Interview with "The Wheel" star and Marine Shon Joyner

Description

We were honored to host "The Wheel" star and Marine Shon Joyner at ReWild University for some great adventures. Here Shon shares details about the survival show and wisdom from the challenges he's faced.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,The Wheel,Shon Joyner

Video Transcription

that I'm here with Sean joiner and for those of you who don't know he was in the wheel which was a really intense Survival show where the people involved participants were made to go from one basically ecosystem to another and no preparation for you didn't know where you're going or so you couldn't study plants and and they'd really selected people from correct that didn't have big background and right not too much of a outdoors or survival background I think mostly you know my channel is about mental resilience mm-hmm so my my big starting question and big question for this whole video is you faced a lot of things in this and in other areas of your life prior to that that required a large amount of mental resilience we're usually in life we can say you can look good I had and we say okay this is how I want everything to look and we you know plan it all out and then if things go off course it's really easy to get upset to get down to just fall apart where did you get your mental resilience what what do you do to bring yourself through tough stuff what's what's that I mean I'm glad that you mentioned about what it is to be resilient before I actually took part on the show there was a card that I carried with me and we're allowed to take a few pictures of our family members or friends so myself I mostly just had I had a note card and then I cut up these four pictures and put them on one side and then on the other side of the card I wrote faith on the top and I put a line and then below it I put resilient because just over time I'm not a big guy I'm five three so I feel like and it's not just me it's probably yourself or anybody who watches this there's times where you feel like a David in life and life is the Goliath and you just have to be resilient through those certain tough times of your life and a lot of my friends would just say man you're you're a little tank man you can just keep trucking so I wrote that on there and when things got really hard for me out there when I had thoughts of possibly quitting or just pushing the button to tap out I would look at my card and look all right I got faith yes

when I say faith it's whatever your meaning of faith is sometimes I would look for guidance from the universe or whether you believe in Lord or Jehovah or whatever it is or just faith in yourself and then the resilient part it was like okay I'm resilient I'm tough you know if I'm not tough I wouldn't be here still at this moment so am I gonna be tough another hour you know another half a day another day or another week so when I would look at that that would instantly snap me when I would start having negative thoughts I knew that that was written down I wrote that down on that card for a reason so that helped me a lot of like you said through the military I did six years in the Marines and I grew up in a not-so-good neighborhood so yeah it was instilled in me at a young age and I'm doing my best to carry it along with me as I get older not all of us are gonna be in the military not all of us are gonna be a show but it's pretty much guaranteed that all of us at one point in life or another we're gonna we're gonna hit something that's going to require that high level of resilience whether it's just somebody else really close to us dying or being that word that we have cancer whatever it's gonna be any words for people that haven't hit something like that yet to give them strength or to give them resilience for that time for that moment when they really need it most definitely I was telling two of his Forrest monks that he has that Rewald University is that there's a difference between quitting and moving on and I think so much and today's life people they say oh well don't quit don't quit you know you quit you're a loser you may be stuck in a bad job or something that you that you hate but then you may have a family and you go I don't want to quit or whatever it may be you'll find a way to know that whether you're quitting are you moving on moving on is putting yourself in a better situation to possibly in your eyes have better success or not constantly waking up and saying why am I going into a place so negative again day after day after day so it's up to you whatever you're going through in life to figure out whether you're you're quitting or moving on and whatever situation situation it may be but my big thing of what I can tell anybody who hasn't yet felt like they've had a certain roadblock in their way if for whatever reason you haven't had any type of roadblock in your life I think you're pampering yourself or you're not getting out of your comfort zone I feel like life is made for us to have challenges and put ourself through things because from when I went to the military everybody told me do not join the Marines whatever you do it's hard it's difficult you're gonna get hazed and I said oh that sounds like a challenge

and I went dating and then write it right away I got why I do this it's too late I already accepted the challenge and then you know same thing on the show when I got on the show I read what it entailed

and I said I don't I don't think I want to do this and what am i one of my friends he lost an arm and a leg in combat and I talked to him and he goes you know looking at what he what Adam had went through he's like man I'm missing an arm and a leg he was like you don't know what I would do to love to have a chance to do something like that he goes man you're still young man you have all your limbs he goes worst case scenario if it gets tough and then just just tap out he goes I won't think of you any different just tried to tackle the challenge I think you could do it so when somebody tells you stuff like that man and you you realize you got both your limbs and your stubble to move around in so far man I'm myself and five other people the only people in the world to ever do something like that so that enough and there is a prize and this was all for no cash prize it was just to see if we were as tough as we thought we were to take on this challenge

