Hazen Audel: Amazonian Tribe Life & Primal Survivor Journey

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In another thrilling episode of The Adventure Diaries, host Chris Watson is joined by Hazen Audel, a biologist, survival expert, and star of National Geographic's Primal Survivor. Hazen takes us deep into the Amazon jungle, sharing incredible stories of his time living with indigenous tribes, his passion for rewilding nature, and how he transformed his wild dream into a successful television career. From catching a seven-foot rainbow boa to encountering giant armadillos, Hazen's journey is filled with jaw-dropping moments that will leave you inspired and in awe of the natural world.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Hazen's lifelong passion for nature and wildlife
• The adventure that changed his life: an eight-month immersion in the Amazon
• Living with indigenous tribes and learning their languages and customs
• The journey from the Amazon to becoming the star of Primal Survivor
• The importance of rewilding and connecting with nature
• Lessons learned from the wild and indigenous cultures
• Hazen's thoughts on community, solitude, and the modern world
• The unforgettable moments and challenges faced during the filming of Primal Survivor

Key Takeaways:

• Hazen's childhood love for nature led him to explore the Amazon at just 19 years old.
• His time with indigenous tribes taught him invaluable lessons about nature and community.
• Sharing his experiences online eventually led to his breakthrough in television.
• Hazen emphasizes the importance of rewilding and preserving natural habitats.
• He believes that true adventure lies in reconnecting with the natural world.

Call to Adventure:

• "Rewild your surroundings."
• "Put up bird houses."
• "Plant plants that are going to bring in the kind of bugs that I don't, yeah, bees are awesome, but I like bugs, like I like biodiversity cause I know how important they are."
• "Invite more wildlife and wildflowers into your life."
• "Learn and interact and be a part of nature."

Pay It Forward:

• Ecotourism: "If you're going to do some eco excursions, go to Ecuador, go to these other places in South and Central America outside of Costa Rica."
• Space for Giants: "It's an organization that's trying to give a lot of education to the locals so elephants can have a place that they can continue their migrations without being shot or beat to death by farmers."
• Jane Goodall Foundation: "Because they're so set, they're so organized, the funds go directly towards education, educating, getting into the schools, getting these kids to acknowledge that where they live, if they live in Madagascar that they have, they live with lemurs, they live with all this wildlife and they can have an amazing life and protect the wild

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:10 Early Passion for Nature
• 3:04 First Big Adventure: Ecuador
• 12:32 Living with Indigenous Tribes
• 21:52 Returning to Ecuador and Further Adventures
• 23:06 Integration with the Tribe
• 23:38 Learning from Indigenous Knowledge
• 29:07 Transition to TV and Academia
• 31:59 From Classroom to YouTube Fame
• 32:19 Guerrilla Filmmaking and Film Festivals
• 33:33 Rubbing Shoulders with the Big Names
• 33:46 The Breakthrough with Icon Films
• 34:49 Unscripted Adventures in the Jungle
• 35:32 National Geographic's Interest
• 36:24 Reflecting on Primal Survivor
• 37:02 Impactful Episodes and Personal Growth
• 38:24 The Importance of Community and Connection
• 40:04 Modern World vs. Traditional Living
• 47:38 Ultimate Survivor: World War II
• 50:11 Shark Encounters in the Solomon Islands
• 56:30 Rewilding and Ecotourism
• 1:01:26 Closing Thoughts and Future Plans

Transcript

 Hazen Audel, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?    

good, good. Nice to be here. Thank you, Chris. Okay.

You're  welcome buddy. Fantastic. Excited about this. So yeah, just as a bit of a frame  relief for the for the podcast today, I want to touch a little bit on your career path, your survival skills,  your biology backgrounds, some of your TV work, but also some of your artwork and your craftsmanship as well. 

And we'll touch on. Some of the juicy bits later in terms of your TV work. So some of the work that you've  done around like Primal Survivor and    Ultimate Survivor as well, which I'm particularly interested in, which we'll come to as well. But, and yeah, so some, I think there's a real theme with I think some of your passion for the outdoors, of course, but indigenous cultures as well.

You spent a lot of time with a lot of different tribes.  And that's where I want to, that's the arc for today, but rolling back your passion for nature and the outdoors talk us through that and how that all came to be.    

I think when you say what my career is, I don't know. Is this my career? I don't know, but I always seem to follow my heart and that's  where I go. So my entire life I've had a real  passion for wildlife and nature and I think everybody  When they grow up as kids,   once they learn that there's bugs underneath a brick,    or a rock, or a log, they want to see what's under there.

So whether they're getting roly polies, or whether they're getting little things. And I think everybody's like that. But for some reason, what I noticed is  all of my classmates were growing out of it, and I never grew out of it. I just Still maintain that real child,  childlike   fast fascination,  and  then realizing that was my one and primary passion in life.

And so just always gravitating towards learning about reptiles and creepy crawlies and snakes and plants. And I think I always dreamed about once I was, I think I was very impressioned by. Our wonderful people like Sir David Attenborough and    watching his shows, I was fixated  and always thought, Oh, that would be a, that'd be a dream job for me. 

But it's like a dreaming about being a drummer in a rock and roll band.  You can dream it all you want, but it's not really going to happen. But then lo and behold very long story short.  I'm living my dream, living my passion, and I get to share it with the world right now. It's pretty darn a good deal.  

As, and you've covered a fair. A fair few miles across the world, haven't you? And you've been from the tropics to the Arctic Africa and stuff. So what was your first big  wildlife, wilderness type experience? I think you went to Ecuador when you were a teenager.  

Yeah I come from a family background where no one is  No one's ever really been in the position to be a traveler for leisure. My mom's native American. My mom, my dad is second generation  immigrant from Greece.  They didn't, they yeah, they didn't really have much    exposure or ability to travel outside of   sort of their desperate situations that they were in.

And but I just.  Like I've said, I've just always been very interested in nature and had a vision for myself as far as being a biologist. I was fortunate to,  I think my folks fostered my interest. They always gave me the books and they, for Christmas I was, rather  than looking for toys, I wanted them to give me rabbit's foot  ferns and weird orchids and things like that and I, and stuff for my aquarium.

