those groups were Christian overall, living in under the Ottoman umbrella. And so sporadically at times they would live okay, and then at times there would be big massacres. And over the course of centuries, there were just constant — it wasn’t a pleasant way to live, I guess, would be the quick way to put it. And so there was sporadic massacres kind of all the time.
And then, so when World War I happened, you couldn’t blame them for wanting independence. And there were better, and worse — a lot of those Christian minorities joined with the British, or the Russians to try to forge out their new nation states that were forming from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. And at the same time, nationalism was really rising, and there was a big Turkey for the Turks movement, like we don’t want other people here.
And that was ultimately the movement with the most power. And so when the Russian Empire collapsed from the Bolshevik Revolution, they kind of left a vacuum in these areas that they’d kind of provided a bit of a defense for. And because of that crazy nationalist fervor that was going on, the Turks decided that they would just kill, or expel all the minorities who — of course, some of them had been problematic, and that there was like these freedom movements everywhere, but collective punishment at a massive scale. And obviously my grandparents were kind of out of it because they were in Urmia, in Iran, but when the Russian presence left there, the Turks went into there, too. And it was basically, at that point, it was just kind of an uncontrolled, what ultimately would be a genocide. It killed like 750,000 Assyrians, and a millions plus Armenians. And it was quite a disaster.
My family was — so my grandma and grandpa, both of them would ultimately be for all practical purposes, sole survivors like their families were completely wiped out. My grandpa was in a village when they were coming in, and burning it down, and his dad was in a wheelchair, basically put a money belt on him, and told him just — he was 17, told him just run, and don’t look back. And he looked back to see his dad’s house on fire with his dad in it. He never knew what happened to his sister. Ended up getting taken in by some Jesuit priests, and kind of raised in there. And then my grandma had a different story where they — so the Ottoman Empire was still kind of conscious of like trying to put on a image to the world. And so instead of — I mean, there was plenty of just straight up massacres, but instead of — they called them deportations, but they were kind of deportations to nowhere.
So, they just drove people out into the desert, and marched them around until they died. And so my grandma, and she had seven siblings, and a mom, her dad was taken off to be shot, and then they just drove them around in the desert until all but the mom, my great-grandmother, and one sister of my grandma were left. The baby just had died, and the mom fell down, and was like, “I just can’t go on anymore.” And my Shalem, my grandma, and Shushan picked her up, and like, “We got to keep going.” At some point there, they split off from the guards, or whatever, stumbled through, and were actually ended up being rescued by a British military outpost type thing. I don’t know. And then they were taken to a refugee camp. Mom, and the sister never recovered really from just the trauma. And then grandma was sent to Baghdad, and raised in a refugee camp.
And so these two people kind of lost everything. Even their like, I mean, the Assyrian people nation kind of almost vanished. Aramaic is what they speak. It’s like almost a gone language now. It’s very just small fragments of it hanging on. So, they kind of lost everything, and then they met in Baghdad somehow, and got married, immigrated to France right before World War II, and then the Nazi invasion happened, and there was a whole, they have a whole series of stories from kind of the deprivation at that time. They were already poor immigrants arriving there, and then to like go through that whole Nazi occupation. And then they eventually made it to America, and actually died not long after. So, my dad was 10 when his parents died, and was raised by his sisters. But what I find something to be that I think about a lot is that they had ended up having 11 kids, so they had a really big family, and I would go to all these family unions with my aunts, and uncles, and my dad, and this, and that.
And they were just the most joyful, fun, like so much love, and joy, and family, and all this. It was a real bright spot in my childhood. And then it was just that Jonas family stuff. And then, and you almost take it for granted until you step back, and you’re like, “Wait a second, we’re one generation from…” This is my grandma, and her grandpa had their entire families wiped out, and lost their whole culture, and had to immigrate, and give up everything, and then had to do that again. But somehow they’ve raised a really joyful family, like a full of people, and our conversations were never about like, “Those people did that to us, and like this is what happened.” Hate was never the common language. It was always love, and family. And there’s like some old grainy videos of grandma, and grandpa, and they’re just laughing, and they raised rabbits, and eating rabbit around the table, and laughing.
And you think, “Well, that’s so interesting.” I don’t know what cross they bore. And I know my dad said his dad used to always sit in his closet, and pray. And he’s like, I’m sure he had like a lot to deal with, but they didn’t pass it down one generation, which is impressive. And not only did they not pass it down, they built, and put into the world something really beautiful, which is my family, including my dad. And so leading into what you’re talking about, dad, but it’s something that I think about regularly more than you would think, because maybe I have a history, and orientation, but just the fact that that’s a legacy that I have that we all have, it’s shared humanity, but what a thing to be able to live up to.
I don’t have to be defined by the hardship and the tragedy in a negative way. It’s like you can expect, you can see how other people have risen to that occasion, and come out of it, and create it. And so when I find myself in a hard situation in the past, or now, or whatever, you have that to look at, and hang on to.
Tim Ferriss: Having a choice.
Jordan Jonas: You have a choice of how to relate to it. I mean, there were so many people, and there’s just like, you have every right to be fully traumatized, and never recover. You know what I mean? There’s no judgment on my front for that. But on the other hand, it’s like, what about those few people that did somehow recover, or what? I don’t know what you would call it, but they somehow built something in the world in spite of the unimaginable horrors, watching your family get killed, and raped, and all the things that went on. And then just being able to build a loving family was pretty impressive.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about your dad. I mean, whether by nature, or nurture, or both, he made seemingly some pretty remarkable choices as well.
Jordan Jonas: He grew up as, obviously, a son of immigrants in America, and they was raised by mostly his sister out on a — and so all I think he really wanted was a family, and stability, and wanted to work hard. And you know, his most joyful moments when I was growing up was just when he’d come home from work, and we’d run out, and give him a hug. I think that was his life most fully lived, was just being a provider, and being able to — he was an engineer, so he was a smart guy, and being able to just create a family. That’s really what he wanted. He was very family oriented. But then it was interesting because when he had also had childhood diabetes, and polio, so he had some health issues, and he wasn’t great at managing his diabetes well. So, when he was probably about — I mean, I was pretty young, I guess, still a teenager probably.
He started to get the sores on your feet that you get. And then basically because of the degrading situation with his feet, he lost his job, and all of a sudden he had to watch as my mom had to go back to school, which was something that was very difficult for her because he’s just not academic, but no longer could Dad be the provider. He was basically somebody we had to care for because he ended up losing his foot, and this, and that. And it was like a 12 year process of his health degrading, and it was really hard for him. Mom’s going to school, and we had to go to the food bank, and I remember him just like crying like, “Oh, I failed.” The one thing he wanted to do.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brutal.
Jordan Jonas: But I remember, and then his foot finally recovered, and he, and I went out in the woods, and we were splitting wood, and he like crushed his foot into the log splitter, and it was like, oh, deflate your sail. So then they just amputated his other foot. And so basically he lost his ability, his physical ability to pursue his purpose in the world. And that was really difficult for him to do. He had to watch his family suffer, and this, and that. But then it was interesting over the years to watch him — well, so from my perspective as his son, from my mom’s perspective, as his wife, we never lost sight of his purpose. We knew who he was in our lives. It was never about the money he was bringing home, or this, or that. It was like, man, what an encourager, and what a joyful person, and all that. And we never lost sight of that. He did. But then it was interesting to see over the course of those 12 years of health degradation, how it was almost like his — he had to refine his purpose, and he did.
And then when his health was at its worst, then he was on dialysis, and in tons of pain, and stuff was in a way when his like, what would you call it, spiritual giftings, or something were at their peak. He was really able to — I could hear him at night crying in pain, and like, “Oh.” And then in the morning he would, “Oh, Jordan, you’re doing great, and this, and that, and let’s read this Psalm together, or let’s do this.” He was very much — he refound his purpose in pouring into us, and into facing the loss of his health, and his own death with joy. And that’s what he did. He finally was like, “Man, I’m in too much pain. It’s too degrading to have me rolling him off the bed, take him to dialysis.” He’s like, “I’m just going to stop going to dialysis.” And that was a hard decision for him, but when he did, it was just like, “All right, let’s just party for the next two weeks.”
