Feb. 20, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:19:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one, boom. | ||
| Hello, Colin. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
|
unidentified
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You wrote a book? | |
| I brought a book. | ||
|
unidentified
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You wrote it? | |
| You wrote yourself? | ||
| I wrote this book last time, since I saw you last. | ||
| The Impossible First? | ||
| Indeed, indeed. | ||
| Yeah, about my solo journey across Antarctica and kind of diving deep through my whole life and kind of what brought me there and other expeditions and the ups and downs of it all. | ||
| And you're coming back from another crazy trip, right? | ||
| I am, indeed. | ||
| What is that nonsense that you did on a kayak? | ||
| Ha ha! | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| So, after I got back from the Impossible First, the Antarctica crossing, right about the time I saw you last year, I got a funny phone call, actually, of all things. | ||
| People were asking me, you know, what's the next expedition going to be? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| And I said, you know, I just walked 54 days by myself across Antarctica. | ||
| Give me a minute. | ||
| Give me a minute to relax. | ||
| And I get a phone call via a buddy of mine from college. | ||
| Connects me to this... | ||
| This guy, this Icelandic guy, I've never met him before. | ||
| His name's Fionn Paul. | ||
| Don't know his story. | ||
| I do now. | ||
| He's an absolute legend. | ||
| And he says, hey man, you were just in Antarctica, right? | ||
| And I was like, yeah. | ||
| And he's like, I think we should go back to Antarctica. | ||
| And I was like, alright, well what do you think? | ||
| And he's like, in a rowboat. | ||
| I think we should row a boat from the southern tip of South America to the peninsula of Antarctica across Drake Passage. | ||
| How far is that? | ||
| About 700 miles. | ||
| Can I see what that looks like on a map? | ||
| And I said, please delete my phone number. | ||
| 700 miles rowing a boat. | ||
| Yeah, so Drake Passage is known to be, you know, in seafaring, one of the most treacherous, if not the most treacherous kind of passageway in the world. | ||
| You know, you've got the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Southern Ocean kind of all converging between the Antarctic Peninsula and the southern tip of South America. | ||
| So you've got... | ||
| 40 foot swells. | ||
| You got crazy waves, icebergs as you get close to Antarctica. | ||
| And the mission or the goal was to see if we could... | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That whole area? | ||
| That whole area, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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From there to there? | |
| From there to there. | ||
| All the way down to the main peninsula there of Antarctica. | ||
| How long did this take? | ||
| So ultimately, it took us just less than two weeks to do the entire row, but it was a long journey in the planning from that phone call all the way through to that year, but it was a 12-day crossing. | ||
| So in the two weeks, you had to have two weeks' worth of food, two weeks' worth of drinking water. | ||
| On the boat. | ||
| Yeah, so, well, water actually, we have a desalinator, so off of solar panels, everything's, you know, solar, there's no engine, no sail, nothing like that. | ||
| It's just completely human-powered rowing. | ||
| We have a portable desalinator? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How big is it? | ||
| It fits inside one of the tiny... | ||
| So the boat's tiny. | ||
| The boat's like 25 feet long. | ||
| Three guys rowing at a time. | ||
| So six of us total in the team, ultimately. | ||
| You know, barely anywhere to sleep in this tiny little compartment. | ||
| It's like the size of sleeping in the hatchback of a Honda Civic or something like that. | ||
| But yeah, so you've got this desalinator that's basically kind of in one of the central compartments. | ||
| So it's probably like, I don't know, maybe... | ||
| Two feet by two feet square, something like that. | ||
| And it doesn't make water real fast. | ||
| You can make 10 liters of water in an hour or two, depending on how hot the sun is. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| But it gets it done. | ||
| Yeah, it gets it done. | ||
| Does it taste like... | ||
| Whale dicks? | ||
| What does the water taste like? | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| As we got closer to Antarctica, I think it started messing up because it got real salty. | ||
| It wasn't doing quite as good of a job. | ||
| The water near Antarctica was like 1 degree Celsius, so 33 Fahrenheit, practically frozen cold water, and I think that was kind of starting to tweak out the system. | ||
| So you're drinking salt water. | ||
| As we got closer, it was still potable, but it was like, this isn't working as well. | ||
| But early on, it worked just fine. | ||
| It was pretty much cold drinking water. | ||
| Like bottled water. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Does it only do it for a certain amount of time? | ||
| Does the filter get filled up or anything? | ||
| It worked for the entire 12 days that we were out there. | ||
| There's guys who have gone on longer rowing expeditions across the Pacific or the Atlantic or longer stretches of ocean. | ||
| That works the entire time. | ||
| But it is one of the things that breaks down. | ||
| So we had extra spare parts. | ||
| Fortunately, we didn't have to use any of that. | ||
| But, yeah, no, it worked. | ||
| And then, yeah, of course, we had to bring food for the entire time as well on there. | ||
| So that was a key part of it. | ||
| How much food? | ||
| So, there were six of us, like I said. | ||
| Pretty much all the compartments were full. | ||
| You know, there were some tiny little compartments, but we basically ate two things. | ||
| So, we had freeze-dried meals, so like Mountain House freeze-dried meals. | ||
| We had this little jet boil that we were kind of as crazy as the waters, like it's 40... | ||
| You know, 40 foot waves are bouncing around on this trying to hold a jet boil to try to boil some water. | ||
| It was pretty tough, but some close calls with that. | ||
| But we also had these bars. | ||
| So last time, I think we talked about last time I was on here, I had these kind of custom nutrition bars that were made. | ||
| And so that worked really well for me in the Antarctica crossing. | ||
| We had done all this kind of blood work. | ||
| Can you explain that again? | ||
| Like how you made, how those were made? | ||
| Yeah, so when I was doing my Antarctica crossing, one of the kind of challenges is basically, can you take enough food with you? | ||
| Because what I was doing was called unsupported. | ||
| So no resupplies of food or fuel, you know, crossing the landmass of Antarctica 54 days. | ||
| And so I wanted to get like the most optimized nutrition. | ||
| And so I work with this company called Standard Process, who's all like a whole food supplement company. | ||
| And they've got all these sort of doctors, food scientists and this. | ||
| And I went in their lab for a year and they did all this kind of custom blood work on my body. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out, you know, basically my exact sort of physiology. | ||
| And they created these bars based on all of the research that they did that basically were these really high-calorie bars because it was the most high calories that I needed to optimize space. | ||
| And they were kind of – they were all – they're all plant-based and ended up – and I know there's – And what's in them again? | ||
| Coconut oil, nuts, seeds, different phytonutrients in a particular macronutrient blend that I needed. | ||
| It was about 45% fat because I needed the high fat, about 40% protein, and then 15% carbs. | ||
| Excuse me, sorry, I re-alternated the protein-carb quotient there. | ||
| But yeah, it worked really well for that. | ||
| And so when I was doing the row, I called up Standard Process again. | ||
| They've been an amazing partner of mine. | ||
| They were like, hey, I'm doing this row. | ||
| Those bars worked so good last time. | ||
| And like I just said, with trying to boil water and all this stuff is really challenging on the rowboat. | ||
| The best would be to have this really kind of high optimized nutrition that we could use again for a project like this. | ||
| But the parameters are different. | ||
| You know, the humidity is different. | ||
| The temperature is different. | ||
| There's six of us now. | ||
| There's not just one of me. | ||
| You know, can we optimize it for that? | ||
| So they kind of made a specialty blend of the bars again that they've called the column bars. | ||
| They've probably come up with a better name. | ||
| But it worked really well. | ||
| They're not for sale. | ||
| We've talked about doing that, so maybe in the future, but you can see online on their website all the different supplements and stuff that went into it, so you can kind of buy the component parts. | ||
| But yeah, one day we might make them, but they've been kind of just custom for these two projects. | ||
| But they've worked really, really well, particularly in the rowing. | ||
| I mean, they worked amazing in the Antarctic Crossing as well, but in the rowing, it was 90 minutes of rowing on, 90 minutes of rowing off, continuous, 24 hours a day. | ||
| So we're kind of in two sets of three, six of us total. | ||
| Three people rowing, three people resting. | ||
| And in that 90 minutes that you're off, that's also when you've got to eat, drink, sleep. | ||
| It's your only time to rest, basically. | ||
| And so, as much time as you can kind of optimize eating and stuff meant more sleeping. | ||
| And so, to have these bars, get done with a 90-minute rowing shift, be able to eat a 1,000-calorie bar, highest quality nutrition in your body. | ||
| I mean, Standard Process nailed it again. | ||
| It was amazing to have these bars and have it work really well for all of us to kind of optimize not just the food, but also the efficiency of sleep because the sleep got... | ||
| It's fucking crazy out there. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| So you're basically sleeping every 90 minutes for one hour or so? | ||
| Yeah, exactly-ish. | ||
| If you can get it. | ||
| Once the swells start cranking up, you're in this tiny compartment. | ||
| I don't know if we can pull up a picture of the boat for a visual. | ||
| There's some on my Instagram. | ||
| Not covered at all? | ||
| Not covered. | ||
| Like, really not covered at all. | ||
| Like, so, well, there's covered in the tiny compartment. | ||
| So the rowing part's not covered at all. | ||
| So when you're rowing, waves are splashing up, like, over top of you. | ||
| I mean, you're getting completely soaked. | ||
| Like, you're getting, you know, completely soaked the entire time. | ||
| And then the tiny compartment, you know, it's like, it's like lower than this table. | ||
| Like, you'd be, like, kind of crouched down, like, in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, this is the robot right here. | ||
| So that's us. | ||
| So that's the floor. | ||
| Is that where all the food is stored underneath? | ||
| Yeah, underneath there's compartments. | ||
| So you can see that tiny little kind of compartment on either side. | ||
| One's smaller and one's bigger. | ||
| And that's where you guys would sleep? | ||
| That's where we'd sleep. | ||
| Well, the bigger one, that's the waves. | ||
| It's hard to believe that there's 12 people in that little thing. | ||
| Six people. | ||
| Oh, excuse me, six people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But still. | ||
| So you got, you know, three people rowing and three people in the compartment sitting in town. | ||
| I think if you kind of scroll up to the top, maybe there's one just that shows like the whole boat or like what it looks like maybe there. | ||
| There's kind of a shot of it. | ||
| So yeah, so you can see in there, like the back little compartment, that's where I was. | ||
| I was alternating with this guy, Fionn, who I mentioned, the Icelandic guy, who was the captain of the boat, really experienced ocean rower. | ||
| And we alternated inside this little cabin, and then the other four guys, they alternated two people, because that one's a little bit bigger in the front, though it's the bow cabin in the front. | ||
| But you're like head to toe in there, or you're crouched into a little ball. | ||
| It's not glamorous at all. | ||
| Did you know these guys at all before you did this? | ||
| So, not really. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Yeah, it was a deep dive into the team. | ||
| And after doing something solo, I was pretty excited to do something, you know, as a team and doing something in a completely, you know, exploring a completely different kind of avenue of exploration in the ocean, something I'd never done before. | ||
| And I had actually, not only did I not know these guys, a couple of them I went to college with, but we like really loosely knew each other. | ||
| Like I kind of like maybe like, oh, recognize their face a little bit, but it didn't. | ||
| We weren't like good friends or anything like that. | ||
| Three of them I'd never met in my entire life. | ||