My rooms were, Wall to wall aquariums. And I subscribe to these different magazines that  I'm in very nerdy, like tropical fish hobbyist and stuff like that. And I would read the articles about these different ichthyologists  that were exploring the Nile or discovering new places on    the Amazon where they're naming new species of  fish after themselves.

And then you get to hear their travel log about  getting stuck in the mud and whatever, running away from.  Cannibals, maybe I don't know what, whatever it was, but it was pretty exciting. And I thought that's what I'm going to have to do is be a biologist and travel to what I was really looking forward to was  the Amazon, of course, because that's the  pinnacle    of biodiversity.

So  first generation to have gone to college, went to college.  Went to the local college and  thinking that I was going to be learning all about the names of snakes and cool things. Instead, I was learning about horrifically boring things like  statistical chemistry and   the Krebs cycle.  And     again, just being really naive about what school is going to be about.

So I went there for two quarters and thought, boy, if I really am going to dedicate my life to the Amazon,  I'm going to have to go there and see it for myself because there's good chance. There's 10 years of school, at least in front of me if I want to  get the credentials to do what I need to do.    So yeah, I dropped out and then  I was 19 years old.  very naive, very poor. I was just mowing lawns for,  I wasn't even drinking beer by then, but I was going door to door mowing people's lawns and I remember that the plane ticket to get to Ecuador, I chose Ecuador because it was the upper Amazon,  huge amount of biodiversity, Brazil seemed like it was just    too big, too overwhelming,    Ecuador seemed safe.

The flight to Quito, Ecuador from my little hometown of Spokane was 680. 680.  I had 78 left over,  was, I was saving in a coffee can  and I thought I have all my camping equipment that I had from high school.  I'm going to go to Ecuador.    I'm going to go to the jungle somehow. I'm going to go camping   and  see however long 78 is going to last me there.

And then I'm going to have to go home.  And  I know, yeah, it was ridiculous. I was 19, I knew nothing. And I was very bashful. I just coming from a population over here in the United States where, they think that if you're going to talk to a foreigner, you're probably going to get kidnapped    at the same time.

I went there thinking  I was going to go take the bus  to the end of the road, which I did. I remember flying into Quito, Ecuador, which is about 10, 000 feet,  and going to the bus station,  and telling them, I want to go as far from here as I possibly can. I want to go to the end of the road. I want to go into the heart of the jungle. 

And the guy at the bus    station said, Yeah, nobody goes there. Nobody wants to go there. There's  night.  And then I said no really, that's where I want to go. And there was a bus with some indigenous looking folks with goats that were tied up and chickens and baskets and bananas.

And they were going to the jungle. So I said, yeah, I want to go there with them.  And it was two days in a bus ride. I think the cost of the bus was probably about 2 and 70 cents or something, and for, yeah, for  two days, we traveled through the Andes on these.  Crazy roads. And it was, we were starting to go further down in elevation.

I started to see  things that  I would have never thought that I would have seen in my life in real life, big hanging termite nests from branches and these epiphytic plants like bromeliads and orchids hanging from branches. And you just started to get in, you started to get more and more remote    into the Emerald green forest.

And there was a  couple of stories about seeing. Really starting to understand that my dreams are starting to unfold. I'm looking out the window and I can remember I was so overwhelmed with just this journey and seeing all this, these things from plants and branches overhead on the road that I climbed out the window. 

And I climbed up onto the top of the bus with all the other chickens   and luggage and things like that. Nobody knew I was there. I just  opened up the window and climbed up and over and just breathed it all in. And it was just me up there. And I can remember looking down the road by that time, the road was a dirt road and it was a big, long stretch.

And there was a snake that was so big. I could see it crossing the road about, A quarter of a mile up ahead and I didn't want the bus to run over it    and nobody knew I was up in the bus. So I pounded on the  ceiling  and freaked out the bus driver and essentially flew off the top of the bus, landed on the hood, landed on the ground, ran over to see what the snake was.

And it was, it had not yet been ran over. And it was a called a, a rainbow boa, which is a, like one of my bucket list snakes to  see in a magazine or a book. And there it was in  real life about seven feet long and never    even had exposure to snakes that were that big. I grew up around, I grew up catching rattlesnakes and garter snakes and little water snakes, but no big boa constrictors.

And there it was a big boa constrictor. I caught it. I was so excited. I didn't know what to do with it, but I ran into the bus.  Everybody that was in the bus to those people. They don't like snakes of any kind but I had it. And then

You  took it with you, you took it onto the  

I did. 

Wow.    Yeah. 

and you gotta keep it.

You gotta keep in mind. This is like 1992. But yeah and a farmer gave it, gave me a gunny sack. I put it in there and I was just going to, yeah. It was going to be a couple hours later till I was going to get to the end of the road. I was going to see it, take pictures of it, and then let it go. And so I had that, and then I was super excited, got back up on the bus,     up on the top of the bus, here we are again, and  literally about a few miles later down the road, there was actually a tarantula that was so big, I saw it crossing the road.

And so again, I stopped off, fell off, ran on the, ran, look for a tarantula. I'd never tried to catch a tarantula before. And then there was a box. And then pretty soon  everybody that was freaked  out of everything that I was doing was they were all in the very  front of the bus with their eyes looking for things that I might be able to run after something.

And so every time there was some exotic.  Roadkill an armadillo or something. I'd get out and at least poke a stick at it and then we'd keep moving on. So everybody was enjoying this antics of this very strange 19 year old kid that didn't know any of the  language. But once we got to the end of the road, I took pictures  of all the loot, let it all go.

And I just walked up the, I walked up this one river, because that was where the end of the road was. And then I found a good secluded place, hiding in the bushes, set up my tent. And my plan  was to just  be,     because I went there, I really wanted to be a freshwater  ichthyologist. So I wanted to go see all the fish that I'd been  forever in my life.

Spending my allowance on when in all my aquariums. I wanted to see them in real life in the rivers So  I was fishing and I figured you know My 20 pound bag of rice that I bought for  hardly anything  and with my  camp stoves and stuff. I could cook rice  I could  catch any fish. I could just eat rice and fish until 78 runs out.

