He Survived 66 Days without Food or a Bible (Dave McIntyre of Alone)

As part of History Channel’s Alone, Dave McIntyre was dropped off on Vancouver Island with nothing but a backpack full of survival materials. No food. No electronics. No Bible. He survived for 66 days and although much of his physical suffering was captured on camera, most of what God taught him happened behind the scenes. Here’s the full story.

Learn more about Dave McIntyre:

• Set Free Ministry: https://www.setfreemin.org
• Watch Alone: https://www.history.com/shows/alone

Read the entire interview transcript with Dave McIntyre below:

Dave McIntyre Interview Transcript

Dave McIntyre:
1999, we went to the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which is the third largest city in Brazil, 5.5 million people. And I was a church planning missionary in the urban jungle, and I grew up in Pennsylvania hunting, fishing, trapping, doing all that kind of stuff. I was very much into wilderness survival from my teens and twenties and all that. And I kind of thought I was giving that up to go to Brazil and work in the third largest city in Brazil. Come to find out there’s more wilderness surrounding that city than any place I’ve ever lived. It’s amazing, really. Now we’re outside the city and you are in the Howling Wilderness and
It was just beautiful. So I started a ministry down there called Per a Wilderness Ministry where I would take kids out into the jungle using wilderness survival training as a springboard for spiritual development. And it was grueling. It was kind of like a rite of passage kind of thing. I didn’t have to do anything artificial to make stress on them. The jungle does that on its own, but the kids divided themselves into people that had suffered in the woods of Pastor Mac and people that hadn’t. So there was a long waiting list to get into that experience and it was wonderful. So yeah, that’s kind of what I did. I was a church planner and youth pastor and wilderness survival instructor. Then 2008 we opened that up to paying customers and as the Bushmaster Wilderness Survival School. So I did that as a tent making effort to survive the economic situation. The early two thousands there. It was good.

Josh Summers:
That’s awesome. So then you came back, and we don’t need to go through the story of how you got onto a loan, but let, let’s fast forward to the fact that okay, you, you’re cast onto a loan, you can take 10 items and I’m assuming it cannot be a book at all. Is that correct? What are you allowed and not allowed to bring on that?

Dave McIntyre:
They had a list of 40 items and out of that 40 items you could choose 10. And really some of those items are really stupid. No serious, no one who knows what they’re doing would ever choose those items. So

Josh Summers:
If

Dave McIntyre:
You look at the things people choose, it’s pretty much within 15 to 20 different items that people end up taking. And the rule was no books, no bibles, no pens, no paper. They said if you have thoughts in your head, speak ’em. We want to hear your internal monologue and say what’s on your mind. Don’t just sit there in silence and we don’t want footage of you reading books or writing in your journal.

Josh Summers:
So

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah, I knew that going in, they talked about that at bootcamp that we would not be allowed to bring bibles because people asked, there were other believers who wanted to know if they could bring a Bible and they had determined in season one that if a person was able to bring a Bible that would be a source of spiritual help and comfort and psychological bull working, that it would give an unfair advantage.

Josh Summers:
Interesting.

Dave McIntyre:
In fact, one of the producers asked me during bootcamp, I was doing an on-camera interview and he had produced the first season. He says, Dave, do you think that your faith gives you an advantage over the other contestants? And I thought, well, I never really thought of it as an advantage over other people in a competition. I said, it is the source of strength for me. I know when I’m stressed, I hit my knees when I’m stressed, I go to God for help. And that is, I don’t know how people get through life without that, but as something that I would hold over other people. I don’t see it that way because that same source of strength is available to them, that they just go to Christ. And if they establish that relationship, they get all the benefits of being in Christ and knowing him. And he liked the answer, I don’t know if he was a believer or not, but they recognized that scripture’s a source of comfort for people who believe in it and they didn’t want that unfair advantage.

Josh Summers:
So if faith was some kind of advantage did not having your Bible with you, how did that affect that advantage, if at all?

Dave McIntyre:
Lemme tell you, lemme the story of my last contact with scripture before I dropped on the island. Okay,

Josh Summers:
Okay.