| And I also have never rode a boat in my life ever before. | ||
| And so when Fionn, he called me up and told me about the project, he's one of the world's most renowned ocean rowers. | ||
| He's got 30 world records or something like that. | ||
| Complete legend. | ||
| He's rode boats across every single ocean. | ||
| This was kind of the last big ocean that he'd never crossed. | ||
| No one had ever done it just like this before. | ||
| And so he kind of said, hey, I wanted this idea, but the logistics are super complicated. | ||
| Like going to Antarctica, there's all this sort of like treaties that you need, all this paperwork, getting a boat down to South America, importing it through the Panama Canal, etc. | ||
| I mean, it's like a tough thing. | ||
| And he'd been like kind of thinking about it for a year or so. | ||
| And he said like, hey... | ||
| I've seen you pull off some big projects together. | ||
| Can we kind of team up? | ||
| And I know, you know, your team has got really good at figuring out these logistics. | ||
| Would you be interested? | ||
| And I'd actually looked at ocean rowing a couple years ago as something that I always wanted to do one day. | ||
| And so it was kind of a, after I kind of got that first phone call, like I said, like, I'm like, dude, I just got back from Antarctica. | ||
| I don't want to go back there. | ||
| Tomorrow. | ||
| But, you know, of course, the curiosity inside of me got the best of me and I called him back up and I said, hey, let's do this. | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
| And kind of dove into it from there. | ||
| My team kind of wrapped our arms around the sort of like logistic and building out the project and he was definitely the visionary of something he dreamed up and it was super cool to team up with him after doing something alone. | ||
| Now, this thing that you did when you walked across Antarctica, very impressive. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| But I'm sure you've seen the National Geographic article they wrote about you. | ||
| And they said that there was another man from, was it Norway? | ||
| That had done it already. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That it wasn't the first time someone had gone across Antarctica. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He had gone actually... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, something I've been talking about super openly, including in my book, which is the Nat Geo article. | ||
| You know, it's a little bit unfortunate. | ||
| I actually just published a 16-page letter asking Nat Geo to retract the entire article. | ||
| And the reason it's 16 pages is, unfortunately, the entire article they wrote is just so riddled with inaccuracies and kind of misrepresentations and omissions that, you know, we had to kind of ask them, say, hey, look, you know, you kind of got this wrong. | ||
| I was never properly interviewed for it. | ||
| But one of the things you're talking about, this guy, Borga Auslan, this Norwegian guy, absolute freaking legend. | ||
| So what this guy did in 1996, so, you know, 20 some years before that I attempted my crossing, is he crossed Antarctica from the edge of the coastline, crossed the ice shelf all the way across the landmass, across the other ice shelf, roughly 1,800 miles. | ||
| And what he used to propel himself was he used a kite for a good portion of the time. | ||
| And it's an absolute extraordinary project. | ||
| And what's really weird about sort of this National Geographic article, a number of sentences is one of the premises of it was saying, you know, Colin never talked about Borg Ausland. | ||
| Like, he never talked about him in his book. | ||
| He never mentioned him. | ||
| He never this. | ||
| And in my book... | ||
| What's really bizarre and why we're asking for a retraction because it's just really ineffectual is that, you know, here I am on page 49 of my book. | ||
| Literally, it says, From 1996-1997. | ||
| Not only did he cross the entire landmass of Antarctica, but he also crossed the full Ron and Ross ice shelves from the ocean's edge. | ||
| Allison's expedition has deeply inspired me and was unsupported that he hauled all of his food and fuels with no resupplies. | ||
| So it was weird. | ||
| It's like the journalist wrote this article without reading your book. | ||
| It's not surprising. | ||
| And I had done, I don't know, there's a lot of speculation. | ||
| I did this big project and the film project around the road was with Discovery. | ||
| I don't know if Nat Geo is coming at Discovery or whatever, but it's really bizarre. | ||
| I mean, we could talk about all the different kind of fine points of that. | ||
| But the big distinction, and I'll say it, I've said it, shout it from the rooftops, but I'll say it here again. | ||
| Borga Ausland is absolutely incredible. | ||
| Like, I am in awe of the guy. | ||
| What he did in 96 is phenomenal. | ||
| That's why I write about it in my book. | ||
| That's why I've written about it in my social. | ||
| The day after I finished my crossing, I wrote about it on there as well. | ||
| And I said, wow, so many people have inspired me. | ||
| I'm standing on the shoulders of giants the only way I was able to do this. | ||
| Right, but this says impossible first, right? | ||
| So he did it first. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the difference is, is there's kind of two really specific distinctions in the world of polar travel. | ||
| There's unsupported, which means not getting resupplied with food or fuel, like I was talking about with the food. | ||
| And then there's unassisted. | ||
| Which means not using anything to propel you other than your own body. | ||
| So that's called human-powered alone. | ||
| So what he did is considered assisted in that he used a kite. | ||
| But he was able to go twice the distance of me, which is amazing. | ||
| And how often did he use the kite? | ||
| Because what I'd read that he had only used the kite in a few instances where the wind was right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's another one of the things that the National Geographic article unfortunately got wrong. | ||
| And in my 16-page letter that anyone can read, it's on my website, colinabrady.com slash blog, letter to Nat Geo, or it's linked to my Instagram. | ||
| It's not like a he said, he said thing where I'm like, oh hey, this got wrong. | ||
| It's just actually a really kind of documented and sourced document that has links to everything. | ||
| And one of the links it shows is actually his entire kind of project afterwards and the aftermath of him talking about it, including talking about with Parawing, which was one of his sponsors, the guy who actually built and manufactured the kite. | ||
| And they're talking about how he used it for about at least a third of his journey, 600 or so miles, as well as he was able to use the kite going 125 miles in a single day, which is, like I said, it's amazing. | ||
| It's really incredible what he did and the time that he did it. | ||
| It's just really kind of an apples and oranges comparison when it comes to polar travel and the distinctions of that. | ||
| So he traveled further, but he used some assistance. | ||
| Yeah, so there's basically these different distinctions in the world of polar travel, and that's another one of the things, again, I'm not sure how they got this wrong. | ||
| In the link on the 16-page thing, I show the text message when the journalist asked me, well, tell me about these definitions of unsupported and unassisted. | ||
| I sent him the link, and there's these links, it's kind of a published thing on this website called Antarctica Logistics and Expeditions, the main sort of expedition facilitator, the person who runs logistics down there. | ||
| It's very clear, unsupported means no use of resupplies, unassisted means no use of kites or dogs. | ||
| And so the thing that I did solo, that people I guess have gotten somewhat confused about at first, was I was the first person to cross the landmass of Antarctica, Solo, unsupported, no resupplies, and unassisted, no kites. | ||
| What Borga Auslan did is he was the first person to cross Antarctica, not just the landmass, but also the ice shelves. | ||
| So there's frozen ocean on these ice shelves. | ||
| So from the coast, across the ice shelf, across the landmass, and across the other ice shelf. | ||
| And no one yet, including myself, has ever done a solo, unsupported, unassisted crossing of both the landmass and the ice shelves. | ||
| I hope someone does it, man. | ||
| It would be amazing. | ||
| I had a 375-pound sled, and I almost ran out of food at the end, crossing the landmass. | ||
| And if you'd need maybe a 600-pound sled or something like that, or maybe a more optimized food solution that no one's thought of yet, but it hasn't been done yet. | ||
| How big was Ousland's sled? | ||
| Similar size to me. | ||
| So he was out there for... | ||
| I think he was out there for 63 days, roughly. | ||
| I was out there for 54 days. | ||
| So we were not out there a lot different in duration of time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| So the sled really did make a big difference, that if he's going that much further than you... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Yeah, so... | ||
| So one more time, you were out there how many days? | ||
| I was out there 54 days. | ||
| And he was out there 60? | ||
| 63 days. | ||
| Okay, that's not that different. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so he, like I said, on some of the days he talks about it openly, that he went, he does it in kilometers, but if you calculate back to miles, like 125 miles in a 15-hour period of time. | ||
| That's unfathomable just walking, pulling a sled. | ||
| They're just two different things. | ||
| It's like the difference between sailing across an ocean and rowing a boat across the ocean. | ||
| Why do you think National Geographic got that wrong then? | ||
| Because the way they wrote it, it was, you know, it's... | ||
| They made it look like you're just a fame whore and that, you know, there was a bunch of other explorers and outdoors people that were in support of the fact that Auslan was the only one, the first one to do it. | ||
| They didn't make this distinction and they actually made it seem like as if the sled was an ingenious solution. | ||
| But it seems like that was a planned thing and that was an engineered thing and that it wasn't something that he built up on the fly. | ||
| This was the method that they used to help him get across the snow. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And like I said, if you look in the pet letter that I wrote, it's got links to actually the manufacturer. | ||
| They kind of talk about it as being this elegant solution. | ||
| It's like you put a kite up randomly. | ||
| You figure it out. | ||
| Hey, I got an idea. | ||
| But it's like a fully manufactured thing. | ||
| It's a legit kite. | ||
| And like I said, this is not me knocking on that. | ||
| I actually think that project, it's one of the projects that inspired me the most to do what I did. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| It sounds amazing. | ||
| Can we see what Auslan, is there any photograph of Auslan's kite? | ||
| I want to see what it looks like. | ||
| Whenever someone does something extraordinary, there's no doubt just what you did. | ||
| How many days again? | ||
| 54 days. | ||
| Alone. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And for anybody to shit on that is nuts. | ||
| And you're the first one that's ever done it just pulling that thing. | ||
| And you showed us what it was like last time you were here. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And some of the areas where you had to pull it. | ||
| It seems like an insane physical undertaking. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, so yeah, it definitely tested me to the edges of my potential. | ||
| There was many times that it felt impossible. | ||
| I think we talked about it last time, but the second chapter of my book is called Frozen Tears because on the first hour of trying to pull my sled, 375 pounds, fully loaded of food and fuel... | ||
| I started crying. | ||
| I literally started crying. | ||
| The tears are freezing in my face. | ||
| It's an all-time pathetic feeling. | ||
| I mean, it was really, really brutal and really challenging. | ||
| And one of the things, for sure, in the National Geographic article, they're not disputing that I did this. | ||
| It's not like they're saying, you didn't walk 932 miles by yourself across Antarctica. | ||
| They kind of grudgingly gave you credit for doing something really freaky. | ||
| They also didn't mention the difference between the time it took you to travel that and the time it took Auslan to travel a far greater distance or that he used that kite to go more than 100 miles in a day. | ||
| Those are pretty big, important things. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And I think that, yeah, hopefully you can pull up a picture of Auslan with the kite. | ||
| It's linked in there. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm finding kites there, but not with him. | |
| If it's out there, Jamie will find it. | ||
| Yeah, we'll find it in a second. | ||
| But, you know, like I said, it's an unfortunate thing. | ||
| I wrote this letter. | ||
| The editor of National Geographic actually responded and said they're reviewing it. | ||