And and that was really the sort of the beginning of a journey of  being fiercely armed with being incredibly naive and Just going for it. And I think, you'll learn the hard way. You learn about when it  rains in the rain forest, everything floods.    So the first night that I was spending the night in there, everything's fully zipped.

You didn't know what kind of animals are going to come in there. You don't, you can just only imagine. And there's. Your mind's playing tricks on you and all you're hearing is bugs. If you ever go to the jungle, you just hear bugs. But it rained torrentially that night. And so I had to sleep in about three inches  of mud that night.

And that was  pretty much about  every night for the next couple weeks. But I just, again was fishing. I was catching Oscars. I was catching angelfish. I was catching all these Plecostomus. And it was,  I didn't care about my discomfort, I was living this adventure, but the, I think the big turning moment was, I kept seeing these,     I was in such an area that was remote,  that they were all indigenous people that were living in the area, and from across the river, It was a good sized river.

There were some indigenous children, I'd say probably from around the age of about six to nine.  There was three or four of them usually, and they were always catching fish, and they were just reeling in fish, all kinds of fish. But it was    too far away for me to see the species of fish or anything, and they'd put them in their  baskets and buckets.  Always wondering what they were catching, how they were catching them.  But then every once in a while they'd be on my side of the river going up the trail. There were no roads. And there was one time when I saw their bucket full of fish. So  I stopped 'em and looked at all the different fish and tried to understand what they were saying.

And     they were ex, they were explaining the names of the fish and their  language.  But then pretty soon, those little kids were, became my friends. We were fishing buddies. I'd go over across the river, go fishing with them even though there was no language. But  at the end of the day, I'd go back into my swamp tent and then they'd go to their houses that were way up the river.

I hadn't been up there yet, but they were telling their  parents about  me rotting  away in a tent. And their parents told them to invite me over for  a meal or something just to go visit. And I can remember walking up there and it was the first time in my life that I had ever seen  people that had, were living in huts, up above the ground, so they weren't getting swamped,     they had thatched roofs, they didn't have walls,   the floors were made out of crushed bamboo,  and dinner was being brought by  the dad who had pig that he just speared and it was it's forearms and hind legs were tied together and it was carried like a backpack and it was brought right into the house and plopped on the ground and the women just got their knives and  just started eviscerating the thing and turning it into  pork chops and everything and  at 19 I'd never seen that sort of stuff before.

And that's what was for dinner and there were a couple other things from the forest that I couldn't identify at the time,  but there's an expression, a Spanish saying, it's mi casa es su casa.  It's basically my house is your house.     By the time they recognized, I was dead. Harmless   19 on my own, but I was fascinated with the jungle and I love the kids.

They just, they could, my language, was they could see my heart and they said, I said you should probably, since you love all these snakes and you love, we can tell you where all this stuff is. We can teach you how to fish. We can teach you how to do all this  stuff.  And you should just maybe    think about living with us.

You can live with us. It's fine.  And I think their agenda was like. Live with us so you don't die out there, but  that that's what started this trip where I thought, I originally thought I'd just be there for three or four weeks and then I'd have to go home. I wound up being there for eight months.

Wow.  

and so being there for eight months, that was, I can tell you more about that experience, but in eight months, I learned two languages, indigenous languages,  was living without electricity for eight months was a part of their community. So it really shaped  my life at a time when  I'm trying to figure out what life, even who I even am.   

That's mad. That's that's incredible that the fact that they welcomed you. A stranger as well, doesn't speak the language you would in indigenous tribes, there's, We can say a lot about colonialism and people, trying to interfere with these types of tribes, but that's fantastic.

That seems like the start of an Indiana Jones movie that's just morphed into a National Geographic epic. It's fantastic. Yeah.    

It was very serendipitous. It can't I think the scariest thing that I could, the scariest and most  unwise thing I've ever done in my life was, is the thing that opened up  my life path. Really?    

yeah, wow,  and what age were you? He's 19. 

I was 19 at

Yeah,  and you, as you said, you dropped out of, was it the, you dropped out of studies to go and essentially this was your classroom to an extent, wasn't it?  

Yeah. Yeah. It was as much as I.  Needed the credentials to go to school. I all I really wanted to do was just go catch snakes for a living  

Wow.

And  

when you're in the jungle, you're that's what you're doing    

What was your first night like then in the jungle? Were you scared?     

I'll tell you the first night. So the first night it rained torrentially I had a I had  

It's doing that, it's doing that right here in Scotland, by the way. It's torrential rain right now in Scotland, so there's noise in the background, just FYI, if it's    

Okay, so I had a flashlight and  I'm just shining my flash flashlight around. It's pouring down rain, but I had never seen  everywhere. You looked with where this beam of the flashlight landed  a something, was a spider, a beetle, a  lizard was life everywhere. You    didn't have to go for miles to see.

You just looked on the tree and you looked up and down the tree and you saw so much  overwhelming.  Not only biodiversity, but just the biomass, the life, and the sound of everything. The frogs, the crickets, the all the weird night sounds.  It's just this cacophony, piercing sound.   And it's coming in from all directions.

And I can remember   looking on the ground and seeing an earthworm that was about three feet long. Never saw anything like that before, tried to take pictures, swamping my camera. I think my camera only lasted for a couple weeks until it became completely destroyed.  And just seeing these amazing spiders on leaves and seeing all this.

And then finally needing to go to bed. So I went to bed,  in    my tent.  In a very wet blanket,   and, of course, the zipper is tight. You didn't, you don't know what's going to crawl into your tent at that time. And I can remember  about in the middle of the night, waking up, and something was tearing up the ground.

I had no idea what it was, but it had just fierce force. It was just And tearing  up roots and whatever ground and I  didn't,  of course, he didn't want to open up the door to the sleeping bag or the door to the tent to see what it was.  I had to see what it was, but I didn't know what it possibly could have been. 

And so finally. I got everything going. I got, had my knife in my hand,  19 by myself. I had my flashlight with the on button, almost ready to go.     My plan was, I was going to  zip  up the open up, do a quick scan, see what it was, and then zip it back up. I opened it up and it was two giant armadillos. I've never seen them in real life ever since.

