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Pedram: Hi, everyone. I'm back with good friend and a hero of mine, really, Cliff Hodges,
who's the CEO and Founder of a company called Adventure Out. How you doing, Cliff?
Cliff: Pretty good, Pedram. How you doing? Pedram: Great to see you. I'm just going to
give our audience a little background here. When we were filming our second movie Origins,
we went to Cliff who taught us wilderness survival skills up in the mountains of Santa
Cruz, California, and it was almost like a religious experience learning how to make
fire just from stuff out there, learning the basic principles of survival and all that.
That's what Cliff teaches guys, so this guy's just been holding it down and teaching people
how to go back to nature for years, and we've had a lot of fun doing that with you. I'm
actually looking forward to coming back and doing your bow and arrow course at one point.
The whole thing is, you take a block of wood. You create your own bow and arrow … takes
a few days. Cliff: Takes a few days, yeah. Start to finish,
a log to shooting a bow, in about three days. Pedram: Powerful experience, so let me get
into your background a little bit, because you're such an interesting guy. You came from
kind of a scientific engineering background and then you did this, so just give our audience
a little bit of your back story, if you will. Cliff: Absolutely, yeah. I grew up in Santa
Cruz and spent a lot of time in the outdoors, but when I finished high school, I ended up
going to college to study engineering. I went to MIT out in Boston. I was there for five
years and did a bachelor's and master's program in electrical engineering, so not exactly
the most typical route for someone who works in the outdoors, but I still spent a lot of
outdoors when I was doing that and when I finished studying engineering and was ready
to enter the work force, I moved back to California and got a job as an engineer, and that lasted
for about three months. I just realized it wasn't … it's not a bad
job for everybody, but it wasn't for me. It didn't call to me. It didn't speak to me and
I didn't feel like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. The outdoors were really
what called to me and especially being in that office environment, day after day, I
felt like I saw so many other people like me as well who were lacking that natural connection.
That's when I walked away from that altogether, dropped the whole Silicon Valley tech engineering
thing, and I started Adventure Out as an outdoor school and guide service to get people like
that outside. Pedram: Man, that's a bold move after all
that time and money spending on education and all that. I'm sure there's a few people
that had opinions about what you were doing. Cliff: My parents were a little freaked out.
That is, needless to say, they were freaked out, but that was 10 years ago now almost,
nine and a half, 10 years ago. It's hard to believe it's been that long, but I think I've
made believers out of them at least and a lot of other people because it really has,
it's worked, it's succeeded, and Adventure Out, every year now, is getting several thousand
people outside experiencing nature, having adventures, and really just falling back in
love with being outside. Pedram: Yeah, that's one of the things I really
like about you is you're a successful guy. You have a very successful CrossFit gym, one
of the early ones in Santa Cruz. You were kind of a leader in that space. You've been
proving this model out and you're showing the value of nature and what you can learn
in nature to Silicon Valley type of companies, the people who are very high tech and they're
so interested in low tech, if you will, or primitive tech because it brings us back to
our roots. That, for me, that was a really powerful part
of that whole experience, was getting into that element of going, "Okay, this is my environment.
This is what I have to work with. I'm going to need to eat. I need shelter," and you're
going back to the basics and what you really talked about, which I enjoyed a lot, which
was your needs versus your wants. I'd love for you to share some of that with our team
here. Cliff: Yeah, absolutely. Touching on what
you started with there, part of the reason why I think Adventure Out has been so successful
is that we are making this stuff digestible for everyone and especially for young working
professionals and people who are in that space, because when I was a child and a teenager,
and I grew up and went to different outdoor schools, they were all phenomenal and phenomenal
experiences, but they were really catering to people who were already there.
All of the classes were full of teenage kids who wanted to spend their life outside or
college kids who were already in environmental studies and knew that that's what they were
going to do and wanted to be, and all of that was great and had a lot of value. It didn't
really work for the people who are working Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and aren't
already in very close contact with the natural world and nature.