| I think they're going to hopefully do the right thing. | ||
| The facts are pretty clear on this one. | ||
| Well, hopefully we can pressure them by just explaining it here. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big difference. | ||
| That's a big-ass fucking kite. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I'm sure that has a lot of power behind it, too, and I bet that really helped him. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Because you can ski with those things. | ||
| Like, the fact that he's got skis on and he's getting pulled by that kite, I mean, you're gliding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not propelling yourself. | ||
| They're both really cool things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hold on. | |
| Go back to that, Jamie. | ||
| Go back to that. | ||
| Look, he doesn't have poles in his hands. | ||
| No, he's just holding onto the kite being pulled along by it. | ||
| So he's probably strapped to that kite. | ||
| Yeah, it's like if you imagine a kite board. | ||
| Like a kite boarding on the water or something like that. | ||
| So he's probably strapped at the waist. | ||
| He's holding onto that kite. | ||
| But it's pulling him while he's on skis. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Whereas what you did was pull with trekking poles. | ||
| Yeah, trekking poles and cross-country skis with skins, but just to give me traction so I didn't sink too deep in the snow. | ||
| But I'm just walking, basically, just pulling it with my own body fully. | ||
| He's not doing that. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| They're just two different things. | ||
| I'm sure there was times where you had to walk. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He manhauled for parts of it as well, like a significant distance, but a lot of it, when the wind was with him, you know, he put up his kite and pulled along. | ||
| The fact that he was able to go more than 100 miles in a day makes me go, wait a minute, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Come on, that's a different thing. | ||
| Totally different thing. | ||
| That's a different thing. | ||
| National Geographic did not recognize that, that that's a different thing, that he can go on the snow, pulling 300 pounds, more than 100 miles, how many? | ||
| He went 125 one time in 15 hours. | ||
| That's fucking ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a totally different thing. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| National Geographic. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they should have been really clear about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because they were trying to make it out like some elegant solution that he occasionally used, not a big deal, but what he really did was amazing. | ||
| What he did was fucking amazing. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No doubt. | |
| No doubt. | ||
| But that, what we just saw in that image of him getting pulled by that giant-ass fucking kite on skis, strapped to this harness with all the weight behind him also being pulled by that giant-ass kite, that's a different thing. | ||
| 124 miles in a day, perfect. | ||
| Pulling 300 plus pounds? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| It's hard to walk 124 miles in a day. | ||
| Let alone with nothing on your back. | ||
| Zach Bitter, who holds the American world record for the fastest 24 hours ever run, ran it full clip in 11 hours. | ||
| He ran 100 miles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So, 124 miles in 15 minutes while dragging. | ||
| 15 hours, yeah. | ||
| Hundreds of pounds, or 15 minutes, I say 15 minutes, 15 hours, 124 miles while dragging hundreds of pounds of gear all in 15 hours is insane. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If Zach Bitter can run 100 miles in 11 hours and break a world record or an American, is it a world record or an American record? | ||
|
unidentified
|
American record. | |
| American record. | ||
| Yeah, that's a crazy record. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 100 fucking miles in 11 hours is crazy running, and that guy did 124 with hundreds of pounds of gear and a sled in 15 hours. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's a different thing. | ||
| It's two different things, man. | ||
| It's two different things. | ||
| World record correction. | ||
| Zach's the world record. | ||
| Yeah, Zach won the world record. | ||
| He had the American record first, and then he broke the world record in his latest attempt. | ||
| Zach Vitter's a monster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shout out to Zach. | ||
| But... | ||
| Him being able to do that running is incredible. | ||
| That guy being able to go further in just four hours longer, pulling hundreds of pounds of gear. | ||
| Come on, National Geographic. | ||
| They're just two different things. | ||
| And it's not unimpressive. | ||
| It's incredibly impressive. | ||
| That guy has... | ||
| Fucking steel resolve to be able to do that and get all the way across the ice shelves and all that shit that he had to do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I mean, the biggest thing for me is, unfortunately, it was portrayed in a certain way. | ||
| I don't know if it wasn't fact-checked or what that, but for me, the whole purpose of any of this, the whole purpose of writing the book and sharing it with the world and talking to people via your podcast or whatever, my whole goal is to inspire other people to step outside of their comfort zones, do things in their life, challenge themselves. | ||
| This is not about me. | ||
| It's not about notches in the belt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's got to be? | |
| A little bit about you. | ||
| You wrote a book. | ||
| I like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you written a book? | |
| No, I have not. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| That surprises me. | ||
| I started writing a book at one point in time, but I had a deal with a book publisher, and the notes were so brutal, I gave them the money back. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They were like, they didn't like it? | ||
| They wanted me to write essentially the way I write stand-up. | ||
| They wanted me to be like, set up, punchline, set up, punchline. | ||
| I was like, this is not how you write things, guys. | ||
| Different without the intonation of the voice. | ||
| Yeah, they actually wanted to take my stand-up. | ||
| They offered to just take my stand-up and transcribe it into a book. | ||
| I said, I'd never do that. | ||
| And they're like, well, George Carlin did it. | ||
| I go, it's because he owed the fucking IRS a billion dollars. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| If you ask George, it was a good idea. | ||
| I bet he would say no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He needed money. | ||
| George Carlin was like deep in the hole with the IRS. He did a lot of things I'm sure he didn't want to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to write a book that way. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, I have walked across the landmass of America by myself. | ||
| I've rode a boat. | ||
| I've done some other crazy shit in my life. | ||
| But the hardest thing I've ever done is write a book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yes, man. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Is that hard? | ||
| It really was, you know. | ||
| I'm proud of the outcome. | ||
| You know, I really poured my heart and soul into it, but it was challenging. | ||
| I've been journaling since I was a little kid, like since I was 12 years old. | ||
| So, going back through all my journals and thinking about, you know, there's the Antarctica piece of this, but the subtitle is From Fire to Ice. | ||
| So, I talk about, you know, being burned in this fire in Thailand, being told I would never walk again normally, going through all these pieces of my life. | ||
| But one of the things that happened when I was in Antarctica, which... | ||
| It was interesting to me, maybe you'll find it interesting, is as I was out there by myself in this empty white landscape, 24 hours of daylight, endless white nothingness, my mind started filling in with all of these memories. | ||
| So I deleted almost all my music, I'm in silence, I'm in full solitude. | ||
| Like if I said to you, hey Joe, remember the day you graduated from high school? | ||
| And like, something's going to pop in your mind right now. | ||
| We're going to keep talking and you're going to move on from that. | ||
| But when I was walking out there by myself, someone would pop in my head like, hey Colin, remember your first swim race when you were a little kid? | ||
| And all of a sudden, like, I'd be back there. | ||
| Like, I could like dive in and I could see my mom on the edge of the pool deck and the, you know, the winds blowing across my face and I can see the kid next to me and I can taste the chlorine in my mouth. | ||
| I mean, visceral memories, like a lucid dream were coming back to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Throughout for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. | ||
| So the book itself, it reads about Antarctica, but it intersperses the way my experience was in Antarctica, which was actually going back in through my life in this kind of tapestry of visceral memories and flashbacks of other expeditions and childhood and the ups and downs in my personal life and kind of all of these things kind of conspiring into one. | ||
| But it was wild to go deep into the brain like that. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| We should probably point out, we've had a podcast before, and this podcast that we did before was right after you got back from this journey in Antarctica, and you described the whole thing in Thailand, you described getting burned, and how you never thought you were going to walk again, and all that stuff. | ||
| So we should tell people. | ||
| So stop, right? | ||
| Pause. | ||
| Go back the other one. | ||
| And then come back here again. | ||
| Did it upset you when the National Geographic article came out? | ||
| Did you feel like, well, they just got it wrong, let me straighten them out? | ||
| You know, it's one of those things. | ||
| I'd be curious to hear your perspective on media and stuff like this. | ||
| You've been around doing type of stuff more longer than me. | ||
| It hurt my feelings, obviously, and it was bizarre because it was so factually inaccurate. | ||
| And National Geographic is a magazine or an outlet that I've looked up to throughout my entire life. | ||
| It's just a really beautiful platform. | ||
| And so I was just surprised. | ||
| I was surprised that I was never asked for a proper long-form interview of this. | ||
| I was surprised that I was never contacted by a proper fact checker. | ||
| There was just some things that were just weird and out of place. | ||
| And I guess it was a freelancer. | ||
| Again, I don't know the whole story behind it. | ||
| That's probably what it is. | ||
| If I had a guess, look, there's very little in, like, praising people. | ||
| There's a whole lot in taking people down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If they could find that you did something, that you did something incorrect, or you lied about something, or exaggerated about something, I mean, they made you out to be a liar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I read it, and I was like, wow, like, they're saying he's a liar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're saying how much of it is fiction. | ||
| Yeah, literally said fiction, but how much of it could be fiction if you fucking really did walk 54 goddamn days not an artik Not only that, the kind of weird parts about it is not only that, but I also had a GPS on me the entire time. | ||
| It was completely transparent. | ||
| Every 10 minutes, the entire journey, we're live for the sea. | ||
| The New York Times covered it. | ||
| They had my GPS tracker up live. | ||
| The map of my route is in the first page of my book, let alone online 24-7. | ||
| There's been hundreds of articles written about this by outlets who have fact-checked and researched or whatever. | ||
| So for Nat Geo to make all those claims, it's like saying, like, Colin somehow... | ||
| He tricked every person ever from every news outlet that's covered this and fact-checked it and reported on it and his editors of the book and some hacked his jeep. | ||
| I mean, it's like a crazy conspiracy weird kind of stance on it. | ||
| Do you think it's because everyone... | ||
| How do you say his name? | ||
| Ausland? | ||
| Ausland, yeah. | ||
| That Ausland had done it. | ||
| Everybody knew that Ausland had done it. | ||
| Maybe they just didn't understand the details of it, so they started complaining. | ||
| Hey, he didn't do it first. | ||
| Ausland did it first, and this guy's like, I got a story. | ||
| So he goes to try to go after you, but then realizes, like, Oh, it's kind of... | ||
| He kind of did it first, but the other guy did it... | ||
| Well, let's just say that the kite was cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He had a cool kite. | ||
| But, I mean, he did even weirder things. | ||
| Like, in the first paragraph or second paragraph of the entire article, he takes a quote from page 50 of my book and a quote from page 214 of my book. | ||