So they're a mate  lo and behold, later on, I found out that they're critically endangered. They're the largest armadillo in the world. If you see armadillos from the fossil record,     they pretty much  have not changed.   They're an armadillo that stands about three feet tall. So about and they can weigh anywhere, they probably weigh close to 80 pounds.

So they're not like your little they're giant. They're giant. They look like  what's out of a dinosaur book and they were so incredibly powerful with their front claws. They were just tearing up the ground and tearing up roots.  And I was, I haven't spotlighted with my  flashlight and they didn't notice that  I was there just because they were spotlighted and they were just tearing up the ground and then eating all the earthworms.

That were in the ground and don't have, I don't have the camera equipment to take pictures of this. I just vaguely know what they were, but never even really paying attention to where they might live in the world. And that was the first and only time I've ever seen giant armadillo.

If you want to do a, an entertaining Google search, go look up giant armadillo. They're awesome.    

because I always thought they were little about the size of a house cat or smaller little tiny little things like, 

There's all different kinds, but they ain't like the big, yeah, the Mac daddy. Those are that.    

Wow. Oh, honestly what an introduction that is to, to the jungle. That's    

I was in a wild place. I was so fortunate in so many ways. Yeah.    

So from that day forward then, and your kind of integration with the tribe, what did that look like then? Did you, because you were there for, if you were there for, what do you say, 80 plus days or something or eight? No, sorry,

No,  I was there for my first stay. I wound up being there for eight months, but  knowing that I had to go back, my grades weren't super great.  I had to go back or else I was not going to be accepted back in the school. And so  I went to school. I can remember going  into  my, one of the just  typical classes.

It was a philosophy class and it was a big room full of all kinds of people.  And I looked around.  And  probably there may have been about a hundred people in that class. And I looked around and he said,  it is still summer. You    guys are just, this is the first day of school and nobody is tan.   What have you been doing all summer?  And I had this kind of story that I couldn't even begin to tell somebody, I'm still suffering from culture shock coming back into school. But did that finish that year? And yeah, every day of going to school, I was daydreaming about    being back to Ecuador. So the day school got out for  that summer.

I went back to Ecuador, the same place, and then that really became my lifestyle, living about half my life there, in my  early to mid twenties, in Ecuador, just being a part of that community, and doing my best to  finish up school in between.    

wow. What you said about the languages he's in? What, is it Spanish? Or is it like a kind of Mayan type Spanish?   

So they, the community that I was with, they're a lowland Quechua, which is Quechua, you might be familiar with this, it's the predominant language in Quechua. Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, but this is a dialect of some of the folks that were either displaced or they moved down into the lowlands, so they have their own sort of  Kichwa, Quechua dialect in the lowlands, so  I learned that language and then learned Spanish  and yeah, so that was that, but I think  you can imagine just the,  how much, like I said, this shaped my life.  I wasn't familiar. Not only was I familiar with not familiar with people, just  everything that they were getting that they needed to build their house was stuff from the jungle.  Everything they ate was from the jungle was from  the rivers. It was all hand to mouth right from there. And  I'd never been around  kids that however old this is, They knew all the names of all the plants. 

And then when you say, wait, what do you mean? You use that plant for medicine? Oh yeah, my grandpa used this for his cataracts. Oh teach me more. And then you go  down the trail, and then the next plant is this plant that they use for    skin fungus. And then this other one that they use for when the pigs are a certain kind of sickness, and they feed it to the pigs, and then this one mom uses to help facilitate  Breast to give more milk and they knew about every single plant and it wasn't like they were looking it up in books.

They already  knew it and they knew the names and  then  you start to understand these kids that are five years old.  Understand this environment  and they know every single name of everything.  Like maybe a kid that's fixated on hot wheel cars and knows the name of these cars. They know the plants, they know where they're from.

And then not only that, I started to see the teenagers   know everything there was to know about the animals,    about where to find. I was bringing field guides of different insects or different plants or different  snakes. And I'd show them pictures and they say, Oh yeah, you want to see that?

Okay I'll show you. We'll go tomorrow. I know exactly where to find them. And they were.  They were sharing with me different kinds of snakes that were in the book, but different subspecies  and different other color colors of  them that  I don't think science has even seen before, but there's no, Oh, you want to, you want an Anaconda?

Yeah, that we have those kinds of Anacondas, the painted ones, those are green with black spots, but do you want to see the jet black ones? And I was like, yeah, there's no such thing as jet black Anacondas. Oh yeah, no, we'll, I'll show you. And then the next, yeah. Few days we go there and we find these jet black anacondas that   still to this day haven't been documented by  science And so i'm around I went to school to learn These people are learning and they know so much more than anybody else about this place That to me is the most fascinating place in the world So it was an absolute shame that I wasted any time anywhere else Other than just being there with these people    

It's a wonderful thing that isn't it? Because if you think about, what you said about textbooks and literature, it's very narrow. It's based on what some person has found at some point in time that isn't native to that area. And you're now in that area discovering, a plethora of species and plants and fauna.

It's wonderful. 

And I, so yes it opened my eyes to this amazing world, but it's not like I'm done traveling. As me I'm always gone because I understand that it's  the more, the more you realize you don't know. And you start to understand that these people know so much they're living off of generations of knowledge that's been passed down and they're living off of knowledge that they, is tried and true, they know it, test it, understand it,  survive by it.

When you want to learn about the,   When these monkeys come through, they know exactly what they're going to eat. They know what time of day they're going to pass through. They know what season it is. They know all these intricacies about everything going around them. And you can't learn everything that they know.

You just,  that's how I learned. And every time I'm just, it blows my mind as far as. The depth of knowledge that these people have about their environment that they live off of    

amazing. What was their social structure like? The men, women, children, was it like clan like? Did they have a chieftain and a structure where, they were like a head

With  that so as I Invested a pretty big significant part of my life to Ecuador I started to I was really involved with the Kichwa Culture and also went into the Walrani. So the Walrani were even more remote And I think I was always striving, the more and more I heard about jungle stories and jungle people and quote unquote wild people in the wildest places still left on earth, it was where the Waiorani's live.