Dave McIntyre:
I got up that morning. I didn’t wake up that morning. I got up, I hadn’t all night and

Josh Summers:
Just

Dave McIntyre:
Anticipating drop day and I got up and I knew I couldn’t take my Bible. So I had my Bible there and I just kind of riff through it and I set it on the bed open. Now, I’m not a believer in Bible roulette.

Josh Summers:
Okay, just

Dave McIntyre:
Spin the Bible, put your finger in there.
But I did. I just opened it up and it just so happens that Isaiah chapter 40 is pretty much in the center of that Bible. So when it laid open, it was open to Isaiah chapter 40 in the N I V it says Comfort for God’s people at the top of the old title from the chapter. I thought, man, I could use some of that right now. I’m going to read this whole chapter. And I started reading the whole chapter and I get down to verse 29, which is he gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Use will grow weary and young men will stumble and fall, but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They’ll soar on wings of eagles, they will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint. And I broke when I read that I absolutely broke. I’m like, okay, Lord, that’s what you’re telling me. That’s what you’re telling me before I do this thing. This was not my first rodeo. I’ve suffered in the woods before. I know what starvation feels like and it’s horrible. And I got out a pen, I took my rain jacket, I turned the hood inside out and I wrote out those verses on the inside of the hood of my rain jacket. So that was right here over the top of my head,

Josh Summers:
Really

Dave McIntyre:
My heart and my mind. I am like, okay, Lord, if you’re telling me that, you know exactly, you brought me to this place exactly what’s in store for me and I think I’m going to qualify for week and weary. And there were times out there, I never once actually took that hood and opened it up and read those verses again. It was there. I know it was there.

Josh Summers:
Interesting. But I

Dave McIntyre:
Never actually read it. But I tell you what, there were times I’d be walking along and just so fatigued and you’re literally starving to death. You and I would start to quote that verse, he gives strength to the weir and increases the power of the weak. And I could never say it out loud and get beyond those words before it broke me because I was just crying out that God, Lord, I qualify here. I mean I qualify for this. You called me into this and you’ve reduced me down to nothing and I can’t do this without your strength. If you don’t lift me up, I will fall. And that is the fact that experience played out many, many times, especially in the first month that I lost 35 pounds in the first five weeks or so.

Josh Summers:
That’s crazy.

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah. Maybe this is t m i for the podcast. You might want to leave it in, want to leave it out. But I had my normal pre-B bush diet dump on day two. I

Josh Summers:
Was there

Dave McIntyre:
And I didn’t have another dump for over a month. Over a month.

Josh Summers:
Are you serious?

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah, yeah. And the crew was worried on me. They had me in medical check to be pushing on my stomach and saying blockage. I’m like, it’s nothing in nothing out, guys. I’m starving it up. I’m eating muscle tissue and fat. You know what I mean? Oh my

Josh Summers:
Goodness.

Dave McIntyre:
There’s nothing. And that didn’t start up again until I started eating seaweed and catching fish in large enough quantity. But yeah, not having scripture, I was amazed at how much scripture came to mind out there. Having been involved with scripture on a daily basis for going on two decades, it’s there. You’ve got it in your head and you are in dwelled by the author of this book. And I know in some of your questions you would shared or being specific, I’m going back eight years here. So there isn’t a lot of things I would say that I, oh, I remember this verse and that verse and things and it came back and it was just the Holy Spirit, the Lord working with me and me praying for my kids and praying for my situation and him bringing up a lot of things that traumas from the past and things like that you really can’t get away from when you’re alone, truly alone with no distractions whatsoever. And the memory of verses kept coming back again and again and again. He really does bring it to mind. And

Josh Summers:
I think that’s a real encouragement because I know a lot of people, it doesn’t sound like you had made scripture memory like a specific discipline of yours prior to going out, and yet the time that you’d spent in the word God can still draw that out. The Holy Spirit was still able to draw that out in the moment. Is that right?