| And parses them together as if they're a single statement. | ||
| And I'm like, they're about two completely different things that I'm talking about. | ||
| And you're like, dude... | ||
| That's what people do, man. | ||
| They want to sell dirt. | ||
| Or he says, like, Colin made up this thing about no rescue zones. | ||
| No one's ever written about the fact of in Antarctica, and he talks about me getting picked up in Antarctica like I can call an Uber. | ||
| He literally says in there, uses somebody else's quote, he says, I mean, getting picked up in Antarctica is like calling an Uber, which is by itself just- He really said that? | ||
| He literally says that in the article, which is just crazy. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Bitch, try getting an Uber in the woods in Montana. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I'm like an Uber, and then the craziest thing, and again... | ||
| That is so crazy if someone says that. | ||
| My response to this is just factual. | ||
| It's not, you know, I just try to not be too defensive or anything about it, but it's just... | ||
| Well, the good news is this will reach way more people than that article. | ||
| Yeah, but I'll say one last thing about it. | ||
| The irony of this is if you Google Borca Auslan... | ||
| In 2019, right after I finished my crossing, he's interviewed about all this. | ||
| And in a quote, and I link to this in my letter, him saying, there are parts of Antarctica, particularly in the large Sestrugi zone, which is exactly what I was talking about, where rescue is impossible. | ||
| The guy who's against me is also quoted saying the other thing, but then he says, it's like, the whole thing is just, you know, it's crazy, man. | ||
| There's so much money in shitting on someone. | ||
| That's what it is, I'm sure. | ||
| And I'm sure this guy... | ||
| Well, I'm sure this guy who wrote that article is probably a little bit of a hater. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, probably saw you and like, fuck this guy, you know? | ||
| It's the world we live in, unfortunately. | ||
| I try to, you know, keep my head up. | ||
| Like I said, I wrote this book to inspire other people to step outside their comfort zones. | ||
| I'm sure they paid for it too, right? | ||
| I got paid for it as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I got... | |
| It's also like... | ||
| Is that so wrong? | ||
| No, you definitely should get paid. | ||
| You should get paid for the whole thing. | ||
| But the fact that they're trying to diminish what you did and what you really did do was walk by yourself for 54 days through Antarctica. | ||
| And one of the things he was even saying something about it was on a road. | ||
| And I'm like, hey, bitch, why don't you walk dragging 300 pounds on a road? | ||
| Like, does that matter? | ||
| Everything's covered in snow and ice. | ||
| Like, what fucking road is this? | ||
| Yeah, so there's basically this 300-mile stretch. | ||
| It's the last third of my part of my journey, which, by the way, was on my GPS, which, by the way, I talk about in my book, which, by the way, I widely acknowledge. | ||
| And it's called the South Pole Overland Traverse. | ||
| And so... | ||
| The South Pole Station, the U.S. research station that's at the South Pole was resupplied throughout the summer season from the coast, and they drive this kind of bunch of tractors basically up this area called the Leverett Glacier. | ||
| It's not like a paved road. | ||
| This is them driving over ice and snow and filling in crevasses along the way, etc. | ||
| And there's some tire tracks and some flagging that are out there. | ||
| So, first of all, I've already traveled almost 600 miles without any of that. | ||
| And then as I get there, and we know this is part of it, and I've talked about widely with all the polar experts, all of the people that make the classifications, and unassisted refers specifically to kites and dogs. | ||
| And they're trying to make this claim that the Road somehow, quote unquote, big air quotes, road. | ||
| Basically, some rutted up tracks in the snow. | ||
| You know, I'm out there. | ||
| This is not a paved road. | ||
| No, there's not a paved road out there. | ||
| And the thing is, Antarctica is so brutal. | ||
| We showed some clips last time. | ||
| He's sitting at my tent in 50, 60 mile per hour winds that it was like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When that blows over, imagine driving a tractor over snow and then 50, 60 mile winds come in. | ||
| What do you think happens? | ||
| It's blown over immediately. | ||
| So I never saw these tractors. | ||
| I never saw these vehicles. | ||
| I never saw this. | ||
| I saw some flags, of course. | ||
| I saw some rutted tracks, but I linked to it on my letter to this. | ||
| So it's really not much difference in walking on flat ground. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| And still, there's still the Sestrugi, so there's still huge bumps of snow. | ||
| And a lot of the time, I was completely whited out. | ||
| I couldn't see 5 or 10 feet in front of me. | ||
| So it's not like I could... | ||
| A lot of times, these flags are every 100 or 400 meters. | ||
| It's not like I'd even see those. | ||
| So it's just a shame. | ||
| And I've been very transparent about the fact that I used that route. | ||
| It was the safest route. | ||
| It was the only route the logistic company wanted to support. | ||
| And it falls completely in the distinctions of what is known as unassisted. | ||
| And he kind of makes this claim about that's not true, where people are Rethinking it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So they're now, because of some of this, the polar community have gotten together after my project. | ||
| So my project squarely falls in the definitions as they were, followed all of the rules and all of this. | ||
| Now, now they're sitting together and they're saying, you know, maybe we should rewrite some of these rules or make certain definitions different. | ||
| Which, by the way, if they want to change rules, that's totally fine. | ||
| The problem is, it would be like this. | ||
| This is like, well, them calling me sort of like a liar or something would be equivalent of this. | ||
| With Major League Baseball got together and said, you know what? | ||
| All games in baseball are going to be 10 innings now instead of 9 innings. | ||
| And all of those guys over the last hundred years that played 200,000 games or whatever, who played nine innings, they cheated, they lied, they didn't play the full game. | ||
| If they want to change whatever distinctions or classifications or stuff forward-looking, great. | ||
| And what would the distinctions be that they would change? | ||
| You can't do it on a road? | ||
| So I think they're trying to make it finer grained, which is like there would be like a kite distinction. | ||
| There would be a no supported distinction. | ||
| There would be a distinction for using, you know, partial of a, if there was a flagging or this like, you know, road, which by the way, is not a road to be clear. | ||
| It's snow and ice. | ||
| Do you have images of this road? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| There's a... | ||
| But at no point in time, was it like flat ground? | ||
| No, it's ice and snow where a tractor, you might see like some wheels. | ||
| And in fact, Lou Rudd, who's the other guy who I was racing out there in Antarctica, he wrote a whole blog post about that's linked to in my letter. | ||
| And, you know, of course, he did the exact same thing as me, by the way. | ||
| The exact same thing, same distinction. | ||
| And, you know, I finished a couple days ahead of him, but what he did was... | ||
| Absolutely incredible is this race, and we talk a lot about it in the book, and a ton of respect for that guy as well. | ||
| He's a friend of mine. | ||
| And he writes about this quote-unquote road or the South Pole Overland Traverses. | ||
| It's actually known. | ||
| And he's like, it's rutted up tracks. | ||
| Even in the parts where I saw tire tracks, it's actually worse than- Because you don't slide across it. | ||
| Because you don't slide across it. | ||
| The snow is all rutted up. | ||
| It's chunked up. | ||
| It's actually tripping you. | ||
| It's even worse. | ||
| Like skiing on broken ice versus powder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this journalist and other people who are saying this, this is not like they've been out there before. | ||
| The thing is, it's an attractive thing to say. | ||
| Part of his journey was actually on a road. | ||
| You're like, oh, fuck that guy. | ||
| There's a road in Antarctica? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's how it sounds. | ||
| When you say part of it was on a road, it sounds like this is the road. | ||
| Oh, Christ. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's the road. | ||
| But that ain't not really a fucking road, man. | ||
| That's just flat snow. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that would be like the best case. | ||
| Most of the time it's wind blowing across it. | ||
| Like that's on the perfect conditions, perfect sunny day. | ||
| But look to the left and look to the right. | ||
| Like it doesn't make a difference. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| That's really deceptive that they wrote that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's really deceptive. | ||
| Because they made it seem like, oh, and then he gets to the highway and he's just walking. | ||
| It's like hitchhiking, put my thumb out, pick up a bus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on, man. | |
| He still went 54 fucking days across Antarctica. | ||
| And I know they acknowledged that in a small way in the article, but they really... | ||
| Like, just that. | ||
| Just the description, calling that a road. | ||
| Like, that is, I mean, sort of technically a road. | ||
| There's no fucking ground, man. | ||
| It's just all ice and snow. | ||
| You don't see the ground. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And like I said, I was transparent about it. | ||
| That was my route. | ||
| Asked all the people. | ||
| They're like, yep, you're within the rules. | ||
| You're doing the right thing. | ||
| No one's ever done this before. | ||
| And then, you know. | ||
| Damn, everybody's a fucking hater. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the world we live in, unfortunately. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crabs in a bucket. | |
| You know that expression? | ||
| No, tell me that. | ||
| Throw crabs in a bucket, none of them ever get out, because when they try to get out, the other ones grab them and drag them down. | ||
| Oh, yeah, exactly, exactly. | ||
| They're piling on top of each other, the other crabs, just get out in here with me, fuck, I can't walk 54 days, you can't either, bitch. | ||
| Just drag you. | ||
| Onward, onward, onward. | ||
| Onward is nice, but man, it's really disturbing. | ||
| Have you thought about suing them? | ||
| Drop the hammer, son. | ||
| Call the Jews. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you know any good Jews? | ||
| They're attorneys. | ||
| Is that racist to say? | ||
| I don't think it is because they're positive. | ||
| They're really good at it. | ||
| Some would say they're not, that it is racist or anti-Semitic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you have a Jewish attorney? | ||
| I do not have a Jewish attorney. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just get one. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm sure there's some Irish attorneys that are awesome too. | ||
| That's a weird one, right? | ||
| Racism when it's positive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you say black guys have big dicks, people will get mad at you. | |
| I'm just saying they're awesome. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's a weird one. | ||
| It's not really racist. | ||
| Italians make really good pizza. | ||
| Is that racist? | ||
| I love pizza. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| Sorry, we got way off track. | ||
| So put this stuff aside. | ||
| Have you considered legal action? | ||
| Like I said, I published this 16-page document that's on my website. | ||
| I sent it to the editor of National Geographic. | ||
| They have acknowledged that they've received it, and like I said, it's been a holiday weekend, so they've had a few days to have it, and hopefully they do the right thing. | ||
| Ultimately, it's defaming. | ||
| It's ultimately painting the wrong picture. | ||
| Is it in print? | ||
| Their version is in print as well as online, or just online? | ||
| Oh, their article is just online. | ||
| I hope they take it down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the problem is then someone's already seen it. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| People are writing on my Instagram like, you liar, I fucking hate you, I hope you die. | ||
| And you're like, whoa, man. | ||
| And that hurts, man. | ||
| I'm not going to lie, I'm a human being. | ||
| It hurts my feelings to see that, particularly when it's about something that's completely not true. | ||
| People are saying, I heard you took a fucking Uber out there and you just walked on this road. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, but, you know. | ||
