Lawyer to Adventurer- Adventure Milo

get ready to experience the pulse of the outdoor community as we dive into the stories of people's journeys into the outdoor world

hello welcome to the outdoor pulse just some quick updates before we dive into this interview today i will be opening up a new page on my website that will be dedicated to non-profits and charities that my guests either are a part of or support and you guys will be able to go on there and go support those causes if you so please so that's the big change on my website and we have some really cool episodes coming up here in the future so stay tuned and i will keep you guys up to date thank you and let's dive right in

hello and welcome to the outdoor pulse i am your host mitch dean and today we are having on miwosh pierowala i say that right close enough awesome adventure milo is the adventure milo the easy way to pronounce it and he is uh he was a lawyer in new york and decided uh one day that he wanted to enjoy life more and get out and explore and see the world so we're going to jump into his story and kind of see how he got to where he is now so how's it going it's going pretty good uh i do want to make the announcement that on january 24th this year 2020 we opened doors to the first ever climbing and outdoor education school in the country of iraq in the country's history i was able to create this project without any experience i had never been to iraq i have no military experience either and with a team of the first mountaineers in iraq we were able to bring this stream to fruition but uh that's the end right yes you're watching like a quentin tarantino movie now you're interested where this all came from yeah uh i used to follow the rules of society i used to expect uh and actually feel entitled that as long as i went to school and put my work in i was able to earn the reward of a sustainable life and income you know benefits insurance that kind of thing later it didn't work out i think our generation grew up in a world where we watched our parents be laid off from companies that they worked 15 over 20 years at and our time is not valued when i entered the workforce in 2006 i discovered a world entering a recession by 2008 forget it everybody knows what happened over there i went to law school for that reason because uh like i said i graduated college and i couldn't find work so i thought to myself well i guess more years of school wouldn't hurt with the idea that i'm going to listen to my elders yeah right because what your parents tell you they want you to have a good job in the future and i think the three top jobs at least from europe where i'm from are you know you either want to be an attorney a doctor or a priest a priest no longer kind of holds but the other two were good my brothers went to medical school and i had to be different so i said you know what i'm going to invest these next years into law school because everybody's telling me if you become a lawyer you are going to be respected by your community you are going to have money and you are going to have success and happiness as a result of that unfortunately when i entered the workforce as an attorney i discovered everything i hated about working to become an attorney in school which was basically sitting at a desk for the majority of my day and reading really old english cases was now going to be my future except for i no longer had professors that gave me bad grades i had bosses that had anger management problems and that got incredibly angry and uh and basically made my life a living health so um after several years of searching for myself and i can tell you that i genuinely search for myself because you know i didn't become a lawyer and say oh i give up i don't like this you know i actually uh i worked with the constitutional court of south africa so i traveled to south africa for that i worked for the royal courts of justice in london that's in the uk for anybody that doesn't know that but i worked for the royal courts of justice in london i also worked in new york city uh in new jersey ultimately for a major firm in uh in manhattan and i went searching i went searching for happiness in this career that's supposed to have it and at one point in my life i realized i was working 95 hours per week let me break that down for you twelve and a half hours monday through friday and then ten and a half hours on saturday and ten and a half hours on sunday no break and then you jump back into monday and you start again that was my work week that happened for a year and a half i was barely making enough money in order to er to pay off my loans i had no health insurance i had no job security and i just had several different bosses who screamed at me and the other however many attorneys were working on the case with me and i realized that i was living my nightmare you know and this is kind of the way that everybody feels that i talk to right now uh not just in america but in many other places around the world you feel like you're trapped in a position and you need to be there because you have to pay for things like for your loans for your rent for uh your insurance for whatever else and i couldn't believe it uh in order to deal with this i as escaped through substances i found myself doing incredibly dangerous things now we're doing an outdoor podcast here right yeah as you can see there's a lot of outdoor stuff over here so i wasn't i was not a person who went out on a big bender and just like you know showed up on monday completely hung over that also happened what i'm talking about is crazy things like being completely drunk and literally walking the edge of a skyscraper while looking up or going to a bachelor party at atlantic city and this there was like a big storm coming and there was these giant like sewage pipes that went out into the ocean and as we were driving by i was like wow look at those waves crashing over those pipes well not more than two hours later i was literally walking out onto the end of those pipes with the crack waves crashing over in my dress shoes and suit and i thought this was all perfectly normal because the reality was i hated my life so much there was no purpose to it that when i thought about the next day i just didn't care i didn't want to wake up i didn't want that evening to end because i was free of that that place that i had to be imprisoned yeah it was crazy and the thing that i say to people is you know there was this like everybody says aha moment right the closest thing that i have to that is um i was at work and as i mentioned before i was working with a number of other attorneys both men and women but this particular day i sat down next to a group of people um and when i looked down the line i saw a guy first that was five years older than me then 10 years older than after that like 20 years older and after that like a super old attorney and i literally saw my future man i mean as close as you could possibly get to it i saw myself moving through what was going to come to me because i already knew what the attorney life looked like it meant you were going to be living in an office with a beautiful car and whatever all that other jazz but you're practically living in the office and i saw that this these people sitting next to me were literally me in the future and i saw how the older i got the more my hair would fall out of my head because i'm stressed out the i i looked at my desk and what i saw was sugar and caffeine candy and red bull or coffee or whatever it was and um i noticed that the more that i would be working and staring at the screen and front of me the more my head would droop luckily though my stomach was growing into a nice little pillow to catch me on my way down right and uh and i realized that the the more i looked at these people the more i also saw that anger had eaten them up from inside they were irritable impatient and intolerant they just wanted to get the f out of there and i looked at it and i was like that's it that's a hundred percent what is going to be waiting for me in the future and the longer i'm there the more bitter i will become and the more my life will have escaped from my hands and uh through a series of insane events i was able to get to the point where i cracked now i think that i'm not any more exceptional than any other human being that i've met in fact i'm actually quite average i think but what i had done is i had put myself into such a high stress environment into such i dug myself so deep into this hole right i almost made it out the other side because the intensity with which i worked towards this dream that was talked about like a fantasy like a fairy tale when i was younger i snapped like reality didn't matter to me anymore i effectively died you know through my substance abuse and through my actions i was effectively suicidal but what ended up happening is i literally something i it was almost like an audible snap in my brain because what i realized was my life is over like i could see my future and my future sucks and i don't want to live it it's that simple if i get hit by a car i didn't like when i was crossing streets in new york i didn't even look both ways i would just walk out you know it was insane and i realized that my life was effectively over i was now trapped in the bed that i made right and the other thing that i realized is there was this thing that echoed in my head this kind of like weird proverb that i heard which was like what's the best what's the best time to plant the tree mitch what's the best time to plant the tree that's time to plant the trees during the wet season well that's the way the proper building or where they're saying goes is the best way the best to plant the tree is 20 years ago 20 years ago yeah forgot about that one and