Dave McIntyre:
I would say the only time in my life I was really serious, serious about scripture memorization was first before I moved to Brazil. And during my first two years there, I was memorizing a lot of scripture in Portuguese because that had to be there. And it really helped me to me, in speaking to people to be able to quote verses rather than just go to my Bible and open it up and talk. Yeah. So I did a lot of scripture memorization in Portuguese, but I am not your regular day job kind of guy who has limited exposure to the word. The word of God has been my job. I don’t memorize the manual on the car. If you’re the mechanic, you know what you’re doing. You know what I mean? It’s there. So there was a lot of interaction with the word far above what your average person who doesn’t have that ministry task to do.

Josh Summers:
I know we were talking a moment ago about how much footage is captured and gets edited down for these episodes of Alone. I mean, you were there for 66 days, 66, is that right?

Dave McIntyre:
66 days, yeah. 5-6 hours of raw footage a day

Josh Summers:
And so we get to follow along with you as you go through the physical struggle, the starvation and understanding that first month, just how it didn’t seem like you were catching anything. You weren’t getting anything. Can you speak to one, a little bit of that physical struggle, but two, what was going on behind the camera or maybe the stuff that didn’t make the edit that was really powerful to you and you wish that story had been told?

Dave McIntyre:
Oh, there were points I intention, I don’t want this story told by ’em. You trust them to edit you, to edit your material and present an accurate version of you. And the truth is, if they edited, if they included every time I was crying about missing my kids, I’d look like a weepy little girl. And if they included everything where I was spot on and did the exact right thing, I’d look like a slick low drag operator. You know what I mean? I think they did a pretty good job of presenting me as me warts and all and everything. The one thing that really, really, really was necessary my relationship with Allure was I had just been through a divorce and two years earlier, I had been through a divorce, lost my ministry in Brazil. It was horrible. I mean, I didn’t cheat on my wife, nothing like that. But there was some major, major stressors going on. It’s a much more story than we have time for today. I had lost everything. And I remember praying about six days in of sitting on a rock and I said, Lord, you’ve taken everything away from me. Now there is nothing left in my former life. I’m not a pastor, I’m not a missionary, I’m not a husband. I don’t own my own home anymore. My life is just gone and you’ve taken everything away from me and the only thing I have left to lose is my life and my health. And you put me in the highest concentration of krugers and black bears on the planet with no weapon. And I said, Lord, whatever you’re doing here, I am okay with it. Obviously you brought me here at bootcamp. I told him, I said, Lord, if you don’t want me to do this, they show you everything about the show. And I’m like, I have to do this.
This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And I said, Lord, if you don’t want me to do this, just pull back and let me fail at bootcamp. Just take your hand off of me. Let me bumble around and be me. And they won’t offer me a positioning. I said, because if they offer me a position, I am going to take it. Alright. I’m just letting you know. You know how I think I make my decisions If they offer me this position, you brought me here, I’m going to do it. So if you don’t want that happen, don’t let it happen. Alright? He blessed me in incredibly during bootcamp. I mean, I was the only person at our bootcamp that did everything in the time allotted in the field trial portion. So obviously he just blessed me there. So I’m sitting on the island and I’m like, Lord, whatever you’re doing here, I’m okay with it because I’ve lost everything and you’ve literally now exiled me to a rock on the north end of nowhere with nothing, and I trust you, whatever you’re doing here. And he proceeded to starve me down. I’m talking about discipline and my lack of it. I’ve never really been a big faster either. I’ve managed a three day fast in the past, but this was the effect. This is more than that. It’s like a 40 day fast. It was that level of starvation. I wasn’t, I was trying to find everything I gave my hands on to eat, but that wasn’t happening. So I’m literally starving down like a 40 day fast. And at about day 30, this is the breaking point for me. I came out to check my gill net, which had not produced anything up to this point. And then the night it had collapsed and rolled itself into a ball and I was just furious and I shut the camera off. I did not want to swear on camera, but it was in that hangry spitting mood. You know what I mean? That anything’s going to pop out here. It’s punch a wall moment. You know what I mean? You’re just frustrated. And I got the ball of net out of the surf and there was this enormous northern kelp crab in the middle of that ball net. And I only have to untangle this net and get to this crab because I hadn’t caught any at that point. And I started untangling this net and I’m just getting angrier and angrier about it that I was like everything I have ever taught anyone to do it, how to survive in the wilderness and getting your fishing infrastructure in and your nets prepared and your lines in the water and just wave after wave of destructions tearing it apart. And this is your life, isn’t it, Dave? This is your life. You were a pastor, a teacher, Christian school teacher, and a missionary, and you serve God with your life and now you’re here and it’s all gone