| That is the problem with those kind of articles. | ||
| That right there, in a nutshell, is that especially people that sort of peripherally look at them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't really go through it extensively and examine what this guy's saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So hopefully it doesn't come to legal action. | ||
| Hopefully they do the right thing here. | ||
| They've reviewed the facts and we can move on. | ||
| Dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Call a lawyer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Make it happen. | ||
| So now you get through this, right? | ||
| You write your book and you get in this rowboat journey. | ||
| Had the rowboat journey been done before? | ||
| So the rowboat before, there's a storied history of ocean rowing. | ||
| So ocean rowing... | ||
| Sure, the Polynesians. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it goes way back, but even kind of as a sport, and maybe the polar community wants to do this more formally, but there's something called the Ocean Rowing Society that has the records of different rows going back over time. | ||
| There's this race across the Atlantic that happens called the Talisker Whiskey Ocean Race across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean every winter that happens. | ||
| And so Ocean Rowing, I mean, it's a subculture. | ||
| It's a small subculture, don't get me wrong, but it happens. | ||
| Like, it's a thing. | ||
| You know, there's boats, there's races, there's competitions. | ||
| But had anybody gone through that path? | ||
| Yeah, so Drake Passage had never been rowed fully and completely before. | ||
| There was a guy who's a fucking legend as well. | ||
| I wish he was still alive because I'd love to sit down more than anything with this guy. | ||
| His name is Ned Gillette. | ||
| A true, true explorer. | ||
| He actually got killed in the late 90s, I believe, when he was climbing in the Himalayas or in Pakistan. | ||
| He got shot by someone who came through the camp. | ||
| I don't know the whole story. | ||
| It was a super sad story. | ||
| But he's done all of these projects. | ||
| Before social media and stuff like this, this guy was out there doing these badass things. | ||
| And he... | ||
| He made this boat called the Sea Tomato, and he took it down to Chile to try to kind of do what was kind of a hybrid row and sail. | ||
| And so he has a sailing mast on there. | ||
| He's got oars. | ||
| He's got four guys with him. | ||
| They try it the first season. | ||
| They actually can't even launch their boat off of Cape Horn. | ||
| So they wait a whole other year. | ||
| And then the second year, they launch the Sea Tomato under sail. | ||
| Why do they have to wait a year? | ||
| Because the weather, I mean, Drake Passage is, we'll get to that, but it is gnarly, bro. | ||
| Like, it is like, I mean, people, you know, as you say, going around the Horn, people say that in sailing. | ||
| Like, Cape Horn is known to just be, like, just treacherous, brutal water as the two of these oceans kind of collide and these huge standing waves come up. | ||
| So a whole season, they sat down there with the rowboat and didn't even launch it. | ||
| Then the next year came back, him and four guys. | ||
| How small is the window where you can make it across? | ||
| So, basically, the best time of year to do it would be December, January, because that's the Southern Hemisphere summer. | ||
| And so the temperature is a little bit warmer, you've got longer days. | ||
| We purposefully did it over the summer solstice, so December 21st, you know, that'd be June 21st for us in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year. | ||
| We still had night, you know, a few hours of darkness every single night, but we at least had the longer days, because once it gets dark, and there's waves coming at you from every single direction, I mean, it is... | ||
| Fucking scary, man. | ||
| This is it? | ||
| This is Drake Passage, obviously, as seen from a bigger boat than mine, but, you know. | ||
| Oh, fuck that. | ||
| Can I see what it was like in your boat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you pull up my Instagram... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's insane, dude. | |
| If you pull up my Instagram... | ||
| How many people die out there? | ||
| I mean, I don't know the numbers, but a plane crash happened the day we were leaving and 38 people died in a plane crash in Drake Passage as we were about to depart on our road. | ||
| That's a whole other crazy story. | ||
| But, you know, there's shipwrecks out there. | ||
| There's boats that have gone down. | ||
| There was a... | ||
| A cruise ship, I think, that went down in the 2000s. | ||
| In Drake Passage? | ||
| In Drake Passage, yeah. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I hope I don't get that story completely wrong, but I'm pretty sure a big boat went down in the last 10 years or so. | ||
| What the fuck is a cruise ship doing there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They go to Antarctica. | |
| Who wants to see that? | ||
| They go to the Peninsula of Antarctica. | ||
| So actually, there's quite a few cruise ships. | ||
| Yeah, so here's me. | ||
| So it's actually fairly calm sometimes. | ||
| I mean, some of the times. | ||
| Yeah, you got some swells, but I mean... | ||
| You'll see this next part. | ||
| So this is me in the tiny little cabin. | ||
| I mean, waves coming over. | ||
| They're crashing us pretty good. | ||
| So where's the cabin closest to us? | ||
| Yeah, closest to us, there's the little cabin I was in. | ||
| There was just one of us in there. | ||
| And this is us putting out something called the sea anchor. | ||
| That's when the waves got so big or the wind and swell was against us so much that we couldn't row anymore. | ||
| And it's like throwing a parachute that basically kind of tries to hold you in place. | ||
| How does the sea anchor work? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| So it's like a huge parachute, basically. | ||
| It's in the water? | ||
| And you put it in the water and it fills with water and it holds the boat into place. | ||
| I mean, not very well. | ||
| Even in this, if we had the volume up, it's me basically talking about how we're getting pushed back in the wrong direction, but we don't have the strength to row against it anymore. | ||
| Just getting hammered. | ||
| How far did it push you back? | ||
| I think that time it pushed us back like 15 or 20 miles. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| So you lose 15 or 20 miles of progress. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was the longest sea anchor. | ||
| I believe we were on it for 26 hours. | ||
| And so what happens is, like you saw on the boat, there's three people rowing, three people in the cabins at any given time. | ||
| And the cabins are tiny. | ||
| Even with one person on one side like I was, two on the other side, you're like smashing there like a sardine. | ||
| But then when you put the sea anchor out, no one's rowing anymore. | ||
| And that open decking, it's like really dangerous to just be sitting out there. | ||
| So we all try to get in the cabins. | ||
| But like this Icelandic dude who's the captain, Fionn Paul, I mean, he's like amazing rowing, six foot two, broad shoulders, whatever. | ||
| All of a sudden, the two of us are jammed inside of like the smallest little compartment. | ||
| It's like two feet, around three feet wide by three feet tall. | ||
| We're like spooning each other. | ||
| We're wet. | ||
| We're cold. | ||
| We're in there for 26 hours that time. | ||
| How did you guys poop? | ||
| So if you look, this one shows kind of the wave, the big swell. | ||
| I'm the one in the back there, and I'm sitting right next to a really fancy toilet, a little something called a five-gallon bucket. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's what you did. | |
| You pooped in a bucket. | ||
| Pooped in a bucket, not too fancy. | ||
| And then chuck it overside. | ||
| Yeah, and then the fish can snack on that. | ||
| But you obviously get, not only were we spooning under sea anchors, smashing these little things, and oftentimes those other guys in the other compartment were either three Three of them were inside the compartment at a time and one would be sitting out and taking shifts or they sometimes smashed four in there. | ||
| But I mean, they're like literally on top of each other. | ||
| So we got close. | ||
| But then also, obviously, there's no space on the deck. | ||
| So it's like, hey, man, just turn your head away. | ||
| I'm going to be, you know, pooping basically a foot away from you while you row into this bucket. | ||
| Like, don't mind me. | ||
| Those mountain houses will create some horrible smells on your body. | ||
| I've had those mountain houses while hunting. | ||
| They're rough. | ||
| Especially for me because I don't eat a lot of carbs. | ||
| It's all like, you know. | ||
| They taste good though. | ||
| They do taste good. | ||
| Especially when you're in the middle of the ocean. | ||
| I bet they're delicious. | ||
| I loved them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| That and the bars. | ||
| I was happy with the eating was good. | ||
| When you're halfway out there, was there any point in time where you're like, what the fuck is wrong with me? | ||
| Why am I doing this? | ||
| Yes, 100%. | ||
| So, one of the things, like, you know, people have asked me, was, you know, solo Antarctica crossing harder in the row, whatever, and it's like, they're very different. | ||
| But one of the things that was so rude about this, Antarctica and the crossing was a lot colder than the Drake Passage row. | ||
| It was about average temperature when we were out there was probably like... | ||
| In the low 30s, you know, dipped below a few times. | ||
| But the ocean temperature, like I said, it's 32, you know, 33, you know, just above freezing. | ||
| There's icebergs in the water when we're getting close to it. | ||
| And you're just getting splashed the entire time. | ||
| So from like minute one, hour one, leaving Cape Horn, we are soaking wet. | ||
| And what kind of equipment are you wearing? | ||
| What kind of gear are you wearing that keeps you from... | ||
| Getting really cold. | ||
| So we started out in just this Gore-Tex, this thick saline Gore-Tex basically, and that worked pretty well for the first few days. | ||
| But one of the other cool innovations that Fionn thought of having done so much ocean rowing is he was like, dude, the only way this is going to work is if we have some sort of dry suit. | ||
| It's just too cold. | ||
| But you start looking at dry suits and you're like, you could never row. | ||
| You couldn't be functional wearing this crazy dry suit, right? | ||
| And so, he basically says, he spends the year, one of the things that he did is he found this, like, Polish manufacturer, and we all got our bodies measured, you know, 25, 6 different measurements and all this, and basically created these custom dry suits that were a lot thinner than a typical dry suit, but kept us dry, but also allowed us to have the mobility on the oars, and it was really actually built for the sitting position and the leg, you know, the leg press and the arm motion and all that of rowing. | ||
| So it was awesome innovation. | ||
| And we got just, I mean, thank God we had those because we were getting soaked. | ||
| I mean, we were getting so, so, so soaked out there. | ||
| And in the 90 minutes, you would think like, oh, in the 90 minutes, quote unquote, rest phase, you would get in there, you know, maybe change clothes or something like that. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| Like we had these suits on. | ||
| We're soaking wet. | ||
| We'd get in the cabin. | ||
| We were all sharing like one sleeping bag. | ||
| Like I had just one sleeping bag that Fian and I were alternating. | ||
| It's soaking wet after the first day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's basically like, if I showed you what it looked like on the last day, you'd be like, I wouldn't sit in there for one minute, let alone try to sleep. | ||
| There's no pail. | ||
| There's brown water on the bottom. | ||
| It's the smells from us living in and out of there. | ||
| I mean, it was grimy and wet and cold. | ||
| But these suits suited us pretty well. | ||
| The one thing that was great, obviously, we were clipped in for safety. | ||
| So we were clipped into basically these ropes that you saw on the edge there. | ||
| So if we were going to get knocked off... | ||
| The boat hopefully we would be able to clip in, or the boat itself actually fully self-right, so if it rolls over, it hypothetically rolls back over the top. | ||
| We had some close coals, but we never fully rolled it, thank God, but we did test that. | ||
| But one of the things about the suits is the suits basically have like neoprene booties. | ||
| It's all like one piece, like you would have in a dry suit, which was awesome for keeping us safe and dry, but I didn't take the suit off for the last six or seven days at all. | ||
| And so when I finally took the suit off, my feet, like you think about your fingers getting like pruney maybe like, you know, in a swimming pool for a couple hours or hot tub or something like that. | ||
| Like imagine seven days of wet and cold and sweat and like all the things. | ||