that's you know I'm really glad you brought that up to the forest monks and then brought it up here too because it can be so much fear of failure mm-hmm sometimes that then we never take that first step forward because we're afraid what people are gonna think of us if we fail afraid of what we're gonna think of ourselves if we fail yeah but to give yourself permission to fail and say it's okay you know then then you can move forward with things and you can try yeah and then you grow a little bit stronger you know each time you try something I know a lot of people watch these programs and love them and it's really easy for those of us you know back on the couch to criticize what goes on you know what somebody's doing but I think we also all realize that we're seeing maybe maybe 1% of what you're actually experiencing that are there I don't know how much you can say about behind the scenes but can you share a couple of experiences that you had behind the scenes that maybe weren't showing that yeah the biggest thing I said speaking of failure is that is different I felt like a lot of failures I've had in life only myself and maybe some close people knew about him or my fire team our squad though I was in Iraq with when you have a failure that only here you know about our people close to you know about to me it's not that bad but when the Euro could possibly fail in front of millions of people to me I think that's very scary you grab six people and say hey this is either pass or fail and you're gonna do it in front of millions of people in 50 different countries

I don't know that bothered me a lot it really started to sink in because I know whenever it was done and I was gonna go back home it was either gonna I was in I felt like I was either gonna be considered a winner or a loser because sometimes I can tend to be hard on myself and nobody wants to be a loser in front of millions of people or however many 30 40 50 different countries whether you see those people and people or not so but as far as behind the scenes they didn't capture a lot of nights stuff and I felt like night was when the Sun went down I felt it was very difficult for me a lot of times I had a lot of mental turmoil going on in my head when the sun's out you can see everything you can move around I felt like you can get clarity but when you're in unknown territory one of the first places I went was was a grande choco bush planes in northern Argentina gets anywhere from like a hundred hundred twenty degrees and you know the Sun Goes Down and you hear all these nocturnal animals come out you know it does the Sun does it sound like anywhere ra's raised in Indiana and you know I built this little this little ghetto looking tarp thing wasn't the best but I was just so low on energy it was enough to get me through so I just find myself sometimes I could never get a good night's sleep because I was always on edge of stuff that I was hearing and I felt just very mentally weak and like vulnerable and unsafe not knowing what was around the corner if it was a Jaguar or a bear or Ocelot or whatever it may be and a lot of times I go you know what man I think I'm just done I think I'm just gonna quit and then I go well real dark I don't want to go hiked all the way back to know where the safety zones at so let me just tough it out and let me just wait till the morning and in the morning would come up and I feel somewhat better again and that stuff was never captured of how difficult it was for me to just get through the evening not not just at that location but every location that I made it to so and then just walking out in the open to go you know use the restroom and always looking over your back to see if it's a big cat or something like this making noises I think I'm pretty tough person but when you're when you give yourself up to the land and you're no longer the top predator on the food chain because you don't have your your gun or your bow with you all you have is a knife and and a stick and you don't have a flashlight to look around man you start finding out a lot about yourself at least I do I want to sure I want to and what brought me and kitten together is that I watched his videos before I want to say maybe three months before I even got this challenge and of when he fell through the ice and how he was able to stay focused and keep his composure and hike you know miles off into the woods and be able to create a fire with the hand roll method while he's shaking and snapping spindles and going through failures of not getting a fire started but then eventually to stay focused enough to get a fire created I felt like kind of any of the YouTube videos I watch watching his mental composure is what carried me to get through the stages that I did I got very sick on day two when I was in the bush planes there's not much that the producers are camera crew were allowed to say to me or warn me about what tea and what not to eat and I'll tell you when you're hungry and you find something that you think's edible even though the rule of method is you don't know what it is don't eat it it sounds easy until you're really hungry and you're really looking for food and you can't catch any fish so it was something I found and it was a bean and I've never heard of any poisonous bean so I was able to boil up some water and put him in there and I started eating them and they were castor beans that you make castor oil with them and they're very poisonous and contain ricin in if you eat enough of them are supposedly one I'm guessing well for one somebody was looking over me from up above I feel like I told you I became real religious out there very quick I don't know if you're not that's fine but when you go through something you're gonna start reaching for something that's the sound of your willpower to keep you going on but I got very sick I couldn't even hold down water he's just constantly throwing up and I'm so glad they didn't capture this stuff but I was I've never had constant vomiting and diarrhea at the same time while being dehydrated to where I couldn't even consume anything because it was going to go right through me again and and at that moment I was 90% sure I was gonna I was gonna quit and they edited pretty good to make it look like I was fine the next day but I went through two days of that

