12 | You Can’t Hold Gratitude and Despair at the Same Time: The True Story of '127 Hours' - Alive Again

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Aim Marion Ralston in two thousand and three got trapped
by a boulder, was the bottom of a canyon for
six days alone, and to amputate my arm with a
dull multitool pocket knife in order to escape. Ever since
that time, I've been sharing about my experience that not

(00:36):
just that I was the guy that cut his arm off,
but that I'm the guy who is smiling when he
cut his arm off, and how that perspective can help
us no matter what sort of adversity we come up
against in our lives.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were
forever altered after having all my died. These are first
hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes
with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share

(01:10):
these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.
Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe
triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Going back into my backgrounds, I was a very intelligent
child growing up that I was accelerated in school gifted
and talented programs, skipped first grade. Also, then, what that
meant was I was a year even two years younger
than a lot of my peers my cohort through elementary school.

(01:42):
My family moved to Colorado from the Midwest in nineteen
eighty seven. I was eleven years old and starting middle
school again, as a new kid from out of state
and being in a family that was decidedly on the
aspiring end of middle class. I wore a lot of

(02:04):
clothes that my mom had helped me get at garage sales. So,
just to paint the picture I was, I was a
different kind of a kid, very easily made. Other was
the target of bullying, being ostracized, excluded, and thereby, over
time even taking on some of these sensibilities that I

(02:26):
was not cool enough. I decided, over the course of
those formative years my adolescence then as well, that I
was going to become the best academic that I could
be and use that as both my source of self
esteem and eventually to create a career and maybe even

(02:47):
a life for myself. That I would show those bullies
who was really the best. You're getting the idea too
that there was. There was some metal health struggles along
the way for me, dealing with anxiety depression, especially around
the ideas that I belonged, that I deserved, that I

(03:10):
was worthy and enough. And after college it came clear
to me that mountaineering, in the books that I was reading,
the adventures and misadventures that I was immersing myself in,
that was my proving ground. I was out of college

(03:30):
and I was suggesting to myself that, oh, I want
to continue to climb these mountains we have in Colorado.
They're called the fourteen Ors fourteen thousand feet high that many,
many thousands of people have climbed them all in the summertime.
There's a list of varying lists between fifty five I

(03:52):
count fifty nine ranked or named summits above fourteen thousand
feet here in Colorado, so we have the most of
any state in in the country, even more than in Alaska.
And I wanted to do them, though in a way
as the ego would have it, to one up anybody
else that had ever done all of this. There have

(04:12):
been a couple people who as partners, had climbed all
of the fourteen Ers in the winter time calendar Winner
between the Solstice and Meet Knox, but no one had
ever climbed them all solo in the Winner. There's my project.
This is the way I'm going to prove that I'm
better than everybody else. I am a hardcore, that I'm cooler,

(04:34):
that I have shown those bullies what's up. That winter
I started, and the adventures built, the misadventures built, The
risks that I took increased. They start fretted with the
ones that were moderate, then got to more advanced, extreme

(04:56):
and even orderlying suicidal in time that over these years
I also got to a place where I realized I
need to be living in and amongst the heart of
and like living in the soul place of these mountains.

(05:18):
I quit my career. I was a mechanical engineer working
for Intel Corporation for these years, and left that all behind.
Moved to Aspen, Colorado, where I took a job at
a mountaineering shop. It's pretty much, you know, way overqualified,
but at the entry level, to just make my minimum wage,
live in the place that I wanted to live all

(05:39):
my dreams and climb these mountains to the extent that
when I came back from several of these climbs. It
was front page news and the local newspapers that world
class mountaineers were saying that I was accomplishing, you know,
world class mountaineering achievements, and so the accolades were there,
The proof was there that I was doing something worthy,

(06:02):
that I must be worthy. And it was also a
time where I was truly discovering what I was capable of.
Reading these books like John Cracker's Story Into an Air
that wondering who would you be if you were out
there in that storm? Would you be, you know, the
guide that goes back into the storm to help rescue others.
Would you be one of the guides who huddles down

(06:24):
with a group that lost in the storm to survive
and not bring as many of them back to camp
as you could. Would you be the guide that fits
with his client until the client dies, and then the
guide dies too, so weakened by having spent his life
force there in companionship. I was having experiences that revealed

(06:46):
these same kinds of answers to these questions about what
would you do if you were out there and your
life were online. I was encountering avalanches, rock fall, blizzard, conditions,

(07:07):
hypothermia of prostbite, even encounters with wild animals along the way,
and all of this building my sense of capacity, and
for somebody in their mid twenties, I think you can
also imagine that the more you overcome, the more you're
somewhat proven to yourself that, oh, I really am invincible,

(07:29):
I can do anything. I also recognized that I was
taking incredible risks and that that required a hardness to me.
I had friends, but I didn't have romantic relationships that
because I felt like in a way that it would
be a distraction that I couldn't take the risk that

(07:50):
I needed to take in my mountaineering project and put
a relationship at risk like that. This leads us up
to the spring of two thousand and three, when I
was done with my winter climbs for the season that
I still had fourteen of the fifty nine mountains left

(08:12):
living in Aspen, and I went out to the desert
for some vacation time at a five day break from
working in the shop and taking all these crazy risks
out in the mountains, And by day three of this vacation,
I embarked on what would have been probably a twelve
hour outing a fifteen mile mountain bike ride along the

(08:36):
mesa top dirt road systems that are out on the
west side of Canyon Lands National Park to the head
of Blue John Canyon, and I was then going to
hike fifteen miles down through the canyon system to get
back to my vehicle. By the end of the day
it was about noon. Then in the middle of the afternoon,

(09:01):
I was on my own in the canyon six seven
miles a long. By two thirty I get to a
low slot in the in the canyon system, and that's
where I would eventually, in short short order, meet my
destiny with a particular boulder. My state of mind on

(09:29):
that Saturday morning, it was April twenty sixth two thousand
and three. I was alone. But two days prior, I
had climbed and skied almost thirteen thousand foot high mountain
outside of Carbondale, Colorado, called Mount Sopras with a friend.
We'd had a great time together. I had done a
canyon hike and a significant bike ride on a slick

(09:51):
rock trail, which is very popular. I was around a
lot of people. On the Friday before Saturday, I was out.
I was on my own. I did encounter too young
whenmen who were also out in Sant Canyon in the
first half of the day, for those first couple of hours,
we descended the upper slot of the canyon together. But
then being on my own, I was in a very
happy place. I was listening to a favorite band, Fish Wow,

(10:16):
live recording of their concerts, and I would record or
trade recordings with others, so I had CDs of a
concert i'd been out just a few months before playing
in my headphones as I'm walking through the desert with
my walkman that I just was out in a very
remote area, but completely at peace and at eades and
moving efficiently through the canyon, so without any sounds of forefloating.

(10:44):
I just ended some very challenging sections of canyon up
above with Megan and Christy, these two new friends who
then they left to get back to their shuttle. I
wanted to do the big drop repel, this big sixty
five foot repel. Boulders fall into the canon, get moved
by flash floods, wedge between walls, debrief piles up behind them,

(11:05):
and then they'll have a drop off the dry fall
or would be a waterfall, when then there's a flash
flood event. Downstream of this drop, there were other rocks
that it tumbled and beyond wedge, so there's a cascade
of boulders blocking the immediate descent there. But those those
rocks wedged between the walls down lower are kind of

(11:25):
an intermediate staircase. You can sort of imagine that I'm
standing almost on the roof low roof of a house,
dangling from the gutter and having to get down to
the ground. I get to where I'm now lowered, and
I'm hanging onto the rock that's at the highest point
I'd been standing on it, And just as I'm about

(11:47):
to be able to reach out to the next boulder
with my feet to then climb down the last few steps,
there the very large rock, this three and a half
foot diameter boulder that I was dangling from, pulls loose.
I dropped to the bottom of the canyon. The boulder's

(12:07):
falling from my head. I put my hands up to
try to protect myself, and in that moment, the boulder
smashes into my hands and it snares my right arm.
This gap between the boulder and the wall. Just before
then the walls of the canyon taper down to the
constriction right in front of my chest. The boulders wedged

(12:28):
between the walls once more, but about seven feet lower down,
right in front of my torso, and with my hand
crushed from the wrist down to the fingertips, and this
impossibly small shadow between the boulder and the canyon wall.
I was standing in the bottom of the canyon. My