He was diabetic, so finally he could eat all the crap food he wanted, and we all had tons of laughs, and he was kind of full of joy right up until the end. And you’re like, “What a cool legacy to see someone face all that, and see purpose, not in their life even, but even in how to face death.” And the way he did that.
We’re all going to be in the same position where we lose our, whether our health, or whatever inevitable suffering is coming down the hatch. I now have a template for how to face that in a way that I’m still putting into the world some kind of light, because I could see that it’s not only possible, but I could see the template for doing that. And so it’s interesting having seen that, too, it really makes you take — no, be grateful for the blessing I have now, and that I do know what I love to do, and that I have an opportunity to share it with others, and to — I know even my purpose now as it is, but I also know that’s going to have to evolve with inevitabilities of aging, and everything else. And so it’s interesting to make sure your priorities now are in such a way that as you have to shift directions, that you’ll be able to make that adjustment. They should rhyme, you shouldn’t have to — it’s not going to be something completely different. It’s just going to evolve into a little bit different angle.
Tim Ferriss: When you think of your dad’s purpose changing over those 12 years, is one way to view it as him going from prioritizing how he acted in the world, like how he does things in the world to how he then supports, and teaches the rest of you in the family? I mean, was he taking on more of a teacher role? Was it a supporter role? I mean —
Jordan Jonas: Maybe not explicitly, but definitely implicitly. His gifting was that he really was an encourager, and was really joyful, and people enjoyed being around him, and he was able to lean into those skills, those gifts in spite of the fact that he couldn’t walk, or that he didn’t have hands, or whatever. And so yeah, I think you lean into those giftings that you have that are not dependent on your ability to produce, which is great while you have it.
Tim Ferriss: How long after he stopped dialysis, how long did he last after that?
Jordan Jonas: It was about a week. It wasn’t as long, even, as we expected. It might be up to two weeks, or whatever, I think it was about a week in, his temperature just spiked, and then that was it. We were all around.
Tim Ferriss: Did you, at the time, understand his decision?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, to be fair, I mean, to be honest, I actually, he was really struggling with it because he was also a man of faith. And I remember him reading, he was like, “Boy, it says…” Because he really was having a hard time hanging on, because it’s the pain, the amount of pain he was in, and stuff, but he was like, “It says here, the Lord will never give you more than you can bear.” And I remember actually in conversation with him, “Well, that’s actually not true, dad. Everybody that’s died was given more than they can bear. It says it won’t tempt you beyond your ability to bear,” which is a different thing, you’re kind of on a different realm there. And so we had that conversation. So, it’s not that I was — I wanted him to hang on as long as possible, but I also wanted him to have the freedom to —
We talked a lot about how it’s weird in the modern world where you have this choice that we’ve never had in the past where you have to now choose when to stop going to dialysis, or stop doing this, or that, or you can just drag on your inevitable downfall kind of forever. And so I think it was ultimately, it just came down to the fact that he wasn’t ever going to get better. He recognized that. He was in a lot of pain, and I think he wanted to free — I mean, you can only do that for so long, and I think he wanted to like, in a final act, kind of free us up too, probably.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to use some of the kind of promises, and perils of modern healthcare, like you said, to extend the runway sometimes in cases where the quality of life just entails so much suffering, or lack of awareness that it raises a lot of ethical questions that we didn’t have to face 200 years ago, 300 years ago. Just to take a closer look at modern living, and specifically where I want to go with that is maybe we could take it to our trip in the mountains, because particularly since we weren’t doing any hunting, if you’re hunting, then you have to time your rhythm with your quarry, and it’s a different situation.
But I remember asking you at one point, I was like, “So when are we waking up tomorrow?” And you’re like, “Well, when we want to wake up.” And I suppose the — and this comes back to the Evenki as well, and living in a settlement where you are managing someone else’s property, or an employee of the government versus having more flexibility in the way you structure your life in your days, right? I would just love you to hear you riff on sort of overstructure versus too little structure versus where humans kind of naturally fall.
Jordan Jonas: The first glimpse I got of this way of life that we’ve lost in the modern context was actually riding trains where it’s like, you wake up in the morning, I don’t have anything I have to do. I just got to figure out where to get food, and water, and that’s basically it.
Tim Ferriss: So, could you — can you give us like a minute, or two of just like how on earth did you end up hopping trains?
Jordan Jonas: The quick minute, or two of that was that my brother had, for whatever reason, done it for years. He hitchhiked, and didn’t like relying on people to pick him up. Somehow he heard about riding trains, jumped on one, and probably a lot to do with this freedom that we’re about to discuss, just loved it. And in 10 years, he basically, seven, or eight, or 10, however many years, he just rode trains, and at some point when I was 18, or so, invited me to go along, and so I did, which was probably a fork in my road just from having a job, and doing the stuff to all of a sudden —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a pretty wide fork.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. But why you glimpse what I think is the appeal there is that, yeah, that rhythm of life that humans are designed for, that we’ve lived for as long as humans have been around, it’s like that then I would really get immersed in again living with the Natives later where, yeah, you wake up, and you have things you have to do, but there’s no particular schedule. They’re all directly tied to your existence right now. You’re not working to make money to put in your 401k so that later this — it’s just all very direct. It’s like, “Oh, let’s go catch some fish today. We’re hungry, or the reindeer might be getting away. Let’s go herd them back.” And you kind of have these activities that are directly related to your life, and in that, you would know the proper terminology, but it feels like your dopamine, and your serotonin, and all that kind of stuff is just lined up properly.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you’re living the way that we have evolved to live.
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. And so you’re in the right mold basically for that. And so, and I’ve described it before, but when you’re successful on a hunt, or when you get into some good fish, and you’re in that rhythm, so you just couldn’t be more joyful than that. There’s just no more, that’s it. That’s your max human experiences. This is amazing. Yeah. And we didn’t have to earn a bunch of money, and it’s just so much more accessible in a way, which is interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it also makes me think about, sorry to jump in, but when you were talking about your brother, and his German shepherd who had never done any herding, and a couple of goats running amuck, and your brother started trying to gather them, and the German shepherd just clicked into what it is evolved, or I should say artificially evolved to do, and boom, it was off to the races.
Jordan Jonas: Fully into rhythm of life.
Tim Ferriss: Knew exactly what it needed to do, and humans are not that different.
Jordan Jonas: No, we’re not. And we have so many layers on top of that simplicity that sometimes it gets — it all feels like hacks, as we know, like even you look on your phone, “I got seven likes.” It’s just a little hack of our berry picking receptors, but it’s less, but you never quite fully get there. But with the — it was always a little bit hard to articulate. I was like, just life feels just more realistic. You’re more like in the world, but it’s a little bit difficult to articulate, but it is —
Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems very tangible in the sense that you’re dealing with few So, fewer layers of abstraction. You’re not like, I’m going to do this thing to then ensure this other thing that will give me more happiness in the future. It’s like, I know I’m going to need to eat in a few hours, or I’d prefer to eat, you don’t need to eat in a few hours. You can fast, but you’re like, “I kind of like to eat. I’d like to be warm.”
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’d like to sleep tonight. So, it’s like, okay.
Jordan Jonas: Cause, and effect are very related.
Tim Ferriss: It’s very easy to track. And not just track, but like have the gratification of individual cause, and effect.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s very tangible. And it was so much so that, this is only a working hypothesis, but when I was living with the Natives, I had the issue that it wasn’t my native language, and as much as they were — I love those people, and they’re my friends. It wasn’t like my family. It wasn’t the people that you grow up with. But I was like, I wonder if everybody would choose this way of life if it was in a little bit more pleasant climate, and with the two modern —
Tim Ferriss: A little bit. Maybe negative 20, and not negative 50.