| Like when I took the suit off, like I almost threw up on the ground. | ||
| Because it was just gnarly, festering skin, and skin was ripping off of my feet. | ||
| It was nasty. | ||
| How long did it take you to recover from that? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| It's hard to put the point on, like, oh, I'm recovered, but it definitely took a few weeks to just kind of get everything back, the stability back in the body, mind, all of that. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| It was interesting, for sure. | ||
| What are you going to do next? | ||
| Because I know you. | ||
| You're one of those dudes. | ||
| You have to keep doing these things. | ||
| Once you've done two of these things, you're going to keep doing these things. | ||
| Yeah, I did a couple before that, too. | ||
| But I think last time your advice to me was stop. | ||
| Stop while you're alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you didn't listen, obviously, so don't listen to me anymore anyway. | |
| Just keep doing what you gotta do. | ||
| You know, look, I'm passionate about these things. | ||
| It's super fun. | ||
| I do them because I like testing the edges of my potential. | ||
| I like exploring different places. | ||
| Like I said, I'd never rowed a boat before and to kind of take this project on and say, I've done expeditions before. | ||
| I've pushed my body in deep and interesting ways. | ||
| But one of my biggest curiosities is certainly about the mind, but particularly growth mindset. | ||
| Can I say, I'm not a rower, But in the course of a year of training, I'm going to train myself up, get on a team with some amazingly accomplished watermen, and learn the skills required to make this crossing. | ||
| And it was cool to kind of prove that out this year because I think that that really applies across so many things. | ||
| And I'm just a generally curious person. | ||
| And I think I'll keep pushing myself and pushing my body because that's one of the things I love to do. | ||
| But I think that curiosity throughout my life is going to be, you know, a lifelong path of diving into sort of different things and taking them on. | ||
| I think that to me, one of my biggest sadnesses and one of the things I like to say to people is like, you know, people come to a certain point in their life and they're like, I'm a lawyer, or I'm good at math, or I'm terrible at art, or I could never do comedy because I'm not the funny one. | ||
| These limiting beliefs inside of us. | ||
| I could be like, dude, I've never rowed ever in my life. | ||
| I'm 34 years old. | ||
| I've never rowed a boat, but it doesn't mean I can't learn now to row a boat. | ||
| Seems pretty straightforward. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How hard could it be? | ||
| You had a little leg action, too. | ||
| What did you do to prepare for it physically? | ||
| The physical prep was pretty cool. | ||
| I don't know if you remember from last time, but I have this coach. | ||
| His name is Mike McCassle. | ||
| He's just this legendary guy. | ||
| He's done 5,800 pull-ups in 24 hours. | ||
| He's pulled a truck across Death Valley. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| Yeah, he's a total legend. | ||
| And he trained me up for Antarctica. | ||
| I mean, I came to him and I said, hey, look, like, I'm not the most experienced polar explorer. | ||
| I got to pull this 375-pound sled. | ||
| Like, what do you think? | ||
| How can you train me up? | ||
| And he came up with such cool training methodologies for that. | ||
| Like, one of the things he had me doing for Antarctica was he had me, you know, I was doing planks with my hands in ice buckets. | ||
| And, you know, as my heart rate's getting jacked up, he's having me hold that. | ||
| And all of a sudden, he's like, all right, get out. | ||
| And I'm doing a wall sit, but now my feet are in the ice buckets. | ||
| And he puts a weight plate on top of my legs. | ||
| And he's like, okay. | ||
| And then he hands me these Legos. | ||
| And he's like, solve these Lego problems. | ||
| And until you don't solve this Lego and build this little, like, you know, aircraft Lego man or whatever, you know, you can't get your feet out of the ice bucket. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| What the hell is going on? | ||
| But he's like, look, you're going to be in Antarctica. | ||
| Your life is going to depend on you securing your tent right or tying down the ropes properly or this and that and the other thing. | ||
| You're going to be cold. | ||
| Your hands are going to be frozen. | ||
| You're going to be tired, but you're going to need your mind, your dexterity to be there. | ||
| Yeah, there's a picture of that, of Mike bringing me through that. | ||
| And so with the row... | ||
| It was super cool to come to him again and say, hey man, there's no blueprint for this. | ||
| There's no blueprint for this. | ||
| There's no one that's done a fully human power crossing of Drake Passage before to the Antarctic Peninsula. | ||
| There's some ocean rowers, but this is different. | ||
| How should we prepare for this? | ||
| And Mike, it's not like he's like, well, I know everything about ocean rowing, but that same curiosity, that same growth mindset, I trust his ability to train me. | ||
| He's like, I don't know, man. | ||
| Let's start thinking through this. | ||
| And so in the gym, I mean, we did all sorts of creative things. | ||
| He brought the ice back. | ||
| He started putting a rowing machine on BOSU balls, like half BOSU balls, basically. | ||
| And I'd start rowing, you know, doing normal rowing motion, but he'd start shaking it around because basically the ocean is going to be moving me around so much. | ||
| So just the rowing motion isn't going to prepare me for the lateral movements, you know? | ||
| The lats, the obliques, you know, all the kind of side-to-side stability stuff. | ||
| Then he took it one step further, which is he actually shows up at my house, knocks on my door at 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| I think he had prearranged it with my wife. | ||
| Knocks on the door and he's like, get up. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| And he's like, we're going. | ||
| We're training right now. | ||
| And he gets me. | ||
| He's got those BOSU balls, but now it's the middle of the night, so I'm sleep deprived. | ||
| I'm kind of disoriented. | ||
| Now he's got me on the BOSU balls and he had brought these buckets of It says training for the drake the impossible row episode three you could find it online jamie it's on the discovery channel youtube page What did you | ||
| do for rowing? | ||
| For the specific muscles of rowing yourself? | ||
| Did you lift weights? | ||
| Did you do rows? | ||
| Did you use a rowing machine? | ||
| Yeah, so the rowing machine on the BOSU balls, that's like in the gym. | ||
| Also, a lot of deadlift was really useful. | ||
| And then a lot of stability stuff. | ||
| So Mike would have me do certain things like we'd have, you know, like a seated row or something like that. | ||
| Or monathons, I thought that was the most interesting because it was going to be destable. | ||
| So the waves are usually coming from, they change directions, but at any given time they're coming generally from one direction. | ||
| So you're either leaning in really hard to your left side or you're leaning in really hard to your right side. | ||
| That's a difference to the ocean rowing than just like a pure river rowing. | ||
| And, you know, he would have me basically like holding, imagine like a deadlift bar, and then I'd have my eyes closed, I'd be holding it there in kind of an isometric motion, and then he would pull the plate A light plate off one of the sides and so I'd have to stabilize and catch you know either my left side or my right side so a lot of stabilization and balance stuff and then the other piece that was huge you know Mike you know admittedly doesn't know a lot about rowing specifically in terms of the technique of rowing and the technique of rowing is actually very specific | ||
| and so A friend of mine, a guy named Chris Woida from Portland, I called him up and he's like this champion rower, collegiate rower, rowing coach, and he took me out on the Willamette River in Portland in a single man, like, rowing skull. | ||
| So very different than an ocean rowboat. | ||
| You know, an ocean rowboat's a lot bigger, different, different waves. | ||
| But he taught me on the river the actual purity of the rowing motion. | ||
| So a lot of the training and the physical aspects of getting stronger was with Mike and the mindset and the ice and all the things we did there. | ||
| But certainly the stuff that we did on the river in the Willamette with Chris was huge for me to actually understand the motion. | ||
| I just like you when you're like, how hard can it be? | ||
| Just kind of push your arms, you know, back and forth. | ||
| It's a pretty complicated motion. | ||
| It's a full body thing. | ||
| It's a coordinated, right? | ||
| It's a very coordinated thing. | ||
| You know, you're powering out of different things. | ||
| And certainly on river rowing, you're having to, you know, square. | ||
| It's called squaring the blades. | ||
| You know, you've got to take some blades out of the water and, you know, turning them so they can just glide across the top and get back in and glide and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So there's a lot to the motion. | ||
| And so it was a short period of time. | ||
| I didn't take my first stroke in a rowboat until July in the river and then August in the ocean rowboat when we came together as a team for the first time to train in Scotland. | ||
| And then I was rowing across the Drake in December. | ||
| So it was a pretty short period of time to kind of learn about rowing and get stronger. | ||
| But it was a fun process to dive into something completely new. | ||
| So all from August, September, October, November into December, did you train and row all the time? | ||
| You know, quite a lot, but there was other things going on. | ||
| I was writing a book. | ||
| Oh, you were writing the book at the same time? | ||
| Yeah, I was writing the book at the same time. | ||
| You know, I was traveling, doing different things. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, obviously the training was the core focus. | ||
| But it wasn't like I was like, every day I was always doing is rowing 10 hours a day or something like that. | ||
| There was, you know, other things going on. | ||
| I would imagine you would need some pretty spectacular endurance to do that 90 minutes on the hour every 90 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, so you got 90 minutes on, 90 minutes off, 90 minutes on, 90 minutes off. | ||
| How did you guys devise that strategy for doing it that way, just to not burn yourselves out too much? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so like I said, Fion has a lot of ocean rowing experience, and from his other expeditions, we kind of collectively talked about it as a team, and he was just like, okay, this is what he felt has worked the best for people to do a long stretch, get enough rest, but obviously maybe the first day or two, you think, oh, I could row for... | ||
| Four hours at a time or something like that, and you get a longer stretch of rest. | ||
| But over time, your body really starts to wear it down, and so he kind of felt that was the happy balance. | ||
| I was delirious. | ||
| We were all delirious and sleep-deprived, and it got weird out there for sure, but I think it was the best. | ||
| My body actually held up pretty well. | ||
| Did you hallucinate at all? | ||
| Yeah, it was wild. | ||
| The things going on in my mind. | ||
| The night shift was really crazy. | ||
| The light nights weren't super long. | ||
| You got about three hours of darkness every single night, but that meant at least one 90-minute shift. | ||
| I don't know where you're going And a guy named Cam Bellamy, a South African guy. | ||
| I've got a funny story about him. | ||
| He's an absolute legend. | ||
| So there's the three of us out there rowing on our shift, and the other shift was Andrew, John, and Fion. | ||
| And on our shift, in the middle of the night, I don't know how it started, but it was one of the first nights that we were out there. | ||
| It's kind of like, you've been rowing all day, and then all of a sudden, now you're wet and cold and it's dark. | ||
| It's just like, this sucks. | ||
| Those are those moments when you're having your lowest moments. | ||
| And you might make fun of me, but we started singing, man. | ||
| We just started singing out there. | ||
| Why would I make fun of you for singing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I didn't make funny for rolling across the ocean. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| You know, we started singing. | ||
| Like, I think I just started belting out one day. | ||
| You know, I was actually born on a hippie commune. | ||
| My mom played Bob Marley Redemption Thong throughout my entire birth. | ||
| There's like, you know, people watch my birth on my futon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I started, oh, pirates, yes, they rob I, sold I to the merchant ships. | |
| We're just belting it out. | ||
| No, I mean, my voice is terrible, but we're having fun. | ||
| Did you hate these guys by the end of the trip? | ||