i realized that if i waited to accomplish my dreams who knows where i would be in the future but i thought if i started 10 years ago if instead of going to law school in college if i decided to go and train as a mountain guide i would most likely already be on top of mount everest what is what is the insane like how far could i be if i started in high school yeah and it just seemed crazy to me to wait another day man you know like i thought to myself no like if i start today i was able to accomplish an impossible feat i became an attorney in new york city and i was a math major and an economics major my grades were very very average lower than average but yet i had i had gotten here so the things that i did not want to do i had achieved right so now think about this incredible dream that i have like because ever since i was a kid and this is where i got to kind of bring this in when i was a kid i wanted to be indiana jones i wanted to be luke skywalker i wanted to be conan the barbarian i wanted to go to places that have been that were undiscovered alien worlds i wanted to meet mystical creatures and i wanted to be i wanted to be exploring and whenever i express those intentions to adults they were like man that's a fantasy it's a fairy tale don't like stop thinking about that think practically milo you know think practically what is going to be the job that's going to keep you happy and sustained and get you a family and all that and so i was like talked out of it right when i was a kid yeah uh what was the age uh how old were you when that that visible and that audible snap uh oh

29 years old 29 years old 29 years old full academic debt i took on loans for my entire schooling both undergrad and law school and i was nearing 30. so in my mind like my time had passed right yeah so now here i was at 29 years old saying to myself no man you got to start now you got a lot of caption up to do because there's athletes out there like petzl athletes archeryx athletes north face athletes who are younger than you who've already accomplished incredible things yeah and so i thought to myself this is insanity if i wait one more day i am actively destroying any opportunity for the future for me to achieve my dreams and i thought to myself what if i start today what if i plant that tree today where will i be 10 years from now let me tell you mitch it's been 10 years about i started in uh september 20th 2012 is when i officially quit my job and started to pursue this full-time and i can tell you that within those eight years i have just achieved more than i could possibly have imagined i did not have the capacity to imagine where i would go in 2017 i filmed a virtual reality documentary up to mount everest base camp i believe i was the first person to ever do that um i started the first virtual reality uh humanitarian program out of new york city where i allow people to put on virtual reality goggles and uh using a cell phone i filmed virtual reality content and i was able to take paralyzed people who who were unable to even lift themselves out of bed with their own strength but with these goggles they could feel like they're climbing alpine mountain or crawling around in caves or flying in a drone or riding a bicycle or even something as simple as riding the subway yeah and then i went to romania and i started an orphanage and i went to poland and i started a fundraising operation there i started mentoring children across the world about what sort of opportunities lay in their future and then i started my own nonprofit which is a global upgrade incorporated i did that last year actually and in in each of these i was brought to opportunities again i could never have imagined i never realized that i was going to be the first person to ever start a climbing school in iraq by the way a country that our country started a war with a country that our country is bombing actively if you're a white guy in iraq and speaking english you're in danger right that's what we've been taught we're not friendly with the nation and yet here i am somehow finding myself in the middle of all this and the reality is the the only thing that's changed is i started to accept responsibility for all of my mistakes because at one point somebody told me milo you're crazy first of all my entire community abandoned me my family abandoned me my friends abandoned me they they they it was it was a horrible time in my life because when i quit being an attorney everybody around me said why would you do that everybody wants to be an attorney especially in new york you've got it milo you have what we want man congratulations but they were going by what they thought an attorney life was laid yeah they didn't recognize the challenges and the things that have been taken away from us through general through like this generation behind closed doors they don't know what's going on exactly they've not lived the life of somebody that that spent 21 years in school in order to build a career in one of the most hardest places to build a career in the world they thought here milo made it and now for some reason he is literally throwing away all of that investment and he's putting on a backpack and he's going outside and doing something that people without a high school diploma can do what a nut case don't talk to my kids don't even talk to me i don't want to hear about this because you're crazy basically somebody from our family my friend turned into a roaming nomadic hobo right yeah and so that's the reality that i faced because the successes that i had in the beginning were literally as simple as getting a piece of gear from a company because i couldn't afford it tent stakes a shirt you know shoes which by the way i think cost like something like 47 cents to produce in china so if you're not getting those from a company i don't know what to tell you man they're not they're practically you know for them but anyway um so when when i did that i was abandoned right and so that's not a position that you want to be in because in the beginning it every single arrow every single indicator every single sign that i went past in this journey in the beginning said turn back you're gonna you know danger ahead and so this is where the story kind of starts to filter people out because i'm telling you that if you dedicate yourself to your craft and your passion patience is literally the only thing you need because the longer you spend hammering away at that the more time you take this giant amorphous block of granite and you've got a tiny little chisel and you're working on it after several years people start asking you questions about what you're doing because you just have the answers yeah i can tell you how to fit a backpack i could tell you which hiking shoes are the best i could tell you which way to get up uh you know whatever mountains here on the east coast and some mountains on the west coast which are the best trails the most scenic ones so that's how it starts but then you're constantly doing these things and this these projects that i have that are you know incredibly successful are not something that even had a defined end goal in the beginning it was just like a couple guys from iraq contacted me and said hey we just want to build a climbing program that's it we just want to be able to teach kids okay well now we have set the tallest climbing route in iraq in history we started the first volunteer mountain rescue team in the country we built the first mountain shelter in the country we translated the first ins climbing instruction manual in the country we opened the first climbing store in sulaimania in the region uh we built the first climbing wall in the region we uh we did so many things i don't even like they're not even 71st yeah that's that's just beautiful for a country that doesn't have anything like that and yeah at least from i'm not that far into the outdoor community i've done some 14ers here and there i've gotten out into the mountains but i just know from my own personal experience how much the outdoor can outdoors can impact your mentality and like yeah kind of switch around like to a more positive state and just being outside in nature is just a happy place uh like i know that we were talking about before it's that place where you can kind of go and um you know and and offering that to people some in a place where you know most people wouldn't even think about or have a second thought about like most people just kind of brush it under the bus you know and you're out there building something putting up all these firsts in this country that a lot of people in a country that they don't care about which is kind of crazy and just an amazing thing that's an amazing accomplishment so but you know when you follow a path that is traditional right like so let's say you become a lawyer or a doctor all right um when somebody asks you what are you doing you know what to say yeah like if you're in your third year of law school you can say uh there and they say what's next for you you can say well first i graduate then i pass the bar exam then i apply for work or start my own company in a couple of years i got a bunch of clients you could literally that is what happens but if you decide to create your own career and you don't know what it is if somebody asks you what are you doing what am i doing hey man maybe you know more than me because it sounds like you might even know which direction to go you just don't know but that's the beauty of it because i didn't know where i was gonna go i wanted to be an ambassador for an american company and go climb some rocks in america and be able to make enough money so that i could put gas in my van so yeah and so dialing it back just a little bit so before you decided to make that move into the outdoor world uh were you climbing and doing stuff before while you were uh lawyers still or was that more of an after like did you get into the outdoor stuff after the click or was it before the click that the seeds were kind of planet just you never really acted on them so that's a very good question because i don't want to sound like some sort of inaccessible like yeah entity right like the one of my pet peeves in college was when you had speakers come in and they would talk to you and they would be like hey guys i graduated magna [ __ ] laude at my school i had straight a's valedictorian i was uh captain of the varsity you know whatever team and i'm just like man who are you like i'm not anywhere near you you're who are you talking to are you talking to the two people in this entire school that are gonna maybe get close to that like no no i had no experience i had i had gone skiing to like regular mountains on the east coast which anybody on the west coast if you skied on the east coast i apologize i grew up skiing on the east coast i skied on a bump in indiana