Jordan Jonas: Modern medicine, and food security are amazing. But aside from that, it’s like, I wonder if people wouldn’t choose this way of life. Even people that just have no idea that they might like the outdoors.
Tim Ferriss: Can I give like a sidebar experience that sometimes comes along with this? You were talking about a little bit earlier today, but can you talk about the bear incident specifically that you were mentioning earlier with your friend with the gun?
Jordan Jonas: This was a time where we’d kind of gone out in the woods, and we’d taken a bunch of the younger dudes that were living in the village, and kind of drinking. And my fur trapping buddy has his big fur trapping territory, and he was like, “Oh, we should get these kids out there, and just like spend a summer, and have them living off the land.”
Tim Ferriss: And just because I’m curious, is this sable, or what are they?
Jordan Jonas: Sable’s what they fur trap. So, we were out, spent a summer out on that territory, invited a handful of these guys, and it was great. We had a horse out there, and cutting hay for it, and all that with the sigh, and living off the land basically all that we fished, and hunted. Well, one day we came out. I heard my buddy was sleeping, and he woke up, and he was like — and you could hear the dogs barking like crazy out. Well, we woke up, and I thought, “Man, that dumb dog, it just barks at every squirrel, this, or that.” And so I didn’t get up, and look. Well, then my buddy goes out to brush his teeth, and runs back, and he goes, “There’s a bear out there.” So, I jumped up, and we look out, and a bear, just 150 yards, not far at all from our cabin had killed a moose.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of bears are we talking about?
Jordan Jonas: These are brown bears, just some kind of brown bear in Siberia, and they — бурый медведь.
Tim Ferriss: Bigger than a black bear.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Bigger than a black bear, some kind of a grizzly. And then so we come out and the bear took off up in the woods and they’re like, “What is that laying over there?” And sure enough, it was big, fresh, warm moose. We’re like, “Oh, no way.” So it was a windfall for us. So of course we cut it up and take it back to camp. We dug a big pit into the permafrost as a makeshift fridge, and threw the meat in there. And then a few days later, that bear came back with a vengeance like he knew —
Tim Ferriss: Was not pleased.
Jordan Jonas: Knew he was not pleased. He came back. But first sign was one of our dogs just ran into the little cabin and under the bed or whatever. And then the other one we started hearing barking outside, and then the bear was — it was a lot of tall brush in the area, and so I could just hear the bear just, ripping through the brush and then ripping this way and that. And I was like, oh, it was pretty intense right off the bat. And I was like, holy crap. So I grabbed the SKS, which is like a assault rifle is basically what they used to hunt over there. And I run out of the cabin and like go kind of towards where the dog’s barking. I figure the bear was over there.
So I’m walking over towards this bark. And then Yorka, one of the younger guys was behind me. And when we just hear this, “Vroosh.” the bear was right behind us and snorted. And we’re like, “Whoa,” like flip around. And then it just pump charged through the alders and we’re like, “Oh, well that was crazy. What’s the dog barking at banging?” And so then you could hear this kerfuffle out in the woods. I was like, “Oh, here, you take the gun. I’m going to take my little three megapixel camera I had at the time.” And I —
Tim Ferriss: I love that that’s your reflex. “Let me go and take some photos.” Seems —
Jordan Jonas: Like, “You’ve got to get this on film!
Tim Ferriss: — like a great, perfect time.
Jordan Jonas: It was a bad choice in the end. Yeah, anyway, I gave the gun to Yorka. Same thing. We’re kind of paying attention to where we last heard the chaos. And again, the bear was behind us like move and snorted again. And Yorka just took off running with the gun. And he full on ran and disappeared from my sight. I had had my knee issues we discussed earlier, so I actually couldn’t run, nor would I want to from a predator. So I kind of just stood there. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just here without —
Tim Ferriss: Now what do I do —
Jordan Jonas: — be eaten with my stupid camera.
Tim Ferriss: — with my 3.5 megapixel camera.
Jordan Jonas: And so anyway, he was gone a long — it felt like a very long time. It was probably 30 seconds to a minute. Like a good enough long time that I was like, “What in the world?” And then finally he comes back and his knees, he’s like, “I can’t do this. My knees are shaking.” I was like, “You got the gun, don’t run.” And then right as I said that, the bear stood up in front of us and he just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and filled this whole magazine into it and it took off. And we ended up getting it, which then I laughed at him because we were joking around. But they had always been telling me like, “You know us with Evenki, one shot, one kill.”
And then it was like Vietnam and we’re like, “Tu tu tu tu.” But then it was super funny. It was pretty intense. And then it was also interesting because I was the first bear that I was with them with when they killed and they had this whole ritual because how they honored the bear. The Evenki word for bear is grandpa. Or maka. And then they would take the eyeballs out. They took the eyeballs out and put them under a rock so that when the spirit of the bear came back, it wouldn’t see who did what to it.
And then the funny better part was they took the intestines and threw them in the river. So when it did come back, it would be the neighboring village that the intestines floated to that caught the wrath. But yeah, that was a pretty intense little moment there.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to do one more story. I mean, these are all going to be stories. But we’re going to do one more story and then — some of the native hunters are better than others. I’m going to cue you. This one also involves moose, if I’m not mistaken. Canoe.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, this is great. Yeah. This is another hilarious story. So there were these two in their mid-60s women that were going to come out to the tribe. So there’s the village, the native village, 500 people. It was about a 12-hour float from a place that’s a common stop that the nomads often stop.
Jordan Jonas: So they had found out that we were going to be there. So these old ladies were going to come out and visit the tribe. Well, they got in a — it’s just a 12-hour float, so you don’t really need much. You get there at the end of the day and can eat when you get there. So all they brought, as any native did, would be an axe. And so they untied their rope. It was an aluminum boat and jumped in the boat and were just floating along. Well, picture these two senior citizen women floating down and there’s a moose swimming across the lake —
Tim Ferriss: Jackpot.
Jordan Jonas: — and as you do, they thought, “We’ve got to kill this thing. We’ll be the heroes!” or whatever. So they rode up next to it and with the rope that was attached to the front of their boat, they lassoed over the — I don’t know if it was the antlers or the neck of this thing. But at the same time, they had the axe, they pictured themselves like chopping it in the neck and trying to kill it. Well, it, of course, got traction on the shore on the water before they were able to pull that off and took off into the woods and skied these ladies in this boat behind them, like several hundred yards up into the woods before it finally went through these two trees and snapped the rope off and it disappeared.
And those ladies just were gone for a few days. They had to sit by the side of the river till the next people — they couldn’t carry their boat, so they just sat there until finally somebody floated by that could help them drag their boat back to the water. And the lady, they made it out. The lady was very funny because we then had to get back to the village eventually. By land, it was like a 30 kilometer reindeer ride and that poor lady — and I had the same problem. I would always fall off the reindeer, but she was the only other person that apparently had that problem.
Because they just put the saddle on loosely. It’s not like a horse saddle where you kind of cinch it up. They just throw it on and it kind of wobbles. But they get used to it and so they can kind of ride along. And it took me a long time to get used to, but obviously it took her also a long time. And I was walking, but we were in the rain and that poor lady, every time we crossed a river or a puddle or anything, it was a swoosh. And they keep lifting her back on, but it was very funny. But yeah, that was a great, great story. There are different breed of people that when grandma sees the moose swimming across the river, decide to go —
Tim Ferriss: Goes to hatchet it in the neck.
Jordan Jonas: — go to axe it.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about Alone, which is probably the only, let’s call it reality TV show that I’ve watched two full seasons of, in the last —
Jordan Jonas: Which were they?
Tim Ferriss: — decade. Six and seven.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Because the word on the street, otherwise known as the internet, was that season six, which you were a part of, and season seven were kind of —
Jordan Jonas: The high points.