and I think watching his videos gave me the mental capability and to also focus myself on be resilient again they got me through that because I don't really know what else could have got me got me through that moment that was my those first three days was my hardest time on the show

hands down easily and when I got today for I go if I don't have this experience again I'm not I'm not tapping out and nothing's gonna make me talk about and I never did yeah for those that don't know those castor beans are considered one of the most toxic plants in the world I can give a quick rundown on what the whole show sort of encompass and sort of the realities of what it's like surviving but the purpose of this show is that there's six people there's six ecosystems the bush planes patagonia very cold was also the mountains the tundra

then there's the island which is in Chile and then there's the Amazon and the wetlands I was terrified of I didn't I didn't know where I was going when I found out I was in South America I knew Amazon was hands-down gonna be one of the locations and I knew that further down when you get down there was a place that's cold because obviously you the further down you go south it's gonna get colder Patagonia is as close as you can get without being on an article so it's cold so my two biggest fears were either getting put in the Amazon right away I just said whatever it is I don't want to get put in the Amazon right away because of what I've seen on channels like that place this food there's a lot of food but there's a lot of predators because there's so much food and and then I don't want to get put in a cold environment so

pretty much you get you do whatever you can to make it to the next location there's no food given in between transports so I would either so for instance I don't know how but I made it out the bush planes it was seven days you never know when it's going to happen I found out later that it was the lunar cycle of the moon which causes a switch so it's very depressing because you don't know when you're getting moved so sometimes you start getting comfortable with the terrain and you're like okay it took me six days and I started catching fish and once I figured out the spot and I go oh my gosh awesome tomorrow I know I know how to start catching more fish now I got the hang of it

nope BAM cycle of the moon the moon changed and I was so mad because I had been going you know all this time really without food and just when I figured it out

the switch happened so now my mind I had something and I go I think they're switching whenever I start to catch food cuz I'm just I just didn't know so next I went to the Patagonia though the mountains and and so you get a little you get happy because I go oh my gosh I I got that place you know yeah conquer that place and then you go where am I going now so now you don't know where you're going again I get put in a private jet they gave me two bottles of water and it's mentally is just depressing to you because you don't know where you're going you're thinking I just want to hurry up and get there because I could be you know looking for food now but I'm on this I'm on this private jet it's just me two pilots and a handler and that's it and yeah I got the Patagonia they dropped me off this mountaintop there's snow everywhere definitely not my territory and I go home and alright it was beautiful though it's definitely beautiful but it was scary

because it was just white everywhere I made it down and I wasn't able to get a fire started

so once again I was just just was very down on myself and it was just white and there's snowing on me and I felt like I wanted to give up again because the few things they were able to communicate with me there wasn't much talking but before I started to go down the mountain they go Sean all we want to let you know is that it's snowing and you really need to get a fire started it's gonna be very cold which I knew and I couldn't get a fire started so I did some classic mistakes of things you're not supposed to do that I knew but you know as a kid when your parents tell you don't touch the stove or don't do that you just want to find out for yourself it's the same thing I feel like that goes into survival almost drink you know water that I didn't boil because I was just so thirsty and I couldn't get a fire started at times so I slept that night just cold I didn't have any bedding and I was just cold and I was I just said Lord universe's help me to make it into the next morning and I did and I was able to refocus myself I was able to look around that terrain and start finding things that would create a fire and and I was struggling I caught some fish my second day's some small rainbow trout that they didn't show because they only pick and choose of what they want to show finger caught three rainbow trout and just they were small but man it felt like the world to me huh and I went on and then I want to say I got today 14 or 15 and I found this dead it's called a Patagonian Mara they're huge they're big big hairs and I couldn't believe how big this sucker was but it was dead it looked like a possible like cougar or mountain lion I got to it and that's what the predator was in Patagonia they call him Pumas but it's the same thing as a mountain lion Bush planes it was Jaguars came in and mayor's so I the back of this Patagonian Mara was scratched up and I could see these like scratch marks on me and I think it tried to get under a hide under under this log or something but I saw it I just didn't think much of I go I'm gonna try to catch some fish today and I had no success and then all of a sudden I just kept thinking about that that kind of going Mar and I go man I'm not eating anything that's already dead I don't know where it's been and I just kept thinking I was so hungry so finally something just said just go back to it and go look and just see how bad a shape it said so I went look the front end of it looked pretty good look at the back end of it was a little scratched up and there was a few bugs on it and I said you know what I've never cut open anything ever in my life everything I bought has been from the stairs