  Later on in my experiences of living in Ecuador,  I became pretty involved with the Waiorani communities, which is, which wound up actually being the very first episode that we ever filmed of Primal Survivor. That was the pilot. It was just like, Hey, come, you got to see these amazing people. 

This is, they do things that TV has never seen. It's incredible. And we shot a total budget pilot and here we are 12, 13 years later, making programs all over the world about indigenous people. So  yeah, the Kichwa and the Waorani made it happen.    

How did you get your break into TV then? How did you go from living in the jungle to the opportunity to tell these stories on

  They so  with so much experience that I was having, In the jungle, and then finally finishing up a school. I knew that I wanted to get my graduate degree and get my all the credentials that I needed to be a tropical biologist, but I had also spent so much time  with indigenous people and knowing that if I do my research,   it's got to.

It's got to  acknowledge, incorporate the knowledge of the locals. It's not just going to be about animals. And so I look for a specialized place that could  understand my niche or my methods. And that was the university of Hawaii.  So then as I went there as a graduate student, And bringing with me  pretty unique experiences and know how, I think I had some street credit by then as far as   living in the wilds and being comfortable out  there  and knowing how to access information from the locals.

The University of Hawaii had an ethnobotany program, which is cultural uses or cultural knowledge of plants and things like that. So I went through there.  Once I went to grad school there, that opened up doors to the same style of travel that I was doing, except I was able to go to Southeast Asia and remote South Pacific.

Again, doing research, doing stuff    with  the locals. And   I did finally finish, got my, all my credentials and things, but I started to realize that this is not,  as far as profession, I don't know if I want to continue with academia. I knew that so many passionate people, world authorities in their subjects. 

But they were  college professors that were moving their families all around the country or all around the world, raising their families in temporary housing  and  in apartments thing.  I just didn't want to live like that. And so I decided I'm going to try to,  I really want to be a teacher where I come from is really wild.

Like I said, there's rattlesnakes, bears, mooses, and then I can go skiing. And I was, I had an art business at that time, so  I decided I was going to move back home.  And be a biologist on the side, but I really wanted to be a high school biology teacher and so I wound up being a biology and art  teacher.

And then in the summers and the winters, I kept traveling   and doing my own research. And I'd just get so excited about the things I was seeing. I was always bringing videos and clips of little experiences along the way.  To experience, to basically,  show my students, but  those are the kind of little video clips and stories that inspired me.

To what I  always wanted to do anyway, so using the same methods and     bringing in little video clips and then pretty soon  I was making more videos of my travels that were more oriented towards what I was trying to teach in the sciences  and they were getting pretty hammy and but they're edited up and stuff and my students.

I ended up putting them on YouTube of all things just for fun  and they started to get popular  and then I  Connected with  some other people that I was going to grad  school with that They themselves were really interested in making  films and science films and we started this really Like I said guerrilla style super hammed up video production company called the wild classroom  Yeah, it was, yeah, super nerdy, nerd alert.

But they were being recognized at film festivals and things like that. And we would be invited to have these five minute films. And, we were definitely the,    

you involved with Ja? Yeah.

our first ones. We were in Jackson Wild at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.  We were all the 3 of us that were involved.

Jonah Stanstrom and Rob Nelson. They're still at it making films. We're all too poor again. We were. We were hiding out in bushes where everybody else is spending a few thousand dollars a night at the lodge and doing that we were   trying to brush our hair in the bushes and stuff and look good and then  go to the film festivals and pitch ourselves as filmmakers.

And there was a lot of courting.  But over the years, I think we all found up, wind up not just being the small fish in the pond, but we are rubbing shoulders with the hotshots, National Geographic, BBC and all that. And some of us got some really lucky breaks. And for me,  it was    a production company called Icon Films.

They made the  same, they made the,  River Monsters, if you're familiar with that.  And they,  I guess they saw something that nobody else saw in me. Everybody else thought I was just a kid that wore flip flops and didn't take life very seriously, but this production company  started to hear stories and catch  wind about.

My experiences and  they asked  me when the next time I'm going to go down. I said I'm going down, going back down with my people  and visit the Walrani and my Kichwa families in April. And we'd like to come down. Maybe we'll do some filming. I was like yeah, whatever  false promises, but his, the owner of the company, his daughter was working in an orphanage in Ecuador.

They were going to go down there anyway.   So he brought one of his    camera people and I brought his daughter. We went into the jungle in search for  my family and community  way off in the jungle. And I even told him  that where we're going to go, there's no roads. There is no guarantee. We're going to get there.

It's river travel. We have to have chainsaws  and bring axes with us and cut  down trees that are falling across the river.   It might flood, the water might be too low,  no guarantees. It might take us 10 days to get there. Just saying, are you ready for this?  And all of my stories were true.  We just about hardly, we just barely got there and they were scared for their lives and I just told them, keep the record button on because  I can't plan anything and we had an  amazing four or five minutes of film for a pilot. 

And they shopped it around. It was National Geographic that sought  and one of the big executives, Hamish, my chair saw what we were doing. That was totally unscripted. It was just watching the people cut down a tree and extract honey from this giant hive beehive. That's about the size of a cab of a car.  

And everybody's writhing in pain and    getting  Covered with honey and it was pouring down rain and nothing was scripted. It was all real. And Hamish said that was the most exciting bit of television I've ever seen in my career. And he commissioned us to make a full episode down in that. So go back there and make a full episode.

And then, yeah, like I said, 70 or 80 more primal survivors later, we did it 

That's  incredible,  Hazen. 

It was awesome.   

serendipity. That's, that's authenticity. It, it doesn't get any bit more authentic than that. That's fantastic. 

Yeah, it was great.   

Wonderful. And yeah, what, seven, eight, nine years later, because Primal Survivor has been going about, what, eight, nine years now.

All right.

Gosh.  I think we started our first film with survive the tribe, which I was looking at the dates. I think it was 2013.  I can't believe it. Yeah.  

Wow. Oh, honestly, that's incredible. It's what a wonderful journey. And because you can, what you were saying at the start about your first arrival in Ecuador, it just reminded me of many of the Primal Survivors episodes. It's wonderful. What what is your, what, if you,  Look  at all the work that you've done with Primal Survivor.  