Tim Ferriss: — two of the highlights.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: With some insane events that transpire in these two seasons. If you ever have to, I had to — well, had to. I chose after elbow surgery to do hyperbaric oxygen treatments for a host of reasons. Sidebar on that, if you’re going to do that, needs to be hard shell, medical grade, typically like two to 2.5 atmospheres don’t do any soft shell stuff. It’s a waste of time. But what do you do? You’re just sitting there, and especially in a hard shell, you can’t bring anything in, but they set up TVs. And so my guilty pleasure turned into watching these multiple seasons of —
Jordan Jonas: Alone.
Tim Ferriss: — of Alone. So for the season that you were a part of, because the format of the show changed a bit over time, but it was referred to along the lines of kind of the Super Bowl of survival, right?
Jordan Jonas: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: And in your particular season, season six, what was the format?
Jordan Jonas: The quick summary of the show is yeah, the 10 people go out in the woods all by yourself. You sell film at source, and you get to pick 10 basic tools like an axe and a ferro rod and a sleeping bag, and a few things like that. And then they drop you all off in different areas in the wilderness. And the person that lasts the longest wins. And hypothetically, indefinitely, I think maybe there was a year cutoff. But hypothetically a year plus you might stay out there if people really get into a groove. So yeah, that was the format of the season. It’s a fairly simple concept but —
Tim Ferriss: What was the location?
Jordan Jonas: Northwest territories, Canada. So we were just south of the Arctic Circle, right at the —
Tim Ferriss: Not warm, ultimately?
Jordan Jonas: Not warm, not warm. But conveniently, very similar parallel to where I was in Siberia.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it seems like having watched two seasons and some other shows also that were — I mean, Alone is my favorite. I mean, you learn so much if you’re into any degree of —
Jordan Jonas: Which is a great show, honestly.
Tim Ferriss: You really learn a lot because you get to see a lot of different approaches, and what seems to work and what doesn’t. And there are multiple approaches that seem to work.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right? Like —
Jordan Jonas: Just don’t build a cabin.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jordan Jonas: Just kidding.
Tim Ferriss: Just DIY. I mean, no, seriously. Don’t try to build like Abraham Lincoln Log Cabin, that image in your mind, don’t try to do that. But then you got Stone house in season seven. I probably wouldn’t have tried to do it because I’d be afraid of blowing a gasket. For sure. But it worked. Very different from the shelter that you built.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk about the tools for a second. Because there were things that would not be obvious to someone watching the show that I found interesting. For instance, when we were out in the woods, you showed me — this is going to require a little explanation. So you’ll have to explain what basic Paracord could be used for.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But you’ve got this, looks like a transatlantic cable of paracord that —
Jordan Jonas: Which was not allowed on the show.
Tim Ferriss: It was not allowed.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you had to have basic paper —
Tim Ferriss: But it’s a single chord that has like fishing line and filament and all sorts of things.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Super handy little —
Tim Ferriss: I’d never seen it. What is that called?
Jordan Jonas: It’s called survival cord. And it has a tinder material inside of it you can pull out. It’s kind of a wax coated thing. It catches spark well and then it has a snare, like Kevlar cable, so you make a snare. And then it has a fishing line and then the regular string that usually comes in the paracord. And paracord is just a string that has an outer sheath and then a bunch of little inner strands that are more like individual strings and they’re kind of twisted together and make for a strong rope. Or you can break it down into useful bits.
Tim Ferriss: Turn it into a gill net.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Turn into a gill net, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Which seems to be one of the winning stuff.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. A gill net’s hard to beat. It’s such a passive way of collecting food and they’re effective.
Tim Ferriss: What is a gill net?
Jordan Jonas: A gill net is a — it’s just a big net that you throw in the water and set in the water in such a way that fish swim and by get caught in it. And fish can’t back up, so when they swim into a net, if it’s sized properly to their body and gills, they’ll get caught in it and they just sit there.
Tim Ferriss: So just for definition of terms, snare kind of similar, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In the sense that you’re trying to get a given animal around the neck. And you have to size it properly.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So snaring is another. In an actual survival situation, it’s kind of not the golden ticket, but incredibly important. It’s also usually illegal in most places because it’s really effective. But if you’re really starving, it would be — yeah, you’d size to what you were trying to catch. So like a hare would be about the size of your fist. You make a piece of wire, or if you only have string, loop about that big, set it on the trail and do some things to try to —
Tim Ferriss: So sorry, I’m laughing because another story just came to mind. So in another example of footage you’re not going to see on the show, so I give them points. A medical team would come out and check on participants. And I can’t remember the exact parameters, but if you’re like losing too much body weight or —
Jordan Jonas: They’d schedule occasional visits to get your SD cards, give you new batteries, and then just make sure you’re not critically in danger with your health.
Tim Ferriss: Of organ failure or something like that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Now, I think you were telling me that at one point when they were doing a medical check for you, that you’d set up — remind me of what this is called for squirrel —
Jordan Jonas: A squirrel pole.
Tim Ferriss: A squirrel pole, because squirrels like to run up things. And then across something else —
Jordan Jonas: Exactly. And if you have a power line in front of your house —
Tim Ferriss: So yeah, explain how you just roughly, how you build this thing and why?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, for whatever reason, squirrels are — they just love running up things and then across things. And so that’s why you see them running on the power lines and everywhere. And so you can take advantage of that to catch them by clearing all the branches off of a couple trees and then running a pole between those two trees, and then throwing a couple snares along that pole. And eventually some squirrel will run up and zip across, especially if you see one in the area.
Tim Ferriss: What does that look like when a medical check is being done right behind?
Jordan Jonas: It was kind of funny because it was early on. It was like maybe the second week or something. And they still had this crew member guy who I thought was hilarious because they really — of course, it’s Alone, so they try to be really stoic. They don’t want to give you actual human interaction. But this one guy was just like, “Whoa, hell yeah. This is awesome.” You really liked what was going on out there, but they all come walking in —
Tim Ferriss: Your setup?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. For the medical check and scared a squirrel and it ran up and hung itself, and it was like sitting there kicking while the guys walked by. But he was, yeah that one British guy in particular, “Oh, hell yeah.” I was like, “Oh, man, thanks guys.” And so that was kind of funny, but they accidentally helped me cheat there and —
Tim Ferriss: So how long did you ultimately last?
Jordan Jonas: 77 days, that was —
Tim Ferriss: 77 days.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And is it fair to say that last is the wrong word to use? Because my understanding and conversations with you is that it was — of course the television has to be edited in such a way that everyone is going through this crucible with coming close to glancing off the breaking point that it’s on.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: But it doesn’t seem like it was that hard for you.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it really wasn’t. It could have been, you know, it’s the woods, you never know what’s going to happen. But man, it was going really well. I actually, I snared a bunch of rabbits, had like 20 something plus rabbits before I got the moose, which I got a moose at day 20. And then from then on, I really nailed the fishing and I just was piling up food like crazy. And just because of my previous experience for years at a time in Russia, I wasn’t a couple, few, three, four months there just didn’t seem like a long time away from the family. Because I knew our relationship was strong, and Janahlee could handle it. And I’d come back and we’d catch up and it’d all be good. But I bore a lot of stress because I didn’t know how long the show would last, so I was —
Tim Ferriss: Which is something that changed in season seven.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It was a big difference in season seven, but in the next season they capped it at 100 days. Which had that been my season would have been interesting because once you get the moose, I could have just basically partied and enjoyed myself. But because I got this moose, it was a lesson I learned, a lesson that I learned on Alone —
Tim Ferriss: That was the first large mammal harvest on the show, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, yeah. And something that I really noticed out there was I should have been more present in the moment, because I did allow myself to stress about this future. I was like, “Okay, I got a moose. Now I’m getting fish.” Surely somebody else is. So man, we’re going to be out here six, eight months and I lost some fat, so now I’m going to lose. So I can’t be out here eight months and lose. So I was bearing a lot of stress because I didn’t actually, as much as I would advise myself if I were to go on again, just be in the present, don’t worry about that future.
