Transcription
Hello everybody. Today, we are going to be talking about the man who stepped out of society and into the wilderness. And that man is Chris McCandless.
Chris McCandless is a character that I've known about for a while now, and I've kept waiting for an excuse to talk about him. Like, maybe he'd show up in an iceberg or a missing person's thing or something like that. But I got tired of waiting and decided I'll just do a standalone video. Especially considering that after I just got done with all the serial killer stuff and the three-hour tree video, and before I get into finishing the conspiracy iceberg, this will be the closest thing I take to a vacation.
As a quick summary, in case you're still wondering if you're interested in this topic or not. Chris McCandless gave up his earthly possessions and simply began to brave the wilderness on his own. Eventually, he found his way into the Alaskan wilderness and chronicled the end of his life through a journal and several pictures. He has become the focus of many documentaries, TV specials, and even a book that was later adapted into a movie by Sean Penn called *Into the Wild*. And to be honest, this is a story that's always resonated with me, and I want to talk about it. So, we're going to do just that. We are going to go ahead and get into it. But as always, thank you for watching.
Chris McCandless was born on February the 12th of 1968 in El Segundo, California, to his parents Walt and Billie McCandless. He was the oldest of two siblings, only having one sister, Karine, who was born shortly thereafter, along with six half-siblings from his father's previous marriage. When Chris was eight years old, his family moved from California to Virginia, and his father began working at NASA.
From the outside looking in, it seemed like the McCandlesses were a perfect family. They had two kids, they went to church on Sundays, the dad had a successful job, the whole family was very wealthy, and it fit the description of a nuclear family. However, this has been contested in recent years, due in large part to Chris's younger sister, Karine.
I said in the beginning that the story of Chris was eventually adapted into the book *Into the Wild*. While his sister also put out a book titled *The Wild Truth*. In the book *The Wild Truth*, Corrine said that behind closed doors, her father was very abusive. More specifically, that he was an alcoholic and would often physically hurt the children whenever he became drunk. During these violent outbursts, Karine said that Chris would always protect her from her father, and it was most likely one of the reasons that Chris eventually did what he did.
Now, for the sake of fairness, I want to say that both Walt and Billie McCandless have said that this is entirely made up by Karine and is incredibly exaggerated as a means of garnering attention. However, those half-siblings that I mentioned earlier have come to Karine's side and said that her father was, in fact, abusive. And I'm not going to cast stones one way or the other. You all can come to that conclusion on your own. I'm just highlighting it to give a possible motive for why Chris went on this journey.
Another detail is that from a young age, Chris was particularly obsessed with Jack London's *Call of the Wild*, and the idea of a man venturing out into the wilderness in order to take back the roots of living was something that personally resonated with him.
In 1986, Chris graduated from Woodson High in Fairfax, Virginia. And something else I want to bring up is that in a lot of the biographies or journal entries you see about Chris, a lot of people kind of poke at him for being a social outcast or always being different than everyone. And why people who knew him in life said that he was certainly a different guy who marched to the beat of his own drum, he was by no means an outcast. His classmates would go on to say later that everyone loved Chris, and that he was a great friend to everybody and always had an upbeat personality. He was also the captain of the cross country team, and during several of the meets or practices they would do, Chris would tell his teammates that they should feel like they were running against the world or running from all of the darkness in the world. So, while he was certainly different, he was by no means a social reject.
In the summer of 1986, shortly after graduating high school, Chris went back to California to meet several members of his family. While there, he learned that his father was previously bigamous with his mother. In other words, he found out that his father was married to his first wife at the same time that he was married to Chris's mother. According to Karine, this had a profound effect on him and served to further disillusion him with the idea of family and society at large.
I watched a documentary that talked to a lot of the family members about Chris, and in it, I kind of got the vibe that Chris felt there was a hypocrisy in his family. Particularly in a lot of the writers that he would write to his sister. Chris would talk about how his dad would be so happy and loving one day, and then violent and angry the next. And how sometimes his mom would be so caring and concerned about his life, and then other times she would be cold and quiet. This is something in his own writings later. Chris would repeatedly shun the idea of being two different people at the same time.