And it’s destroyed. And lemme show you how that happened. Lemme show your contribution, all that. And the Lord showed me me. And when you go through a divorce, you’re in defensive mode. You’re not, you’re hearing about everything you ever did and you’re not buying any of it. You’re not willing to engage anymore and consider yourself and you’re just trying to preserve any shred of your dignity. You can’t. And now, two years later, after starving me for 30 days, Lord kind of wrapped his arm around him and said, okay, let’s take a look at this. Let’s take a look at you. In the midst of all that, you did make mistakes, didn’t you? I didn’t neglect my life. I did make some bad choices and bad decisions for our family, and my ship sank and I was at the helm and I had some confessing and repenting to do, and he graciously forgave me and he led me through those one by one. He gave me a five minute break and I looked down and there’s a whole nother bucket full of rot down there. And there’s people in that bucket, people that did things to our family that quite literally men kill over. Okay? Things were done to my family that men seek revenge for and have plans to hide bodies for. Okay, I’m just saying, is that serious?
And that was me for a long time. I had just been forgiven. And now I look down and there’s all these other people and I have to forgive him because God didn’t go to my ex-wife and ask her for permission to forgive me. He just forgave me because he paid for the sins of mankind, all of mine. He owns them, not me, not her. He doesn’t have to consult her about forgiving me. He bled his life out and died on the cross for that. So he done the cross, those people in that bucket too. And what are you going to do about it? Do you want to get your revenge? You want me turn this over, give placed to the wrath of God for those people? Do you want to be the one to do it or do you want God to do it? And one by one, he brought those people up and I had to forgive them. There’s a lot of people there. And one by one I forgave them, turned them over to God and experienced the chains falling off of me for not having to carry that burden. He carries the burden of the people that did the horrible things. He paid the price for the people that did the horrible things. And I’m out of the equation now. And man, I tell you Josh, after this I was light as a feather. I had dealt with all of my internal garbage,
And he dealt with the bitterness and the unforgiveness and the murderous rage that I held towards more people than any man should have to. And he dealt with it. He lifted that burden off of me, and I was light as a feather. And I went back and I ate that crab and I said, Lord, I get out of here. I’m going to an all you can eat crab place. I’m going to eat crabs. These are amazing. They eat dead stuff on the bottom of the ocean and they taste like this. It’s a miracle, right? It’s it is a miracle. They’re the ugliest creature on the God ever made, and they’re the sweetest pasting meat. They’re beautiful. And a couple days later, I’m out fishing and standing on the edge of my reef there, and I look out in the seaweed and I spotted a kelp crab and I caught him and I caught five others that night. I think he bought six crabs that night and they filmed that. They included that.

Josh Summers:
Oh yeah, I remember you holding that thing up. Yeah,

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah.

Josh Summers:
So exciting.

Dave McIntyre:
And I said, yeah, it’s horrible for a Baptist to say the only thing to make this better as friends and beer. So anyway, it was a great thing. It’s like Laura was saying, you don’t have to go home for all you can eat crab meal. We can do that. And I did that a lot. I started eating those crabs consistently after that. But yeah, the Lord took me out there to break me and to give me that experience of just taking me down to nothing and then building me back up. And as soon as I went through that experience with him on that beach, about day 30, he turned the food back on and I actually started regaining weight that I had lost. Actually I didn’t regain anywhere near my pre drop day weight, but I was regaining. I got down to about 160 pounds and I was on the mend from that. I was heavier than that when I won on day 66

Josh Summers:
That’s incredible. There are a number of things that I loved that the editors kind of pulled out from what you said, and it’s one of the reasons I even reached out to you because I resonated so much with parts of your experience having our family was taken when we were serving in China and they had taken everything from us and there was that the thing that they said pretty much in every single one of the intros of who are you when everything is stripped away from you?