What happened is, yeah, I was gunning for 140 days before I even thought it might end. And hadn’t even allowed the thought to cross my mind that it would. Had a lot of food to get there and then it ended at day 77. And I can’t say I ever thought I was going to win. I went out there to win because I wasn’t like trying to prove anything. But I was just, you try to keep going in your stride, just see what happens. I’m just going to go out there and see if I can be sustainable. And I was genuinely shocked when it ended and thought it was going to go quite a bit longer, so —
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me tackle a couple of things because there are a number of details that I think might be instructive to get into. So first let’s talk about the basic tools.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There was, I’m amazed, I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but like one of your competitors made a shocking decision, which was to not bring a ferro rod.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And that was a very risky maneuver. Ended up making it work, but in part he was very good with something called Bow drill. Look up Bow drill online, but it’s using friction to create a fire, but if you’re accustomed to using softer wood, and then you go into alpine territory and it’s much, much, much harder wood, you got a problem on your hands.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. He was able to find a cedar board, which doesn’t grow up there.
Tim Ferriss: You’re allowed to use anything that you find, so tin cans or barrels or whatever it might be. Effectively human garbage or things that have been washed up on the shore. So 10 basic tools, what did you choose to bring?
Jordan Jonas: I took an axe, a saw, a Leatherman, which is like a multi-tools, it’s a knife and pliers and stuff. And a frying pan and a ferro rod, a sleeping bag, a bow, an arrow. You get like bows and arrow. A fishing kit, trapping wire and Paracord. And trapping wire was just a thin gauge, solid, stainless steel wire.
Tim Ferriss: And then you could create the gill net out of the paracord?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So I thought about bringing a gill net, but then I just thought I’ll bring a Paracord, I can make a gill net and the Paracord will come in handy for other things too.
Tim Ferriss: What are some common mistakes? If you look at what people choose to bring, what are certain things they choose to bring? Let’s leave aside a gill net, right? Because we already covered that you can create that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What are some other, would you say, mistakes, common —
Jordan Jonas: I mean, I always, with my own biases, always think when someone doesn’t bring an axe I’m like, “Really?” But I have my own — how are you going to get through the ice and how are you going to — they’re so handy. But I brought a saw, which in hindsight, I probably should have just brought a gill net and had two instead of making the one and have — anyway, but I do think not bringing a fire starter is a poor choice, because it’s just so much stress. You have to bear so much stress of not letting your fire go out, and everything’s harder. So you have to be really conscious of the fact that things like staying hydrated is super important. And so if there’s an extra step to hydration, you’re going to drink a little bit less water.
Tim Ferriss: So just to be clear, if you’re drinking out of a natural source, you want to boil that water?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you typically will want to boil it. So if you’re going to boil it, and then you have to start a bow drill fire to boil your water, then all of a sudden —
Tim Ferriss: You’re also burning a lot of calories.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. It just becomes a stressor. You don’t want your fire to go out at night because you got to wake up. So I think that’s a big one. Some people are really good with bow drills, but I still think it’s not worth it.
Tim Ferriss: A ferro rod it’s a lot easier?
Jordan Jonas: It’s not worth the trade-off. Well, I was really into bringing a bow. I mean, you do need practice with a bow to be effective with it. But I can’t tell you how much time I spent enjoying myself just hiking through the woods because I could maybe shoot a squirrel or maybe get a grouse, you know —
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s something that stood out to me is that — and I think one of the stronger competitors in season seven did something very similar where it wasn’t that you would necessarily go out on a dedicated large mammal. Or let’s just say you wouldn’t go out on a dedicated hunt. But if you went out to do anything, you just bring the bow.
Jordan Jonas: Take the bow. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: In case —
Jordan Jonas: Because it’s like on your way to your fishing spot or on your way to get firewood, and it just gives you always something to do, and it gives you always that, “Oh, is there a rabbit or is there…” So you’re more engaged. Whereas if I hadn’t taken the bow, there would have been a lot of time where I was like, “Boy, what do I do?”
Tim Ferriss: How many arrows are you allowed to bring?
Jordan Jonas: Nine.
Tim Ferriss: Nine. Interesting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I don’t know why. Seems like a lot or a little. I don’t know why they chose nine.
Tim Ferriss: What committee had a long debate that landed on nine? But that’s actually a decent —
Jordan Jonas: A substantial number of arrows.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a decent number.
Jordan Jonas: I never had an issue with them.
Tim Ferriss: What type of tips did you bring?
Jordan Jonas: So I brought blunt tips, which are —
Tim Ferriss: Kind of like judo points?
Jordan Jonas: Judo points, except they weren’t specifically judo points —
Tim Ferriss: You’re right.
Jordan Jonas: — to get in the nuance. But yeah, you don’t want a sharp blade when you’re shooting small game because you don’t want to just shoot right through the animal. You want to hit it and blunt force, kind of knock it out and kill it. And so for small game, I had five of those and then I had four broadheads.
Tim Ferriss: Broadheads.
Jordan Jonas: Which are just sharp blades.
Tim Ferriss: How many blades?
Jordan Jonas: Two blade, they were VPA, like just solid steel, broadheads. just so that they were tough and I could — yeah, we were sharpening them on the fly and all that.
Tim Ferriss: So the moose, so corralling or fencing, I mean, fencing gives people an image that maybe is not exactly the right image.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But animals are really good at taking the path of least resistance.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Jordan Jonas: It’s something you employ when you’re trying to snare them, when you’re trying to do anything to catch an animal. You just take advantage of the fact that we all take the path of least resistance.
Tim Ferriss: So what do you do?
Jordan Jonas: So I was actually out there, and I’d done a lot of calling, a lot of placing my shelter in the proper wind location, and doing all this to try to make a moose encounter happen. And I had set up a trip wire that would signal a tin can so that it would like, if a moose came by, I would know. And then I went out, had a 40-yard shot at a moose and I missed. And long story short, it was a big fail on my part. But I remember watching that moose run away just like, “Oh, you’re idiot. How’d you do that?”
You get used to screwing up and failing when you’re in the woods like that by yourself, whining isn’t going to help. There’s nobody else you can blame anything on. It’s like you literally better solve your problem or you’re screwed. So I was like, I was disappointed I missed the moose. But at the same time, I was immediately it’s still running away. I was like, “How do I make this happen again?” It just made me more determined to learn from what I just did. And then as I was watching it run away, it just kind of dawned on me that there’s — I mean, I don’t know how far apart, but say 500 yards. There’s just kind of hills, two hills. It’s not like there were cliffs or anything.
But hills, the animals are going to go through the low point there because it’s easy. And then I just remember, “Oh, we built those fences in Russia. Should I really?” Because what had happened is it had come on kind of unexpected path, so I wasn’t really quite set up to get him. But I was like, “Well, I guess I’m not here to starve. I’m here to make it happen.” I’m an action oriented person in that way. So I went over there and decided to try to build one of those fences and funnel the — because I remember even the Natives saying before guns, they used to funnel animals with fences like that to hunt them.
Tim Ferriss: So could you explain, when you say fence, that might involve chopping down some saplings and kind of knocking —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Sort of real basic.
Tim Ferriss: — them over, so that you’re creating obstacles, something like a moose does not want to have to step over or navigate so they go kind of where you intend them to go.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. So I had kind of set up that same tin can alarm system and then I had found a nice shooting bush that I could shoot from and get to with relative cover. And then I built a fence, but again, it was just, I hadn’t even finished it when it ended up working. But it was just, with the Natives, we’d do four rows. So four rows of arm thick logs kind of stacked in such a way that they hold up into a fence looking thing —
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so it did look like more of a fence.
Jordan Jonas: It did look like a fence when it’s done. But I just initially did one rung. So the first rung and ran it all the way across.
Tim Ferriss: How long did that take to create?
Jordan Jonas: Probably a couple of days.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, it sounds like a —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was a —
Tim Ferriss: — good amount of work.
Jordan Jonas: — lot of work and I was like, it was a calorie risk and expenditure, but it was clear I wasn’t going to win if I was starving. And so I was just, I wanted to get food. And so I built that funnel and then actually not long after I was out pulling a — again, I hadn’t even finished it yet. I was pulling a rabbit out of a snare of all things, and I heard that can clank. I was like, “Oh, something’s coming no way.” Ran over there, snuck up to the bush and that moose just came strolling along my fence to the opening where I was and I worked amazingly well. It was the morning after I’d spent the whole evening calling the moose and was able to put an arrow in it and —
Tim Ferriss: What was the distance on that?