What's your most impactful, or what's left the biggest mark on you in terms of the, an episode or series? Because you've done a lot in the Amazon, but you've also traveled further afield into, like you say, into the Pacific, Southeast Asia. You've done some stuff up in Europe as well, haven't you?

In  

Yeah,   

norway in places. How does, looking at all that as a package, What's been your most wonderful memories  or    

That's I, a lot of people say, oh, what's your favorite place? What's your favorite?  

I'm trying not to say that I'm trying to, I'm trying, I suppose what I'm trying to say, because I can see the passion for Ecuador and the Amazon that comes through. So maybe putting that to one side for a minute outside of that what's left its biggest mark on you, whether emotionally or physically?    

I think just the biggest thing is that  people that,  no I'm not going to lie, I still live half my life in the United States. I was, I grew up as an American. So I can come from a perspective   that is pretty good at comparing and contrasting   our life, the life that I've been granted,  compared to the lives that other people live and the realities that other people have around the world.

Yeah, there's a lot to be critical about. There's also a lot of things to be very thankful for. But    one thing that really resonates with me  is generally, People that are connected to the land, they're living traditionally,  they have to be more community minded,  and there's that trust  people have for one another, and  they're living under the same conditions, and     I think that just really resonates with me, especially, my time in my life where I would really like to be prioritizing having a family someday, And seeing what it's like to raise children  and being in a partnership and  seeing the  struggles that   how difficult it is to raise children as a Westerner now rather than being a play based childhood where a phone based childhood I live in a country where people are really divided.

People want to find their alliances and then they  want to find out who their enemies are and not  interact. And this is a new phenomenon  from how I grew up as an American. I grew up in a rural area where it didn't matter  who you really wanted for a president. You still wanted  You could vote however you wanted, but you're still going to  be invited at the person's dinner table. 

And    you are going to be depending on that person to help them out, help them  get the cows out of their field or help them put in a new window or something. And you just had kind of fundamental trust and we're always really trying to look out for your common man.   And that's still very alive and true around  the world. 

But  when I'm living in this quote unquote modern world, that is so cool.  Influential and seems to be the trendsetter for how the rest of the world will be eventually  it's,         I just have to keep traveling to get these reality checks about what do I learn from these indigenous people  that yeah, maybe my first agenda, first and primary agenda was to learn and be with nature and be with people that knew everything there was to know about nature and learn from the best.

But there's all these side things that I value as I get older, maybe in the second stage of my life of going. Wow, what is it? What does it really mean to be a human and I think a lot of it is. Yeah, it goes back to our relationship with  nature. I look at  we as homo  sapiens. You want to look at it?

Maybe  we've been bipedal homo sapiens for 500, 000 years. We've been evolving.  Very differently than all the other animals in the world and that how we can communicate how we can get how we get hunches about things in nature, how we're able to categorize  catalog plants and animals and have memories and be able to share those memories.

With our people, with our communities, with our tribes,   that's that's like what we're the very best at   as humans, but we're not living a human life because we're not doing that anymore. That's being translated into these other things. And you can see it in our vocabulary, we're.  Yeah, I'm really switched on to that.

Yeah, let's download this. Oh, I just need to get plugged in. Oh, I just need to be recharged. We're not talking, we're not, our terminology is we're not, where are my roots? I'm branching out. Things like that. We're losing this connection with nature, and it's showing up  in our overall health as people.

 Said,   my primary agenda was not this, to go travel the  To Southeast to go to all these real wild places to see wild animals. But now it's more like God. Look at how we are amazing humans. But  where is the sustainability? Where is our connection with nature that we are?

If you want to believe in God, You could say God gave us this amazing ability to interact and have a language  and be the keepers of the earth. And we're not doing that.    

Yeah.

you believe in God or not, we're not doing that, but we need to, because this is why we're here on this planet.  

Yeah, I'm all for progress and innovation, but there has to be an environmental consideration for it. And it shouldn't be at the detriment of our mental health and our, like you say, the human connection, because these people and these indigenous people are still going around living their lives that they've lived for millennia, in these environments.

And we are living in a Western world that's very conflicted and very, very  Yeah, very connected and   not to each other. It's connected in a digital sense. Do you feel that you need the solitude, Hayes, in this kind of, because if you're a TV star as well, keeping up with all, with that and everything you're doing on like YouTube and, the digital creation side of it, do you feel that you really need to have that reset from time and time to, to get out into the.

The jungle.  

Yeah. I think that  there was a lot of time when I was younger,  I was, I think we get seduced as Western people that  we get these accolades for being the lone wolf and being an individual. And it goes for men and women, I think we're seeing   that these people that are,      we're giving attention to them because yeah, they are such individuals and maybe they're the self made man.  They're the power woman.  Yeah, we do that, but we're not.  We're basically encouraging people to be really self absorbed and selfish  So often because you have to be that way you have to forge your own path  a lot of times, you know You're you want your kids to succeed? so  you Send them across the country to go to this college and they never come back because they got this great job And but they're not no longer a part of our community we're Prioritizing this way of life that in the end  Again makes us selfish self absorbed and that's what makes us lonely  So that's why we have the greatest     percentages of      people that don't, they don't really understand the meaning of life, even though they've gotten everything that they've needed.

We have more we have more depression than anywhere else in the world. And you could compare the quality of life that we have to so many of these places that are considered third world countries. And they're not suffering 

Yeah.  

like we 

That's, see, that's a really important, because that's one thing I hate about the Western society. We tend, we love a label and sometimes we label these indigenous and third world countries as if they are unhappy because they live a very different life from us. And it couldn't be further from the truth in a lot of the cases.

It's, yeah, it's something that really, yeah, I don't want to get on my soapbox,  but it's, yeah. Yeah.  

like the traveling and the things that I've noticed is just just how people treat one another. And you're in a tribe means a tribe means the tribe is raising the families. It's not just, 

Yeah.    

One husband, one wife, parents are nowhere to be found to help out with childbearing.

The tribe has it figured out. They've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years, but we think we're superior.  To being able to raise, figure out life, and that's not the case.   We need to go back to these considered  ancient ways, but they're tried and true.  And, so traveling and living the world is just, I really have to  force my mind to not be seduced  by the consumer cul de sacs that we're in    here, 

have you ever tried to explain the Western world to some of these indigenous tribes?   