Dave McIntyre:
I was not thinking about that. I didn’t say that in relation to the show.

Josh Summers:
Really.

Dave McIntyre:
I had been talking about all the stuff that I had lost recently in my life and it all had fallen apart and now I’m down to nothing. And I’m like, who are you when everything’s stripped away? And it’s like now I get to literally do this in a very literal sense in front of the entire world it seems. And to me, it was just amazing when I look back on it that God, I broke me down to nothing in front of all those cameras all by myself. He took me down to nothing. And there was a lot of things I didn’t film because it was just too personal. Like that day on the beach, I wasn’t running the camera. As I’m weeping and crying out loud to God, I was talking to him out loud. I’m not just praying in my head, I’m just telling it to the you’re all by yourself. And I’m not filming that for the world to see in detail like that. I love telling that story now, but some things are too personal to put on camera, but enough of the story comes through in the show. I’m very thankful they did not edit my Christianity out of me. And we don’t want to show that part of this story. It’s very much there

Josh Summers:
It is.

Dave McIntyre:
There were times I’d be preaching to that camera though.

Josh Summers:
Really?

Dave McIntyre:
At one point I actually apologized. I said, I’m sorry if this is getting too theological or too heavy for some of you guys, but I’m pastor. I’m a missionary. You give me a camera. You say, let me hear your internal monologue. I said, this is what I think about, so I’m going to talk about, so yeah, I’m talking about creation and evolution and all kinds of stuff. You know what I mean?

Josh Summers:
Oh man.

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah. The people that edited, I actually got to meet them and they really appreciated some of the things I was saying. They’re like, I said to the one guy, I said, oh, you got to listen to all my insane ramblings. He says, sir, you’ve got some mighty interesting ramblings. So they were listening.

Josh Summers:
They were listening. Yeah, I can imagine that it would be, you don’t get access to those tapes now, right?

Dave McIntyre:
No. The raw footage. No. No.

Josh Summers:
Okay. Yeah, they

Dave McIntyre:
Did give me the paper writeup because they watch it all and they kind of chronicle what’s in each scene, and they gave me that writeup. It’s like 95 pages long. It’s really cool to go back in.

Josh Summers:
That’s really cool. I kind of wish I’d had that for our experience. I feel like the thing that, there’s another quote that I want to read out that you said at the very end that also very much resonated with me because I feel like you go through an experience like that, and there’s so much that God taught me in my personal experience that I don’t think I would’ve been able to learn anywhere else. Like that breakdown period of you just got to get to a certain point in order for God to be able to say, okay, now I got you here. Now let’s move up here. And if you don’t mind, yeah, if I’m going to read this to you, back to you, this is what you said, but still I love it. It says, suffering has value. We avoid it at all costs. We would never want to go back and repeat it, but it has value. It’s a part of life. Nobody goes through life without suffering. The question is, what do you allow that suffering to do in you? You can allow it to chew you apart or you can look for the deeper meaning. How does that sit with you now, eight years plus later? Absolutely.

