My Les Stroud(Survivorman) Story: Get to Know Joe. e2

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in. It's Joe here, we're in the hot tent today. Think I do a episode two of Get to Know Joe. Episode one went over very well, and it's almost at, it's about 10,000 views now in four days, so that's really good for me, especially just for me sitting there talking about myself. So I appreciate the views, I appreciate the fact that you guys do want to hear this kind of stuff, that you do want to get to know me a little bit more. And on the last one, I mentioned something about having a Les Stroud story, and I got overwhelming amount of replies saying yes they'd like to hear the Les Stroud story. So this is my Les Stroud story. Once upon a time, so about, I don't know man, 12 years ago roughly, maybe even a little bit before that, there was nothing, there was nothing for me. The internet was there, it just wasn't readily available for people, at least I didn't know of forums and groups and stuff like that of people talking about bushcraft or the outdoors, survival, wilderness skills, stuff like that. So my whole library and people that I knew that did this kind of stuff was just through books that I had borrowed from the library. A library, boys and girls, that used to be a thing. Things I watched on PBS, like Dick Proenneke's Alone in the Wilderness on PBS when they want to give them donations and stuff, they'd play that. What else? Oh, Ray Mears was on PBS as well. uh survival stories here was the mark of bushcraft he had like three different shows that was that were on PBS and then out of nowhere OLN started playing this thing called Survivor Man and i am blown away by this right because Ray Mears is awesome but he's bringing his gear he's british he's well known he's a little bit farther out of my reach farther out of my my knowledge and and And Les Stroud, Survivor Man, I come to find out, lives a few hours north of me, right? And he's out there doing all this. This guy became my hero. Like, I'm talking, like, I can't even explain it. I was, I was, I had to find out everything this guy did. I went back, I found at the library his Snowshoes and Solitude VHS, not DVD, because DVDs back then were a commodity still. So, yeah, so I found out as much as I could about him. I was obsessed with watching his show, Survivor Man, and I would watch it all the time. So I actually did a bunch of research on the Internet when still the Internet was not a big thing, at least for me. And I found Les Stroud's phone number, okay? And I was just blown away. Like, what am I going to say to the guy, though, right? I'm just doing all this research. I'm just trying to find some way to connect with him, some way to find a way to pursue this as my career, as something that I wanted to do in the future. And I thought, he's the guy to talk to, right? So I actually found his number on the internet, like I was saying. His website was like this rinky-dinky. If you've ever seen my website, my Joe Robin at Bushcraft website, it was worse than that. Okay, mine's pretty bad. it was like a couple phone numbers a place where you could buy a dvd or a dvd of his um snowshoeing solitude or dvd of his Survivor Man or whatever so found his number on there called him he answered i think it was him a guy answered and i got so nervous i hung up the phone it sounds a little creepy and stalkerish it could have been maybe but that's how i felt i just didn't know what to say the guy what am i supposed to say oh i like your tv show i live in Windsor yeah i don't know it just seemed too far to me so I put that on the back shelf for a second and just continued just soaking up as much as I could just just knowledge bushcraft survival all that stuff and again went on the internet and found an address to write him to so before an email and all that stuff the norm was to write a letter so I wrote him a letter just explaining to him how big of an impact he had had on my life because he had and what kind of things I could do in the future to to become more uh going going in that that direction for a career and things like that so i wrote him a letter didn't really expect anything after that a couple months later i get this big letter back from from africa a big envelope from a title from africa and in it was a signed autographed picture of Les Stroud and a huge letter with him wrote back to me all just as as much info as he could give me in a letter right and he's a busy guy and he wrote it from africa on a shoot of Survivor Man how cool is that okay and in the letter he wrote back like i don't usually write back blah blah blah all this stuff but this this spoke to me or whatever i actually looked for that letter today like for two hours in my basement i can't find i know i still have it i definitely didn't get rid of it i just can't find it i wanted to show you guys maybe in the future if i find it i'll put it on a video but uh yeah so i got that and i was ecstatic i was just tickled pink to have that to my my hero