Jordan Jonas: Like 24 yards.
Tim Ferriss: See, I mean that’s like —
Jordan Jonas: Doable.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the payoff. 40 yards, I mean, look, I mean —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Recurve and wind in it —
Tim Ferriss: — I do a lot of recurve and I would not put money on myself for a 40-yard shot on a moving target.
Jordan Jonas: Nor would I, but when you’re starving —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, sure. Why not?
Jordan Jonas: You have to have a couple of shots. It’s actually doable. You can kind of correct. But in my miss, I had only had one arrow with me at the time, so yeah. So I hit it and it was actually felt like a really good shot, but he took off and I was like, “I’m going to wait an hour, let him kind of just calmly…” If you’re bow hunting, one thing you realize is a lot of times the animal doesn’t see you when you shoot it and it’s quiet and it gets hit. It doesn’t know what happened. So it’s going to run over somewhere and like lay down. It doesn’t feel good.
And so usually that first place it lays down, because it doesn’t think it’s getting chased per se, it just lays there. And then it slowly bleeds out and it’s about as calm of a way you can probably go as a wild animal. But what happens if you get too eager and start running after this animal you put an arrow in, is it’ll, if it sees you, it’ll then know it’s getting chased and they’ll get this second wind and just take off and run. And by then they’ll no longer be bleeding as much and very often people lose animals like that. So fortunately I was aware of that, waited a good long time.
Tim Ferriss: You waited a while also. So I mean more than an hour, ultimately, that —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was about an hour and then I started tracking it, and great blood trail and then it just started to dry up. And the ground had been like an old burn and so it was hard and there weren’t tracks. And I was like, no way am I going to lose this moose. You start getting stressed like no way. And I had lost its blood trail and I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, well the last thing I can do is it’s going to take the path of least resistance once again, particularly when it’s wounded. So I just did it a few times where I stood in the woods and then you just kind of walk through as if you were going to go, where does it take you? And go with the flow.
And sure enough, 500 yards up or whatever there it was laying there, oh, no way. Ducked down and it was still alive. And so I was 50 something yards away and I was like, man, I can either try to stick another arrow in it, in which case it’s either going to run away. Maybe I kill it or maybe it charges me. And you got a 30 percent chance of each. So I said my best bet is to just watch it and let it calmly finish its process. And so that was a very long couple of hours honestly watching it.
It would stand up and my heart would sink like, “No, no, no.” And then it would lay back down and be like, “Ah yes.” Stand up, very emotional roller coaster. And finally it stood up and tipped over and we were talking about earlier, but the joy that I felt was irreplaceable. And you almost can’t match it. Just that demon of starvation that for three weeks now just chewing at you, “You’re going to starve, you’re going to starve.” Slayed that!
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. How much meat do you get off a moose like that?
Jordan Jonas: Oh, it was hard to say. I probably had, I’d be a little bit guessing maybe 400 or 500 pounds. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a big animal.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, big animal. And then you have all the bone marrow and the brain and organ stuff. Talk about, I don’t know if people like eating liver, but I got myself sick of it. You got the liver the size of my body, and there’s no way to preserve it. So you got to eat that thing first, oh —
Tim Ferriss: Why can’t you preserve the liver versus other things?
Jordan Jonas: Usually things that are really bloody, like you have a lot of blood in them spoil fast. So same with like fish. If you catch a fish, there’s a blood line in there that you want to scrape out or it’ll spoil.
Tim Ferriss: Right, okay, yeah.
Jordan Jonas: And the gills carry blood, so you want to rip those out or it’ll spoil. Any animal that you’re going to preserve, you just want to make sure it’s bled really well. And liver for whatever reason is just —
Tim Ferriss: Saturated.
Jordan Jonas: — saturated. And there’s no way to drain it, you know, so — Oh, man, I had plenty of vitamins there for a while.
Tim Ferriss: God, I’m just thinking of the OD of vitamins that you have.
Jordan Jonas: I know. Yeah. It was a little bit of a concern and —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For you adventurous eaters out there, don’t eat a polar bear liver in one sitting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, that’s fatal.
Tim Ferriss: Vitamin A will do you in. So you mentioned you had some fat stolen.
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: Noticed some very unique earrings on your wife this morning. These may tie together.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, they do. It so happens, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What were the earrings?
Jordan Jonas: Man, so you’re out there and things are going well, but you’re still living on the edge, and little mistakes can be the difference between surviving or not. And so, even the process of keeping yourself hydrated, like we talk about, is elaborate and involved and thought out. Walk into your fishing hole, it’s like, “Oh, I better take some ash so I can sprinkle on the really icy spots.” Everything’s thought out, and so the last thing you need is this whole extra variable coming in and adding a bunch of difficulty.
Well, one morning I went out and I had set my meat out on a shelf with this kind of half-hearted — not half-hearted, but maybe a bear will come and if a bear comes, I can shoot that from my shelter, so I could maybe double up and get it, almost like a ready-made bait pile. But I hadn’t even really thought about the fact is that there’s wolverines up there, and that they might show up and I might not hear it or notice it as much.
And so I came out one morning and had I stored probably 90,000 calories worth of fat in this gallon jug. I don’t know how much is in a gallon, but full gallon of fat. And I came out and it was the day, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to render that fat.” And I come and I started looking around like, “What are these tracks?” Like, huh, that’s interesting. And then you slowly start to have something dawn on you like, “No.” And then I noticed my jug was gone, and then I was like, “Oh, those are wolverine tracks.” And like, “Oh, no.” Ran down the tracks. Pointless. That thing’s long gone.
And so I came back and I was like, “Oh, no, I’ve got a wolverine here.” And one thing you notice about the woods, when you have meat, every forest freeloader knows you have the meat. And so like, all the jays, and all the wolves were coming around, and the wolverine now, and just everybody’s coming to get your meat. And that wolverine, they’re known as being some of the most ferocious animals on earth, and they’re like that honey badger video everybody’s seen, but they’re much larger and on steroids.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like — I guess it is technically in the weasel family.
Jordan Jonas: Weasel, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you took a weasel and put it on every performance enhancing drug imaginable, like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV, and gave it on top of that, just like a very irritable, combative demeanor.
Jordan Jonas: I mean, they’re not huge, like 40 pounds or whatever, but they fight off wolf packs, they take down full-grown moose.
Tim Ferriss: So just think about that for a second, guys. 40 pound animal. How much does a moose weigh?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, like a thousand pounds.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, that’s insane.
Jordan Jonas: You just grab on, and there’s been stories of them holding onto a moose’s neck for days until the thing suffocates of blood loss and die. Just like —
Tim Ferriss: So terrifying.
Jordan Jonas: And so, they make up for their size and just being aggressive. And that was my first time of really dealing with one like that. And he kept surprising me with how bold he was. You kind of figure, okay, that’ll take care of it. And then all of a sudden, whoa, right in front of me, he’d run by and grab a chunk of meat and run off. No way. And so, basically it came down to the fact that it was either me or him on this island, and that was very clear, and he was claiming my meat and this and that. And I made a long trip wire again for him.
Tim Ferriss: With the can.
Jordan Jonas: With the can, which proved to be a really useful tool. And then one night I heard that thing clank, came out of my shelter. This was after the previous night of the similar situation happening and I didn’t take a shot at the wolverine because he was behind a bush. And so this next night I was like, if I get a chance, I’m going to take it. I came out and he was behind a bush. I could see his eyes glowing, and I just sent an arrow in there, and it ricocheted through and hit him, but I could see him spinning around. I didn’t know what was, exactly how I had hit him. So I just grabbed the axe and ran over there, and I got over there and he lunged at me, and I could see —
Tim Ferriss: And you had pinned him to the ground.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, but he had been pinned to the ground and both the part of the arrow was stuck in the ground and part of it was hung up in the alders, so it caught his lunge, and I swung and it eviscerated him, and then he spun around and was like grabbing at his own injury, and then I swung again and again. But I definitely have that mental image of his teeth and his jump right at me.