(12:49):
feet had hit the ground before I became trapped, so
I was standing in a very narrow part of the spot.
It was barely more than the width of both of
my feet, fourteen sixteen inches across there where my shoulders were.
The canyon widened just a little bit that it was
less than three feet, though across it was really just

(13:11):
a few inches more broad than my shoulders. There's debris
rocks above me. There's some smaller rocks down below, no
standing water. As I'm standing there and the rock has
falling on me, there's first a panic. I'm enraged, the pain.
They are drownale. I spend almost an hour trying to

(13:34):
brute force my way through and rick my arm for
your yeah, push the rock, lift it, punch it, trace,
added all of it, just try to get it to
let me go. But I understand immediately that I am
in a terribly profoundly difficult situation, that no one's coming

(13:55):
for help, and that this will kill me over time
if I can't get free. As I process and I'm
finally able to get myself calmed down, start thinking, taking
deep breaths, doing what I didn't really know but was
kind of a meditative practice here to clear the adrenaline,

(14:17):
to clear the emotions and the unhelpful thoughts, and to
really start looking at this as an engineer, as a
problem solver. I'm using brainstorming techniques practice that very much
at my wheelhouse, applying those kinds of more structured and

(14:38):
rational higher brain functioning to this situation. I had knowledge
to stop and stop as an accronate I even use
in this general kind of crisis management protocol where you stop,
you take those deep breasts and then t think that
you start engaging your higher brain and going through yes

(14:59):
like a ration system, oh, making observations, coming up with
the options, and p deciding on a plant. It's a
very rudimentary rubric there, but yeah, to stop and start
applying this process, which I was able to do, and
coming up with, okay, the observations of how I was trapped,
the observations of what do I have with me, the

(15:20):
contents of my backpack, the time, day, the weekend, the setting,
the likelihoods of like somebody coming across me or an
intentional rescue finding me. I'm processing all of this, and
I'm also simultaneously thinking of like, oh, could I signal
passing aircraft? Could I use my my belongings to start

(15:42):
of fire and send smoke signals? Did I try to
use a mirror to reflect light, shouting for help? That
just anything and everything? Using the rocks down by my
feet to try to smash into the bigger boulder to
get me free, using of course, very short order, coming
to the idea I was going to have to use

(16:02):
the pocket knife that I had, Oh, maybe to carve
through the rock and excavate my aunt, but also I
might have to cut my arm off. I think I
was simultaneously both trying to come from a place of
calm as opposed to panic and addressing the anxiety by

(16:23):
being creative that I was trying to come up with options.
I'm absorbing the information that's around me, and I don't
I don't think you can very do that very well.
When you are hyper aroused, when you're in a state
perhaps you know, a fight or flight kind of level
panic that nor can you do it when you're under aroused.

(16:44):
Like the one of the fight or flight mechanisms we
also have is that you go to sleep. It's just
it's all too much. You shut down. You have to
be in a somewhat optimized place, so to compartmentalize for
me in the moment, to set aside the pain and
the trigger that that was releasing in my body, my brain,
these neuro kind of flos of course, that are just

(17:05):
like agitating me more. I liken it to an alarm
that's going off. If we've ever been at a gate
the airport and somebody triggers the door and it's like
making just this horrendous noise that after enough minutes go by,
like you kind of stop hearing it as much and
you go back to what you're doing. And then finally
when it stops five minutes later, they get the security
person that you turn it off, and everybody's like, oh,

(17:27):
but I almost forgot it was there. And so the
same sort of system, you know, we adapt very very quickly.
I was trying to adapt to Okay, yes, the pain,
I recognize its information. It means I'm in trouble and
nothing's changing in the immediate moment. Right now. There's nothing
I can do or don't do that changes the level

(17:50):
of pain that I'm experiencing. And it's not that I'm
going to be in more danger if I don't do something.
It's just that's what is accept it, and now I
can focus on something else, which is how I'm getting
get out of here. I know that I'm not going
to be able to do this easily, and at the
same time having that idea that I'm going to have

(18:12):
to cut my arm off, and I wasn't ready to
just jump upon that immediately either, So that goes at
the bottom of the list and I start working through
the other options first. But like trying to carve through
the rock that first afternoon night to the second morning,
fifteen hours of effort, chipping and prying and trying to
carve with but I don't have I don't have the

(18:33):
proper kind of tools. And this rock is a metamorphosed sandstone,
so it is very durable. It's not just like the walls.
It was a section a bowler that it had dropped
in from another part of the canyon where there was
some fult activity, and so it had been compressed and

(18:54):
therefore I was not going to carve my way through it.
I removed half of like a golf ball. That fifteen hours.
That was going to take me a month to try
to carve through enough to remove my hand. So that's out.
I work through setting up a pulley system. My engineering background,
my search and rescue training, in my mountaineering experience. I

(19:16):
bring all of that to bear. I have some equipment.
I don't have exact kind of equipment that I would need,
so I am improvising and that's what also that creativity,
the resourcefulness, innovation, all of this in a moment of crisis,
and I get a system in place. It takes me

(19:37):
five hours, every kind of ridiculous effort, but from below
with one hand to build an anchor, and I get
a three to one and then that doesn't work well.
Five to one, the six to one mechanical advantage system,
but there's problems with that. I don't have a static cable.
I'm using a stretchable climbing prog and so a lot

(20:01):
of forces being dissipated in the friction over the not pulleys.
I am using cara beeners, the little snaplinks that do
not roll with it. So there's sliding friction. It's supposed
to rolling friction with much higher level friction wellness, the
stretching rope, it's trying to lift a bowling ball with
a rubber band. It's just none of this has gone well.

(20:24):
But I did have an anchor, so I could clip
in a short line from the anchor down to my
climbing harness, which I was able to put on, and
I could rest my legs a little bit. I could
sit back. I couldn't move too far because otherwise the
bend in my arm as my shoulders drop caused the
angle to change where it was pinched, and the pain

(20:45):
would spike tremendously, So like, okay, I don't do that.
So just a few inches, a few inches being able
to it was the equivalent of kind of holding a
supported chair pose better than just It gave me an option,
but it wasn't comfortable. I'm rationing my food, I'm rationing

(21:07):
my water, very little water that I had. I know,
that's the important thing here. It's what's going to keep
me alive or not for the coming hours or day,
and I'm starting to run out of options. So no
one's coming. Megan and Christy aren't coming back to look
for me. Other canyoneers aren't getting this far into the
canyon system Sunday. Now it's noon. Now it's afternoon, It's

(21:30):
going to be dark in a few hours. We're now
twenty four hours into my entrapment, at which point I
know that, yeah, I can't get myself free. I can't
carve through the rock, I can't lift the rock, I
can't rip my arm out of there, that no one's
coming to help me, even by happenstance or intention, And

(21:50):
because I wasn't even due back for several more days
at the end of my five day vacation, and at
that point they would start to rescue. But I hadn't
left word about where I was going. It was the
end of the week, it was Sunday, so if anybody's
going to show up, it's going to be a week
from now. I had not left word. And I want
to stress this because this was a choice I had made.
I went out on this adventure and had not told

(22:13):
anyone where I was going. No one even knew what
state I was in, and you can't really expect the
rescue to show up in a timely manner when you've
gone out and tried to hide in the desert that far.
It was an accountability process I had to go through,
so I wasn't blaming myself and getting down on myself
more criticizing myself. It's very easily get doing, but to say, Okay,

(22:35):
I made the choices that got me into this, now
I'm going to make choices to get me out of there.
That was what I think empowered me to continue to
work to dig into myself about what's motivating me to
find Eventually they answered that, Okay, now I'm gonna have
to try to cut my arm on it. This is

(23:02):
twenty four hours in, so like still very early on.
I'd already had the idea in the first hour. Now
I'm actually trying to problem solve how do I do it?
I had some medical training exposure, but I was not
an empt or anything, and I'm just like doing the
best that I can. Yeah, I've watched some television shows
in my time, so I improvise a tourniquit out of

(23:23):
some of the camelback backpack system that mine had some
neoprene insulation on the hose that comes over your shoulders,
I wouldn't freeze as easily and cold temperatures. I stripped
that mioprene off. It's the end stretchy. Wrap it around
my forearm, tie it off my teeth, clip a carabiner
through it again, snap links that I can twist and
it bites into my arm and say, yeah, keep the

(23:44):
carabiner out so I can tie it. I clip it
to some other webbing around my bicep so it doesn't
want twist. There's a lot of planning and mitigation of
anticipated issues. So that's that's really what I was trying
to do to give myself the best chances. Which way
do I go back to my bike and then try
to ride fifty like no that I'll easily die before

(24:09):
I probably even get to the bike, let alone trying
to get all the way. I need to head straight
for the truck. It's still eight miles away. The big
drop ropel is down there, but maybe I get to
some water along the way, try to climb out of
this eight hundred foot escarpment that leads to my vehicle,
and then sixty miles of driving out of this washboard
of winding dirt portol drive road, and my mind jumps ahead.