Something else that I gathered from the documentary, as well as several of Chris's letters, is that he was particularly put off by the idea of material possessions. More specifically, it seems that his parents, who were quite wealthy, would try to buy his trust or buy his happiness with things, and Chris didn't much care for that. In high school, Chris became a door-to-door salesman and eventually saved enough money to buy a cheap car. Whenever Chris was in college, his parents bought him a much nicer car, but he refused it because he felt like, for one, he didn't earn it, and two, he didn't want to take another gift from them. Karine even said at one point, Chris came to her and said, "I know you want to go to college, but whatever you do, do not take more money from Mom and Dad."
And this may just be kind of a biased interpretation, so feel free to ignore this part. But in the documentary, the documentary was called *Return to the Wild*, by the way. In *Return to the Wild*, I'm not going to say if definitively I think the father was abusive or not or whatever. That's up to the family. They're the only ones who will ever know for sure. Blah blah. However, I feel like watching it, there was a material characteristic to the parents that seemed to be the kind of thing Chris was running from. In other words, in a lot of Chris's letters and writings, he talked about how possessions slow people down, and everyone's so concerned about money, this money, that, and blah blah blah. And in the documentary, his parents just kept bringing up stuff like, whenever asked about them, they'd be like, "Oh yeah, well, Chris loved that car," or "We tried to get him this new one, but he didn't take it. I guess he just loved his old car so much." Or they talk about how great of an entrepreneur he was and how well he could make money. And kind of had this superficial idea that kept cropping up of how he conformed to their idea of what success was. And it was so interesting watching *Return to the Wild* because it was like I was seeing the picture of what Chris was trying to explain in his writings.
In 1990, Chris graduated from Emory University with a double major in history and anthropology. And immediately after graduating, Chris donated the entirety of his remaining college fund, which was about $24,000, to the Oxfam charity. And then shortly after this, in the summer of 1990, Chris got into his old Datsun car and just began driving west with no car insurance and an expired license plate. His parents kept trying to get him to make an itinerary, explaining where he's going, how long he'll be there, what his plan is. And every time, he just simply said that he's going out west, and that's all there was to it.
The car turned out to be a lot of trouble, as it kept breaking down along his journey. This culminated when he got to a location near the Arizona-Nevada border, and a flash flood came and completely destroyed the car. Not deterred, Chris simply got out, packed a backpack full of whatever he could carry on him, and just started walking from there.
Chris began his sort of vagabond lifestyle, as he simply began hitchhiking and walking to wherever he wished to go. Eventually, he found his way to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and began staying in and out of hermit camps. From 1990 to 1991, there were several abandoned houses within the Sierra Nevada area, and it wasn't uncommon for the people who lived the sort of free living apart from society lifestyle to go stay in those abandoned houses at night or find whatever supplies were available there. There was one point during this time that it was later shown Chris broke into an owned house and took some of the food from within the house. However, in other reports that I saw, this house was very dilapidated, so it's quite possible he thought this was just another abandoned structure to walk into and accidentally broke into someone's property.
During this time, several people began to pick up Chris, who was going by the alias of Alexander Supertramp. The last name Supertramp is hilarious because if you're going to be a homeless hitchhiker, you might as well have fun with it. There was one story whenever a woman was driving down the road and he was just set out on a fold-up chair reading a book. So she stops and rolls down her window and says, "Are you a hitchhiker?" And he says, "Yeah, I am." And she says, "Well, you're the worst hitchhiker I've ever seen because you're not even trying. No one's going to give you a ride like that." And he says, "Are you going to give me a ride?" And she says, "Well, I guess so." And he says, "See? Now I've got a ride." Everyone who ran into him attests that this carefree lifestyle and attitude followed him wherever he went.