One of Adventure Out's biggest goals was, let's reach out to the people who aren't doing
this already. Let's make this fun, digestible, and a really good educational experience for
everybody. We got all these programs and made them at times and days and on weekends where
people like that could come out and one of the big things that we taught, like you mentioned,
is this whole concept of needs versus wants. When you get people outside, start teaching
basic survival, then they're realizing, wow, all I need to survive this weekend or this
day class is a shelter made of sticks and rocks and a fire by rubbing two sticks together
and foraging my own food and collecting my own water out here, and I'm becoming a fully
self-sustainable person. That, although that's one, a great experience out there in the wilderness,
that really, I find, has translated back into people's daily lives when they see just how
little they really need to survive and to live, and that so many of these things we
surround ourselves with are nice, but like you said, they're wants, they're needs.
Pedram: Yeah, something is very powerful about going back to the basics and building from
the ground up again, because there's so many things that we think we need. Here I am, I'm
some desk jockey who's working some sort of spreadsheet-filled life and I got bills to
pay, couple of kids in school. I've got medical bills for my wife, whatever it is, and you're
telling me that coming out to nature is going to make my life better. Why, right? What is
it? People can't even see that in a lot of ways, so they don’t realize how magical
it is until they're in the experience. Cliff: Exactly. I think, as human beings,
we lack so much when we don't have that and it isn't until you get back out there and
see what you've been missing that you realize just how important that is and I think one
of the biggest things we do at Adventure Out besides teaching hard skills, teaching survival
skills, or back country skills, is just providing that experience.
One of my favorite authors and most inspirational people I've ever read or learned from is Richard
Louv, who pretty much coined the phrase 'nature deficit disorder'. Right off the bat, I'll
admit this is not a technically defined medical term, but it is a phenomenon that we are starting
to see and so Louv is the real founder of that movement.
The concept is that as human beings have moved further and further away from a natural existence
and the natural world, we're starting to see a whole lot of problems come into play that
just didn't exist before, like the rampant growth of things like ADHD across our childhood,
and childhood obesity, and when we start getting kids and getting adults even back outdoors
and experiencing nature, there are a lot of other symbiotic things that come along with
that that make us healthier and happier people. Pedram: Amen to that. I just came back … I
was just telling you offline before we got on, I was up in the woods for four days and
it's so relaxing to go back to just the elements, that how nature's moving, the sound of the
wind. What is that? Is that edible or not? Look at those quail, and just watching the
movements and the patterns of nature and just shutting up a little bit up here and looking
at a world that's happening and emanating in front of you, instead of one that you're
creating in an abstract sense up in your head with maybe some abstract problems that aren't
necessarily related to your mortality in any real way.
Cliff: Yeah. I think there's a very psychological or meditative aspect of it, of being outside
and creating that space for yourself where you're not surrounded by all these problems
and busyness and stress day to day, and then there's also really just the physical and
activity-based things that go along with it. Not only when you're spending time outdoors
are you creating that wonderful and serene mental state, but when you're spending time
outdoors, you're playing, you're running, you're hiking, you're swimming, you're doing
all these things with your body. All of a sudden, the physical parts come into
play as well. It is a very tangible thing. It's not just the psychological aspect, which
could be the biggest part, but it's also really the physical aspect and the lifestyle that
goes along with it. Pedram: Yeah, yeah. You tell me to stand up
and walk on a treadmill for an hour and I kind of want to hang myself. I'm just not
a treadmill kind of guy, but if we're standing in some field and we look at some mountain
out there and say, "Hey, I wonder what's on the other side of that," I'm in, right, because
curiosity and exploration and all these types of things make moving a natural consequence
to what you do. You want to know an answer, you've got to go there, right?
Cliff: Right. Pedram: I remember when I was in Nepal, they
would send runners from village to village to communicate, so they'd say, "Go over to
that other village and tell your uncle that the doctor's arrived." We were doing a lot
of barefoot medicine over there. The kid would go and come back four hours later and I'd
be, "What happened to this guy?" They're like, "Well, the village is 14 miles away."
