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Episode #170: Alexander Souri

Founder and Executive Director

Relief Riders International

Episode #170: Alexander Souri
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Guest Bio

Alexander Souri is the founder and executive director of Relief Riders International, an organization he launched in 2004 to combine adventure travel with meaningful humanitarian work. Through Relief Riders, Alexander designs and leads horseback-based missions that deliver medical care, educational programs, and community support to remote villages where access to services is limited. The organization brings together travelers, volunteers, and local partners to create journeys that provide both cultural immersion and tangible aid to underserved communities.

Before founding Relief Riders International, Alexander worked as a producer in theater, film, and large-scale special events. His career included involvement in major productions such as The Matrix, X-Men, End of Days, and Back to the Future: The Ride, along with directing commercial and industrial film projects internationally, including work in Beijing. His background in storytelling, logistics, and production now informs the way he organizes complex humanitarian expeditions in remote environments.

Born in New York City to a French mother and an Indian father, Alexander grew up with a deeply international perspective. He attended boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas in India and later studied at an international high school in Sophia Antipolis in southern France before graduating from Simon’s Rock of Bard College in Massachusetts. These cross-cultural experiences helped shape his worldview and inspired the mission behind Relief Riders International—creating opportunities for travelers to experience adventure while contributing to positive change in communities around the world.

Show Summary

In this episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast, host Jason Elkins speaks with Alexander Souri, the founder of Relief Riders International. Alexander shares the story of how his career shifted from film and theater production into humanitarian work after a personal turning point led him to seek a more meaningful path. What began as a search for purpose eventually grew into an organization that delivers aid to remote communities through horseback-based relief missions.

Alexander reflects on his internationally shaped upbringing, including formative years spent in Afghanistan, India, and France. These experiences helped shape his cultural identity and gave him a broader understanding of the world at an early age. The conversation explores how these influences, along with the challenges of navigating family expectations and career transitions, ultimately guided him toward creating a mission-driven organization.

Jason and Alexander also discuss the unique model behind Relief Riders International, where adventure travel meets humanitarian service. By traveling on horseback into isolated areas of India, Turkey & Ecuador, teams are able to bring medical camps, educational support, and other critical programs to villages that often lack access to basic services. Along the way, Alexander reflects on lessons about burnout, resilience, family relationships, and how travel and exploration often become powerful catalysts for personal growth and self-discovery.

Key Takeaways

  • ✓ Relief Riders International conducts humanitarian missions on horseback to reach remote communities.
  • ✓ Alexander’s shift from the entertainment industry to humanitarian work came after a deeply personal turning point.
  • ✓ Growing up across multiple cultures helped shape his worldview and approach to global service.
  • ✓ Early life experiences in places like Afghanistan and India influenced his understanding of identity and belonging.
  • ✓ Relief Riders combines adventure travel with direct social impact in underserved communities.
  • ✓ Over two decades, the organization has evolved while adapting to logistical and cultural challenges.
  • ✓ Horses play both a symbolic and practical role in delivering aid to hard-to-reach regions.
  • ✓ Creative careers can bring fulfillment but also burnout, sometimes leading to unexpected life changes.
  • ✓ Travel often creates opportunities for reflection, growth, and deeper self-awareness.
  • ✓ Family relationships and personal history can shape the path toward purpose and meaningful work.

What You’ll Find on Relief Riders International

  • ✓ Horseback-based humanitarian missions that combine travel with community service.
  • ✓ Medical camps providing essential healthcare in remote rural regions.
  • ✓ Educational support and outreach programs for underserved villages.
  • ✓ Opportunities for travelers to participate directly in relief and development efforts.
  • ✓ Cultural immersion experiences across the landscapes and communities of India, Turkey, & Ecuador.
  • ✓ Stories, updates, and insights from ongoing humanitarian missions.

Learn more about Relief Riders International and connect with Alexander at:

https://www.reliefridersinternational.com

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Podcast Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.

Jason Elkins (00:01.348)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. So happy to have each and every one of you back here today and also very excited to have my guest. We’ve got Alexander Souri He’s the founder and executive director of Relief Riders International. Alexander, welcome to the show. Happy to have you here.

Alexander Souri (00:20.933)
Thank you, Jason. Happy to be here.

Jason Elkins (00:25.062)
Our listeners don’t know this, we did attempt to do this a few months ago. Actually, I was in Thailand and you know, as I, as I travel and do this digital nomad thing, I don’t always end up in great places and we had some tech issues. So we came back to do it again. I, and everything looks and sounds great. So, so happy that you’re happy that you were able to come back and join me.

Alexander Souri (00:45.198)
For sure, yeah, no, very lucky to be here again and with you.