(24:31):
It's like, why did I have to buy a stick shift?
I mean, man, you don't transmission in this thing, and
I'm gonna die trying to shift gears driving out this
winding road. I knew, though, as I held a knife
to my arm, that it was just a slow act

(24:51):
of suicide. I'll bleed the depth before I even get
to my truck. Like trying to hike out of that
canyon all those miles, I bought myself an hour something
but probably not eight to ten hours before I can
get to definitive medical care. And so I set the
knife down and I'm out of options. And now I'm
not just standing in the bottom of the canyon. I'm
actually the way I saw it scanning in my green

(25:18):
I reached for my video camera that I had with
me I carried on my adventures, my fourteen er clients
all this, and I got this cam quorder out, held
it in front of me and I looked into that lens.
And after I get through sort of an intro where
I ask, whoever finds this get it to my parents,
I give my names an address, and then looking at

(25:40):
them through this lens, I start to talk to my
mom and dad and say I'm sorry, and I love
you and I'll always be with you. And to express
my accountability, I go out looking for adventure, trying to
throw something about myself. So dumb. Taking all these risks

(26:02):
is so dumb. For what I talk to my sister.
I tell her how much I love her. I'm saying
I love you, I'm sorry. She was getting buried that summer,
it's going to ruin her wedding. But connecting through that
lens was also connecting with love, and that is what

(26:26):
switched for me. Now I knew what was so important
that I was going to give this everything that I had,
knowing I'm in my grave, I'm going to die here,
but I am going to hold on and survive as
long as possible for them, you know. I would talk

(26:49):
into that camera periodically, multiple times a day, talking to
my grandparents, talking to my best friends from childhood, from
high school, college. It was this process that I went
through to support myself. I did not have the sustenance

(27:11):
in the more typical forms like food and water sheltered,
but I had love and it was keeping me going
perceived the experience of love that I was there, the
source that I was tapping into when I would talk
into the camera lens and I would feel that it

(27:34):
was the feeling of perspective, of being supported, of knowing
what was important and that I would do anything for that,
of having a source of motivation. So it was. It
was a very clear and almost tangible effect of talking
to my loved ones, envisioning them in a place where

(27:57):
they were watching this tape being played, maybe at my wake,
but to feel their love coming back through that lens
into me, and that this is where I now have.
I have the strength to do what I need to do.
I have the courage to do it. I have the
perseverance to see this through to the end. I have
the resilience to take what comes and to keep going.

(28:19):
That I have the grit, the determination. Just everything that
I could possibly need is coming to me from that
source of the relationships in my life, from love and
understanding it's not just what you do in life that's
important here, and it's about who you are, how you
love and knowing I'm fallible, I'm imperfect, and I can repair,

(28:42):
I can try again, I can do better tomorrow. That
I have this understanding what's important and that I can
draw from that, and that I can give back into that,
and that's what would pick me up. So I went
through times I tried to cut my arm. The knife
is so dull it can't even cut the hair off

(29:04):
the skin. Having you cut your arm up, the knife
is so dull you can't cut through the skin, let
alone get you know, through the rest of the arm.
You can't. I'm hitting bottom, but I get the camera
out and I'm lifted up. I'm booi. There's this elevating
effect and it's not woo at all. It's about the
power of our minds and our emotions that interact with

(29:25):
one another, that provide us either stimulation or depression. And
to know that I'm loved, to know that I love,
and those things in concert with one another is what
gives us the possibility for everything else. It's how I
move through those times to where I'm smiling on that videotape.
I'm looking into that lens and remembering things, you know,

(29:48):
positive memories from my childhood, going to national parks with
my family on vacation, learning how to ski together, going
to concerts with my friends, climbing mountains with them, all
these things, and it's about the memories of togetherness, bonds
and connections. That is what is putting a smile on
my face looking into that lens in this situation where
I'm alone in the middle of the desert, dying in

(30:10):
a hole, and yet I'm smiling. That's this power of mindset.
That's what I get. What I work to get across
to people is that when we perceive something a bolder
in our lives, yes, it's there. It's a darkness, it's
a burden, it's a there's a heaviness to it. There's
a maybe a negative life force around it, but nothing

(30:32):
exists in shadow. It also always has light. There's there's
always this duality around it. But that means that even
in the darkest place as I was in then there
was still light coming through me and with my family
and my friends through the love that we share. That
that's still how I was existing, how I was holding on.

(30:53):
You can't hit a deeper bottom than knowing that your
death is imminent and it's over and there's nothing you
can do, but what I can still smile. That was
so powerful There's an interesting connection there between the motivations

(31:17):
I had and climbing fourteen ers in the wintertime solo
and needing to prove something about myself that I was enough,
that I was deserving, and then realizing while I was
trapped in the canyon and talking into my camp order,
that I had it, that I have relationships, that it
wasn't about what you do to prove something, that it's
about who you are that's already there, that you are light,

(31:40):
that you are love, that you are deserving and worthy
of all of it, and that you have it. Then
there was also a sense of apology, like I'm sorry
that I didn't recognize that. I'm sorry that I didn't
give up my presence as deeply as I could, that
I didn't share my affection as often or as profoundly
as I could have. I was learning a lot. I'm

(32:02):
getting all of this, guys, I don't know enlightenment maybe even.
And I am also dying. My external circumstances. Not only
have they not improved, they are rapidly deteriorating as time goes.

(32:24):
I don't think I'm gonna make it to the fourth day,
but I'm still there. Then I have this idea, a
little light bulb moment. You don't just have to hold
a knife like a star. You can take up like
a dagger. And I stab myself and all of a sudden,
I've gotten through the skin. Now this is like, ah,
I did it. Maybe I can get myself out of here.
The excitement bounds. I have to call myself a breathe. Okay,

(32:47):
one am I up against observations options going through this
with a plan. Probing around inside the hole in my
arm that I now you get still to some extent.
See there's a little bit of a scar or it
in here between my fingers there that that's that's where
I stab myself. And then now I'm like, okay, one

(33:08):
of my up against there's muscle. There's like a lot
of it's blood okay, but not too much. It's not
it's not oozing out too fast. But then the knife
touches something hard and I understand, oh, i'd sooner be
able to slice through the boulder, then cut through the bone.
So here again, Now I've found like a sub basement

(33:32):
to my my rock bottom. I'm very clearly not going
to be able to cut my my arm off. I
I can't cut through the bone. Knife is just too dope.
So once more I get the camera out, and once

(33:52):
more I'm smiling. I'm elevated. There's this powerful uh yeah
again thing up of my spirit, of my capacity, and
there's nothing more to do. Really, I mean, I have
to have to make some decisions, like I've decided by
noon on the fourth day I've been out there. Now

(34:15):
it's going on to eighty hours since I first left
my truck. I'm confronted with this, you know, dilemma of survival, like, well,
do I drank my own urine or not? And even
more above that, I had this one little mummified bite

(34:36):
of burrito left, and it was like the dunk or
not to dunk, And that is the question. I dunked,
you know, stopping it up and put it down the hat,
chase it down with some more urine, Like all right,
well that's the worst picnic lunch in human history. I

(34:58):
think I did take gifts from this though along the way.
Part of it is like, yeah, the ability to like
what you focus on, what you put your energy towards,
what you attend to with your attention, that is, that
is what you feed, That's what you received. There's a
whole thing about like the power of suggestion or of manifesting,

(35:22):
you know, And it's about this power of attention, and
that I was putting my attention on what I needed
to do, on what I had, on the relationships in
my life, with the news videos, the little clips that
I was recording, and that's what was keeping me going.
I did my best to compartmentalize and set aside the

(35:43):
rest of it I had understome to understand what was
important to me love and relationship, about what was possible
for me. I'm now into the fourth day, the fourth night,
eventually the fifth day, I'm still alive, doubling the amount
of timeline I might survive without adequate food and water
and shelter in the desert, proving I'm more than I

(36:05):
possibly could have imagined. And that's something I think is
universally true too. We're so much more capable of what
we think of ourselves as weak. I was discovering like, Okay, well,
there's a gift in a way from this boulder of
like what really constitutes a bad day pretty much any
day in my life today, that I didn't have to
drink my own urine I'm like, yep, thumbs up. You