Cliff: He just ran a marathon. Pedram: Yeah, exactly, he just ran this kid
a marathon to go deliver a message and he was just a happy little kid. He was as healthy
as can be and that was it. We used to move a lot and moving out in nature, being in nature,
seems to really do powerful things for people. What is everyone complaining about sitting
in these office chairs? It's obesity and stress and fatigue and all these things that tend
to start going away if you get out and live your life.
Cliff: Yeah, as a culture and as a people, we're spending billions of dollars developing
pills and drugs to combat that, to combat stress and anxiety and obesity, and if people
would just get off their butts and get outside, you can solve a lot of those problems. With
Adventure Out, it's been almost like the hidden mission statement as well; we are an adventure
company, a guide company, and that's our hook. We get people outside because humans love
adventure and they love excitement, but at the same time what we're really doing is getting
people active, but also just teaching people, like I said earlier, to fall back in love
with nature because there are so many things that myself, as an environmentalist, I want
people to do. I want people to be outside and enjoying that natural state and I also
want people to become stewards for the environment. You can browbeat people over the head with
that stuff over and over and over again … oh, you need to recycle, we need to look for alternative
energy sources, we need to get people back outside … and if people don't have that
frame of reference, all that stuff means nothing, but instead of tackling all those problems,
if you just teach people that outside space is important and that nature and wilderness
are important and vital to human existence, all that stuff is just going to follow along
with it because people are going to seek it out when they want to do it.
Pedram: Amen to that. There's a famous story that broke, maybe a few years ago now, where
there was a Waldorf School in the Silicon Valley area that people were basically almost
just getting into fistfights trying to get their kids into, and these people are all
the CEOs and captains of technology. All these huge IT tech firms that are fighting to get
their kids into a school that doesn't allow technology for the first eight years or something,
where you've got to garden and climb trees and be a kid again, and so it was this big
crazy juxtaposition of realities, where people were saying, "Wait a minute. You guys are
the intels of the world, you're this, you're that."
I don't know if his kids were going there, and one of the things was, there's no real
evidence showing that early exposure to technology makes a kid more intelligent and there are
studies to suggest that possibly more exposure to three dimensions, like climbing trees and
stuff we used to do as kids, being out in the woods and understanding what an acorn
is, helps develop a much more global type of intelligence. Then they could pick up the
technology very quickly down the line, but they don't need to … my sister's kid won't
even go to the bathroom without an iPad at this point. It's like give me the iPad so
I can go play my game on the toilet. Cliff: Yeah, it's ridiculous, and we've made
it such. We've insulated our children so much from play and from the outdoors and we've
almost … not almost, we have made the outdoors really a scary place or a dangerous place,
and we've taught kids that getting dirty is bad, that playing outside is dangerous, whereas
we should be teaching them the exact opposite, because the most dangerous thing we can do,
lock a kid in a room and have him play on an iPad for eight hours. Diabetes, childhood
obesity, ADHD, all this stuff is being very closely linked to just an inactive childhood.
Pedram: Yeah, not to mention lack of social skills and subsequent depression because you
can't relate to other human beings. We're tribal animals. We came from places where
we were in small groups hanging out and basically taking care of each other all the time. It's
interesting. Dr. Sara Gottfried and I are actually doing a show on this this week, where
we talk about the biodome and having the good bacteria in your gut and what that means and
how that means in terms of expression of genes and immune system and all this stuff, and
you're right. We're Pureling our hands everywhere we go.
We're just trying to nuke germs and the whole point is, guys, there's good bacteria out
there that live with us symbiotically and help us digest things, help us make our different
enzymatic processes and vitamins and minerals and co-factors. That all comes from interacting
with dirt and earth and shaking off a root and just eating it and not getting super sterile.
What I'm worried about is motor oil in the water. What I'm worried about is hormone-disrupting
chemicals that come from your expensive Italian colognes, and all this kind of stuff that
people are not even looking at, and again, you're right. They've made nature out to be
the bad guy and that's … if you boil it all the way down to the roots, that's where
we come from, guys. That's where we come from, and so guys like Cliff are out there doing
this and reminding us of our history, of our lineage.
