Lucas Miller - Survivalist from History Channel's "Alone"
“Do you want to be on a TV show?” “I don’t know, are you legit?”
Social media is filling up with harrowing tales of working from home with children, homeschooling kids who were not taught to ‘carry the one’, and only being able to eat at your favorite restaurants by (gasp) carrying out! There are many real challenges to our current social-distancing lifestyles, but this week’s Moonlighter maintained social distance from everyone except for wild animals for days at a time on the reality show Alone. Lucas Miller spent 7-8 days at a time totally alone in the woods of Pacific Northwest trying to figure out what he would eat, staying safe, and how to stay warm and dry.
“My dad would call it the green apple quick step”
Lucas Miller was contacted by the casting company putting together a reality show in which survivalists would be dropped in the woods and be left to film themselves and their experiences. Participants were given a list of 40 items and were allowed to choose 10. From there, they were dropped into remote areas and had to find a way to survive. He was given a camera and a GPS tracker to allow the crew to be able to get to him in the case of an emergency. After being dropped by the crew, it was just Miller and the wild. Besides a pretty awful story about eating a bad mussel, Miller thrived. Over time, he established a yurt, canoe, steady supply of clams, and even an instrument and it seemed like Miller could continue to live in the wild for months.
“If its gonna go down that way (being killed by a cougar or bear) that’s a cool story too”
In the end, Lucas Miller had to decide what was best for him. Did he want to continue to ‘play the game’ for a chance at $500,000 or did he want to continue to live his life by his own moral compass? He made the decision that he no longer wanted to struggle to survive just to get money. Miller spent 45 days in the wilderness by himself, finding ways to survive as part of the show. At the end of his experience, Miller struggled to readjust to his normal life. He left the show valuing a simple life, connecting to nature, and his work taking troubled youth into the wilderness as a part of redirecting their lives.
This week things get really nice on the podcast. That’s right, the Iowa Nice Guy, filmmaker, actor, and Moonlighter Scott Siepker returns to the pod to talk about his new feature-length documentary film, Kinnick. Scott and Tim take the pod outdoors for an early fall evening conversation about Nile Kinnick and the years-long journey that Siepker set out on to tell the famous Iowan’s story.