Jay Carson Went From Terrified Student to Running the Country's Top Survival School

Jay Carson didn't go looking for a life change. He went looking for survival skills — and found both.A writer and television creator living in Los Angeles, Jay had the unsettling realization during the early days of COVID that he was completely unprepared for anything resembling a real emergency. When the power went out one night, his phone went dead with it, and he had no idea what to do. A friend who'd raved for years about the Boulder Outdoor Survival School gave him the push he needed. In 2021, Jay enrolled in a 14-day field course in the canyon country of southern Utah — no sleeping bag, no tent, no matches, no phone — and it changed the direction of his life. He's now the executive director of BOSS.In this conversation, Jay and Stephen talk about what the first night in the wilderness actually feels like when the instructors walk away and don't come back. They get into the BOSS philosophy of teaching through intentional discomfort — deliberately depriving students of what they need until the lesson lands hard enough to stick — and why that approach produces something that no classroom ever could. Jay talks about the concept of "compare down," which he calls the single most useful thing he took away from the course and practices daily. They discuss Colin Fletcher's "man crud," the Francis Bacon legacy of teaching Western culture to fear and subdue nature, and what it actually means — not metaphorically but practically — to feel at home outdoors.And then there's the part where life tested all of it for real. Jay lost his house in the Los Angeles fires on January 7, 2025. He talks about what he reached for then, and what held.The Boulder Outdoor Survival School can be found at boss-inc.com.