exactly anyway uh so and and uh while i was in law school i was part of a group called taramar adventures so i was an organizer for adventure around philadelphia so we would go and do things like horseback riding um we'd go rock climbing with guides but to the extent that i had actual training like practically zero uh the i maybe had gone camping five or six times in my life at that point so in order for me to kind of get into this career when i quit that was really the first time like i think 2012 probably actually was probably the first time i actually took it seriously that i needed to do something where i needed to become an expert so the first thing that i did is i took a nulls course which is the national our outdoor leadership school yes and um i will tell you the reason i did that is because i knew that no matter what i do outdoors no matter where i go i need to have the fundamental skills to be able to uh navigate the outdoors and stay safe and uh within that uh with the knolls course i i became a certified wilderness emt uh before anybody says milo where'd you get all that money uh what i'll tell you is that i was incredibly active in um in asking for it so the first thing that i did when i quit there's no lie i wrote a personalized email to over 500 people in the outdoor industry like easily over 500 personalized email asking them for advice and an opportunity and i can tell you right now that 497 of those came back as rejections and or unanswered but uh three of those emails i still remember came through with some opportunities and so i entered this entire thing without experience without connections and without money and when i wrote to knowles and i explained my situation and i explained my intentions and i explained my ambitions i was lucky enough to receive one of their i believe it was a scholarship or discount so through the work that i demonstrated to them i was able to get into one of their courses because i didn't have enough money and afterwards i was very active in the community i actually gave a lecture at one of at the wilderness risk management conference that they put on every year uh i was selected as a distinguished alumnus and uh the reason i'm talking about this is because i didn't have opportunity guys like i didn't it may seem that way because now i'm looking back and i'm talking about you know all this big game but the reality is i went to my first outdoor retailer in 2015 outdoor retailer is the i believe it's the largest outdoor sports show on the in the eastern hemisphere and i remember being there and i remember looking around and being like man there's like a thousand other people over here that are like me just young people looking for a ambassadorship or some free gear just to get their career started and i was like i'm drowning because these people live in the grand tetons or near yosemite or all this and they actively have that lifestyle i'm some guy that's crawling out of an office unfit without any knowledge or even understanding of what's going on outdoors but you know what happened i came back the next year and there was less of those people the people that i recognized there were still a thousand new people right but the people that came back that year less of them and then the next year i came back way less and now when i come back the amount of people i met that first year that were people there that were there the first time with me i could literally count on one hand because patience rewards those people who exercise it yeah and it doesn't matter if you're the fast if you're killian jornit it doesn't matter if you're um uh you know any one of the bigger guys i'm like all escaping my mind right now right but like you know alex hannel like it doesn't matter if you are an exceptionally talented athlete because those guys won the genetic lottery or whatever it is or you know or they're just so incredibly passionate that that you're not listening to this podcast you're probably going out out there you're attacking yosemite or surfing big waves if that's what you're doing what i'm talking about is people who do create careers in in this in this industry and the reality is the more time you spend the more conversations you have the more projects you bring to these people that are rejected the more they actively see you pursuing this career path seriously and i can tell you that there is a whole number of people in the industry who i am eternally grateful for for their patience because they dealt with me eric larson thank you you're awesome man thanks for putting up with me um he was one of the first trips that i did for myself i did polar expedition training with him in 2014. that's awesome and um him and ryan waters and then i got the chance to meet ryan waters at his expedition camp uh at uh mount everest base camp and i did a virtual reality tour of his camp so that was cool but the reality is the more you spend there the more time you spend there the more these people realize they're just not going to get rid of you yeah and so you know you get friendly with them a little bit and you start telling them about stuff that you're successful in and like time that time investment creates you and just like what i said before the more you exercise this the more people recognize you as a person who may know a thing or two about what you're doing the more years you pack on the more these opportunities grow and you start to see things that you didn't see before because you know what you look what to look for you understand what sort of things brands are looking for it's not just a pretty picture it's the story behind it it's the way that you do this it's are you on time are you you know responsible are you uh effective in what you do do you make big promises and you you follow through i have these incredible projects right now i can tell you that i have not received more than five thousand dollars in sponsorship total ever the total amount of sponsorship that i ever received is less than five thousand dollars and i have all of these incredible accomplishments under my belt because now i can say i am effective at following through on the things that i promise and this is what people are interested in and if they're not interested doesn't matter because i figured out how to have a sustainable life without that type of investment so that produces negotiating power because now i go up to companies and i and i say hey i'm doing this next major project do you want to be a part of it or do you not and if they say oh we don't have the budget for this this year milo uh you know this isn't really what we're doing you just say thanks no problem you know i'm just gonna go to the next guys because all the sponsors that i've worked with in my past are incredibly happy and i started with nothing but it doesn't mean that you should also undervalue what you bring into the outdoor industry either um so mitch and i met through the base camp outdoor jobs and more facebook group that's it i think there are several critically important conversations taking place on that platform right now one of them is a person who is collecting statistics on the amount of money that people are paid freelancers are paid in their positions in the outdoor industry which means you can take a look at those numbers and when you go up to somebody and say hey i'd love to work with you and they say hey yeah we give you a jacket for that you could be like no no because other people are demonstrably getting more yeah you know so you kind of figure it out and of course yes the first few jobs you do have to be free because these people can't take a risk on somebody they don't know with zero evidence that you're effective right exactly so you you have to bring that you have to develop that on your own and um i was going to rewind it but if you want to keep going with this for a minute you can go ahead i was going to dial it back to uh your first big your was knowles your first experience really in like the outdoor uh world community and actually getting out there and having a big experience like that yeah yeah you know so i i chose uh the i chose the knolls course that took place at their headquarters in lander wyoming under wyoming yeah and lander wyoming happens to be an incredibly beautiful uh outdoor preservation area or near you know out lots of outdoor stuff to do over there the wind river ranges out there so if you guys get a chance definitely visit and uh but that was really the first authentic outdoor experience uh for me where i was actually thought skills and and let loose out there and they were very serious about it you know because the reality is when you go outdoors when you see these great videos and photos and everything even