Dave McIntyre:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s even more so my life’s experience since then has entrenched that even more. I’ve had a lot of people say, oh, you must have had these really deep spiritual insights when you got to the island. It’s like, no, I’ve been through a lot in my life and these were lessons I had already learned that I was able to just completely stand upon by faith when I got to the island. You know what I mean? It was not a question of will God take care of me? Is God with me in the midst of my trial? So I’m like, there is no doubt that that is the case. So yeah, the suffering, what are you allowed to do? You are going to go through suffering. And I have seen people turn and shake their fist to God over that, and how can they do that when you look at Christ? You know what I mean? I remember going to a hospital one time and there was a girl who was really having a pity party for herself, and she was under some serious stuff. But when I found her, she’s sitting there with two guys that are double amputees and they’re trying to encourage her. And I got back to her room and I said, she’s woe is me and all that stuff. And I said, you want to pull yourself out of this? You got to find somebody here who’s worse off than you, and go encourage them every day. Find somebody here. And she thought about it. She says, well, what if I turned to the side and I find nobody who’s suffering worse than I am? I said, oh, that he’s occupied by Jesus Christ who bore the sins of the entire world, and he’s the one who’s going to hold you together and he’s going to encourage you, and that’s the case. You’re going to go through suffering. So what are you allowed to do? You shake your fist at God or do you go into the clinch? Because at that point in my life, I was thinking, I felt like I’ve been T-boned in the intersection of life. Everything’s destroyed. Everything’s gone. I’m laying there in the smoking wreckage and I see the face of Jesus looking down at me and the smoking wreckage, and I say, Lord, I just got hit by a truck. He’s like, I know I was driving it. I did this with you. This is a controlled demolition here. My life was a controlled demolition. He knew exactly how he was taking me down. Okay? I was never not in his hands through all that. I remember coming home to my shelter at night, and I had caught a fish or two and it was dark. It was after dark and it’s cold. And I’m standing there in my shelter and I am just gassed. I have nothing left physically to make a fire. I’m emotionally and physically overwhelmed with the prospect of making a fire and cooking these fish.
And I remember just standing there in the shelter and I had the headlight on and I was in front of my chopping block in the wood pile, and I’m just staring at it and I just can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do it. Okay, I’m done. And I’m like, Lord, I can’t do this. I can’t do this. And he says to me, clear as a bell, my voice in my head, not my idea. You can put a piece of wood up on that chopping block. You said, yeah, I can do that. So I reached down and put a piece of wood on a chopping block. I’m just standing there. He says, hit it with the ax. You can do that, right? You can hit it with the ax. I can hit it with the ax. I can’t build this fire. I can’t do this. I’m in my end. I can hit that with an ax. So boom, I hit it with an ax. The two pieces of wood fall on this side. Well pick one of them up and put it on the chopping block. You can do that, right, Josh? Literally, he talked me through every stage of making this fire until it’s sitting there and it’s glowing and the fish are boiling a way and making stew. And you talk about saying grace. You know what I mean? Thank you Lord. This we bless our bodies, yada, yada, yada y.
I didn’t do that a lot out there because it was in that attitude of prayer all day long. Lord, I’m starving to death. I haven’t eaten in two days. Give me this day my daily sea perch. And it was that constant connection there. It was a lot of prayer all day.
You have no one else to talk to, so talk to God. And he’s great. You know what I mean? He knows. And it was good. Really was good. I mean, the emotion of catching a fish or crabs or whatever, and knowing that God’s taking care of me. His hand is on me. He’s taking care of me. And at the end, the last week I was there, I had a meal again. The moment that God talked to me, I go out, there’s one little tiny fish in the morning, and I fish the day 64. I fish all day long. All day long. I’m catching nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Go to check all my crab places, nothing. I’m getting skunked. I’ve got this one little fish. It’s like six inches long. And I get home. I’m on my way home, and I stopped at the last place on my northwest coast that I could fish.
It was good for fishing, and I could watch the tide come in and there was a cliff there. And if I waited too long, I couldn’t get back to my camp. I had to go when the water was at a certain point and I could see it from that spot. So I got my head down, I’m grumbling. It’s sleeting. I’m not filming. I’m just angry. And I’m kind of grumbling at that. I’m like, Lord, I’m not learning anything new here. I stay 64 and someone else obviously is suffering just like I am, and I’m not learning anything. I don’t know what new lessons, what more of this is going to teach me. I don’t know what’s going on, but it is, I’m really starting to suck. And again, my voice in my head, not my idea, go down, stand on that rock and cast into the bull kelp, loud and clear. And I look up, I look down and there’s a flat rock down there by the water. I’m like, well, that’s dumb. Why would I cast into bull kelp? And I just put my head down, start grumbling again. Go down, stand on that rock and cast into the bulk kelp, loud and clear, not optional.
Okay? I go down, I cast bulk. Kelp is floating rope. It’s very, you lose hooks in bulk, kelp, right? So I cast out into a hole in the bull kelp and the wave washed out towards the sea again, and I was hooked in the bulk kelp, and it just rock solid, stuck in the bulk kelp. I’m going to lose a hook. I’m just going nuts. And another wave came in and the bulk kelp came in with the wave, but my line was still headed out to sea really hard. And I hauled back on the line and the sea perch comes out of the water as big as my Bible just, he lands in the rock behind me and I stabbed him to death and everything. And yeah, that perch gave me a quart of filet meat in my pot. I had a two quart pot. Half of it was just fish meat that night. Oh