(36:27):
cannot hold despair and gratitude in your heart at the
same time. That there's a lot of things that you
can like both and in your life and your emotional
but would really profound despair and really profound gratitude displace
one another. They are opposites. And the more gratitude you curate,
you cultivate, you practice, you express, as I was able

(36:49):
to do into that camera, that that's what caused the
rock bottom despair to be replaced with this brilliant elevation
of love. So as I'm there four days, five days

(37:11):
and I'm smiling, I'm appreciating that I'm still alive. I'm
finding gratitude for all the gifts I've received in in
my life that I'm finding peace an acceptance with Like
this is what is this aligning yourself with the will
of the universe that that gives you such a deep
sense of peace. It's really the struggle when we try

(37:35):
to have what we don't have, or that we don't
want what we have. That's what creates tension, that's what
creates dissonance, that's what creates struggle, and that's what creates
the anxiety or at most extreme level, the depression disconnects.
It was about by the fifth day, surrendering this is

(37:56):
what's happening. I'm drinking my own urine. It doesn't matter
if I do or don't, doesn't matter if I cut
my arm, I don't. Letting go of the type a
personality like I have to control this, I have to
do everything I like. I don't. It's not up to me.
And letting that go was a process of another gift
that I received from the Boulder, from this experience, to

(38:17):
say that I found peace in a very difficult situation
and it was okay. I knew by the time the
night came on that fifth day, I was going to die,
and it was it was okay. I kept saying that
out loud as I shivered into that night, that it's okay,
it's okay, you can go, you can go. I had

(38:44):
expressed all the love, of the regret, of the gratitude
that I could under that camera, and I understood very
clearly this is how people die of exposure. That there's
eventually I'd read enough to know there's a warmth, a
false warmth that comes over you that people in blizzards
are found with their jackets undone and toss the side

(39:05):
of their hats and gloves up that there's this like
overheating that happens in the moment before you actually go,
and so I waited for it. What came instead was
a vision. And this is the point. This is the

(39:25):
out of body experience. This is the near death experience
that I had. The middle of that fifth and final night,
I saw myself leave the canyon. My body was still
trapped by the rock, and I walked through the wall,

(39:46):
the left wall of the canyon where I'd etched my appitaph.
I was that certain that I was going to die,
I'd put them my name, my birth month and year,
my death month and year as APR three and then
rip at the top of it, carving into the softer
sandstone wall there with my knife. That whole wall moved

(40:10):
and there was a hallway. And I step into this hallway.
I take eight steps down to a doorway. I'm in
a dark space. It's light coming from a living room.
I walk into the living room and there's sunlight coming
in through sliding glass doors, and a little boy three
and a half years old playing with a truck on
this hardwood floor, making a little noise with the truck,

(40:32):
and I watched myself with eyes floating behind my head,
crouched down, open my arms up. A little boy drops
the truck, comes running over to me, and it bowls
into my chest as I scoop him up, and I
see like I see him, but I'm also seeing behind

(40:52):
him as I hold him. I'm holding him with my
left hand and a handless right arm. And then I
lean back and his eyes, these beautiful, brilliant blue eyes
are just exploding it. This blond hair little boy did.
I dance around with him and this will last I
mean fifteen seconds maybe at most, and then it's gone,

(41:17):
and I'm back at the boulder and I'm shivering worse
than ever. The hypothermia is there, like I still haven't died,
but I crossed over. I know, maybe in a sense,
I died and I came back because that little boy
filled me with so much love, I knew it was
not over. That was premonition. It was the first half
of a deja vous. I would someday seat o little

(41:38):
boy in my life. That meant I was going to
get out of here. I was going to have the
sun and then we were going to play. We're going
to play toach other some day hours we by the darkness,
the deepest darkness of the experience of my life. And

(42:02):
then the sun came up. I saw the dawn that
that little boy had led me to the sixth day
of being out there in the desert alone, it's about
one hundred and twenty four hours, and and then I
have this ultimate epiphany. T got light bulbs, this is

(42:24):
stadium lights. This is megawatts going on. How do you
cut your arm up the knights? It's too dolle to
cut through the bone. You're don't have to cut through
the bone, aaron, use the use the boulder, break the bone.
How sudden this smile comes over from my face as

(42:45):
I understand that this is what it was all leading
up to. Is this moment of realizing that the torque
that I could exert on my arm as like two
by four a table dice. And I snapped the bone,
and I'm taking out of here. I'm gonna get home.
I'm beaming. I'm smiling, the biggest smile of my life.

(43:07):
I realized, oh wait, there's a second bone. Okay, of
course they're It's like you gotta do it again, like
we just reverse the course and snap the second bone.
Now it's even like I'm, you know, ear to ear
Guinness Book of Old Records, kind of smile as I
undertake the rest of the amputation broke the bones booth

(43:34):
in the same spot. I have access to it. This
little blade that's still sharp, only an inch and a
half long, and maybe only an inch long really, as
was the three inch flong like larger blade to the
multi tool. And I'm using this tidy blade to cut, cut, cut,
and I'm smiling bigger and bigger and bigger as I
worked through. Now I felt it all like and there

(43:54):
was a moment when I touched something like a spaghetti
strand in there and WHOA, Okay, I'm not smiling the nerve. Yeah,
but what am I going to do to stop now? Now,
I take the knife and flip it upside down. I
sliced through that. It's just like more snapping it than anything.
And that felt like I had just thrust my entire

(44:17):
arm up to my shoulder into magma. It's vaporizing thiscineration
sensation that crests in a wave and then recedes over
the course of a few more breaths in seconds, deep breathing,
eyes closed, regulating myself, coming back from this insane sense

(44:38):
of pain. And when I opened my eyes, now I'm
through the crux that this is all happening. It's the
last few pieces of skin. I stretched my arm, cut cut,
the tension releases. I stepped back. My feet are free,
like I'm I step out of my grave and into
my life. And that it is when I almost passed out,

(45:02):
but not from the pain, but from the infinite possibility
of having a life again after having died. There, after
having gone through the entire process of breathing my life,
eulogizing my relationships, thing, thank you, all of it. I
had come to accept and even embrace my death. And

(45:23):
now all the joy and happiness and delight and pleasure
and possibility, it's all there for an entire life. And
when you know what that's like, like, that's not what
it is for us more born. We still have that
infinite possible, but we don't have a sense of it.
And I had the sense of it. So yeah, that's
my knees buckled. You just you can't handle our brains

(45:47):
can't process all of that. Had to tourniquet on stuff
my arm and my empty camel back kicked the straps
over mine. Like I kind of rehearsed all of this,
practiced that thought it out. I've done the basic first
aid of stopping the blood flow as best I can,
slinging and cradling my arm so it's guarded and that
I'm able to gather my rope. But before I left

(46:09):
the spot, I take my nlging bottle urine in and
flip it to my arnt. But I get my camera
out and I still photography camera. I take a photograph
of the boulder with yeah, the bloodied hand and the
blood going down the wall. The bone ends visible like
good ridds. But as I take the photo, I say
thank you out loud to the boulder for everything that

(46:32):
had given me. And that's the message that I have
out of this, that we can greet the adversity in
our life when we can greet that adversity with gratitude.
Say hello enemy, bolder diversity, I welcome you because you

(46:53):
are here to bring me gifts, to help me grow,
to a vault, to learn lessons, to finding more gratitude.
That is the choice that we get to make that
is the choice of taking the possibility over the pain,
of seeing a boulder as a potential blessing, of taking
a trauma and seeing it as our path for transformation.