Eventually, in 1991, he completely ran out of money, so he decided to get a job at a grain elevator in South Dakota. Everyone who worked with him said he was a great guy, and he even struck up a personal friendship with his boss who hired him. However, after a few months of working there, Chris decided he was tired of it. And when leaving, he left a message for his boss that said, "Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal. I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come."
Shortly after this, he made his way to the Colorado River, where at some point he bought a kayak and a handgun. And from there, he just started kayaking the Colorado River, passing several people on guided tours. A lot of these people on guided tours began reporting him to the park services and the police because you're supposed to have a permit to go down the river, and he also wasn't wearing any safety gear. So there were several police officers and park rangers who were searching for him for some time because he was wanted for not having a permit. And there were even several cases where they chased him down the river, but every time he managed to get away.
It seems that during this time, he rationed out his money and would visit things like small general stores for food. There's not any record that he was hunting at this point, and it seems that the handgun that he didn't have a lot of ammo for was simply so he didn't get robbed or attacked by some animal.
One day, while kayaking, he decided to go underneath a dam spillway and ended up crossing the American-Mexican border. After realizing what he had done, and also realizing that there were waterfalls ahead that he couldn't kayak across, he decided to get out and carry his kayak back to the United States. However, when crossing a checkpoint at the border, they found his handgun on him, and they didn't like that one bit. So, for the first and only time, Chris was arrested. But this was only for a few days, and eventually, they confiscated his handgun and just let him go with his kayak, I guess, back into the desert.
After this, he decided to begin hitchhiking north, and in April of 1992, found himself all the way north in Fairbanks, Alaska. A man who had picked him up before he crossed the border into Canada asked him if there was any way that he could buy Chris a ticket so that he can take a plane to Alaska or do anything besides hitchhike all the way. To which Chris said that was very kind of him, but Chris felt like it was his job and his duty to get there on foot. The people in Fairbanks who met him said that while a nice guy, he was very, very weird, and also very smelly. Which, having never met Chris in my entire life, I can also confirm that he was definitely weird and smelly.
Eventually, on April the 28th of 1992, Chris met a man named Jim Gallien and asked Jim to drive him to the Stampede Trailhead, which is a very long hiking trail that wraps around through the Alaskan wilderness. During the drive, Jim noticed that Chris's bag, who, remember, Chris was going by the name Alex at the time, that Alex's bag was very lightly packed, and he didn't think that this guy had the means of surviving in the wild. Specifically, Jim could tell that he had very little cold weather gear, very few rations, and almost no real experience. Jim kept pleading with Alex to change his mind, and even offered at one point to drive to the next town over so that Jim could buy him real survivalist gear before he drops him off at the trail. Chris, Alex, kept saying no, and emphasizing that this was just something that he's got to do. However, Jim eventually convinced him to take a pair of wet boots, as well as two sandwiches and a bag of chips. And that was the last time that Chris McCandless was ever seen alive.
The rest of the story, as I'm going to tell it, comes from the various journal entries and notes that Chris took over his 113 days in the Alaskan wilderness. This comes from a specific day chart in which he took notes of what was happening to him every day, as well as little notes and letters that he would write to himself and others in the margins of all of the books that he brought. The supplies that Chris brought with him, other than personal effects and the clothes that he was wearing, were a 10-pound bag of rice, several books, one of which about plants that can be eaten in the wild, and a Remington 22 long rifle rifle with 400 rounds of hollow point ammo. So, he was underclothed. 10 pounds of rice, while that may seem like a lot, isn't enough nutrition to sustain you for any real amount of time. And while you may have heard the line about 400 rounds of ammo and thought, "This guy was armed to the teeth," this is 400 rounds of 22 ammo. So, yeah, not that much. Furthermore, this is the size of a 22 bullet, so he wasn't shooting anything other than squirrel with this. Which, that was exactly his plan. He planned to survive off of the rice and small game that he could hunt in the area for an indefinite amount of time.