Josh Summers:
My goodness.

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah. I could barely finish. It

Josh Summers:
Tasted so good too. I’m sure.

Dave McIntyre:
Oh my God, I could barely finish it. I had a couple meals out there that were so big I could just barely get it all down. And that was one of ’em. And that was day 64. That was the day that Larry actually left. Yeah, I didn’t know. I thought at that point somebody was sleeping on a bearskin rug with trained sea otters bringing them crabs. Every someone out there is doing fantastic.

Josh Summers:
Yes.

Dave McIntyre:
Yeah. But it was me. I was doing really good at that point. It’s a hand to mouse subsistence level. I did not, you see other guys on loan of one who have stockpiles of frozen fish and half a moose and all this stuff. I was hand them out there. I never had food to prepare and store in any way. I ate what I caught. I caught everything I could and I ate everything I had every day

Josh Summers:
Immediately.

Dave McIntyre:
It is hard to analyze why you won.
It’s easier to analyze failure than it is to analyze success. But I would say that my faith absolutely held me together out there. My faith that God would provide kept me motivated to go out and look, God doesn’t want me to starve to death, but I have to catch the fish so God will provide for me. Therefore, I am going to get up out of the sleeping bag. I am going to search my environment. I am going to engage with the wildlife. I’m going to do what I need to do for God to bless me in it. And that definitely was a motivator. Having him to talk to constantly was huge for my strength. Having scripture come up, bubbling up like a well whenever I needed it, that was huge source of comfort. That faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
I mean that word of God bubbles up. It strengthens your faith when you remember what he said, okay, I can rest in this. I can depend upon this. So those things were definitely, but that said, that wasn’t something I took with me out to the bush. That’s something I learned through my previous years. I didn’t suddenly jumpstart that engine out there that had been got to bring me through the ringer in a lot of different ways to teach me those lessons, but they hold it now to think that he brought me through all those different things to put me out there in front of so many people, that is very humbling to think that he planned that all and

Josh Summers:
That he was able to use you in that way to kind of share that kind of message. Yeah.

Dave McIntyre:
Well, we say things like that, that he was able to use me and now that’s what I needed for me. You know what I mean?
That’s what he had to do for me, to get me to engage with him, to get me to bend the knee, to get me to repent, to get me to forgive. He had to bring me through those things to teach me those lessons. And it is amazing that he put me in a place where I was all filmed and now it’s out there for millions of people. That’s very humbling that he would do that. And people think, oh, the money. That was really a blessing and it wasn’t life changing. It definitely got me out of debt free and all that. One thing recently, which my daughter brought to my attention is that my exit video, the one that’s out on YouTube is a perfect metaphor for the rapture. If you believe in a preacher rapture, here’s this guy. You’re going through everything I say in there. If you think, okay, this is a metaphor for the rapture, okay, go back and watch that video. Everything I say in there, everything that happens
Because here, I want to be found when the Lord comes back, I want to be found head down in the work, working for him, doing what I’m called to do, and he knows he’s coming back tomorrow. Okay, fine. But what does he call me to do next week? That’s what I’m focused on. I’m doing this thing this next week. I’m going to a conference in Dallas. Okay, he can come back right now, but if he doesn’t, I’m going to a conference in Dallas and I mean, we’re building a high school, we’re doing all these different things. It’s like I’m standing there and my plan for the day was to go out on my north shore, northwest coast and take my gill net and lay it down over a big crack out there, so when it would flood, anything going in and out of that crack is going to get in that net cracks and all kinds of stuff. And they’re there doing that exit. They’re doing that interview with me, talking to me about TV stuff, and my daughter walks up and I turn around and there’s my daughter standing there and I’m done. This is all over. All this is done. Everything that I’ve been doing, all my plans there, all my hard work, I’m out of here and I get to go in the helicopter now I sort out of there, wings of eagles, you know what I mean?
All the metaphors are there.