(47:19):
If that's true in that moment, at the most extreme levels,
then that can be true every time, whether it's financial hardship,
it's a relationship hardship, whether it's and it doesn't mean
that it's always going to be like, oh, now it's easy. No,
that's where the hard work begins, because says for me
and the canyon, this is now like, Okay, the clock
is ticking, you're dying. You got you gotta go. Dragging

(47:45):
my rope out of the bottom of that slot canyon
and moving through down climbs, other boulders, chokes twists. It's
dark at midday because the sun is blotted out from
the curves of the wall overhead during my head lamp on.
But in one hundred yards of struggle of fifteen minutes

(48:07):
to move down through that space, I get to the
drop off of the big drop repel sixty five feet
down to the continuing canyon floor. There's the Indiana Jones
and the temple with you. When when he comes out
of the railroadroad tunnel at the edge of the cliff,
and the crocodiles are down below. It's a spot like

(48:28):
that where you're just like, I'm in the middle of
a wall and ye, but I have my rope. I
rig it up, I repel down. There's a pool of
water down there, which I'm so blessed. It's like not
my own urine, but there were dead things floating in it.
It's just like this desert soup of decay and like
a black tea. But it tasted so sweet. I think

(48:50):
from all the like the leaves and the others decomposing
that there was like almost a sugary taste, like a
port wine. Yeah. I drank almost a gallon before I
fill up three leaders more to carry with me. I
take a selfie there to just prove that I'm still here.
It's a very basic existential statement. And then I put

(49:13):
my cameras in my backpack. It's just the cameras in
the water, and dump everything else out and I start
hiking mile after mile after mile after mile after mile.
Five hours of hiking with the tournique drip drip, drip,
I lose a leader. Two leaders of blood. Haven't slept

(49:34):
in six days and I'm not going to make it.
I know, I'm having a heart attack on the way out.
But there's a family I've come across and they're helping
me along. The dad is walking with me. He's taken

(49:56):
my backpack. I'm just stumbling, and I looked tell him
that I'm going to die this this roar in my
chest and then it's like echoing in my ears, but
it's like seeming outside of me, and just I feel
like I'm about to dissolve to the other side. And

(50:17):
I also then realize he's waving in the air and
it's and it's not just this racket from my heart,
but it's actually a helicopter is echoing between the canyon walls,
and a helicopter lands in front of me. Yeah, and
I bound over to it. I mean, this is like

(50:38):
chariots of fire, like no, no, no. There was a
whole search and rescue operation that had been spearheaded by
my mom. Like I know as much as the black
helicopter that stays the day, what it really was was
my mom who had gotten word from my manager. By
the Wednesday, the fifth day, he had realized like, oh,

(51:04):
Aaron's supposed to be back for work yesterday on Tuesday,
he didn't show up. Gave him some extra time. He's
not the kind of guy who just like ditches out
and doesn't call. Maybe he got it wrong, but now
it's then two days he's in trouble, calls mom. Mom
picks up. He's in trouble, like he didn't call, he
needs our help. They start and break into my own

(51:24):
line email. There's a whole another story that goes into
like this rescue enlisting my roommates, the cataloging, like what
gear I had taken, trying to guess, like based on that,
where I might have gone with my email access. My
mom blasts out every contact that I had. You know,
does anybody know where Aaron is? One of my friends

(51:45):
had a list of slot canyons that I had suggested
that we might go explore that spring. I wasn't in
any of those places, but it got them looking in
the in the area. They traced my credit card that
I'd used at a at a grocery store six days
before on the friday as I had arrived so like
the last known location was the Moab Safeway and from

(52:08):
there listing the assistance of multiple different public agencies, including
a couple of shriff's departments. Of one of those sheriff's
deputies had a contact in the Park Service who was
out on a radio and was near enough to his
ranger station where his radio picked up and like, oh,
that truck, Yeah, I've seen it. It's been parked out

(52:29):
at the horse Who Canyon trail that for the last
five days. I'll go check that it's still there. The
moments of the synchronicity as this plays out is that
I realized that I can use the bowler and break
the bones at the same moment that they've confirmed that
my truck is still at that trailhead, that I've been

(52:50):
out there for all this time, that therefore, like it's
just at the level where I might still be alive.
Deploy the helicopters. They start sending helicopters in different areas.
The first one that gets there is the one from
up in Salt Lake City. It flies several hundred miles
down and is starting to search the Horseshoe Canyon system

(53:12):
up towards Blue Jawn from the mouth to the head.
And I'm hiking from the head to the mouth. As
I get down far enough where I'm within a mile
and a half of the trailhead. But the helicopter's running
out of fuel because it's come all that way, It's
burned all its fuel. It's got to drop off the
people in the back seat at the trailhead where my

(53:32):
truck is. Did you go fly back to Moab and
get more fuel to come back and resume the search.
If I hadn't made it with the help of that
family around that last bend to where we were within
sight of the trail that goes to the where the
parking area is, and the helicopter was only coming that far,
and that those two things happened within a matter of

(53:53):
minutes of each other. If it had been five minutes,
ten minutes later that I get there, the helicopter's gone.
I bleed to death before it gets back. When when
they got me off the helicopter, fifteen minutes after it
picked me up, I had minutes left a whip, but
I still managed to walk into the er room in
the Ellen Memorial Hospital in Moab. They put me on

(54:14):
the you know, the gurney, laid me down, Give me
some give me some morphine, and I kind of faded
black but my mom had brought that tire operation together.
She is the miracle of all of this, and I

(54:37):
wouldn't be here without her, any of us wouldn't. But
she said, well she she gave me the gift of
life a second time. Yeah, I'll pick up with the
vision of the child that I had, because for many
years afterwards they I didn't. I didn't, I didn't have

(54:58):
full clarity. There was some speculation, like when I would
share about that, that people had like, was that you was?
Was that baby Jesus?

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Like?

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Was that a future sun that you might? And I
felt like it was a sun that it and also
like but who rarely knows. Five years after the amputation
and the escape, rescue and everything, I met a woman
who I was off and on with a little bit

(55:35):
for those that first year until I had the chance
to go on a rafting expedition down the Green River,
which goes right by the mouth of Horsebory Canyon, and
I'm probably within twenty air miles of the spot where
I was trapped on a night when I had the

(55:57):
only other kind of similar vision that I've ever had
in my wife, where I just had this immediate like
thunderclap understanding that, oh, she's the mother of that little boy.
Six months later we're engaged, married. A few months after that,

(56:18):
we conceive a child. She's pregnant at our wedding, and
we get our ultrasound at the twenty week point. You
know where you get the chance to like learn, Oh
you want to know what sex the child is, Well,
you can tell her. I know it's going to be
a boy. I actually said that to the technician, and

(56:41):
sure enough it was, And sure enough as he was born.
And now he's upstairs here in my house doing his
online school work this morning. That he's about to turn
fifteen in a few weeks. Blonde hair, two eyes. He
is that little boy. All of it. It absolutely came true.

(57:10):
Nothing is good or bad but what we make of it.
So we have to put that work in to keep
striving to maybe renew ourselves, to adapt, to change, to
go through something that's very, very difficult in order to
come through on the other side and then be able
to look back and say that was the exact thing
that I needed in my life.

Speaker 4 (57:57):
Everybody with me in the studio today we have learned
Vogel Bomb, Brent Dye and Nick Tukaski.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
That ship was crazy.

Speaker 5 (58:10):
But seriously listening to the stuff, like I have never
really watched I've never watched the movie. I was aware
of the movie, but I'm not a movie I'm not
that movie person.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
No, I will not have a good time watching that.

Speaker 5 (58:22):
I like the horror that I enjoy is like supernatural.
It's like human human horror.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
I just can't.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Buy it because fucking dragon.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
And this because I.

Speaker 5 (58:30):
Watch it on the news every exact day, because like
I get hit with it constantly.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
But at least the star Wars the fast well dressed
I was.

Speaker 5 (58:38):
He got so like explicit about the physical aspect of it,
like the spiritual mental stuff was amazing. It was great,
But it was like also that the actually I was
listening to it and while I'm driving and I'm listening
to it, and he's talking about like.

Speaker 6 (58:58):
Breaking the bones of his with armile.

Speaker 5 (59:01):
With a smile, and he's talking and he's like very
explicitly explaining how the bones break. And as I'm driving
the car, I'm just like my I'm just like shaping
my arm just like.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Yeah. And he's a.

Speaker 5 (59:14):
Very good storyteller in like, and he was telling a
story that I just I just was having a hard time.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Here, and you haven't seen the movie, so.

Speaker 5 (59:21):
I have no because I don't like watching like people
like I don't like watching people go through these horrifying
physical things.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Because Grant said he fainted during the movie.

Speaker 7 (59:31):
Yeah, we went to the movie when my wife was
pregnant with our first child, and we had made a
deal with my wife, and I thought I was not
going to be in the delivery room because I cannot
handle the.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
Sight of blood. But I did go the delivery It
was wonderful.

Speaker 7 (59:42):
But so I was like, this will be good preparation
for me to watch this horrific scene. So we watched
him hack his arm off, and I'm like watching him
like that wasn't so bad. Then it shows him come
out with his stub, the bits of blood dripping, and
he goes his canteen and there's no water left, and like, oh,
now he's got a hike with these this blood loss

(01:00:02):
and no water, And I'm like I got to get up,
and I start walking out of the theater and I faint.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (01:00:09):
But what struck me about this story was there was
so much more to it than the movie. Like, if
you're a fan of the movie. If you saw the movie,
this is not the whole story, like it's been years
since I saw the movie, but but just to be
able to kind of dig down into the spiritual things
that you talk about. The relationship with the Boulder is
not in the movie from what I remember.