On the fourth day of his journey, Chris came across something that he called the Magic Bus. In the '40s, whenever the original roadways and trails were being cut out along Alaska, there were several sort of way camps that were set up for the workers. Since it's not really a good idea to try to build anything that far out in the wilderness, they would take mobile units such as a bus and then park them for a while and just leave them for the workers to stay inside of. However, this specific bus broke an axle while it was out there. So, since it was too much effort to fix it and bring it back, they just decided to leave it in the middle of the wilderness. And this very bus is the one that Chris had come across and deemed the Magic Bus.
From his writings, it seems that Chris's original plan was to just walk through the woods until he hit the Bering Sea. However, it also seems that the woods were much more thick and much more dangerous than he originally assumed. So, he decided to just set up his base camp in the Magic Bus. The bus itself, while a mild shelter, had a cot and wood fire stove still inside of it. And for the rest of his journey, Chris just began taking pictures and writing several notes and letters while within the bus itself. His diet consisted mostly of berries that he would find, as well as small game that he would hunt, like squirrels, geese, and porcupine. And during the first couple weeks of this journey, it seemed that Chris was enjoying himself and everything was going well.
The first big change came on day 43, when somehow he managed to kill a moose. As mentioned before, this isn't doing a whole lot of damage to something the size of a moose. So, I don't know if he like, like fought it with his hands, or if he was like hiding in a tree and jumped down on it. I don't know. I just know I'm impressed. I will also mention that several Alaskan troopers and people who have researched this story said that it was, in fact, not a moose, it was actually a caribou, and he was just dumb. Which, I don't care. I'm gonna give the man credit. If I was out in the middle of the woods for 43 days and I killed something the size of a caribou, I'd say it was a moose too. However, it seems from his journal entries that he didn't know how to properly gut or store the meat from the animal, and most of it ended up going to waste.
It seemed at some point, as with most of his journeys, he decided to return back to civilization for a little bit so that he could regroup and maybe get some good food. However, something that he didn't take into account, most likely because he didn't understand the region that he was in, is that the nearby Teklanika River rises regularly during that time of the year. Whenever Chris originally crossed the river, it was shallow enough for him to wade across. However, in this time of the year, during the summer, the snow begins to melt, and the river gets too deep to just walk across, as it would carry you away. Chris tried this at some point, as mentioned in his journal, to which he fell in and nearly froze to death.
To add a particularly tragic note to this story, especially if you know where it goes from here, about half a mile from where he tried to cross, there is a hand-operated cable car made specifically so that if someone gets stuck out in the woods, they can make their way across the river. However, again, Chris didn't have a map or knowledge of the area and was none the wiser to the fact that salvation was only a couple thousand feet away.
The first sign that something was really wrong came on the 69th day of his journal, in which Chris said, "River looked impossible. Lonely. Scared." Things got even more dire when on the 94th day of his entry, Chris said, "Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy." Keep the potato seed in mind. We'll talk about it more with a sort of theory section at the end, because if I'm doing a video, you know there's going to be a theory in there somewhere. But it seems that between not being able to cross the river and now getting sick, things quickly got worse. This was exemplified when on day 100, the entry says, "Made it but in weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat. Too weak to walk out. Have literally became trapped in the wild."
During this time, he continued to take pictures of the scenery and himself, while also recording notes within his books. One of the notes that was found that was believed to be near the end of Chris's life said, "Happiness only real when shared." Now, some people have interpreted that to be a tragedy, that at the end of his life, Chris realized he needed people around him. While others have interpreted it as he always shared his happiness or his energy with those he came into contact with, and him sharing his happiness was him doing exactly what he was doing. Either way, his situation became dire enough that he left a message on the door of the bus for any hunters or people who may pass by. The message read: "Attention possible visitors. SOS. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out. I'm all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you. Chris McCandles. August." I should also mention that this is the first time in any of his travels that Chris used his real name.