| You know, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It was intense. | ||
| Did anybody hate you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You have to ask them, I guess. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Honestly, it was a crazy social experiment. | ||
| We've got guys from four different countries, three different continents. | ||
| No one knows each other super well. | ||
| A few of them had done a project before in the past, so they know each other a bit better. | ||
| But in general, it's not like it was six guys who were like, oh, we've done a bunch of stuff together. | ||
| We're bros. | ||
| We both hang out. | ||
| And it really, you know, required some really diligent kind of human dynamics to bring it all together. | ||
| One of the things, we came together in Scotland in August and we rode for the first time. | ||
| That's the first time we all met each other. | ||
| We came together. | ||
| That's where our rowboat was. | ||
| We were getting it custom built and built out. | ||
| And then that was the only time we saw each other in person. | ||
| We had these Skype calls and stuff. | ||
| And then we got down to Punta Reina, which is where we staged it out of in Chile, in Southern Chile there. | ||
| That's kind of, we got our robo, we imported it, we're getting everything going. | ||
| And those 10 days in preparation were some of the absolute hardest of the entire project, getting to the start line, right? | ||
| You know, there's gear everywhere. | ||
| We're trying to figure out how it all fits. | ||
| Like, you know, how are we going to fit all this food in here and our personal gear and there's nowhere this. | ||
| We're trying to pack the boat and like, you know, tensions are elevated. | ||
| Everyone's just kind of like nervous. | ||
| Like the reality of what we're about to do is setting in. | ||
| And, you know, there was kind of some breaking points. | ||
| And to credit where credit's due, one of the guys named Andrew Town, absolute amazing guy. | ||
| He's actually a management consultant. | ||
| So he's like a lawyer, businessman, management consultant. | ||
| And he's like, he's like facilitates all these conversations in his work. | ||
| And he sits us down and he goes, hey guys, like we need to have like a real conversation about like teamwork and what's going on. | ||
| Cause there's six of us in this tiny little boat, life on the lines. | ||
| We come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different things. | ||
| Like let's set some intentions. | ||
| And, you know, at first I think we're all maybe a little bit skeptical, but he sits us down and we have this conversation about like, you know, let's talk, let's talk, let's talk real. | ||
| Like, what are our real fears going into this? | ||
| Like, what are our vulnerabilities? | ||
| What are our weaknesses? | ||
| How can we trust one another? | ||
| And, you know, we all were very honest with one another. | ||
| And I think it really set the tone for the entire thing. | ||
| One of the guys is a school principal. | ||
| He's got a two year old daughter at home and he's like, Hey guys, like, I want to do this. | ||
| Like, I want to be a part of this project, but like, here's some of my fears. | ||
| And for me, I'm like, look, we've got to have a communication. | ||
| We've got to be able to stay to each other. | ||
| If we're having a bad day, we've got to just be honest. | ||
| Like, hey, I'm not having a good day, but it's not because I'm a bad person. | ||
| We've got to support one another. | ||
| And really having that facilitated conversation as a team early on before we were out in the water and the intensity, I think carried us through. | ||
| And I'm so, so, so grateful that Andrew facilitated that conversation because that was a really turning point in the group dynamics. | ||
| And so the Discovery Channel was their idea for this thing? | ||
| No. | ||
| Did they come to you guys? | ||
| Yeah, so the whole discovery thing is a really cool part of this. | ||
| So basically what happens, Fion had the idea for it, this legendary ocean rower, but the component parts of pulling it all together are really complicated. | ||
| One of the reasons is because... | ||
| So, say you owned a yacht or something like that, and you're like, you know what, Colin, I want to take my yacht to Antarctica. | ||
| Like, that's not really something that you can just do. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of environmental protections and laws and things like that. | ||
| There's, like, specific boats that have, like, permitting. | ||
| It's called the IAETO treaty. | ||
| And it's basically what governs tourism in Antarctica. | ||
| And the reason they do that is because of sort of environmental concerns in Antarctica. | ||
| And it's a really good thing. | ||
| But turns out like my ocean rowboat is not like part of like the full treaty of Antarctica. | ||
| And so the only way to do it and be like well within the rules and like above board within everything that's going on in Antarctica, all the environmental protection is to have one of the IAETO certified boats there And so what we realized is we needed what was called a supervising vessel. | ||
| Not a vessel that would give us support in the middle and hang out with us and we could jump off and take a hot shower, but a boat that's basically overseeing the totality of the project and also has us being fully permitted throughout that. | ||
| And so we're like, okay, that's interesting. | ||
| There's going to be this other boat out there. | ||
| We've got to figure out who this is. | ||
| It's super expensive. | ||
| So we've got to raise the money to make sure we can have that. | ||
| You know, all these types of things. | ||
| The only way it can work. | ||
| We kind of got set to work on doing that. | ||
| Myself, my wife Jenna, she builds these projects with me. | ||
| Blake, who works with me, and a bunch of people kind of working on kind of the details of it. | ||
| And we quickly realized, like, wow, what an amazing opportunity. | ||
| If we have this other boat out there... | ||
| We can film this thing. | ||
| And I've wanted to film some of my projects and share them really widely before, but when you're walking across Antarctica, dragging a 375-pound sled, and the whole purpose of the goal was to be solo, it's not like you can have a cameraman just hanging out there shooting you. | ||
| I mean, although there's just a road, so there's just people hanging out there. | ||
| L-O-L. L-O-L. But basically, that's when we said, hey, let's see if someone will be interested in coming on as a media partner of this and really filming this and sharing this in a big way. | ||
| And so we got to talking with Discovery. | ||
| They got on board of it. | ||
| And it was a really cool vision. | ||
| It was kind of a combined vision of theirs and ours. | ||
| Through all my other projects, I mentioned the GPS through my last, you know, Antarctica Crossing and my other previous world records before. | ||
| I always carry this GPS and share it in real time. | ||
| I have this non-profit where... | ||
| During the row there were 600,000 school kids and school curriculums we built around like ocean and environmental learning and stuff like that all incorporated into the kind of daily following along with the science and curriculum. | ||
| So I always wanted to share the projects in real time. | ||
| And so we talked to Discover and they're like, this is super cool. | ||
| Let's do three different things at once here. | ||
| So we invest in all this satellite technology with Iridium, the Iridium satellites. | ||
| And they were able to basically allow us to do social media during the time. | ||
| So if you're sitting at home on Christmas Day as we're arriving in Antarctica, like you watching me bouncing around on this rowboat, you can follow the whole thing. | ||
| And who's doing this? | ||
| The other boat? | ||
| So yeah, they have the satellites on the other boat, but I'm shooting the social media and the content on my boat. | ||
| And the other boat is powered how? | ||
| It's like a 120-foot boat with a proper engine. | ||
| Well, that's nice that they were with you, too. | ||
| So shit goes sideways. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So definitely had that as the... | ||
| Why didn't you tell them to carry the food, too? | ||
| So the unsupported part of the project means the second we launched, they couldn't touch us. | ||
| If they touched us, it's catastrophic. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| That's the end of the thing. | ||
| And so my wife was on board that. | ||
| She runs all the best projects for me in the background. | ||
| So she crossed the Drake in this larger boat, which for Drake Passage standards is still a much smaller boat. | ||
| There were five guys who ran the boat and then five guys on the Discovery film crew. | ||
| But they rigged our ocean rowboat up with all these GoPros and batteries and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| So we were completely self-sufficient on the boat itself and just had to switch out memory cards and stuff for ourselves. | ||
| But what ended up happening is there was a social media component happening live. | ||
| And then what Jamie just pulled up in the video of me training, there's these 14 episodes on Discovery Go that are online right now. | ||
| And they're all like five to 10 minutes long that kind of tell the story in mid-form episodes, which is cool because that was coming out concurrently. | ||
| So while we were out there, they were putting these pieces of content sent out by the satellites that people could see. | ||
| And then this spring, a couple months from now, they're going to have a long-form documentary that comes out about the entire thing. | ||
| And there's definitely been some really cool footage of ocean rowing expeditions in the past. | ||
| But to have a boat out there and to be able to shoot it from the perspective of not on the rowboats, Sometimes on the rowboat, it's weird. | ||
| You've seen boats in really big swells, but because of the perspective on the rowboat, it's kind of moving with it. | ||
| You can't kind of dwell how big it is. | ||
| But I think there's a video, actually the last video maybe I posted on my Instagram, where you can see my boat just completely disappearing and going up and down and completely disappearing in the waves. | ||
| And they're able to shoot back and get drone footage and all this sort of stuff. | ||
| So the feature-length documentary should come out in a couple months. | ||
| It will be really cool on Discovery. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's just a crazy thing that you've done, and it begs the question. | ||
| When you do crazy things, like, does this change you as a person? | ||
| Walking across Antarctica is one. | ||
| Rowing across the Drake stretch, is it what it's called? | ||
| Drake Passage. | ||
| Drake Passage is another. | ||
| Is this changing you as a person? | ||
| Because these are experiences where you told someone, hey, you're going to sleep 90 minutes at a clip, and then you're going to row for 90 minutes, and you're going to poop into a bucket, and you're going to sleep like a sardine with a bunch of other dudes on this boat. | ||
| You're not going to sleep much. | ||
| You're probably going to hallucinate. | ||
| Sometimes you're going to row in the dark. | ||
| Sing songs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'll get through it, though. | ||
| A couple weeks later, you'll be done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, these are weird things that you're doing that's sort of changing. | ||
| Your personal life experiences are so much more extreme than the average person's. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I mean, you know, one of my reasons for doing this, for sure, is to test the limits of my own potential and grow. | ||
| I'm not doing them just so that I can be the exact same person on the other side of Antarctica or the other side of Drake Passage. | ||
| It's to take that learning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I've been asked a similar question, I guess, before. | ||
| My answer, or the way that I think about it, is I've started to think about life and the totality of life experience between, say, a numerical 1 in 10. 1 being... | ||
| The worst day of your life and 10 being the best day of your life. | ||
| And, you know, one might be, you know, a day that a family member passes away or one might be being wet and cold and freezing in an ocean rowboat, you know, spooning with this other guy and, you know, been shit in a bucket and being exhausted and tired, you know, like just like rough moments in your life, right? | ||
| And 10 is this hedonistic joy, the most pleasure-filled day ever, just happy, joyful, maybe you've succeeded in something you've accomplished, like all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And as I've kind of looked around at the world, people say, what are you afraid of? | ||
| You must not be afraid of being alone or you must not be afraid of, you know, these hard challenges and stuff like that. | ||
| I'm like, well, maybe not. | ||
| But what I'm really afraid of is actually living a life range bound between four and six. | ||
| I think too often people, you know, the typical life experience, unfortunately, because we have some creature comforts, particularly in the Western world, where, you know, you can live a life just stuck between four and six. | ||