when you watch like meru or you know vertical limit or all these things you see these heroes you know that they're like they had a great time and the danger isn't really something you can appreciate but when i took the outdoor course uh at knolls the wilderness emt training um they were basically they made it extremely clear that if you're like two miles down a trail and you twist your ankle that puts you in a high risk situation you may not be able to make it back to your car you can catch hypothermia you can crawl maybe a mile but there's so many different things that can go wrong and so for the first time i began to appreciate how dangerous it is outside yeah but that's the reality right because if you take the view that i'm gonna go to school i'm gonna go to college i'm gonna get a job and if i get decent grades i am now entitled to an income and you take an entire generation and you feed that to them what happens is you find yourself in the position that we are all in as a community right now where we expect something based on our personal uh decisions meanwhile somebody else who is in a significantly more powerful role takes the absence of your participation in society and takes advantage of that and takes everything for themselves and you stop stop participating in the decisions that create your career because you expect for other people to grant you those things well i'll tell you right now i don't walk around and ask for permission i look for opportunities and if there's an opportunity to create something man that is where the fire is there's an opportunity to create a school for climbing in iraq don't you want to be there looking back now i'm just like yeah i mean i guess i totally expected for this to happen sort of but in the beginning it's like me and a bunch of people i've never met i can barely communicate with them online because english is a little you know yeah questionable and uh yeah wow we're gonna create a climbing school have i ever participated in a climbing school no do i know how to start no but i got a bunch of people who are ready for it and um something i learned from george bosh who is the founder of the himalayan stove project himalayan stoveproject.org go check it out 2017 they received the citation of merit from the uh explorers club dinner george bosh told me and this is a common quote but he's the one that told it to me he said every uh journey of a thousand miles starts with one step and so when i started this entire career in the outdoors when i started the project in iraq when i started the project in romania when i started the project in new york with virtual reality i had no idea how to get anywhere but i could tell you what to do next i first i got for a virtual reality first i gotta get a camera then i gotta start producing content then i gotta learn how to process that content into videos at a time that literally this did not exist right i know the steps the next step and if anybody asks me well what's your long-term vision the long-term vision is like well i mean you know it's like a compass right like i know which direction to go in but i don't know what to expect and i don't know when the things are that we are going to achieve when those are coming and that's what i meant before as a doctor as a lawyer as a engineer if somebody asks you where do you expect to be in two years you can say i know exactly where i'm going to be in two years my debt is going to be paid off this much i want to be this much closer i'm going to be earning this degree i'm going to be earning this next certification perfect what about you milo you know what are you going to do uh be alive hopefully you know like because some of this stuff i'm doing is dangerous but really i don't know projects are like a month at a time now you know so like i'm talking about all of these successes but there's way way more failures there's a lot more ambitious projects that fell through the cracks that didn't work out where my partner stabbed me in the back worked against me you know like where i was fooled by snake oil salesmen and as you progress you learn who is reliable who are the people who are you know who who help you out and by participating in the community you also become the community you carry the culture in you you're not an outlier you're just part of this like amorphous blob of human beings who all come together one time a year and otherwise crawl into their respective holes that are really difficult to get to in the world literally so it's kind of crazy but i mentioned the the base camp group before yeah and again i i you know i want to underline how important it is for us to participate in conversation because whether you believe it's society whether you believe it's deliberate or not our collective actions have resulted in a completely uh blind ability like where we're blind to like what the industry offers as far as jobs we don't really understand you know you can have somebody who's earning a ton in one part the area but you have people who are doing the same stuff for free as a volunteer in a different area and you don't know that the more we communicate as an industry the more of a voice we have for happens to our for what happens to our outdoors as well and so i just wanted to thank uh ali and jenna uh during this broadcast for for continuing this this really difficult uh uh venue or you know for for creating this platform for us to have these discussions uh and for people like you and me to connect as well and yeah their their platform is amazing they do a great job moderating it too and keeping it set just information in there and very you know information center people can ask questions uh jobs can be posted and it's just i mean it's a beautiful community that they've built and it continues to grow which is amazing to watch and i've only been a part of that group for less than a year now so i joined it before i moved out here but i i'm in a very similar position as you but like you 10 years ago because i decided to quit my job that i got after college that i had my degree for and everything and i took a job in anything just to get out to denver and be closer to the outdoor community in the outdoor world and i've been out here for four months now so and just taking that first step so i i can relate to that i wasn't it wasn't any like crazy job like a you know new york attorney or anything like that but still i had a bunch of family who's like what are you doing so i i can totally relate to the whole experience of just going against the grain of what people expect you to do and after moving out here since i've moved out here it's it opens taking that leap of faith and putting yourself in a difficult position opens up uh you two going out of your comfort zone and your comfort zone just keeps expanding expanding expanding kind of like exponentially almost so and it's a beautiful thing and people just need to realize that um getting into the outdoor community just getting into sports even um that like you said you were 29 when you decided to start going out and adventure like it doesn't matter what age you are you can still go out try climbing for the first time hike that 14 or that you'd been not wanting like wanting to do but like just putting off and and all that so and just that first step is so important and people just need to see that they can take it and i think your story about how you went into it completely blind at the age of 29 is a great kind of like reminder to people like you don't need to know a ton to get into it you can just everyone starts somewhere so i mean i had you know friends who had kids and here i am starting on my path right yeah and so you you find yourself discouraged practically every step of the way and you're thinking to yourself like how much worse can it get man like how much worse can it get you know i'm poor i literally don't have a place to sleep tonight there's nobody nearby that could even drive to me that i know and i gotta figure out what to do to get to tomorrow you know those are real situations that i encounter these are above and beyond you know hanging off a cliff and maybe having like a piece of protection fail yeah right so you're not like it's not that instant possible danger of death but the slow simmering you know destruction of your life that you're watching before you as you're investing every single effort into something incredibly risky so uh you know i don't i don't want to sound distant from your audience i want to say to them we are this generation that is dealing with the way that society has transformed and it is entirely up to us to shape what's going on yeah and that means that if you're doing something that's shaking things up you are the person changing the the norm the status quo you are and if people resist and they do that by standing in your way or actively working against you or disagreeing or discouraging you i think what you're doing is you're creating your vision and they're saying wait no we don't want change and it's like you don't want change why are you complaining to me every single day about your crappy boss about how you work too much how you're not recognized how you don't get enough value for these things yeah you know how close are each one of us to complete bankruptcy i think that coronavirus kind of revealed that because now we have significant problems across the united states and then you're looking at people you know so so where would you have invested your time right in a job like jim carrey said this right you can work your entire life towards a career and then it have it fail and if you don't love what you did it means not you just wasted your entire life yep or you could work towards something that you're passionate about and that you absolutely love and if you fail