so there's a top there's a lot of first experiences on that show so I went ahead I put it on this stick that had a V shape and I picked it up and it was heavy I carried it back too close to the river and I just I just gathered whatever I watch from watching youtube videos and I skinned it I cut off the bad sections of it and then I gutted it and I start feeling like a man I felt like I was doing some manly stuff I mean I felt like a man in the Marines but we didn't we didn't do stuff like that is different is this urban warfare man I start to feel like a man I started feeling proud that I was accomplishing something and man that was my that was pretty much my really only good meal they show and part of survival is just being a scavenger and coming across things you know there's a lot of these shows where they're all you know you're gonna all of a sudden this magical like hog or something appears or whatever and oh my come on now you know but in reality men these animals they're gonna they're gonna see you before you see them

a big part of survival is just taking whatever you can find are you come across and using it to your advantage and man was I glad that I that I found that that dead Patagonian Mara and and I just made this hey I'm hungry I'm just I'll deal with the with the situation later but it was good and I didn't get sick

and yeah and then of course and after that the beacon goes off so now I have in my head that whenever I find food on the show that they're doing a swish so I'm like you know what I wonder if they're like since I'm thinking everybody else is doing great on the show cuz I don't see these people we're all at different locations so we're all rotating so I'm like I'm probably just doing so horrible of a job that I'm catching food like later than everybody else and they're switching it out so my last location was the tundra and we had to ride we had to ride through the terrain on horse and I felt that I've already come through the worst which was the bush planes and the the mountains and I felt that I already started becoming an animal as far as my instincts I could smell certain things I could hear certain things different and I felt like I was already the transformation 15 days in and by Nam I made it to the tundra and I was able to find water pretty quick it was just I was just so sore from being on a horse for a hour and then going down this you know this real rocky just it reminded me of the Grand Canyon with just a little bit more foilage around but was it much stuff there and yeah I didn't I didn't really catch anything I didn't really have much success catching any fish I got some good bites but I wasn't able to hook anything and I found this small little crayfish and man there was hardly any meat on that thing but to me it was it was a lobster in my mind I made it up like it was a lobster meal and I was so hungry and a man this is little claws on it and I'm cracking the little claws and getting every little bit of me that I can and I remember I felt like I had analyzed I remember I laid back and I was just so proud of myself that I found this little crayfish and in my head it was as much as is bigger a lobster just because his survival mode anything any little thing that I found out there helped and you know I find dandelions and I'd eat dandelions but it it got to the point where I had lost close to 30 pounds in a matter of 30 days and the medics were really getting concerned about me and I had I wasn't able to use a restroom in almost a month and so I didn't want them to pull me off the show they they asked me what would it be to make me quit and I told him I would and I would either finish the 60 days or they would have to I are if I broke something or if I got carried out and so day day 30 I felt nervous because I they had warned me a few times that I needed to use the restroom and that my body wasn't in good shape so I forced myself for like 20 minutes felt like giving I don't always like to give birth before man I feel like I got pretty close to experience I was able to use a restroom and I was so exhausted I was so tired I remember I set up my camera I did a lot of self filming to I had a camera crew around me but I did a lot of the filming myself and they offered no comfort they just blended in with the with the territory to me and I remember I got my camera and I go well looks like I'll be able to continue on I use the restroom and I go I think I can make it another seven days from that moment I started hearing it because I have microphone will small microphone so even though the rest of the people are you know miles away they can hear it because I might I had to change my own batteries and stuff so I felt like from that moment like 10 minutes later I like in the distance I hear a vehicle pull up and I see these people coming down and they told me to come over and I knew whatever it was it was in good news and they the producer he goes he went to go talk to the medic and then they came over and I saw I saw three of them walked over to me and I knew wasn't gonna be good mandated almost he'd bent down to me and he said go Sean he goes we're sorry man but we can't let you continue and you would think that I would be happy at that moment cuz I'm about to get all the food I've been dreaming about but and it brought me down to tears because I know that even though my body was was deteriorating I knew that I had seven days or a week more worth of fighting me to continue on and I felt like they let meet some poisonous stuff that could have killed me so why not let me continue another seven days so I it was it was a life it was so I don't know was a blessing and I hated that I had to get pulled off the show like that but I guess I'm happy that I didn't quit and I really got to see what I was made of to even put my body through that stage to start deteriorating but I tell you what it everything was so real when it was over about just seeing people once again seeing children and certain things almost made me want to break down into tears uh I remember the first time I heard of a car it felt like those thirty days felt like six months to me and I remember I was so mad that they pulled me is that I didn't want to talk to any of the medics really I think would ask me questions how I felt when they were taking me back up to the facility and I just I was so mad I was upset at myself that I let my body get in that shape and then I had talked a lot about ice cream my mission ice cream so much and I ain't Gustavo he was one of the medics and he goes he goes he tricked me he goes Shawn if you cooperate with this he goes we have some a lot of a lot o as ice cream and Argentina and man I was like a little kid right he said I was like so I cooperated with them and they had some ice cream with me man I made everything better