The final entry in his logbook was on day 107, which simply read, "Beautiful blueberries." Days 108 to 112 all had dashes through them, which would normally indicate that nothing occurred during that day, until finally, day 113 was left completely blank. Shortly before day 113, Chris took a final picture. It was of himself holding a note that was later discovered on the bus along with his remains. The note he was holding read, "I have had a happy life and thank the lord. Goodbye and may God bless all."
On September 6th of 1992, a group of hunters were walking through the Alaskan wilderness when they came across the Magic Bus. After walking inside, they immediately smelled something that they assumed to be a rotting animal carcass. However, after looking around, they found curled up in a sleeping bag at the back of the bus was the body of Chris McCandles. The coroner placed his time of death as being about two weeks before the hunters discovered him. So, if Chris could have added another 14 days to that 113 days, he might have made it. Meaning Chris died around August the 23rd of 1992, at 24 years old. His body, when it was found, weighed only 67 pounds.
This leads into the theories about particularly why he died. The coroner's report said that it was of starvation, which would make sense. However, he would have starved to death in about two weeks. While certainly not impossible, it is unlikely for someone in Chris's physical condition who also had access to fresh water. The main clue we have is the entry in his journal that said he got sick from potato seeds. Now, while it always could have been something with those particular potato seeds, it's also possible that he may have eaten wild sweet pea seeds, which looks similar to wild potato seeds, but if ingested in large amounts, become poisonous.
The other primary theory people have with it is something known as rabbit starvation. So, for those that don't know, if you eat an exclusively lean meat diet, you can still starve to death. The reason being, if you consume exclusively protein that has no fats on it or anything that can also supplement different nutritional requirements of your body, you can starve to death on a full stomach. The reason being, you have all the protein to process that your body needs. If you exclusively consume lean animals like rabbits or squirrels or other things that don't have a lot of fat on them, but your body isn't getting the required acids and vitamins that it needs in order to process that protein. So, even though you have plenty of it, there, your body can't do anything with it, and like I said, you die on a full stomach.
I believe that it was most likely a combination of the two, and that's the reason his body became so emaciated before his death. Because if he was to be on an exclusively lean meat diet, then his body was running out of means of producing fuel for his system. And then you combine that with possibly eating bad potato seeds or sweet pea seeds and getting poisoned, and your body isn't strong enough to fight back against it. And at the same time, a lot of people say he was just dumb and may have been starving for weeks beforehand and just not mentioned it in his journal. Um, I don't think he was like a dumb survivor by any means. Sure, he was dumb for not understanding the territory he walked into, but 113 days in the Alaskan wilderness is still pretty impressive. Buster, otherwise he was eating something to keep him alive up to the 113 days. So, I wouldn't exactly write him off as just an idiot. I mean, he was definitely an idiot in some regards, but not entirely.
However, this certainly isn't the end of Chris's influence. As soon as it came out that a man had given up everything he had in order to walk into the woods and die in a magic school bus, some people became very interested. So interested, in fact, it became common practice along the Stampede Trail for groups of people to make the hike out to the Magic Bus. So many people did this, in fact, that they began calling the journey the McCandless Pilgrimage. However, the Alaskan State Police were not happy with this pilgrimage at all, as they had to rescue a total of 15 people who got stuck while trying to make their way out to the bus, and two people drowned in the same river Chris had trouble crossing because, again, they were trying to make their way out to the bus. Eventually, the Alaskan National Guard flew in a Chinook helicopter to pick up the bus and bring it out of the woods. And on September 24th of 2020, Alaska University in Fairbanks announced that they would host a permanent display for the Magic Bus.
However, before that bus was moved, Chris's father placed a plaque on the back of it, which read as follows: "Christopher Johnson McCandles, also known as Alex. February of 1968 to August of 1992. Chris, our beloved son and brother, died here during his adventurous travels in search of how he could best realize God's great gift of life. With this final message, I have had a happy life and thank the lord. Goodbye and may God bless all. We commend his soul to the world. The McCandless Family. July of 1993."
