Please make sure to click the 'Follow' the show - it really helps surface the show to a wider audience (which i thank you for!)

Tom Williams went into the Canadian wilderness with a gill net, a knife, and a handful of survival skills he'd honed on tropical desert islands. He came out 35 days later as the winner of Alone UK — feeling, by his own account, the happiest and healthiest he'd ever felt in his life. His IBS had cleared up. His anxiety had gone. He'd been sleeping 11 hours a night. He was genuinely sad to leave.

That's the thing about Tom's story. It isn't really about a survival competition. It's about a kid from Portsmouth who was bottom of his class, bullied by his teachers, and so uncomfortable in an office cubicle that he signed up for a race to the North Pole after a few beers with a mate. One expedition led to another: coral reef mapping in Honduras, sailing 8,000 miles across the Pacific on a superyacht after a cold email, moving to Chile, losing his mum, and finally finding his purpose in the place he'd always been drawn to — nature, isolation, and the oldest
kind of living.

Chapters
00:00 Peak happiness in the wild 
01:00 Who is Tom Williams? Adventurer, founder, Alone UK winner
03:30 Portsmouth upbringing: the chip on his shoulder and the cubicle he had to escape
07:00 The North Pole race — a pub bet, 28-hour days, and hallucinating polar bears
13:00 Training, resilience, and the 40 per cent rule
18:00 Fundraising, white-collar boxing, and getting to the start line
23:00 The catalyst year — North Pole, 8,000-mile Pacific crossing, and losing his mother
30:00 Coral reefs in Honduras and the seeds of Desert Island Survival
36:00 How Desert Island Survival works — and the transformation it triggers
41:00 Learning bushcraft from Tom McElroy — one of the world's leading primitive skills experts
46:00 Getting cast for Alone UK — and the mixed feelings about winning after just 35 days
50:00 Inside Alone — the gill net, the duck, and the drop-shock moment
55:00 Peak health, mental clarity, and how long he could realistically have lasted
58:00 Reintegration, health changes, and the book — You Are an Animal
01:01:00 New expeditions — Okavango Delta kayak safari and the Sweden Alone experience
04:30 The machete incident, close calls, and finding his ikigai
58:30 Call to adventure: micro adventures, kayaking, bike touring
59:30 Pay It Forward: GiveDirectly

Today he runs Desert Island Survival, maroooning people on uninhabited tropical islands across Panama, the Philippines, Tonga, Indonesia, and now the Okavango Delta. His next project is a book about evolutionary mismatch — and why the happiest he's ever felt was when he was living exactly like a hunter-gatherer.

What You'll Learn:
• Why Tom believes the mind always quits before the body — and the mental training method  that helped him outlast everyone else in the Canadian wilderness
• What it actually tastes like to eat a roast duck you caught accidentally in a gill net after 25 days on nothing but pike
• How Tom sent a cold email to a superyacht owner he'd photographed on a dive — and ended up sailing from Vancouver to Chile
• The simple bushcraft formula behind Desert Island Survival — and why the most transformative guests are the ones who have never camped before
• What evolutionary mismatch is, why most intelligent zoo animals are on antidepressants, and what that means for how we live
• The science behind phytoncides — the chemicals trees release that kill cancer cells and make you feel good — and why aromatherapy is, actually, empirically legit

TOM WILLIAMS | Adventurer, Survival Expert & Founder of Desert Island Survival
Website: tomwilliams.tv
Desert Island Survival: desertislandsurvival.com
Instagram: @TomWilliamsAlone (instagram.com/tomwilliamsalone)
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/desertislandtom
Pay It Forward: GiveDirectly — givedirectly.org — direct cash transfers to the world's
poorest communities, prioritising women as recipients

ABOUT TOM WILLIAMS
Tom Williams grew up in Portsmouth — bottom of his class, bullied, and seemingly destined for nothing much. At 27, he signed up for a polar race on a whim over beers with a friend, walked 367 miles to the North Pole, and never really went back to normal life. He's since sailed 8,000 miles across the Pacific, mapped coral reefs in Honduras, and spent six months immersed in tropical island survival with one of the world's foremost bushcraft mentors. In 2023 he was crowned winner of Alone UK, surviving 35 days solo in the Canadian wilderness. He is the founder and CEO of Desert Island Survival, which runs immersive survival expeditions across
seven countries, and is writing his first book — You Are an Animal — about why living aligned to hunter-gatherer instincts may be the key to modern health and happiness.

For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Thanks For Listening.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment and subscribe for more exciting content.

Please visit AdventureDiaries.com/GO  For more authentic stories of Adventure Exploration and the natural world

The Adventure Diaries Podcast also covers a broad spectrum OF topics withIN the fields of Adventure, Exploration, Micro-adventure, Survival, Mental Resilience, Conservation, Scotland, Hiking, Solo Travel, Cycling, Nature, Storytelling, Mountaineering