you still participated in that thing you love at a level that's you know just the beginning but you did you put that time in and now that i look at like the opportunities that have opened up the families the communities that are like families that i've created around the planet i feel like there's purpose in my life i feel like there's a reason for me to be to for me to wake up yeah and i don't get paid in money you know let me get let me just be very clear everybody you don't earn money with a non-profit right but you have a purpose and you live experiences and you have a family and you have people and you have an opportunity to speak like i do and by improving the world by providing opportunities to people who would otherwise not have them you're making the world a better place and so whatever your vision of what the meaning of life is there's a purpose that you discover by doing these things and that purpose drives you in a way that money never could yeah and it's an incredible transformation that has taken place in my philosophy behind life because if i was earning tons of money right now as an attorney somewhere i would be looking forward to that tiny opportunity to actually go and climb and pay for a guide to take me somewhere but now i'm literally living that so what good is money why don't we just take that out of the picture and if there's milo money and my goal if i take that money out bam i am literally living life that i want to live and that just means that you know and what i tell people is like this wasn't something that like you know i said to you i wanted to be an explorer ever since i was a kid but the picture is not so clear when you get started yeah right it wasn't like i want to be you know uh indiana jones here's my hat my kangaroo leather hat it's like i want to be indiana jones right no that's not how it works the reality was i didn't know what i wanted to do i literally didn't and so i started looking for it all i knew was that i wanted to discover things that's it nature was really easy to get to because there's no entry fee to nature if you hike in uh if you have your tent and your stove and some food with you you're good to go man you know just purify some water um i did not know i i had failed at so many things i was an artist an attorney a mathematician an economist an event producer uh i was a video producer photographer like all these things all of them web web designer like everything art like uh uh writer like all these things and like each one i did until i reached the point where i'm just like no i really can't do this for free you know i had my own expedition company that i started in 2011 called exp adventures at first it was just an expedition company for everybody and then i transferred over into private clients designing their trips uh their ideal trips their dream trips and i realized i really didn't want to be babysitting people who really didn't know what they were doing either and then ultimately i kind of whittled it down and whittled it down and whittled it down and now i have this focus of producing humanitarian programs in remote locations around the world for communities that need them for marginalized communities that's literally creating opportunities for them and i couldn't get to here without all the wrong turns the mistakes the bad decisions i couldn't get here you know if i had not done that so i don't want to give this impression that i like got out of the starting starting gate and i knew exactly what i wanted to do it was like no i spent a significant amount of time and effort searching for what it was that i wanted to do and uh only through that process was i able to get to where i am today so if you're looking at this or you're listening to this this podcast and you're saying to yourself man i'm not like milo it's like i think you're probably better than me in a lot of things i just figured out that i am incredibly stubborn and i don't give up and that's sometimes a problem i've got i've learned my lesson many times but at the same time it's brought me to here and so if you are stubborn and patient ultimately you are going to be the person that's going to define the community that you are entering because all the old guys and the old women they're all going to pass to a better place and the people that are left are going to be the people that participated from a long time ago and that's you yeah that's that's a good way to think about it i didn't i never even thought about that is like if you're in a community if you end up dropping out you're out of the community then where if you stick around at some point you're going to be one of the you know the people that people look up to and ask questions because you're the one that's been there you're the one that's been around they see your face around and you become that person that you're looking up to at the beginning like oh i could never get to where they're at and then you become that person by staying in and just being persistent like you said it's a great way to think about it yeah um so back to the the knolls course so after that um where did you kind of go from there because you got your knolls course um that's yeah so that's when i started the the expedition company um and i and the knolls course was necessary because if i'm going to be trekking out with anybody else out into the wilderness uh you know i i don't want to be dependent on anybody else for for rescue or for medical assistance at all at least i need to understand it how to do it how to perform it how to identify potential problems um so i had that for a couple years and of course that includes you know event production to promote it building the website creating marketing campaigns flying like literally traveling around the world as much as i could in order to uh get experience and that was not paid what i did is i started to look for volunteer opportunities there is so many of them my god okay if you believe that there's no opportunities out there for volunteers you're blind and inexperienced you can literally look like okay let's let's let's start let's do it this way would you like to go to hawaii and to go see some volcanoes would you like to go to costa rica and go to a yogurt treat or bali would you like to go australia and go surfing right what you can do is you can go online and you can look up surfing retreats or tourist destinations or whatever in those locations and you just send them an email and you say hey i'd love to volunteer at your location for free i'll work for free all you have to do is give me housing and food and i will work for free and guess what the entire world will open to you maybe a couple places will say no but man who's going to turn down a volunteer to come over and to work for free for them most of these places have extra rooms anyway and the amount of food that they produce they throw out anyway so to them you're effectively you know free labor yeah and that's how i got my start i ended up going to yukon territory and uh being a uh dog handler um at one of the largest kennels in the entire territory i worked with 158 dogs uh i went into costa rica like i said you know costa rica is one of those locations where you could volunteer as well and there was a whole number of these things you don't get paid right so every single time your parents call you're gonna disappoint them you're not gonna be able to go out on dates and you know get dinner with girls or anything like that but what you are going to do is you're going to start you know chipping away at that rock that is your future career and it's the only way to do it and you're just not not especially in today's environment you're just not going to find a paid position if you do man congratulate yourself um i had you know as a writer what i discovered is i couldn't afford gear but if i reviewed it i would be provided that gear for free so i started working for several different publications online and receiving gear for free eventually i started making 15 per article which is woefully underpaid by the way and uh you know in order to be a writer you have to stick with it for a very long time you have to like writing um but you also have to realize uh influencing becoming a social media influencer is highly unlikely to happen the reason i say that is because companies literally hire people whose only job and only responsibility is to build social media campaigns and create marketing campaigns so if you're trying to build your career and have that as a on the side promoting yourself you're fooling yourself you know and you can hear this from regular influencers and everything this is my opinion so if i'm offending anybody please you know send me an email let's talk uh but the reality is you know you have people who whose entire job is to do just that and they have resources to do it you don't so that ship has sailed you know like we're past the dot-com bubble we're past all that stuff now it's just figuring out how to do these things and what i can tell you right now is that a genuine person who is competent is uh and reliable is such a rare thing in the outdoor industry because we're just a bunch of hard-headed jocks who have their own idea of what reality is you know also hippies or whatever you want to call us but we are you know free-spirited people who really are nomadic at this point so if you demonstrate competency and reliability man you are going to have doors open for you real quick but you also have to tolerate a bunch of nonsense a lot of a lot of bull um so you know it hardens people over time yeah but getting back to you know the entire process uh you know i don't want to go down my entire timeline because yeah you know going through all of it what i do want to say is that every single next step may feel like