During a goodbye letter he wrote to a high school friend, Chris said the quote, "I now walk into the wild." And this phrase, *Into the Wild*, became the title of the book that was written about him, as well as the eventual movie adaptation by Sean Penn. And as far as things directly related to Chris, that's the story.
But one of the more interesting things to me when reading the story is the amount of people who absolutely hate Chris. For example, this is a question to an Alaskan park ranger who was asked for his feelings regarding Chris, to which the park ranger said, "When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had a good map, he could have walked out of his predicament. Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide."
And that's not the only one. The author Craig Medred of Anchorage Daily News straight up called McCandless a thief and a bum. There's a lot of people who are furious by his stupidity and hate the idea of somebody accomplishing what he did and feel like that he was a failure for not braving the wilderness and becoming this sort of survivor man. But I don't really think that was ever Chris's intent. Do you remember that final note that he wrote before he died? The one that said he was thankful to God for the life he lived? Well, he wrote that on the back of a torn-out page from one of the books he was reading. And on the other side of that page was an excerpt from a poem called "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours" by Robin Jeffers. And the excerpt of that poem reads: "Death is a fierce meadowlark, but to die having made something more equal to the centuries than muscle and bone is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone. The people admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness. The mountains are not softened nor troubled, and a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper."
I love that poem, particularly the ending, because that idea that there are a few dead men who are completely unbothered by what the world may think of them are the exact same as some mountains. The mountains don't care if people love or despise them because they simply stand in solitude. And a few men's thoughts are the same way. What's even more insightful about that poem is that that's just the final stanza. If you look up the entire thing, it's actually about how wise men despise stupid people, and they despise stupid people because whenever a stupid person comes to die, that is their thoughts described in the final stanza. See, it's saying that wise men, whenever they come to die, they have all these thoughts of, "What I could have done more, and I didn't get to live life entirely," and blah blah blah. Whereas the stupid people, they're the ones that are these mountains. They're the ones whose thoughts are not moved by those around them. And whenever I hear these stories of park rangers and survivalists and news reporters talking about how stupid and dumb and awful Chris was, I can't help but feel in the same way as he wrote on the back of this poem, that he is one of those dead men whose thoughts are not bothered by what other people think of him.
And I will concede this, from a logical perspective, Chris was an idiot. It was a very dumb idea to walk into the Alaskan wilderness with no knowledge of the area, of how to get out of it, when the river's going to rise, and undersupplied. But again, I don't think Chris's purpose was to be a survivor man. I think his purpose was to experience life in the most absolute sense up until life overcame him. Chris really seemed to me like a man passed his time. If you were to take Chris McCandless and you were to drop him in the days of the frontier, or the days of the great explorers, of people who sailed across oceans, and people who led expeditions into the middle of the jungle, you would find a mini Chris McCandless. But because Chris was born in the modern age, the world wasn't built for him. It wasn't built for the type of people who do away with all progress that society has made in the sake of technology and comfort. And it's not ready for people who just want to experience life in the most absolute qualities.
I've heard about this story for a long time, right? But whenever I was going through and researching and writing down all the details for this video, it kept ringing in my head over and over how similar this is to *Walden*. *Walden*, if you don't know, is a poem by Henry David Thoreau, in which Thoreau talks about why he went and lived in the middle of the woods because to him, that was the only true way to live. And sure enough, while I was reading McCandless's journal on day 60, it says that he finished *Walden*. The excerpt from *Walden* that has always stuck out to me is this: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discovered that I had not lived."
Two people like Thoreau and two people like McCandless, living required some sense of struggle or some sense of passion to it. Similar to whenever Chris left the grain elevator he was working at, and similar to whenever he left college with a double major because he didn't want a lifestyle that supported his existence. He wanted to absolutely define and control the reason for his existence. And again, yeah, logically he's dumb. You can think I'm dumb for thinking all of this. It's perfectly fine, and I'm sure that to some degree, Chris and I are both stupid.