from that moment I forgot about other stuff but I'm glad I'm here and I've talked a lot and I just want to thank Kenton his monks his family I'm just happy to be here at this moment a year from this day it would be day four for me when I was out in the bush planes in Argentina so this is like a special anniversary for me to come from Indianapolis Indiana and join Khitan up here in in northern Wisconsin and and just let him know how much I appreciate that that mental stability he gave me and learned from him and his forest monks and just the environment so I feel privileged and I hope that a little bit that I was able to share with you guys from my from my show and and watching the stuff that kitten has done from you know living a night in the freezing cold and in falling in ice and crawling out and living making it through the night through that this guy really is the truth I'm not trying to be a downer to some of these other people who call themselves survivalists who are famous but kitten is the real deal you know he's not going back up in a in a warm place at night to look warm and then coming back and acting like he was really there so he's the real deal I spent a few days with him now and this is just an honor so thank you very much thank you

well nothing yeah a lot of people that watch this channel are some younger people that are just coming out of high school or still in high school and struggling to find their their way in a world that lays things out for us really clearly but usually if we follow that route it's not the route in our heart mm-hmm any words of wisdom for most guys and girls I was telling uh two of the monks or Knight they're 18 and 19 and when I was 19 I was enlisted in the United States Marine Corps infantry getting prepared to go vote our Iraq at the time but I thought and you know you just never you know if there's people that say hey I want to be a doctor and they follow that path to being a doctor like I think that's awesome but then there's a part of me that goes it's sort of boring like you have your path already laid out for you but it's awesome that you are accomplishing it so it's your perspective on what you look at it and there's there's been times in my life where I go I don't know what I want to do like when I got out of the Marines what am I gonna do and you know never what I thought that I would be on a reality so everybody you know I'm trying right now I'm training for American Ninja Warrior but I thought there might have been a possibility that I would have been on that but I never would have thought I would have been on a survival show when I told all my friends was gonna be in a survival show they thought I was insane cuz I have no knowledge of anything about doors so I'm letting you guys know that to say that sometimes it's okay to not know what your next step in life is gonna be but it's up to you to try to figure that out and it's not gonna happen overnight sometimes sometimes it'll take somebody like my friend Adam who lost his arm his leg and say you know what I think you really need to do that I believe in you I have faith in you it takes somebody like kitten or you know to give more education to these monks or it may take your parents or it may take one of your friends that I'll point you in the direction of where you feel like you want to go but do not feel like you're obligated to go the path of everybody else of going to high school then going to college and then you get in student debt and then feel like now you have to get in this pull of being an apprentice or or doing whatever what everybody else does do not feel like you have to get in that cookie cutter type of mode to live your life it's okay to not know what your next step in life is I think that's the beauty of life sometimes as is the unknown and that's what the will was on the show was unknown of not knowing where I was going next in dealing with it thank you for sure no problem man guys a legend he doesn't like me he doesn't like me saying it but he's a legend I knows what he's talking about and I tried to share some stuff with him

I think he should tackle the opportunity on one of these big survival shows and and I just tried to give him some wisdom and and letting him know that he could spread his words to his word to millions of people instead of just a select audience on YouTube so I don't know we'll see if if he does that or not but I I think he would totally kick butt at that