actually acknowledge me and write me back and sign a picture and give me tips and tricks um he actually told me to go uh to the school called school in the woods i believe by david arama who was one of his teachers arama and uh never ended up doing that thing's gotten away anyways fast forward like eight years and i'm up in huntsville right so we had moved from windsor up to huntsville up to sioux saint marie to go to school then we had moved down halfway way back to Windsor to Huntsville. And Huntsville is 40 minutes outside of Algonquin Park. It's cottage country, basically. We lived in a cedar log cabin there with a wood stove for our heat. It was really cool. We had a moose walk through our yard a couple of times. Really nice place. So I'm really getting into the bushcraft and the outdoor stuff. And this is how, after I'd gone to college for it, I decided I want to take a course. So I'm looking all around me. The only course I can find, there's one by Canadian Bushcraft, Caleb Musgrave or Oz. I'm sure a couple people have heard of him And I was his first student So I went, I drove a couple hours to the Hiawatha First Nations area Took a class with him Talked about Les Stroud a lot Come back a couple days later And me and the wife decided to go to Blockbuster To rent a movie So we go We're both separate in the aisles Separate aisles All of a sudden my wife walks up to me with a beet red face And she goes, Les Stroud is two aisles over And I'm like, no way you know what i mean my heart like just like skips a beat he lives in huntsville okay uh maybe i forgot to mention that he he's moved around uh around that area but at that time he lived in huntsville so it wasn't hard to believe that he was there it was just very exciting so the wife comes up to me tells me that and i'm like man i gotta go say hi to him but i don't want to just be like hey Les Stroud you know what i mean like another just like groupie or or fanboy whatever which I am completely I just didn't want him to think that so I needed an in and right right away my head thinks just tell him he wrote you a letter from Africa like that's an in that's that's a conversation starter for sure oh man it's getting toasty so so I walk over and he's with his son his son Logan and he's young at the time and I don't want to like bother him too much or anything but again I have to say hi so I say Les hi you wrote me a letter from Africa once and he looks at me he says I did he's like I didn't do that much I said no and I explained it to him he said oh, yeah, yeah, and I'm not sure if he actually remembered or if he was just humoring me, because this, again, was like eight years prior, but really, really down-to-earth guy, talked to him for a good five minutes in there, again, I was the one to kind of separate it, because I didn't want to seem, I didn't want to seem like I was holding him up, he was with his son, you know what I mean, who am I to break up that time, so talked to him for a couple minutes, he actually says, I'm having a book signing at the bookshelf, which is a bookstore in Huntsville, in a couple days why don't you come definitely i'll see you there less so i go we set we separate separate ways i was just tickled pink i actually called up uh caleb the guy i took the course with because it was like the day the day i left i told him he was just blown away too and um yeah a couple days later i went to the book signing with him and uh there was a full house i actually got i spent a bunch of time with his son logan that day uh just talking to him for a couple hours i waited until the end. Les, I gave him a letter. I was really happy just telling him how much he's like influenced my life and all that stuff. Got to spend a little bit of time with him there too. That's my Les Stroud story. Pretty cool, especially for me, for him having such an influence on my life early on. It does kind of suck now what he's doing, saying about alone, saying that we had producers and food and camera crew and stuff with us on the show we didn't that's just a fact we didn't we were alone and he doesn't believe that he's he's saying in social media and other places that that that is the truth and really I don't think that he should he should be doing that because it's not the truth the same with him putting down Bear Grylls and stuff Les Stroud you are up here Bear Grylls you are down here you have no no kind of like connection in the middle there there's not even a question in my book so Les just keep taking the higher road man don't worry about the other people you are doing it you were the first you you go and survive for seven days however long now by yourself filming do a great job don't worry about Bear Grylls and and don't say that things are fake that you don't know that aren't I mean alone was real my experience on alone was legit so hope you guys enjoyed this little Les Stroud chat yeah you asked for it so there it was we'll be back with another episode of get to know Joe and maybe next month take care guys thanks for watching