The author who wrote the original book about Chris described his story as a sort of Rorschach test. That you can lay out all the details and, like a Rorschach blotch, it's entirely up to the reader to figure out if they think Chris was some kind of folklore hero or just a really dumb idiot who's gotten overhyped. But similar to what Thoreau said in *Walden*, I feel like Chris lived more in his 24 years of life than most people ever will. That's really one of the reasons that I've always loved this story so much. Because of every sense of logic and reason that we understand it, absolutely makes no sense. This guy just walked into the woods and he died inside a bus. But who knows? You can call me crazy, but I've always felt like the story of the man who walked out of our world and into one of his own making was a story worth telling.
But of course, you could think that all of that is dumb. You could think that I'm dumb. You could think that Chris is dumb. We're probably both dumb. But regardless, you're here right now, and I just want to say thank you for watching. Thank you all so much for sticking around this far into the video. Um, that's so cool to me that I can just talk about whatever I want to talk about. That it can go from a three-hour video explaining trees and James Dean as president to whatever weird analysis thing this is. Um, and that's so cool to me. I love the support that you all give me. It's, it's really a blessing. And thank you all so much for that. Like I've said, I've been waiting kind of passively for Chris to come along in something. I figured he'd show up in a missing person's thing or something about the woods or whatever, but he never did. And I decided, you know what? Before this year's over, I want to talk about him. So I'm going to talk about him because, like I said, he's, it's a story that's always kind of intrigued me, and I felt like it was worth telling. So if you're stuck around this long, hopefully you enjoyed. Hopefully you also thought it was interesting or at least entertaining in some regard. And thank you for sticking around. That song, it means the most. Um, thank you all so much for just the support on the last video. It, like, whenever you're working on a project that long, like with the research and with editing and everything, like, you know, you spend a couple weeks on one video that comes out to be three hours long, and there's this worry in your head that, ah man, this is going to tank the channel. No one's going to hate this. They're going to think this was the worst thing ever. Blah blah blah. But every time, you guys prove me wrong. And thank you so much for that. I'm glad that you all liked it. It's currently the highest performing video in the history of my channel, and that is thanks to you all. It's really cool that I can do something like that, and you all are still there for it. And it really, it warms my heart. Thank you so much.
Uh, one announcement before we continue this little dude. Uh, when the dude, at the time this video is going up, there's gonna be like five or six days left to get him, and then he'll be on forever. So, link in the description if you're interested in that. Thank you all so much for the support on the channel as a whole. I think we're at 875,000 subscribers. It's wild. At the beginning of this year, I had, I think, a thousand. May have been more like 800. No, I think I broke a thousand end of last year. So it was around like 1500 or 2000 subs at the beginning of 2021, and now I'm at 875,000. It's, it's insane, and it's all thanks to you all. Thank you for the blessing that you have been to me. It really does mean more than I could ever say.
Uh, while I'm giving thanks, thank you so much to my top-tier patrons that you can see here. And thank you to all of my patrons. You guys are the reason this channel is allowed to continue and continue to thrive on. If it wasn't for the support in that regard, I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time to the channel as I do. And this is, this is here because of you guys, and it really does mean the most to me. So thank you so much for that. I hope that you enjoyed this. As far as future videos, like I said, this was a semi-vacation because I just finished the serial killer stuff, and then a three-hour breakdown of trees, and then I'm about to get into the conspiracy iceberg finale, and I want that to be special. Um, so this was like a pause, in a sense. Um, but yeah, look forward to that. I may or may not do a Christmas video. Kind of back and forth on it. I really don't think I can ever top the Christmas with the Cranks video, so there's no point in trying. Um, but in all seriousness, thank you for sticking around this long. I hope that you enjoyed, and I will see you in the next one. Bye.