Yeah, I think I get it, and I hope that I can be a, an ambassador for Americans when I'm there.  We can easily get stereotyped around the world. I think, when you think about the movie star days in the fifties, 

Yeah.    

was just like, they were trendsetters, they drove big, fancy, crazy cars and they were making rock and roll and they were making all these movies.

And I think now  I'm starting to see that the rest of the world is starting to wise up  and start to    question  what is considered  modern advanced progressive.  Because it's not it's not serving so many of these people. Do I try to describe it? I don't know. I just, like I said, I try to be a, I try to be    an ambassador for how I live and say, hey, everybody in the world  is trying to be the best  human they can, no matter what you want to think.

You want to think terrorists and whatever, but you got to go really back into how they grew up, how their psyche is, what they're fighting for. If they're fighting for freedom. They   don't work like us.    Where is it coming from?  And I think when it comes down to the very basics, we all want healthy babies.

We all want to be able to provide health for our neighbors. And how come we're not doing it?   

Fantastic. All right.  Switching, mindfully, just conscious of time hazing as well, switching lanes a little bit because there was  one thing I wanted to touch on as a fan of the shows,  the ultimate survivor world war two.

Yeah, there's some fantastic What, six or seven episodes or something, I think it was, but the episode    in the Solomon Islands, I think it was Lieutenant  Hugh,  what was his name the shipwrecked Hugh Miller, he was stranded on an island. 

What a story that is. He became a national hero after that, but I think the episode that sees you shipwrecked landing in the sea, surrounded by actual sharks and then making your way through the jungle. What was that experience like? That, that looked absolutely wild.  

That to be able to, so that was a  ultimate survival World War II was a series that I invested a year into researching  World War II history. And as it's about  talking about wilderness survival stories from our servicemen, whether it was Air Force, Navy Marines, and a lot of it was stories about people escaping prisoner war camps in the.  In the example that you  were saying was surviving a shipwreck and in the  remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific and then living in those islands, trying to find safety, trying to get back to their families the best they can in the middle of World War Two.  And that is another life changing experience. I'm ashamed of myself  previous to making those episodes that I had not thought about World War Two every day.

Now I think about it every day, thinking about the millions. And   I  think it was a real honor to be able to highlight some of these people's lives that had  at least some stories that were documented that I could least attempt to reenact a little bit to give the rest of the world a little flavor about what our boys were going through. 

And yeah, it was,  it is hard to reproduce. The way the world used to be like in the fifties, when I started traveling, there wasn't cell phones, everything was maybe a letter,     there wasn't infrastructure. The world is very different over  the last 20 years now, but in the fifties, boy.

These places were no man's land frontier towns, no roads,  no combustion engines, no electricity. It was a very different place in a lot of these places. But yeah fortunately saw some of the places in the Solomon Islands are still pristine enough to where once I got, once, once you dip into the ocean, the sharks will come.

Yeah,    

you can see you on the, you're floating out towards a dinghy and you can see the shark from above circling in the water and then 

I could hit them.  I wasn't scared of the sharks.  But that, I have cameramen with me that are in the water, and they're swimming around sharks, and they're familiar with sharks too, but the thing is that I'm in a dinghy, there's sharks around, I could literally go out    and touch the sharks, but I know sharks well enough to know that   they don't have hands,  if they feel something, if they want to  Figure out what something unusual is.

They'll just feel it with their razor sharp teeth. And then while I don't have a raft and I'm in the ocean with a whole bunch more sharks, it  was just that scenario. And yeah, that was good stories because.   We eventually had to abandon project at that particular well, while we were filming behind the scenes.

We had to relocate because it was like the sharks were just getting too crazy and nobody could be in the water. Nobody can film and focus because there are so many sharks coming so. And our locals, the Solomon  Islanders were like, wow, this is really weird. There's usually not this many sharks.  Okay, we'll go to this other place.

Where there aren't as many sharks and we'll finish the scene. So then we go  travel about 10 miles down somewhere else. And by that time, the water's really murky. It's different. They said, there's no sharks there. And we're  doing a bunch of stuff in the water, except     the sharks came again. And it's even worse because now   the water's murky.

So you don't see the sharks coming until they're about three feet in front of your face and they're whizzing by your mask.  So then,  we are all getting spooked out, and this, the Solomon Islanders, our local boys that were driving us around in boats and stuff, were like, this is not  good.

This is not right. This is, something's really wrong here. And they live  with the ocean. They know not to be scared of sharks in a lot of ways and stuff. But they were really concerned. There were, this is not usual. This is not normal. And once we got To the island,  our boat driver was notified that his uncle had just died     in the village.   And amazingly,  he was relieved. All of our local boys were relieved. Because they say that is the reason why the sharks came, is because his uncle died. And the sharks tell them certain things.  And they said, Oh, that they were actually  relieved  about his death. Whereas if  the sharks didn't come and the uncle died without any sign from the ocean, the thing that they're so incredibly intimate with, they would have been they would have been really distraught.

Like something really bad is going to happen if not has already. So just interesting.   

That's

I could    talk plenty of story with you. Plenty of stories. Sorry, we don't have 

Yeah. And I'll probably do a follow up then, because pick your brains on that. That's amazing just the connection with it, with the land and the environment and the marine life. It's, yeah.  life. That's fantastic. Wow. Yeah. And yeah,   being  respectful of your    time hazing because we've been on for nearly an hour already.

It's been fantastic. What what a journey you've had so far. It's been phenomenal. And we haven't even gotten into your art projects and all this stuff you do repurposing wooden ceramics and all that good stuff as well, unfortunately,    but.  

Can,  yeah, I guess just keep up to date, check out my website. He's not Dell dot com and he's not Dell artworks. Doc, who knows what I'm up to? I wear a lot of hats. I

yeah    so before I move into  what are the two closing traditions, just wanted to ask, do you have any  unrealized  adventures considering everywhere you've been and all the stuff that you've done? Is there anything you haven't done yet that you would love to do or a place that you would like to go?    