Some of you might be thinking, all right, here you are, too young dudes, talking about
getting out there and running up and down mountains. What about me? I'm 70 years old.
My back hurts and I have a kidney issue or whatever it is. A lot of people feel like
their health is too far gone or they're just too far gone to be able to go out in the woods
and do this. I want you to kind of speak to that, because I know a lot of the corporate
people that you see are normal people who otherwise wouldn’t want to be out there
or don't think that they can hack it out there in nature.
Cliff: Yeah, and it's funny. Those are the people that need it the most, in my opinion,
and it doesn't take a … you don't have to go climb Everest to experience the outdoors.
You don’t have to take our advanced rock climbing class to learn how to climb upside
down underneath overhangs to experience the outdoors. The adventure is great and we tailor
those programs for people who need it, but our most successful programs, in my opinion,
when it comes to that mission statement, are the ones that get those people outside who
really are sort of on their last leg. Whether it's just a simple hike on a regular
basis or, our most popular corporate program is a basic intro to survival program, and
it's stationary. We're not hiking 20 miles at a time. We're at a campsite, but we spend
an entire day out in the Redwoods of northern California, and we're working on skills and
introducing people to edible plants and doing animal tracking and working with stone tools
and getting their hands in the dirt and their feet on the ground.
You don't have to be an Olympic athlete to do it. You don’t have to be an athlete at
all. All you have to do is walk to get back out there. It's the act of being there that's
the most important, not just how physical or how technical the activity is that you're
doing once you're out there. My biggest goal this year is to really push
a lot of these programs even out further because here in northern California, here in Silicon
Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, even though we're the home of tech, it is also
one of the more forward thinking and active areas and communities in the country and the
world, so pushing this stuff out here, I think, has been relatively easy compared to a lot
of places. The next goal of mine in Adventure Out is to really see this push out a whole
heck of a lot further and see these programs operate in more places.
Pedram: So that's where you're at. You've got a great thing going. You've got a lot
of fans up there. Thousands of people have come through your program. You've proven it
out. You're helping people every week of your life, so now you're ready to expand this and
take it out to the world, and I want you to share that with us a little bit because I
know that this is kind of an exciting time for you in Adventure Out.
Cliff: Yeah, this is a big push and this is where Adventure Out is really looking to become
worldwide, so in the last 10 years here in California, we've grown from a company that
works with a couple of hundred people a year to about 5,000 people a year, and my big goal
now is to see this work on a national and international level, so just this year we
launched our Adventure Out affiliation program, so we're now training people to run outdoor
schools, training people to be outdoor guides. We're now licensing out the Adventure Out
name and the Adventure Out brand for people to go different places in this country, different
places in the world, and open a guide and an outdoor school business called Adventure
Out, and use the power of that brand to start working with people in their own communities.
We're in Silicon Valley, for lack of a better term, we're going to open stores with this
whole outdoor school thing, so I've done it enough.
I want other people to be able to do what I've done and see what I've seen, so we're
bringing in people and teaching them exactly how we operate, how we run our business, how
we want to run our programs, and we're going to go and let them go out in the world and
use the name Adventure Out to push this out to more places.
Pedram: Fantastic. I couldn't recommend it more, you guys. I've done it myself. I'm dying
to get back and do some more of the advanced training. It was phenomenal and you guys will
see, in the upcoming Origins movie, Cliff's in there and teaching us how to do stuff.
It's not that difficult, and that's the beautiful part. If you think about it, and this is kind
of an esoteric concept, but at the end of the day, we're all dealing with survival.
It's not that you're stuck out in some rainy forest in the middle of nowhere.