a catastrophe in the beginning but what's actually happening is it's life pushing you to the next step it's saying ah you've exhausted your time here now it's time for you to start growing over here and the question becomes how rapidly can you set up a network how rapidly can you identify resources and how can you put those two to work so that you can accomplish the goal that you came to this location to accomplish whatever that is and it's very easy to be distracted you know so you really have to you know ask yourself what do i want to do and maybe put that up on your mirror so that every day in the morning when you're brushing your teeth you can say you can see it and you can ask yourself what do i want to do do i want to stay here or do i want to go somewhere else and the more you practice that the more you're going to get to the negotiation and when somebody says this is all that we can offer you you can go well that's great that's not what i'm looking for so i'm going to go look for it elsewhere and you can understand that you are not in a critical place with your resources where you're going to die literally no you are lit you can live a sustainable life whatever sustainability means to you at that point if it's just having a place to sleep at night you know i've been there the reality is how do you put yourself in a place where you're negotiating power is your feet and if somebody's saying ah we can't offer any money and you're at the point in your life where that's what you're looking for well guess what there's a billion billions people out there who are only going to be able to offer you nothing except like not money so you can walk away from those guys there's plenty of people looking for money but it's harder to find but it's there because you could be reliable and dependable and that's really all it takes stick around patience yeah um switching gears a little bit was there a certain experience during all this that has impacted you the most and made you realize like hey this is definitely the path that i i want to be on and like kind of stuck with you um well uh

i mean it's probably once a year that happens at least yeah uh because you know like here's the thing uh recently last year i needed to collect funds in order to get this school started in iraq yeah and i was talking a bunch of people and i was proposing you know what we're gonna do and i had a guy who was just like all right milo let's have some real talk here all right i want to give you money okay but i need to know that that money is going to go to the right place so let me ask you two questions let's just be real you got to answer them for yourself first question have you ever met the people to whom you're going to give my money and i was like no i've never been to iraq and he's just like okay that's an important question to answer second question have you been there do you know where they're building the school what they're doing who the people around them are and i was like no i don't and he's just like so you expect me to give you tons of money and you don't know who you're giving it to or where it's going and i was just like no and he's just like why would i give you money and he's right he's absolutely right and so there that suddenly the decision came to be right in front of me i had to fly to iraq

that was not an easy thing to do because first of all i was paying to go there second of all i was going to visit people i've never met in a country that we had been at a war with for a very long time we are it's a complicated view that people have of americans over there especially people who are going on their own for the first time without ever having been there without military experience and so i was faced with this dawning reality of okay you know adventure milo i created this brand i created the wet i got the website i got the logo i put it on everything what does it mean like do i want to be what do i want to be right so do i want to be an influence or do i want to like am i a lie do i want to just fly to bali hang out on the beach get my camera equipment where's my camera it's not over here uh you know and try to take the best photos to compete with those professional photographers who hire models do i want to do that and just kind of like hang out and try to get as many followers as possible or do i want to fly into an actually dangerous situation with no support to start a project that no brand is interested in touching with a 10-foot pole but i stand to chance creating opportunities for thousands if not millions of people that i will never meet in my life to actually create change in the world i was faced with that decision because i was either going to fly to iraq or i was going to go to some tropical place like ibiza or like hawaii or somewhere else and just try to jam myself in with everybody else and that was a very important decision to make because my life was actually threatened you know i i'm careful saying that now that i know iraq much better and now that i have a community of people who love me over there you know i don't want to say like you're flying into hell uh but in the beginning the propaganda and all of the experience and exposure i had to iraq at all had indicated to me that this was practically flying into a volcano you know with a helicopter with the attention just crashing and so uh you know that was a very important decision i had to make am i the real thing you know am i am i just living some sort of like you know lie or do i actually want to do this and you know you can see the decision that i made because i didn't receive any support uh you know i had i posted on multiple climbing groups and i said hey guys we're collecting gear for my school in iraq and we need new gear and so many people said you are stupid who's going to give you new gear what ask for used gear right and i'm just like really well you know am i going to get used client now i'm not a climbing expert i consider myself to be a novice climber i can't even tell if a gear is adequate for being used i can't tell if a rope is good enough or not like after use you give me a rope i'll look at i'll be like yeah that's a rope that's as much as i know so now what would happen if i created a school and we've got a child hanging off of a rope and one of the pieces of protection fails the rope swings out and snaps right now we have an international incident where the most positive intentions the most good will just flowed into an incident that paints us as an enemy bringing inadequate gear into a country and causing the death of a child in that country i didn't have a choice i had to get new gear and so i was like you know what i don't care man this isn't your project if you don't believe you can do this too bad and so you know these types of decisions came all the time i drove from poland through slovakia hungary bulgaria serbia actually serbia then bulgaria into turkey i drove through the conflict through the war that is actively taking place on the border of syria and turkey and i drove into iraq in order to deliver nearly ten thousand dollars worth of donations that i personally collected from all across europe because there was no other way for me to get there i literally drove through a [ __ ] war and when i was in iraq and i finally reached my destination on january 4th this year 2020 the united states dropped bombs on baghdad and killed the iranian top general kusam soleimani when i was in the country alone with my 19 year old car hold on a second my battery might be dying here you're good uh actually let me plug this in yeah take your time otherwise we're gonna disappear so america bombed iraq and killed the top general in iran and i was in the country alone effectively and i needed to escape with my life it's crazy so when i found out about that i actually got it recorded so if you guys should watch documentary i'm producing right now please support it the money is going to the documentary which is publicizing the school and we are doing incredibly effective things but i literally had to escape with my life with human beings who were hunting me iranians and iranian sympathizers immediately started to crawl up americans and you probably didn't hear about this didn't really make it to the media that americans were in specific danger every single humanitarian organization that we reached out to in iraq immediately sent out an email to all of its international volunteers and workers and employees that said do not leave your residence meanwhile i had to drive almost seven hours to the border i was escorted by a couple of the guys you know i'm really grateful for that i feel blessed that they were willing to drop everything they're doing and escort me to the border instantly by the way on the way literally my wheel broke off of my car because the roads are bad over there and then i had to drive the next seven days non-stop through the war zone in turkey again and back over to the safer european union countries that's what happened you know and that when i'm driving when i was driving home i really felt like the grim reaper was sitting in the back of my car