I. I've traveled so much and it's not like I'm done, but not to get too corny or anything, but I really do want to focus on a family. So if I can land the lady of my dream someday and live in this house that I built to raise a family with family for. That would be awesome  because I want to just like I love sharing my stories with you. 

I want to share this with some little rugrats and stuff. But so that's a big focus, but I think  a lot of these places too. I don't need to see it all a lot of people brag that they, Oh, they've been to this many countries. That doesn't matter. That is bullshit. Like you can go on in one neighborhood   and it'll be completely different from another neighborhood. 

You just have to be present with where you are. And you start to see how  just the differences in how people live, how people's mindsets are paying attention to that. And that doesn't mean you have to go all the way around the other side of the world to see that. But, everybody around the world. 

And everybody that lives down the street knows something  that you don't and give them the respect and try to learn  from them and give some service to them and, they'll wind up giving the shirt off their own back for you too. And I think that's like  kind of the magic of life. So do I know enough people in my life?

Probably not, but

Yeah, I'm just gonna, you just have a wonderlust.  Wherever you're at every day, no matter where you're at  

that's a great way to, a great outlook to live your life and I wish you luck on that front. So two closing traditions, one of which the call to adventure and the other is the paid forward suggestion. So as a call to adventure to listeners and viewers, Hazen, what would you see or recommend?    

a call to adventure. You'll have to give me an example of what that might be. 

Yeah. So just an activity. So it could be, I'll give you some examples of what people have said before. So people have said to, to, like disconnect, go out into the woods, have, a bit of solitude or go and look up your local, outdoor center or, just  anything to the whole purpose of this is to get people.   

Outdoors and active. So just a recommendation to go and do something adventurous. It doesn't need to be visiting the Solomon Islands. It could be anything like, going into the woods for a week or couple of days or what, whatever, just whatever that means to you. So as a call

I  think the biggest thing, I don't think it's going to blow anybody's minds, but I'm really, I didn't even know that there was a word for it, but I think you guys have a word for it over there. It's called rewilding. It's just making your environment, all of this environment that we have  Changed because of human impact, we have the same power to make it better than how we found it.

And so  non intentionally, I just  do it because I love it. I want to put up bird houses. I want  to plant plants that are going to bring in the kind of bugs that I don't, yeah, bees are awesome, but I like bugs, like I like biodiversity cause I know. I know how important they are. The birds come in, the grasshoppers.

I know that I want to have habitat so  my kids can see little snakes going through the lawn and it's a safe place for them. And I just, now we live in a world where we have these reserves and  everything's, Locked into a reserve rather than us just  interacting with it and having patience with it and having it be the magic of our lives.

Once,  if we have kids that kind of know where the tree frog lives under the mailbox is just a little cool thing  and it changes their perspective. It lets them think about another creature beyond themselves and think about, wow, I, maybe I can make the place better. There's still going to be frogs under my mailbox for my kids and there's going to be more so  I think and then once you find that you start  to rewild and you start to invite more wildlife and wildflowers into your life you learn and like I said it's in our DNA to learn more and interact and be a part of nature so  you can get the you can get the full on  High impact, high performance jungle experience, but get that, but also get the rewards of just your local wildlife.

So that's my adventure.    Yeah,

Excellent. Fantastic. And rewilding. Yes, it is a thing. It's a fantastic suggestion. Excellent.  Love it. And then finally, a pay it forward suggestion. So any worthy causes, charities, organisations that may be important to you. What would you recommend as a    pay it

I do want to say  ecotourism.  A lot of people might think that's like a bad word or something, but a lot of tourism dollars and our ability as.  With our ability to travel the world we're putting our dollars where they mean. So if you're going to  do some eco excursions, I think the big hot spot  is, you go to Costa Rica.

Everybody goes to Costa Rica. I'm not endorsing Costa Rica, but because there's so much of a world attention on it, it's the only place in the world that's making more rainforest than cutting it down.  It's because people are appreciating it. Now, what I want to say. Is    have the same experience, have a more unique experience   and a more authentic experience.

Go to Ecuador, go to these other places in South and Central America outside of Costa Rica. So you're not getting  Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's along with the jungle experience. Go to travel all these places and show the local people that we care    about. Their natural resources, and I think ecotourism   is a huge deal.

There's a, I spent the last, my last series was traveling in the great rift Valley. I think African extreme African safari, you can see that on primal survivor, but, so I spent three months in Africa and I was seeing the impacts of  just so many people on the environment. Elephants don't have a place    to go.

I went there with the agenda of seeing. The Great Migration. The Great Migration, these animals don't have a place to migrate to because  places are being turned into  surrounded by cyclone fences and electric fences and barbed wire for cows or  highways and things like this. But there are organizations there's   there's one organization called Space for Giants. And it's a, it's an organization that's  trying to give a lot of education to the locals to be able to  So elephants can have a place that they can continue their migrations without being shot or  beat to death by farmers and things like that.   I think that's a really great one. And then, of course, some, but someone that's dear to my heart, and I know it's a household name, but the Jane Goodall Foundation is just because they're so set, they're so organized, the funds go directly towards education, educating,  Getting into the schools,  getting these kids to acknowledge that where they live, if they    live in Madagascar that they have, they live with lemurs, they live with all this wildlife and they can have an amazing life and protect the wildlife that they live with and have pride in that.

So that's a huge Any of those organizations that's really dedicated towards on the ground education, I'm totally for.    

Awesome. Fantastic. Excellent. That's been that's been wonderful. Hazen. What a conversation. I've thoroughly enjoyed this being yeah, having seen everything on TV and just how you started your story about your experience in Ecuador is wonderful. Where can everyone go and get their fill of Hazen?

Where can we where can we go and find out more? Haz. 

I always appreciate, I try to share a lot of my life on Instagram. It's just my name without any space, Hazen Adel. I've got a website, hazenadel. com. But then, you can see the shows on On Discovery Channel. And then if you have Disney plus it's National Geographic's top show on Disney plus.

So I'm very proud to say that. And yeah, I'll be around. I might, who knows, we might be doing more shows about other things that I love. So we'll    see.

Ah, excellent. Excellent. Thank you. And we'll bring this to a close.

  Thank you. All right, Chris,  and be well, everybody out there.

     ​