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
Well, he's told the story a lot. But there's one
thing that was really cool, which was everything he was
doing was trying to prove himself, and then when it
finally came time for him to actually really have to
dig in deep as deep as he did, which is miraculous.
Nothing short of that, it was because of gratitude and love,
not out of some need to sort of prove himself.
And I was like, that's that's so interesting that you

(01:00:52):
know that what in the end, what pushed you to
really become the most heroic had nothing to do with
proving yourself at all.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:01:02):
Yeah, although I would say the show has like a
lovely sub genre of dudes trying to like prove ship
for themselves. It was like I think in this particular,
especially Outdoor, Oh yeah, yeah, it's like I have because
because society made me feel like an other, I had
to just go and strike out and prove that I
was better than society. Yeah, or prove that I was

(01:01:24):
worthy of of this stuff. And I I totally get that, man.
I mean, how much of my life has just been like.

Speaker 6 (01:01:33):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Don't like me.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
I could be funny, I could be sonny.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Yeah, I'm likable with a joke.

Speaker 5 (01:01:45):
Yeah, and I do.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
Well, there's this cool thing that that came out when
he's at the end. He starts to talk about how
you can't hold despair and gratitude in your heart at
the same time. So when you are stressed and you're
freaking out, and when you're in fight or flight, the amigdala.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Is super activated. Right, it's the fear center and brain.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Yeah, the other party, Your brain shuts off the part
that has to the prefrontal cortex shuts off, and that's
the part that has to do with gratitude and has
to do with feelings of love, and it has to
do with feelings of belonging. And the two are sort
of diametrically opposed, so you can't have one while you're
having the other. So in that sense, it occurred to
me like, oh, the ultimate antidote for fear panic any

(01:02:30):
of that is gratitude and.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
Physically, not just psychologically. We're not just talking about now.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
We're talking about neurologogic like WU stuff. But yeah, yeah,
there's nothing WU about it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:43):
The limbic system, the amigola, and then the restoration mode
is the loving graceful is rooted in the prefrontal cortex
and the higher order networks, which is just fascinating. And
I was like, okay, so if we can all figure
out how to override fear, you know, it really is
with love. Yeah, and he and he found that in
the in the most dire of consequences or situations. But

(01:03:05):
I beyond that, I can't even think of like six days,
not three without food and water, six days or sleep,
right and in excruciating pain. Yeah, and if he had
and if he had stayed in that that first state,
he probably I would put my two cents and then
he probably wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
Have made it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
We wouldn't have heard that story, right right.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
Oh yeah, And that I mean, for lack of a
better word, that's miraculous to me, or it's or it's
just at least pointing at something we've forgotten about the
human you.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
Know, sir seems it feels impossible to access, you know,
like especially, I mean, we all get stressed out over
our daily lives, over small things. I mean I go
four hours and I'm like, I'm really cranky, and I
need a snack right now. And but but of course
we are capable of overcoming those those immediate physical situations

(01:03:57):
and being a better version of ourselves, being the version
of ourselves that does want to connect and does want
to experience love and keep doing that.

Speaker 7 (01:04:07):
Well, I'm sure the fight or flight instinct comes from
when we were scavenging animals, fleeing predators, So your best
thing is either to play dead or to fight back.
But in his situation, he wasn't fighting an immediate threat.
He was fighting a long term threat. So he had

(01:04:28):
to think this through. The fight and flight instinct didn't
really serve him well. And it's almost like a story
for society, you know, as we as a species now
have to confront climate change, AI job disruption, nuclear proliferation,
maybe we need to move away from this idea, this
good or bad, this enemy friend, this fight or flight,

(01:04:49):
and moved back to almost enlightenment.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
It's not even a new idea.

Speaker 7 (01:04:54):
It was an idea from the Enlightenment, which is that
you use reason and logic to work your way out
of a problem. Like we've backsli on that, and his
story shows like if you really just stop to think
things through, you can find a solution. I wonder if
we can as a culture cultivate this idea of love
and gratitude more generally as a survival mechanism, you know

(01:05:14):
what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
I yes, And I.

Speaker 5 (01:05:19):
Think that like a third of the population is capable
of that. A third of the population. So the third
of the population is like thinks that that is a weakness,
that empathy is a weakness, and then a third of
the population just doesn't pay attention enough.

Speaker 4 (01:05:35):
I interviewed Rick Doblin for the Maps the Multi Disciplinary
Associations for Psychedelic Studies right right right, and he's got
this cool thing that he's pursuing in his lifetime called
net zero trauma, where if enough people have these whether
it's whether you use psychedelics to get there or whatever,
the pathway is, if enough people start to have these

(01:05:55):
experiences and these sort of epiphanies out of this sense
of gratitude of this, you know, activating this other part
of their brain. Then over time you can start to
heal the trauma that we've all sort of carried with us.
Zero trauma by twenty seventy. And that doesn't mean there's
no no more trauma happening. It's just that we've caught
up with with the abuse and with the neglect and

(01:06:19):
with the you know, the self deprecation.

Speaker 5 (01:06:21):
Well, and the more people who are able to come
to grips with the trauma begets trauma. And if you
are fixing yourself, you are less likely to commit trauma
on your on your children, right or the people around you.
So I mean, like, I think that that just just
basic logic that makes sense. The more people that are

(01:06:44):
sort of open to healing.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
Able to actively work on themselves.

Speaker 5 (01:06:48):
Yeah, and people who are able to fix themselves are
able to help not commit you know, crime or not reinflict.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:56):
It's there are several stories in the Live Again that
we've listen to people talk about whether they experienced homelessness,
or whether they experienced abuse, sexual abuse as a child,
or what have you, and how much that just steals
their sense of self worth to the point where I'm
driving around now differently than maybe when I was young

(01:07:18):
and I see homeless people, or I see people acting out,
or I see people acting violently, And my first thought
these days, from having recorded all these interviews is I
bet that person is suffered so horribly in their childhood.
They're not just you know, not that I ever thought, Oh,
they're just lazy, and so therefore they're homeless. But now
I'm like, oh, that person's probably shouldering massive, massive amounts

(01:07:43):
of trauma.

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
Yeah it's not it's not like, oh fuck that guy.
It's like, oh fuck, what happened to that guy? Yeah
kind of situation.

Speaker 4 (01:07:50):
Yeah, And it's and it's not just the And then
there's there's other folks who who who maybe had a
different route, like you know, maybe Aaron Ralston who or
Eric Larson who were like, Okay, you know, I'm going
to go prove myself in nature or I'm going to
go find some some other way to prove my sense
of self worth. I think I did that for a

(01:08:11):
long time. I think I was like, Okay, come hell
or high water, I'm gonna make movies and that's gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Be my thing.

Speaker 4 (01:08:17):
And and all those people who doubted me when I
was young, like, fuck those guys, I'm you know I can,
and I think a certain degree of that is healthy.

Speaker 7 (01:08:25):
I think a certain degree of like I look back
to the people who bullied me or challenged me as
a kid, and it just drew me more into art
and drew me more into who I am, and I'm
thankful for that. I was never gratuitously successful like I
wish I would have been, But but.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
I couldn't go back and go fuck.

Speaker 6 (01:08:42):
Y oh Man, look into my Blockbluster movie.

Speaker 7 (01:08:44):
But but you know, the the journey, the friends I've
made from that, the person I've become is worth. It
shaped me as a person. I think, of course, I
was never sexually abused. I was never physically abused, so
that's a different kind of trauma. But I think that
there's a certain amount of just from this podcast, what
I think I've kind of learned is like the first
part of your life is trying to identify who you

(01:09:06):
are and find and it's very important up until you're
like in your mid thirties to fifties. That's it. It's
putting a stake in the ground. This is what I've accomplished,
this is who I am. And then about the time
he turned fifty, you're like, Wow, none of that's really
that important. I mean, there's a reason Kirk Colebin shot himself.
There's a reason George Harrison hated being in the Beatles.

(01:09:26):
You know, it's not all it's cracked up to be, necessarily,
you know.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
But there's this lovely kind of tool that makes me
think of you know, if we can consciously evoke gratitude,
even when it's something small, it begins to neurologically deactivate
the brain's.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
Panic or fear circuitry.

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
Right, And so that's not just philosophical, that's not meta,
that's like, that's real physiological.