and the further i went the more i got just became crazy and grateful that i was alive grateful for these experiences but one thing suddenly dawned on me that childhood dream that idea that i held when i was like five seven whatever it was of wanting to be luke skywalker indiana jones or whatever any one of these guys suddenly i had a purpose traveling through an area as one of the only people who have ever done this that wasn't from that country driving through western turkey or eastern turkey rather and i was there with a purpose to help people i was literally living out my childhood fantasy as an explorer even though i was pissing my pants with fear i suddenly realized this is exactly what i wanted to do and a piece came over me and i said yes this is what i want to do this is who i've trained myself for this is the vision that i had and i'm enacting it right now and so here i am i'm not afraid anymore and the reality is when i came home and when everything happened after january 24th when he opened our doors for the first time then corona hit and we had to start making video lessons and i started to have volunteer incredibly accomplished volunteer athletes from around the world want to participate and to teach for me that's when it suddenly dawned on me now you got to realize i had ptsd at the time i couldn't sleep that was a nervous wreck anxiety was eating me alive and uh i was sitting there up at night probably 3am in the dark alone and i had realized that i had accomplished something that by all standards was literally impossible i had become the first person to reach the mariana trench to climb mount everest to reach the moon in my own way i had taken an idea that was absolutely impossible given my resources given my connections given my experience and it came to fruition we had open doors and so you're asking about like you know this crazy moment of epiphany here it was i had literally demonstrated to myself that i could do anything anything i can achieve the impossible and that realization shattered my world view because i recognize now that whatever projects i had now that i had i will be putting on my plate would come to fruition i wasn't afraid of failure anymore i had absolute certainty and confidence that what i was going to do i would figure out and my life is now transformed completely you know we're having this interview right now but the depth with which i speak the types of experiences and wisdom that i've gained not having resources and being able to accomplish these things you know it's laughable the type of excuses people give me now oh well i've got a job well i've got student loans oh well you know we're going to have a baby oh we've got a mortgage and it's just like really you know i've met quadriplegics that climb 14ers yeah i know people who are blind who've ascended the top of mount everest i have friends who have multiple children who are actively exploring nature and you're telling me that you've got some depth and you can't do this this is just not for you yeah so if somebody would have asked you 10 or told you 10 years ago that like i'm from the future i'm coming back to tell you that in 10 years you're going to be driving through a war zone to set up a climbing school in iraq what would you have said to them man i don't know i don't know it's uh it's one of these things that you don't you know i i told you before that i i didn't have the capacity to imagine what was possible because i was constrained to that small box of the world that i was used to with a bunch of people telling me what to do and what was possible and what wasn't and i felt like they had the experience and the wisdom to tell me the truth but in reality we're all just grown-up children playing by our own rules so if you define those rules and if you keep breaking them you keep figuring them out you're eventually going to get to a place that nobody else has been yeah but if you play by those rules you just get put into a box so you know are you somebody who is brave enough to do something you haven't done before think outside the box and just go be your own person and be happy which i feel like a lot of people uh like you said uh settle kind of settle you know you you have this life where it's comfortable but you're not doing the thing that you love like you have your bills paid you have all this other stuff but you know that childhood dream i feel like people stop dreaming once they hit a certain age almost oh yeah and it's like you had that dream as a kid like you said and at a certain point that dream becomes just a dream like you don't actively pursue it anymore you're like yeah it would be awesome but i'm comfortable now i have my bills paid i can't go chase after that i can't go do this because i have xyz now i feel like that's such a mindset that a lot of people get sucked into that it's hard to break it is hard to break because comfortability you know comfort is it's comfortable you know even if it's not happy you're you're at a place where you don't want to go out your comfort zone because you're afraid of getting hurt or yeah failing or anything like that i mean you know one of the things that i do want to divulge here you know i want to make i gotta i gotta express my vulnerability to you because you know there's times i've had breakdowns catastrophes have happened personally you know personal breakdowns where like i felt like i've reached my limits i've reached the end uh completely broken back down and battered you know zero money zero things to show for all the effort that i put in somebody stole everything i had and the problem is i still woke up the next day

so i had another 24 hours to do something else and if you keep wallowing in self-pity you know you're just extinguishing your own flame and i know it's hard to get up and to move and i know it's hard right but nobody's going to be there to help you nobody's going to come and lift you up you've got your two feet so take the next step and you know which direction it is to go to safety and if you don't take it anyway because worst case scenario you're just going to backtrack but you're going to know where not to go now so i don't want you to think that milo's had this incredible life of opportunity because i haven't there is a just like a destructive like just trail of destruction behind me i just haven't stopped moving and now i know which direction to move in with confidence and how to value my experience because i have accomplishments i could show for it and if somebody doesn't believe me tough you know because i don't tell you that i'm going to be good yeah i can show you that i'm good yeah you went out and you made a climbing school in a place where if you told someone anyone 10 years ago they'd be like what are you talking about climbing school in iraq for let me pose you a a suggestion how about we go to north korea and start a basketball school how crazy does that sound sounds just sounds absolutely ludicrous yeah right well that's what this idea sounded like when we started it the difference was i had a bunch of people in iraq or just a group of people like five people in iraq who said we absolutely want this and if you give us any resources we will immediately put them to work towards that goal so all i did was just got whatever i could and i gave it to them and that collaboration it just worked man it start it's it sparked the fire then i know you're not the guys that are there in iraq but i mean i i'm sure that you can kind of gather kind of like their mentality and like who they are oh god it's like outdoor people if you want to just talk about them for a minute and kind of shout out to them and talk talk about that because that's that's deserved on their part too i gotta be honest you know i can't take the credit for this entire project i'm the guy that's operating outside of iraq right but these guys are the guys that are operating within the constraints of an economic island practically every country in the world has placed sanctions so you can't send products or produce services that iraqis purchase so they just have whatever resources they came up with as a country then and there's a wall between them and everybody else these guys have zero exposure to the outdoor world world except for through some internet that kind of works through that's not in their language so they see pretty photos and videos and these are the guys who are the first generation there is no generation before them that had went and explored because they're dead yeah because there was conflict there for over a century and so these are literally the explorers they are in it's like a sample it's like this this you know vacuum this petri dish and they are the first people exploring and this past month just within the past month we have rediscovered a lost canyon we set a new route to one of the most popular mountains as well as another route you know and we have now uh discovered a new a a series of new things in caves that were only discovered i think five months ago by a german team that went in there and there's nobody else exploring caves in the country we're working with the head of the water keepers for the country as well nabil musa and we are exploring uh how to do river sports as well as you know diving and things like that so this school the scope of it has grown significantly not through my actions but because these guys are going out there with no experience except for what they taught themselves and they're entering areas where by the way there's mines explosives so on the iranian border there's literally millions of mines the first time that i went climbing with them we found them we found a mortar shell and a bunch of bullets an exploded mortar shell so if you're going hiking in iraq and you're going on a trail that nobody's hiked before you can step on a mine right so this team of people is right now exploring the lost parts of iraq these guys are insane they are so passionate they have regular jobs families a cultural expectation to do things and they also are busy with their lives just like every single one of us paying the bills learning figuring out what they're going to do today they have things that they got to do for people like family or friends they have wives children you know they have debts they have no opportunity and yet they find through passion this burning desire that will not let them stay home but they throw themselves out into this incredibly