Tim Ferriss: It’s good he was pinned.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it was good he was pinned. I mean, I think I would have still won, but it would have been a lot more of a — we would have both suffered a lot more.
Tim Ferriss: I think you would have suffered a lot more.
Jordan Jonas: I would have suffered a lot more. I was hoping I would win. But no, it was intense. It was a very primal moment. That’s all I would say about it. The moose was so thoughtful, and the wolverine was just one of those things where you’re like, what just happened? Like, that was crazy. I can’t believe that just happened. Anyway, it solved this problem that had been harrowing me for weeks by that point, and was pretty liberating.
Tim Ferriss: And now his claws have been turned into your wife’s earrings.
Jordan Jonas: And so I had to make some earrings out of those claws, a gift to my wife. They’re pretty nice.
Tim Ferriss: So, to bring in something that I don’t think people would pick up on watching season six, there’s a point where, as I think you put it to me when we were out in the woods, you were like, in effect, right? Up to that point, you’d been making plans, executing the plan, sort of living on offense, if that makes sense. But you kill a wolverine, and so there’s this kind of mystery in the show people might not immediately pick up on, which is not the only wolverine around, right?
Jordan Jonas: Right, right. Yeah. We were allowed to kill one wolverine.
Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s the thing, right? You had tags.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, the tags, you still have to follow these rules.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not something that is —
Jordan Jonas: I wasn’t able to kill every wolverine out there.
Tim Ferriss: It is artfully omitted from the final cut.
Jordan Jonas: So I only had about a day of relief before I heard another wolverine. I was like, no. But this time I was in defense, and it just so happened to line up with the time of year where I had this very tangible mental shift that went from me being in that, when you’re in fight or flight. I was in fight. I was in like a proactive mode, like you say, making plans, making things happen. Well, now the ice was freezing on the lake and I couldn’t go out and fish. And so, couldn’t fish.
Tim Ferriss: At least in the normal way.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, in the normal way. Well, I couldn’t even go walk on the ice to ice fish yet. So there’s a couple week period there where it’s just hard to fish. And then I had all the rabbits I needed, honestly. I had so much protein with the moose that there’s no reason for me to go kill or snare rabbits, so I didn’t do that.
Tim Ferriss: Also, AKA toilet paper, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What did you use for toilet paper?
Jordan Jonas: The rabbit feet. I hate to say it, but it was quite luxurious.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, good to know.
Jordan Jonas: Your imaginations can carry the rest. And then this wolverine came and I had to only play defense, and it was a very tangible shift that I went, from being able to be in control of my own destiny, to all of a sudden being on this, what felt like a downhill trajectory. It’s like, I’ve collected everything I can collect, and now I just see what happens and try to defend against the wolverine, and all I can do is wait for the ice to — it felt like a very different frame of mind, and that was a more difficult moment period to get through.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, all these animals have optimized to steal food, right?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, that’s all they do, is scavenge.
Tim Ferriss: And so, especially something like wolverine, it’s like, you can take the bark off of the pillars holding up your elevated platform, but —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, I made a cool platform the Evenki had showed me. I had built a bunch of them with the Natives, and.
Tim Ferriss: A participant in a later season almost killed himself trying to copy that.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a certain technique to how to build them, which was useful to know, to do it safely. But you’re also calculating not using unnecessary calories. And so, I should have finished it. There’s actually, you box in that raised platform and then you build a box on top, and it’s pretty everything-proof. But of course, again, that wolverine kept surprising me. So I had built the platform, done a few tricks to try to keep it from getting up there, and then it got up there. By then it was like, shoot, I should have built the thing. But anyway, so, yep, learning on the fly and trying to react accordingly.
Tim Ferriss: Most people in modern life, they have their — I’m making this up, right? Random meal, but they’re like, salmon or chicken breast, some veggies, maybe some pasta or sweet potato, who knows? But you mentioned the fat being stolen.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And people can look up something called rabbit starvation too, but how important is fat?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, you learn that really fast, also. And that was the first time just solely living off the land that I had, where I didn’t have any noodle backup or anything like that, for an extended period of time. So I was curious how long you could live off a rabbit. I was curious, all this kind of stuff. And what I learned quite quickly was, your body needs fat right away, and every day you’re burning your fat reserves or fat you’re bringing in. The protein it’s actually more attainable out there. There’s a lot of little animals and a lot of things, even mushrooms have protein in them, but the fat is the bottleneck of survival. For sure. And so, that’s why we love it, I guess. It just proved, and it was so interesting to observe the animals, is how homed everybody was in on just the fat. The wolverine, the crows, the jays, everything would just try to get the fattiest part of your fish or your meat.
Tim Ferriss: Eyeballs.
Jordan Jonas: Brain, skin. And they would leave the chunks of meat. Like a big fish, they’d strip the skin off, eat kind of the fatty belly area, the eyes.
Tim Ferriss: Grizzlies do the same thing too, right? Like when they’re grabbing salmon.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: If they’re plentiful enough, they eat the brain and just leave all the meat.
Jordan Jonas: Yep. It’s pretty interesting. So yeah, that’s the fuel of the forest out there.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so let’s talk about some new projects. Well, first of all, not really first of all, but lest I forget, where can people get one of these incredible axes? I have one. People, do not just run around your living room swinging this like a toy. It’s not a toy.
Jordan Jonas: It’s a tool.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s a uniquely designed — I don’t want to say all in one, but multipurpose tool.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah. I think if people take the time to learn it and learn its nuances, it’s like, you’ll love it, but there’s a learning curve to it because it is like a kind of a finely-tuned —
Tim Ferriss: Machine.
Jordan Jonas: But at JordanJonas.com. I have a website, Jordan Jonas, and JordanJonas.com/axe, you can get that. There’s two versions. This is a little bit smaller version. It’s easier to carry when you’re backpacking and stuff. And then I have like the fuller, bigger version, that if you’re on the farm or car camping, things like that, has a little more heft.
Tim Ferriss: And then if people, and you and I have to book some time before this goes live so that I don’t screw myself here, but if people want to experience what it’s like to go into the wilderness with you, which I highly recommend, if you can do it, guys, you will learn a ton. You will not be able to absorb everything. There’s going to be a lot that you pick up and are able to practice, which was so fun. I mean, not just some of the finer details of fundamental survival skills, but learning how to use a relatively simple tool like a Tenkara rod, but just learning how to utilize a simple tool well, right? Same with the axe. So, how can people learn more about —
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, same deal. It’s the Instagram, follow along, YouTube.
Tim Ferriss: Jordan Jonas, also.
Jordan Jonas: Instagram. Yeah. JordanJonas.com is where I have access to sign up for courses and sign up for, there’s hunts available there and stuff that people can guide you on. But yeah, they do book pretty quick. This season’s booked, but I’m all about taking people out on private trips and stuff. You just have to kind of get in early or wait for my schedule to come out for next year and try to squeeze in. But yeah, I love them, man. It’s been such a cool way to share what I love. I talked about it earlier with the purpose. It’s kind of like, I’ve had this stage of my life. The purpose is defined and trying to share the lessons that I’ve gained with others, and I really enjoy it, find it meaningful, and I know people get a lot out of it, so I would love to see some folks out there.
Tim Ferriss: So, speaking of purpose, the book. What are you up to? Why write a book?
Jordan Jonas: My wife and I talk about it fairly often, that it’s like, we have a life that is very good, very full, and on a lot of levels, I would say, emotionally, spiritually, on the family, it’s a big blessing. When I was on Alone too, it kind of struck me. I was like, well, how’s this situation that’s so difficult, or, I mean, even life-changing for people — it just kind of felt like another trip to Russia. It felt very normal for me. I was like, I wonder what prepared me in life to make this kind of unusual situations seem normal.