Josh Summers:
They

Dave McIntyre:
Just came and just harso just pulled me out of my cove. And now I go, I’m in a cabin and I got you turn a knob and flames up appear. You lift a lever and waterfalls. You know what I mean? It’s just like you want it to be warmer. You just turned up the thermostat. I actually turned the heat off in there. It was, I couldn’t stand inside. Oh my goodness. It was horrible.

Josh Summers:
Really? That’s crazy.

Dave McIntyre:
Just being inside, I felt like someone was forcing their hands over my eyes and ears.

Josh Summers:
Wow.

Dave McIntyre:
Because you develop this a hundred yard circle of attention around you because you’re a pre species out there. You’re not the top predator

Josh Summers:
And

Dave McIntyre:
You’re aware of everything going on around you for about a hundred yards radius. I mean, everything that’s happening and you get inside and all of a sudden there’s this thing buzzing. The heaters moving it. It

Josh Summers:
Was terrible. That’s so interesting. That is

Dave McIntyre:
Terrible. Came inside. I would put all my dirty bush clothes and go sit outside in the frost on the deck of the cabin just because I couldn’t be inside. And then when I come home to my apartment, it’s still going on. A week later, I still couldn’t stand being inside, so my apartment was on the first floor and there was a little pond out front, out behind the apartment, and so I’d sitting on my patio and it’s like 11 30, 12 o’clock at night, and I just can’t be inside, and this duck comes steaming up. It’s like December 4th or fifth and this duck comes paddling up to the side of the lake and he’s going to hop out of the water right in front of him. He’s maybe 10 feet away. I raider locked on that duck. I was going to kill that duck. I was just everything in me. It’s like he’s here, he’s in range. I can get him. He’s dude, dude, dude, slow. We roll, calm down, man. You got a whole bag of tilapia in the freezer. You’ve got food, you’ve got peanut butter and jelly. Man, don’t

Josh Summers:
Kill the

Dave McIntyre:
Duck.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, that’s so funny.

Dave McIntyre:
It feels good to be that guy. It feels good to be that instinctual, that primal.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, I bet

Dave McIntyre:
You don’t get an opportunity to do that in life, and that doesn’t happen if you just go out for a hike or something. You don’t convert into that primal Homo Sapiens 1.0

Josh Summers:
Program. Well, Dave, you bring up a good point and I want to ask one more question. Most of us are not going to be put in the position that you got to be put in good and bad ways. Most people, even when I tell my story, are never going to find themselves in a Chinese prison and in this weird situation. Is there anything that you particularly learned, any lessons that you learned either teaching survival or going through this that you think are more easily applied to our Christian life or the way that we go through day-to-day life, things that we forget or things that are important to prepare for

Dave McIntyre:
Sure. I would say the number one thing I have learned before going to the bush and then applied it absolutely on Vancouver Island is that God doesn’t actually give us strength. He is our strength.
You’re not going to get everything you need to go through chemo. When you pray that first time and say, Lord, I need you to go through this. It’s not like he writes you a giant check at that point said, okay, here’s all the strength you’re going to need. Here’s all the resources you’re going to need. Here’s all the comfort, all the love, all the encouragement you’re going to need. Now parcel it out as best you can during your ordeal. Okay? He is those things for us as we abide in him, as I abide in him moment by moment, he gives me, he is for me everything that I need to be moment by moment.

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