dangerous undiscovered terrain i feel like that's part two it's hard to summarize how i feel like i'm in the presence of greatness when i'm around them and they're like milo without you we couldn't do this and i'm just like no no without you i you couldn't have this man i'm just like this cheerleader on the side yeah that's like publicizing this but you know i feel like i feel like everybody in the group uh feels that way i feel like that's that childhood kind of like uh you know that want to explore and they're just freely showing it and actively listening to that childhood voice in your head to hey go climb that rock go paddle down that river go you know do something climb climb a tree in the woods you know go explore it's that i think everyone has that as a kid and like i said it a lot of people lose that sense of adventure that sense of awe and wonder and um unless you've actually gone out and been somewhere where not many people have been or just out in the middle of the wilderness it's kind of hard to describe that feeling of just being in awe of nature and that sense of adventure you know i just i i do want to mention though that this you know this isn't all sunshine and rainbows we had um the founder of the team probably one of the first five people who started climbing in iraq his name was raza and on september 9 2019 he was the first casualty of climbing in iraq and we experienced the moment where everything could turn upside down yeah because in the culture of the country you have to put yourself in their shoes you have to realize these are people where for several generations the only place they could survive not live but survive barely get enough food and shelter was in the villages within their community so this is the first generation of people who are saying i would like to walk in that direction for three days i will sleep on the ground we'll go up mountains and cross streams and stuff and then we'll come back and so the people who are in the villages they're like why what you're crazy why would you like to go in that direct what's over there and they're like nothing nothing's over there we're just gonna walk out over there right so we have a we have a culture that is completely inexperienced to why the outdoors even matters and suddenly this sport that they don't understand called mountaineering has produced its first casualty and so the entire country suddenly is at a fork in the road do we reject this crazy sport that doesn't bring any value that i understand because someone has died or do we just let these people continue to do this and have our children participate in a sport that kills right and so we were at a very very dangerous juncture in the development of the sport in the country and i was fortunate in having interviewed hauraz who had become a good friend of mine uh several times i recorded my interactions with them obviously because we're producing a documentary about this so that everybody that's listening here can share and uh i'd love for you to link the video so i'll send you the link yeah but i produced a video where i used interviews with haraz and i used his own words to describe the passion with which he pursued outdoor recreation outdoor sports mountaineering climbing and you and his words where he talked about recognizing the risks recognizing the passion that would make it impossible for us to stop people from going into the outdoors and recognizing that there was an absolute necessity for a program that taught people how to responsibly go outdoors how to be responsible and safe his words the person that died saying i don't have the right equipment i don't have the right experience and i might die but if i die i hope that it is because i am developing this dream so that others can climb safely after me yeah and uh you know i can't say that whether it was that video or the collective actions of all of us but climbing is more popular than ever we have 50 women in our classes we have a female instructor as one of our four instructors sally who is the first middle eastern woman to summit lenin peak and she has a something else planned for the next month that i want to talk about because i don't spoil it for her yet but we have created an environment where women can achieve equally to men which is unprecedented in the country as well i'm not going to talk about that yet because we're still developing what's going on over there and observing what sort of things are going on we don't want to create any dangerous situations for anybody but i do want to say that the sport of the outdoor sports in iraq uh are creating a very very unique environment and we are the ones that are that are heading this so so i do want to say that you know this is real this isn't some sort of uh you know i'm not trying to glamorize this i'm not trying to to say like oh man outdoor sports is radical and sometimes people die it's like no this is real it has consequences if you don't do this correctly you're going to get hurt you're going to injure people in your life you're going to change drastically the way that your family and your friends you know lives are yeah through the actions that you're doing on the other hand we can't stop ourselves we can't stop people from going outdoors that's where freedom lies that's where we don't have rules yeah you're not going to have a debate between the eagle and the bear no one is going to eat the other one that's how they live and you know the rules in nature there is no rules you can't put rules in there so that's where we're going to look in order to find you know a voice inside of us when we listen to that so that's what you're saying about going out to nature and yeah you know really appreciating it we evolved in nature yeah so these strange constructs the ability to speak to you through a flat piece of plastic that shows glowing lights and produces sounds the fact that i have shelter and running water and electricity is really a completely novel concept that we have not evolved to at all yeah but if you go outdoors and nature calling that's just home yeah so teach yourself some basic skills and start enjoying it yeah it's out there nature is one of those things and that that risky aspect is something that you always have to talk about especially with adventure sports i mean that risk of death i mean from the outside some people look at it as the whole oh my god radical like they're they're crazy and they just accept it it's like you don't exactly accept it but you accept the fact that it's mother nature and you know anything can happen and people inside the community i mean if you're in there long enough you're going to know somebody that's died climbing or died in some way doing something it's just a part of being a part of the outdoor community i feel like it's it's a sad aspect but you know and then mountaineering also i mean it's it's just a part it's a part that you have to explore yeah and people that don't understand it just and it's hard to describe unless you've actually been out in that type 2 fund where you're out there just miserable to understand why people do it because some people just don't understand why people would put themselves through hell let me tell you man after after you have been you know hauling gear up a mountain for several days in a row when you discover a hot spring you you understand comfort and pleasure in a way that you could not possibly understand it if you're working in nine to five you just can't you just can't it's not going to happen and so i mean you know everybody could say that about what they do right but like and i don't want to say that i'm sort of sort of like you know authority on this but what i do speak from is experience yeah and i know how to give it my all and have life slap me right back in the face and just say too bad not today and over and over how many years has taken and you know what i can't say i'm successful yet i can say i did something cool but we're still working on it yeah you know so i hope you guys get a chance adventure milo.com iraq check out the information about the project you can see all the other projects on my website as well please consider making a donation the only reason the school is running right now is because of donations that we received from across the world including patagonia and adidas who really needed to have their arms twisted in order to make that happen but if you are a climber consider that these people do not have access to climbing gear climbing training or anything else and we are the first people providing it with your donation we can really make a difference in changing the entire culture of an entire country yeah deeply appreciate it thank you yeah no problem and is there anything else that you want to end with anything else that you want to talk about just to kind of close out or is that about it i mean if anybody's got questions i you know encourage you to reach out uh you can find me on social media adventure milo all of them facebook instagram twitter um so uh send me an email visit the website make a donation even five dollars man i mean that makes a huge difference you know we've had big donations small donations but it's it's the participation and the betterment of you know mankind all over the world no matter where it is makes a huge difference awesome well it was great to hear your story very happy to have you on i'm sure i'll be in touch um with everything so thank you very much and that's the end of the episode i will see everyone else later on the next episode thank you if you enjoyed this episode please comment like subscribe review and share this episode with your friends thank you very much for tuning in again and i will look forward to talking to you guys next time on the next episode thank you and have a great day