Speaker 7 (01:09:52):
Yeah, it's the foundation of all of our religions too,
the good ones at least.

Speaker 5 (01:09:59):
Yeah, I'm a mad Yeah, I'm a mad Maxia, and
I only believe in in chrome and violence.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
Witness me.

Speaker 7 (01:10:12):
There's a there's another part of that too. It's not
just his his. By the way, the way he found
that love connection through a video camera is right stunning.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
I love that part. As a as a media theorist,
I adore that part, you know, like I it really
got me thinking about technology and connection and disconnection because
you know, like there's a lot written about how communication
technology these days actually really distances us because you know,
like like a phone call can connect to you over
great distances, or a text message or a blue sky

(01:10:46):
skeet or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
But but how visceral is that connection? Does it give
us what we really want or need from human connection?
And you know, like what if the line isn't clear,
what if there's static? So like a lot online forums
or whatever platform can can connect people who feel alone
in their life in a lot of ways. But we've
all seen how discourse can break down so quickly.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
When when people feel shielded by the when lack of
extual intimacy.

Speaker 3 (01:11:17):
When the distance of acting through that medium makes people
mean or or at the very least like unforgiving.

Speaker 8 (01:11:24):
Well, because you're you're you're not you're not shouting at
a person, You're shouting at the idea of a person, right,
And that's a lot it's a lot easier to dehumanize
someone when you're when they're oh, just a moving image
and some words that piss you off.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Right, both of us have been on the end of
angry YouTube.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
Cod death threats for yelling at my cat. I didn't
even yell at my cat. I meowed at my cat.
I woke my cat up with the me.

Speaker 6 (01:11:51):
Never wake up a cat or a sleeping baby.

Speaker 5 (01:11:53):
I got, I got, I got comments that made me
question my like worth as a human being.

Speaker 6 (01:11:59):
Can you give us some background on this?

Speaker 5 (01:12:01):
Okay, so sorry, what are you talking about? I had
a cat right italics? He was a real asshole. He was,
I mean, he liked he hated everybody but me and uh.
He would wake us up in the middle of the night,
me and and my my partner at the time, and

(01:12:22):
it just it happened so often that we were losing sleep,
and occasionally, to make us feel better after a long night,
if somebody was at work, somebody was at home, we
would just see him sleeping and we would just videotape
us waking him up, going like, pre you sleeping, are
you sleeping?

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
Pre sleeping? And how's a feel? How's it feel, how's
it feel? You like this?

Speaker 5 (01:12:43):
And it was just to make the just to make
the other person laugh. But there was one day where
I caught him sleeping and I managed to frame it
perfectly so that he's on one side of the frame
and my head. I moved my head into the other
side of the frame and meowed at him loudly, and
he wears startled. He sees it's me, and he just

(01:13:05):
like flops down.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
He's like whatever.

Speaker 5 (01:13:08):
That video has gotten death threats, hundreds of millions of
views over over different platforms, right, and so I have
gotten tens of thousands, possibly more, of hateful comments, people
just going like you were a huge piece of shit.
There was one woman that was like, you should never

(01:13:31):
have a child because you are incapable of empathy. You
are a piece of shit. The fact that you're able
to do this to a cat shows that you are
a monster, and you were irredeemable and the best thing
you can do is die.

Speaker 7 (01:13:44):
Off of a four second video clip of very completely.

Speaker 5 (01:13:49):
Thirty one seconds.

Speaker 4 (01:13:50):
But like, but like, and I could just picture this
woman while she's typing this hate mail, just like away.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
Got important thing to do.

Speaker 5 (01:13:58):
And and I literally I never responded to these things.
If I did, it was always some jokey like, hey, real,
please to see you. We love talking to our fans.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
Have a great.

Speaker 5 (01:14:12):
And I wrote some nasty stuff back to it.

Speaker 7 (01:14:15):
I was like, she could use some of that zero trauma.

Speaker 5 (01:14:19):
And you know, Lauren, having gotten lots of hate mail
for being a woman.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
Who talked about science, talked about science on YouTube.

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
Yeah, you talk about science.

Speaker 6 (01:14:29):
I'm off the podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:14:33):
Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking there.

Speaker 5 (01:14:35):
But politics and history are the only things you're allowed
to talk about.

Speaker 6 (01:14:39):
And sewing did you choose made?

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Whoa whoa? Whoa whoa whoa.

Speaker 5 (01:14:42):
Let's not get regressive.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
What about the science of shoes? No, but just so
you know, like it's it's that kind of instinct can
very much be out there. And I think that's a
lot of what we think of when we think of
technology these days. But there's at least like two edges
to this blade. And I love that in Aaron's telling
of this, the concept of like the mere presence of

(01:15:05):
having a communication technology with you, meaning that you're not alone.

Speaker 7 (01:15:10):
Yeah, And I think his experience with the technology is
more like letter writing, because he's not getting the kind
of feedback you're describing where you know he has to
then he's not being performative. He's not trying to frame
what he's got to say to please a certain audience,
and he's talking directly to people he loves. But what

(01:15:32):
amazed me about it was that even though he wasn't
getting a.

Speaker 6 (01:15:36):
Direct response from them. He was feeling the love from
these people coming.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
Out of this device.

Speaker 7 (01:15:41):
Like that's how he described it, Like he could feel
them loving him through this device, just by him sharing
the position that he was in, you know, like it's remarkable.

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
And it shifted his brain.

Speaker 7 (01:15:54):
He shifted his brain. And you also think about the
technology itself as kind of bulky, you know, like the
battery could run out. It's like you've got to balance
it somewhere, you know. It's not like an iPhone that
you can just flip out and take a selfie and
record it. Like it was work back then to get
your camera out and say something.

Speaker 4 (01:16:09):
And two other things that really struck me. One is,
like you were saying earlier, Lauren, about his ability to
think the boulder or to like the boulder is what
provided this entire transformation for him. You know, how hard
is it for people to look at their adversity and
thank it to go, well, you know what, I'm glad

(01:16:30):
that happened to me. I'm glad that, you know, thank
you for that experience, because without it I would not
have become what I am now or what have you.

Speaker 5 (01:16:36):
That's just I need to call my stepfather to kill me,
and he doesn't kill you, only makes you a basketcase.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
Makes it very funny.

Speaker 4 (01:16:52):
And the other thing is just the other thing that
I thought was crazy was that was the actual NDE
part of it. It wasn't about a life review. It
was about a future life, which I thought was something
we've never heard before. We've heard lots of people with
true indiees that talk about a life review or they
talk about finding this loving grace that's eternal. But he
saw this vision of his kid and then later he

(01:17:14):
was so confident in that.

Speaker 5 (01:17:15):
I had a similar I had a similar experience without
the near death when I was at twenty two in
college and I was like close to suicidal at that point,
and I was getting ready to drop out of school.
And there was one just really rough night. I fell
asleep and I had a dream about ten years in
the future, and I was in a large park in

(01:17:37):
the middle of a city I always think like Central Park,
but it's at a family barbecue type thing. I remember
walking across the street away from it and running into
my best friend McClain across the street and.

Speaker 1 (01:17:52):
John McClean Ian McLean Shelton.

Speaker 5 (01:17:56):
I had just I called him, called him McLain since
we were like ten, Sorry, but but yes, it was
John McClean. I was like, come to New York some laughs.
But like, I go across the street and he's sitting
there at the bar and I sit down next to him,
and he's like, hey, hey me, how you doing man?

(01:18:17):
And I said, I've never been happier. And he's said
that's great. And I was like, are you coming back?
And he goes, yea, I'll be back in a minute.
So I walked back across the street and as I'm
coming back into the park, I hear daddy and this
little kid with just like this short blonde hair runs
at me, this little boy, and and he runs to

(01:18:38):
me and I pick him up and I cling to him,
and I wake up with this feeling of love like
I'd never felt before. And then when I realized it
was a dream, this deep devastation, and I carried that
with me for years. I just this dream like haunted me.
I wrote about it a lot. What's really funny is

(01:19:01):
that my daughter, like last year, I was going to
meet she and her mom at a playground and I
show up and she'd she'd cut her hair at the
time because her mom's hair was short, so she wanted

(01:19:23):
her short. And I remember getting out of the car
and I'm having a rough day, just like in my head,
and she sees me before I see her, and I
hear dada, and she runs directly at me, and I
pick her up and I'm holding her, and this intense
deja vu hits me that like it's taken twenty plus

(01:19:47):
years to get to that point, but that's that's my kid,
and like that dream came rushing back to me and
I felt that just this really intense, weird like just
like I was connected like something like a shadow, like
an echo of my future and like hit this kid
in the past and like kept me alive for another day.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:20:11):
And it's just like hearing that that was the part
of this particular story that just like hit me like
a freight train in a really lovely way.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:20:23):
So yeah, this story was very affecting in a lot
of different ways. But I think that really on a
personal level, just was like a like a love like
a loving tap to the heart.