That doesn't happen to most of us anymore, but if it does, it'd be nice to know how to
handle yourself, but aren't you dealing with survival every time you have some sort of
issue at work and you've got a mortgage due? Aren't you dealing with survival every time
your kid's out late and you're not getting that phone call and you're wondering what
happened to them? Survival's really something that is hard-wired in our systems. It's hard-wired
in our consciousness, and it's a really important concept to really think about and become okay
with, because it taps into a piece of our consciousness that's really deep and it really
makes us mortal. It really connects us with all other life on the planet.
I don't want to go off too far on some esoteric rant here, but it was some really powerful
stuff, tapping into some of that, and it really opened up my eyes to what being human means
and what our limited time on this planet means and how I personally want to step up and do
more than I'm doing at any given point because this is a gift. It's a real gift to be here
and learning these skills that are hundreds of thousands of years old, that you've kind
of incorporated into your curriculum. It seems like pretty simple math. It seems like if
you could spend four days, five days, learning 100,000 years worth of human technology, seems
like a pretty good investment. Cliff: Yeah, that's where we are, Pedram.
You hit the nail right on the head there. Human beings are survivors. Every other animal
on the planet is accustomed to a certain ecosystem, a certain environment, a certain food source.
The reason why human beings are on this planet, that we're survived and thrived for so long,
is that we can adjust. We can move between ecosystems. We can travel. We've developed
these skills. We've developed tools because we are the survivors. We're the ones that
move with the seasons and move with the food sources and learn how to take care of ourselves
instead of waiting on the planet to just take care of us.
Pedram: That's why I'm such a big fan of what you're doing and I want to support you along
anything that you do because a lot of what we stand for here is people getting out and
living life again, and this whole broken medical system of a pill for an ill, and just sit
around at your kiosk, eat your fast Del Taco in between things with your diet Coke and
then once things break, we'll give you pills. I mean, the whole thing is just nonsense.
It's just a crazy ludicrous system, and I'm not saying there's not a place for certain
medications for certain people, but if you're out there living life and you're taking care
of yourself and you're back to your roots and you understand where food comes from and
you appreciate it and you have a reverence and you're moving around and your stress levels
are down because you're not worried about that purse, right? It's not just driving you
nuts that Wendy over here has a purse that you don't have, and all these silly modern
human dilemmas, if you will, that are driving us crazy and making us sick.
You go back to the roots and all of a sudden you've got healthy happy people out there,
in nature, appreciating it, and also, because of that appreciation, becoming stewards of
nature, and really taking ownership of this planet, that a lot of us have been witness
to things getting bulldozed and DDT being put in the water, all this stuff that is atrocious
that we can stand by and be okay with because we don't have a relationship with nature anymore.
Cliff: Exactly, and that's what we're doing and that's the goal and I'm going to keep
doing it every day of my life so I hope to get more people coming out and I really appreciate
you shining a spotlight on it, because, like you said, it's kind of the root of all these
problems and instead of treating symptoms, instead of stuffing pills in people's faces
and coming up with new ad slogans, we can [Inaudible 00:24:28] the root of these problems
and change our lifestyle instead of just trying to bandage the problem.
Pedram: Look, I'm a lifelong fan and I'm excited to see you grow. I'm excited to support you
in any way. What I'm going to do, we'll put links for people to check out all your stuff
associated with this video and guys, you see this, and you think this guy's as cool as
I think he is, please share it. Send it around. Cliff's got a great message and we're going
to support him and if you have any questions, just go ahead and wherever you're seeing this
video, there's going to be a place where you could either chat, there's going to be a Facebook
place or whatever, throw up questions. We'll get them over to Cliff. We'll stoke a dialogue.
We'll help you guys understand what this is about more, but this is, in my opinion, one
of the most important things you could do for yourself is get back out in the woods
and wiggle your toes in the dirt, and understand where you came from.
Cliff: Absolutely. Thanks, Pedram, that's awesome.
Pedram: Great to see you, my man. I'm looking forward to it again. Can I invite you back
for another show, hang out and talk about some more stuff?
Cliff: Anytime, happy to be here. Pedram: Awesome. Great to see you. We'll see
you next time then. Cliff: All right, take care, Pedram.
Pedram: You too. Thank you.