Tim Ferriss: And just to provide the counter to that, I mean, people break on this show. In a lot of different ways, sometimes in very traumatic fashion.
Jordan Jonas: Mm-hmm. And so, it made me a little bit introspective about what had prepared me for it well. And in thinking about those things, I was like, man, there really are some patterns of my being that have created — and Tim, if you guys listen, know he’s really good at naming things and putting a place on it. But have created a reservoir of resilience that I can tap into and that is well-exercised. And I just thought it would be really interesting to share with people through the story of my life and all these kind of fun stories, but also some of the keys to living a life well, really, but by building resilience that’ll help that.
And what is interesting is, you want to build that resilience before you find yourself in the situation, because once you find yourself in the situation, it’s often a little late. And so, the key is to come through hard times and trials — anybody can get through it, but you want to get through it and be positive and be putting light into the world. So it’s me trying to help —
Tim Ferriss: Like your grandparents.
Jordan Jonas: Like my grandparents, like my dad. It’s me trying to help people learn the lessons that I’ve learned, that might help make their reservoir of resilience fill up, so that they’re able to confront things as they come. So it’s a fun project. I got, Harper Collins and I partnered up on it, and it’ll be what I work on this year. So, it’s been fun starting.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the tentative pub date plan? Any idea?
Jordan Jonas: Early, start of 2027. So, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s exciting.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it is exciting. First book, so it’s a fun new project.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to, for people who — I really encourage people to watch seasons six and seven. There’s a Reddit thread titled, quote, “Can we agree that Jordan from season six is the best contestant to ever play the game?” And it just goes on and on and on and on.
Jordan Jonas: You’ll find some disagreement.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. I mean, it’s Reddit, so of course, there’s plenty of disagreement.
Jordan Jonas: Oh, yeah, fun.
Tim Ferriss: But you mentioned hardship, and earlier this morning we were chatting, because I was in Tennessee, and was with very, very skilled and podcaster and kind human, Shawn Ryan, and found this folded up piece of paper in the chair I was sitting in, and it ended up being a copy of the Serenity Prayer. And I have long been a fan of the Serenity Prayer, in part because it has echoes of and reinforces a lot of my reading in Stoicism. What I didn’t realize is that what I thought was the Serenity Prayer is actually just a small piece of it. Are you able to pull it up on your phone by chance?
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, it’s a great prayer. So I’ll read the full thing here. It says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Then it goes on, “Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as the pathway to peace, taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him in the next.” It has a lot of interesting concepts there. Not everyone, but most people are familiar with the start.
Tim Ferriss: The very beginning, right?
Jordan Jonas: The next one is like, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time. There was that lesson I got slapped with on Alone, where it’s like, I’m worried about the future and worried that — ended up not coming. And then accepting hardship as the pathway to peace, as we were discussing this morning, it’s quite a profound bit of wisdom in there.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot in there.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just, it’s wild. I mean, some of my favorite, maybe concepts, maxims from Buddhists, philosophy, from Stoicism, I mean, it is so neatly wrapped into the Serenity — Stoicism. It’s so beautifully put and it just kind of blew my mind that I had such a partial understanding of it, because I only knew, I think like most people, the very beginning and not the rest.
Jordan, people can find you at JordanJonas.com, J-O-N-A-S. They can find you on Instagram and YouTube @hobojordo. Makes me laugh every time I say it. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you’d like to add? Ask my audience?
Jordan Jonas: We’ve all been noticing lately that the political division is ramping up more and more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that so many people I know and love over the years have vastly divergent political opinions, but when you filter each other through politics, you’re really likely to see people as avatars of an ideology rather than as fellow humans. I see that right now it seems like with immigrations, the hot topic at the moment.
Of course, I believe we should keep track of immigration and who comes in, and people who take advantage of the system shouldn’t because there’s a social contract and a trust that has to be shared and maintained in a society. But at the same time, I have a personal belief based on my faith that I should help those in need when I have the ability. In my personal life, I’ve chosen to take on, for example, in my case, a couple who were Russian asylum-seekers, didn’t want to go to the front in Ukraine, so they fled.
But I don’t expect others to be forced via the government and taxation to live out my morality. And I don’t judge or think ill of those who don’t because I know there is a genuine sacrifice there. So I don’t use politics to vicariously fulfill my moral obligations that I feel good about myself without having to make the personal sacrifices that a personally lived-out ethic in the world requires.
If I have the government fulfill my morality, it costs me nothing and I can even find myself in a situation where I’m judging people who might actually practically be doing more to bear the actual burden of what I think is right in the world. So I think if more people approach their morality on a personal level actively, but also take responsibility for it in their lives, the reality has a way of tempering the extremes and it cuts in every direction.
If someone on the right has a really strong opinion about abortion, it’s like foster children, adopt, support single moms. If someone on the left has a really strong opinion about wanting an open border, well, take in an immigrant family, support them using your own means and social connections. Get to know the complexity that comes when you do all that, and you’ll find you’ll actually understand people that don’t because it is a sacrifice and you’ll be less judgmental and probably less self-righteous.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a little bit lately. Working that out is my favorite part of my spiritual path of Christianity. It’s like, I don’t have a law. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, usually. I’m supposed to filter the real world through this ideal of love your neighbor as yourself, love Lord your God. And in doing so, I’m constantly like, what does it mean to love your enemy? It’s not realistic. What’s it mean to give to everybody of us? That’s not realistic, but it makes me wrestle with this thing, and in that it all comes to life. Whereas I could just, you know, I could have chosen to throw it out at some point, and throw all that wrestling out with it, but I would have lost a lot of what provides meaning and value in my life, also. So I don’t know, working that out in your life is super valuable.
Tim Ferriss: It strikes me, I mean, this framing of wrestling with God. And look, I know I’m getting over my skis here a bit, but it’s the people who wrestle with X, who foster a type of introspection that I think often leads to decisions that are better aligned with their truest of true values.
Jordan Jonas: Right, right, right. Yeah, it gets a little dangerous when you know for sure. So it’s, embrace that struggle, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know attribution, but it’s like, admire the seeker of the truth, beware the person who’s found the truth.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah, right.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, there are times when it’s like, to have solid values or principles that you choose to live your life by, but at the same time, to wrestle and to ask questions, under what circumstances would this not be right, and to cross examine. It’s asking a lot of people, I recognize. It’s asking a lot of anyone, but —
Jordan Jonas: Because it’s easy to just have a formula to follow. The highest path is to work it out.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I admire how you have tried to work it out. I think it’s a very thoughtful approach. It’s not an easy approach. And I just love what you do in the world, man. I feel like you’re reintroducing people to a lot of core, evolved sensitivities that make humans human. And when you do that, the abstractions and the concepts that people are willing to go to blows over on social media just fall away as what they are, which is typically some type of artificial line in the sand that people have chosen and been encouraged to take on as some type of team identity. And that just falls away when you simplify things and put people in an environment where they can see that. I think it’s really beautiful, and people don’t have to live in Montana to do that.
Jordan Jonas: Right.
Tim Ferriss: There are ways to seek it out. So, I appreciate you taking time on the show, man. It’s great to see you.
Jordan Jonas: Tim, it’s been fun getting to know you and hanging out with you in the woods and here, and really enjoyed it. It’s an honor.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m excited, man. I can’t wait to pack in my own axe now, next time, and make absolutely sure I don’t stick it into my foot. So, to be continued. Thanks, Jordan.
Jordan Jonas: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And for people listening, we’ll link to all sorts of things in the show notes at Tim.blog/podcast. Just search Jordan, and there may be one other Jordan. And you can certainly search Jonas. There’s not going to be another Jonas. He’ll pop right up. Until next time, as always, just be a bit kinder than is necessary, to others, yes, but also to yourself. To quote Jack Kornfield, “If your compassion does not include yourself, then your compassion is incomplete.”
Jordan Jonas: Indeed.Tim Ferriss: Thanks for tuning in.
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