Speaker 7 (01:20:35):
I just love when there's a fold in space and
time in these stories because we don't know what the
threat of our life is for we don't know where
we came from, where we go. I mean, I very
well believe you could go on to an afterlife or
you could fall into the ground and rot. Both of
those are plausible pibility.

Speaker 5 (01:20:54):
And I'll be honest with you, either one fine by me.

Speaker 7 (01:21:00):
It's the same, the idea that somehow there's this reality
where this thing happens. There's there's even I've never clicked
on these videos on YouTube. I watched a lot of
science videos, but there's always one there's time even real,
and it's like, well maybe even Einstein kind of said,
I don't know. I'm not going to get into it.
I'm not a scientists, but my science is as bad

(01:21:21):
as my theology. So but yeah, is it is it?
Did it already happen somehow? Can you see it? Is
it preordained? Or is it a possibility?

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
Like?

Speaker 7 (01:21:31):
Is this a I don't know, but I thought that
of all r Andy's Eat stories, I thought this one
was the most amazing because it wasn't like maybe these
things that people talk about seeing the light, meeting a
spirit guide and all that happened, but it was so
unique and so original and so moving for what for
the reasons you just said, Nick, Yeah, like this is
your possibility.

Speaker 2 (01:21:52):
In front of you, the reason to live.

Speaker 5 (01:21:54):
You know, I think that sometimes we get to like
just barely rush up against the divine, and I think that,
especially in times of our lives that are more difficult,
it can hit you the wrong way. You know, you
get sad right that that you can't embrace this thing

(01:22:15):
more fully.

Speaker 2 (01:22:16):
Or a feeling of loss, because it's like.

Speaker 5 (01:22:18):
Yeah, feeling of loss. And I think that it takes
it takes a lot of study and a lot of
practice to really be able to embrace that. And having
that dream when you're twenty two and and suicidal, it
it can kind of it can feel almost traumatic.

Speaker 3 (01:22:36):
It feels like a joke. It feels like you're playing
a joke on it.

Speaker 5 (01:22:39):
It feels like something being pulled away from h But yeah,
I think that Aaron shows that you can really embrace
that in the moment and you know, let that move
you forward. And I wish I'd been more open to
it when I was twenty two, because maybe my life
would be different if I was able to at least
take things as teachable moment as a.

Speaker 3 (01:23:00):
Positive sign not a negative.

Speaker 5 (01:23:02):
Yeah, this this dream it was. It was a dream.
You know, it didn't need to break my heart, but
you know my brain wasn't ready to accept that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
Yeah, I mean, and we all have to make those choices, right,
You have to choose to want. I mean, there's also
a lot of brain chemistry involved. And I don't know
what was going on with your brain chemistry when you
were twenty two. Mine was crap.

Speaker 5 (01:23:22):
Oh but mine mine was like mine was. Mine was
held together with like dorrito dust, chewing gum and like
Bacardi one fifty one.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
You know, but it's true.

Speaker 4 (01:23:32):
I wonder if it'd be I would love to cultivate
a tool set or a skill set so that when
I'm in adversity, I can stop and reframe the adversity
not as punishment but as a lesson or as something
that I can that I will at some point be
grateful for, and to know that while it's happening might.

Speaker 2 (01:23:52):
Be interesting way to live.

Speaker 6 (01:23:53):
I don't know, it's sounds nice.

Speaker 5 (01:23:55):
I have that nice work if you can get it right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:23:59):
Right to go through what he went through though and
to have this vision of reason to live and then
to have to again make his way out of the park,
you know, like, how is he going to ride his bike?
How's he going to hike down? How's he And then
he meets that family and he's like, I am bleeding
to death. And if that helicopter hadn't come right when
it came, I would have bled out in front of

(01:24:21):
this family, Like to have seen this tantalizing vision of
what could lie in the future for you and still
not be through it. You know, it's just heartbreaking to
think he could. He could have gone through all of
that and still die.

Speaker 4 (01:24:35):
It's kind of interesting during the interview, looking back when
I was cutting it, I thought, I wish he had
told me more about that moment of knowing that he
was safe, that moment of knowing that, like the helicopter came.

Speaker 2 (01:24:46):
He kind of.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
Breezed over the rescue a little bit, Like he got
all the way up to the point where the helicopter
got him, and then it was like and that was that,
and he, you know, he was about finally that point,
was just about to lose consciousness and he wouldn't have
made it another ten minutes or something. It's pretty miraculous,
but he kind of moved past it quickly and didn't
get into it. Maybe it was because you know, he

(01:25:07):
had already had the epiphany, He had already had this,
He already knew he was gonna make it. Like but
his life was saved, not in that moment with the helicopter,
but back in but the way he described it, where
he's like, I'm hearing this boom boom, you know, and
I'm dying and it turns.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
Out it's the helicopter blades. I just thought that was
such again, not as hard.

Speaker 6 (01:25:24):
A nice as crossfade.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
Dan.

Speaker 7 (01:25:33):
You make a good point about the need to embrace love,
and I think what happens when he's doing that is
he's taken himself outside of himself, and that becomes the
value that he brings out. It becomes his motivation. But
a huge part of the story is also his intellect
and his ability to stop and think through a moment,
you know.

Speaker 6 (01:25:51):
And I think that's a lesson observe, stop, observe.

Speaker 7 (01:25:54):
And yeah, I mean I think as a society, we're
so reactive you know, on on YouTube, comments, on Facebook,
We're so reactive. Our foreign policy, our national policy is
so reactive. Where if we could go back to that
enlightenment idea of stop, get calm, think this through, you know,

(01:26:15):
like I think, to me, that's a huge lesson story
as well.

Speaker 4 (01:26:20):
Yes, if you're talking about like culturally, we're all running
around reacting to the shit that's going on politically, and
if we could stop and instead of just reacting to
everything like there's you know, constant fires all around us,
if we could all just stop.

Speaker 6 (01:26:35):
And the problem I do like Bruce Lee and enter
the dragon and just sit down.

Speaker 5 (01:26:40):
The problem, the problem with our soy, I mean to
go back to the technology. Well, the problems is that
the technology benefits from us being reactionary. The technology benefits
from it. We engage more, we see more of their ads.
This is it's designs to make us reaction there.

Speaker 4 (01:27:02):
I bet that because of our iPhones and because of
our social media, are amigdalas are like ten times bigger
than they normally would be. I mean bigger than like
lions chasing us and you know and being hunted by wolves.
I mean, like the real threat that fight or flight
is built for in our brains of you know, surviving
predators or horrible situations. I bet our amigdalas are bigger

(01:27:25):
than our primal ancestors.

Speaker 3 (01:27:28):
I mean that the litany of terror that is available
at your fingertips every second of every day.

Speaker 1 (01:27:36):
Next time on Alive again, we meet Eric Larson, a
renowned polar explorer.

Speaker 9 (01:27:40):
I could have been killed multiple times. You know where?
What's the direction we're all going? None of us are
getting out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:47):
Alive a story not about how a brush with death
informed his life, but about how it has experiences in
extreme life threatening conditions informed his battle with cancer age four.

Speaker 9 (01:27:57):
Cancer is the worst thing you could hear, but it's
also the nature of the world. But that little gesture
of just like, hey man, I get it. It's fucking scary.
That kindness has really informed my life and like to
take that away would mean that I wouldn't have had cancer.

Speaker 1 (01:28:20):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima Lkali and Numes Griffin.

(01:28:42):
Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson, mixing by
Ben Lovitt and Alexander Rodriguansen. I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Special thanks to Aaron Ralston for sharing his incredible story
with us. To learn more about Aaron and his journey,
go to Aaron Ralston speaker dot com, so check our
show notes for links where you can follow him on

(01:29:02):
social media. You can also dive deeper into his heroin
experience and extraordinary resilience by reading his memoir Between a
Rock and Heard Place. Alive Again is a production of
iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near
death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

(01:29:25):
That's a l I V E A g A I
N P R O j E C t at gmail
dot com.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}12 | You Can’t Hold Gratitude and Despair at the Same Time: The True Story of '127 Hours'