| So maybe the happiest day of your year or your week, it's like the Super Bowl and your team wins the Super Bowl and you crush a couple beers with your buddy and you high five and you're like, oh, that was awesome. | ||
| Like, that was cool. | ||
| But it's not 10. I mean, it's a six. | ||
| And then like maybe the worst day of your week, it's like a Monday and your boss yells at you or something like that. | ||
| And you're just like, you're like, oh man, like, That's kind of a bummer, but you know what? | ||
| I don't really give a shit about my job anyways, so I'm not really that bummed about it. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| I'm just kind of in this life of quiet desperation in the middle. | ||
| And I think a lot of that has to do with because we're hedging or we're afraid of the ones. | ||
| We're just like, I don't want to experience a one. | ||
| I don't want to experience discomfort. | ||
| I don't want to experience pain. | ||
| Anything to do that. | ||
| But what I've realized, I think of it like kind of a pendulum, like swinging the totality of life experience. | ||
| Like, to get to the tens, you also need to embrace the ones. | ||
| Like, the totality of life and the experience, it's not, I'm not experiencing these high highs or these hedonistic joys or these beautiful flow states or things like that, you know, in spite of the ones, in spite of the challenge, but it's because of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| By pulling my sled, you know, 53 days, on my 53rd day of pulling my sled across Antarctica, I get there, my hips are poking out, my ribs are sticking out, I'm exhausted. | ||
| I can barely pick my duffel bag up to put it in my sled. | ||
| My body's completely compromised. | ||
| I'm exhausted. | ||
| But then I tap into the deepest flow state of my entire life. | ||
| I find this place in my mind, in my body, in my soul, and, you know, I push 32 hours without stopping to the finish line. | ||
| And I wouldn't have gotten there had I not pushed myself, had I not, you know, gone through this difficulty. | ||
| You know, I like to say that, you know, pain is mandatory. | ||
| These challenges are painful, straight up. | ||
| Pain is mandatory. | ||
| Make no mistake about this. | ||
| The obvious things I'm doing are painful, they're hard, whatever. | ||
| But the suffering part is optional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you don't have to be in these moments so wanting to be like, oh my god, this is horrible, I'm in this, and why did I get my stuff out there, this is terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, and go down this path. | ||
| You're like, I'm doing this because when I step outside of my comfort zone, I grow. | ||
| And as I grow, I can share that with other people and hopefully have that ripple effect of positivity and inspiration that's lasting in the world for others as well. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned one of my favorite quotes ever, the Thoreau quote, most men live lives of quiet desperation. | ||
| I love that, yeah. | ||
| That's a great fucking quote and so damn true. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think you really need very difficult things in your life in order to appreciate real comfort and relaxation. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I don't think you hit it if your whole life is just soft cushions and everything's made out of velour and people are feeding you grapes. | ||
| I think you live like an asshole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think... | ||
| We don't like that because suffering is hard. | ||
| It feels uncomfortable. | ||
| But you don't realize that unless you suffer, you don't appreciate calm. | ||
| You don't appreciate peace. | ||
| I think there's just far too many people out there seeking comfort. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| And I think that it's funny because people are going towards that. | ||
| They're hedging against discomfort. | ||
| Like, okay, how to make this as comfortable as possible? | ||
| And then they sit there and they're like, why am I unsatisfied? | ||
| Why am I not happy? | ||
| And it's like, because you're hedging against discomfort. | ||
| Because you're trying to make, like you said, it's poor education, really. | ||
| People are not educated on what it takes in order to be fulfilled in life. | ||
| The idea is that material possessions or some modicum of success is the goal. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| You know, difficult tasks is what make you do something that's hard to do. | ||
| Do something that's interesting. | ||
| Do something that's complicated and intricate. | ||
| Do something that requires you to stretch your boundaries. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So that's why I'm asking you because you're stretching your boundaries into some weird life, you know, death-defying sort of thing. | ||
| You've done two of these so far. | ||
| Like, what is next? | ||
| Are you going to do ultramarathons? | ||
| Are you going to try to climb mountains? | ||
| Like, what are you going to do? | ||
| I know you got something going on. | ||
| I did a big mountaineering project before any of this. | ||
| For these last two projects, I did something called the Explorers Grand Slam. | ||
| So I climbed the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents and went to the North and South Pole for the last degree of latitude, faster than anyone's done that. | ||
| So I was 139 days back in 2016. So Everest, Danali, Kilimanjaro, etc., back to back. | ||
| The next actual physical project that I have, it's not some world record-breaking thing or anything, but my wife, so one of the things that we do, we have this non-profit, as I mentioned, and love speaking to young people, kind of opening their minds to the outdoors and being stewards of the land and really Inspiring young people to think about, you know, doing hard things and testing themselves. | ||
| It doesn't have to be in the outdoors at all. | ||
| It could be anything, music, art, culture, whatever it is, but to aim high in their life. | ||
| And one question we started asking young people was this question, which is, what's your Everest? | ||
| You know, it's a really obvious metaphor for kids. | ||
| It's like, you know, what's your big goal? | ||
| You know, what is your Everest? | ||
| And kids are amazing. | ||
| In a gymnasium, I get, you know, kids raising their hand going, you know, my Everest would be the first person in my family to graduate from college or, you know, whatever amazing things kids, you know, dream of. | ||
| And help facilitate them towards those goals. | ||
| But about a year ago now, my wife, who's not, you know, didn't grow up, you know, climbing mountains, didn't grow up as an avid athlete or anything. | ||
| She's been wildly supportive of the work we've done. | ||
| A lot of the book is really about our love story and building these projects together. | ||
| But she looks at me and she goes, Colin, my Mount Everest is now to climb Mount Everest. | ||
| And so, we are going back in April. | ||
| I've climbed Mount Everest once before from the Nepalese side, but we're going to go back and climb Everest. | ||
| We'll be there in April, May of this year, so in a couple of months, to climb Mount Everest from the north side. | ||
| And really, for me, that's to be a support, a facilitator of her goal. | ||
| So, the next thing I'm doing kind of in the athletic or outdoor space is actually to support Jenna in climbing Kudanku. | ||
| Literally, her Mount Everest being Mount Everest. | ||
| And it's really cool to see her, you know, just someone so close to me, commit to a goal. | ||
| It's an audacious goal for her. | ||
| For her back, I mean, she's amazing. | ||
| She's strong. | ||
| She's fit. | ||
| She's trained. | ||
| She's ready. | ||
| But like, just like six months ago, I never rode a boat. | ||
| You know, a year ago, yeah, she's climbed some big mountains. | ||
| But to say, hey, I want to climb Mount Everest was a massive goal for her. | ||
| Do you think you're going to do stuff together? | ||
| Like do some death-defying thing together? | ||
| Are you going to get her addicted to this shit now? | ||
| You know, I think, we'll see. | ||
| I think for her, this, I don't want to say it's one and done, but I'm sure that, you know, I don't think she has the huge desire to keep doing these types of things. | ||
| I think the next journey for both of us probably after that is a parenthood, having kids. | ||
| Yeah, that's a journey. | ||
| That's a whole other journey. | ||
| Everest seems very commercialized now. | ||
| I watched some of the footage of the giant line of people trying to summit. | ||
| It's a weird thing now. | ||
| Yeah, so that's from the south side. | ||
| That's the side that I climbed in 2016 from Nepal. | ||
| That photograph was taken from that. | ||
| What a wild and bizarre thing that was, to say the least. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's strange. | |
| Traffic jam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So on the north side, there's less crowds, what we'd be climbing from. | ||
| But also that day, I mean, look, I don't have the answer to the problem. | ||
| That certainly was a problematic thing that happened up there. | ||
| It's kind of a weird, perfect storm a little bit where it was actually really stormy for a while and then people got delayed and the ropes were delayed getting in and all of a sudden there's one good day and everyone goes at the same time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, I don't know what the solution is, but everyone going up at the same time on the same day on one day in May is obviously clearly based on that picture. | ||
| Did anybody die that day? | ||
| Yeah, people did die that day. | ||
| I don't know the exact count, but people did die that day because they got stuck out there and couldn't move one way or the other. | ||
| When I was climbing in 2016, it was actually a somewhat crowded day. | ||
| Nothing like that photo, but it was a more crowded day. | ||
| I was climbing with a Sherpa by the name of Pasang Bode, an incredibly strong guy. | ||
| When we summited together, it was his seventh time on the summit. | ||
| Just an absolute legend. | ||
| And him and I talked about it, and we were behind all these people. | ||
| And we actually made the decision. | ||
| He said, we've got to weigh the kind of pros and cons here. | ||
| If we stay behind people, you're moving as slow as the slowest person in this line. | ||
| And it's just like you've seen those photos. | ||
| It's just not a great situation. | ||
| It's cold. | ||
| You can get frostbite and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And so we actually made the choice to unclip people From the ropes, the fixed rope there on the first half of the summit day, all the way up to a section called the balcony, we actually climbed unroped, but beside the people, because we actually made the call that we said, you know, actually climbing unroped of this section felt safer, you know, risking a slip or a bad fall with no ropes felt safer than being stuck behind some other people. | ||
| And then eventually it did get too stape and too falling off. | ||
| Yeah, that's the photo that Nims Dye took. | ||
| That's a crazy picture. | ||
| I never saw anything like that. | ||
| And that's, I mean, that's definitely the exception, not the rule on Everest. | ||
| But the fact that exists is just horrible. | ||
| I mean, there's horrible, you know, there's nothing good to say about that other than it's just, it's tragic for sure. | ||
| So, you know, I think that, again, I don't know what the solution is. | ||
| I'm proud of Jenna for setting this goal. | ||
| And, you know, I think that people should, you know, set that goal. | ||
| I think people... | ||
| If that's what they want to do, great. | ||
| If they want to climb mountains, if they want to do anything, they don't want to stop people from doing that. | ||
| But certainly a situation like that where people are stuck on ropes and dying in a situation where that shouldn't happen like that is a terrible thing. | ||
| So this book, The Impossible First, it's out now. | ||
| People can go get it, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's out now. | ||
| It came out a month ago. | ||
| Are you going to write a book about your rowboat experience as well? | ||
| Do you think I should? | ||
|
unidentified
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Why not? | |
| Fuck it. | ||
| The book, it's also an audio book, so if you don't like reading and you like listening instead, you got the audio book. | ||
| I narrated it myself. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Yeah, I narrated it myself. | ||
| It's out. | ||
| It came out a month ago. | ||
| Just hit the New York Times bestsellers list. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, congratulations. | ||
| Don't die. | ||
| Come back again next time you do something else crazy. | ||
| Yeah, you got it, man. | ||
| What have you talked about? | ||
| Good? | ||
| No? | ||
| Jamie looked over at me like something's going on. | ||
| So, The Impossible First. | ||
| It's out right now. | ||
| Go get it, folks. | ||
| Thanks, Colin. | ||
| Yeah, appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks very much, man. |
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