Jason Elkins (00:50.118)
One of the things we were just mentioning before I hit record I wasn’t sure if I was gonna mix it into the into the conversation so quickly but but you know if there’s no script here and we were discussing we’re sitting here recording this in early March all kinds of weird things are going on in the world So some of those things might come mixed into the conversation and I wanted to point out when we’re recording so if we do discuss those things and get into them people are able to kind of connect the dots, but before we

It’ll come out but at this moment, let’s do this. Let’s start with giving our listeners kind of the I guess I don’t know 30 60 second elevator pitch on what is relief Riders international It’s a pretty cool thing that we discussed a little bit last time and I’d love to hear it again

Alexander Souri (01:33.72)
Sure. I’ll be as succinct as I can. Well, Relief Riders is a humanitarian adventure travel-based company that leads humanitarian missions on horseback through developing countries.

And we have worked, I’m trying to keep it simple here. Yeah, so no, we’re a company that basically leads relief missions on horseback. We have worked in several countries. Our flagship country is India, which we started there in 2004. We then rode in Turkey and then also created a hybrid trip in South America and in Ecuador.

Jason Elkins (01:55.268)
I was very concise and pretty cool. Go ahead. Keep going.

Alexander Souri (02:21.026)
that rode in the Andes and then we flew in with the Red Cross into the Amazon to basically help out a tribe called the Sapara tribe and that was an amazing experience. So we’ve gone around the world a bit and usually mostly using horses, but in that one case I just really wanted to work in the Amazon so we created a hybrid trip. But most of our work for the last 20 years has really happened in India, Turkey and also Ecuador.

Jason Elkins (02:50.36)
It’s a very cool concept. I know that you guys have gotten some publicity about what you’re doing because it is very unique. And honestly, when I first connected with you, I had not heard of the concept. So I thought, wow, we need to come on and chat about that. I have a lot of questions about that. But I think what we’re going to do is we’ve planted the seed. Everybody’s listening is like, that’s pretty cool. We’re going to come back to that. before we do that, let’s figure this out.

How the heck did you get from where you were to where you are now? So how far back do we need to go to kind of get an understanding of that?

Alexander Souri (03:25.55)
Oh wow. So I started in 2003 on an R &D year where I, you know, based on a pretty, you know, intense life experience of loss, great loss, lost my father, four friends, did a big walkabout in my father’s country in India and saw that there was a lot of poverty and decided that I had come from a 15 year in film.

Jason Elkins (03:42.681)
Mm.

Alexander Souri (03:53.678)
a career in film and it was time for a change and you know I very clearly said I know purposefully that I have to kind of give back or just be of service and I needed to figure out a way to do that dynamically so that I could just repetitively be inspired to keep going and part of that was basically involving horses and so I got

really lucky, the universe really kind of listened and somehow I was granted permission to pull a beautiful concept down from the ether and I’ve been riding horses and helping people for god, 23 years now. And it’s been a great privilege for me to be able to do this type of work through thick and thin I might add. I mean it hasn’t been easy, there are 24 years, a happened in the world.

And but we have always kept our lights on no matter what and no matter how. So just very lucky. Sometimes you ride with, you know, full groups of 12 to 15 people and sometimes we ride with four and we still carry out our mission of eye surgeries, dentistry, pediatrics, gynecology. We build bathrooms in schools that have no bathrooms and missing something else.

one program out I’m sure somewhere but we have about five of them and we regularly perform them on all of our rides. They become signature programs for us.

Jason Elkins (05:30.97)
cool. I and I suspect because you just kind of casually mentioned you’d been working in the film industry for 15 years and I thought, know, I think let’s go back a little little bit further than than that moment when you mentioned your tragic loss of your dad and some others. I get that that can make a big change in somebody’s life. But I’m curious what was going on well before that. You know, you mentioned that. Yeah, you mentioned that your dad was Indian. You know what? Let’s go to the childhood.

Alexander Souri (05:38.072)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (05:45.45)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (05:52.526)
before then? Yeah. Well, I think

Sure. Right, so well, you it’s interesting, you know, given the current circumstances, I have a couple of friends that are stranded in Dubai. And again, I mean, my father and I and my mother were actually, my father had a factory in Afghanistan prior to, even though we’re Indian and we were living in New York. And the reason I bring this up, it’s all tied in.

is that we got caught in Afghanistan during the Russian coup and my mother and I were on the last flight out and my father had to stay in country for six weeks where we didn’t know where he was. So there’s a lot of energy today about trying to get people home from Dubai. the airports are closed. Hopefully they’ll be resuming flights soon. so this is kind of like, wow, you know, I’m kind of reliving a childhood. think I was nine years old at the time when that happened and it was.

But it’s happening, you know.

Jason Elkins (06:56.23)
Wow. So you mentioned that you were living in New York, but you were in Afghanistan because he had the business there. So, or did I get that wrong? Were you actually living in Afghanistan?

Alexander Souri (07:03.574)
Right. So think to support this whole conversation, let me just start off from the beginning. My father was Indian and my mother was French. I was born in New York City. I went to school in the French Lises in New York and around about the age of six, my father basically… So they had this really fashion kind of design…

Indian fashion store, clothing store, and Bloomingdale’s would come over and just buy the whole store out every third Thursday of the month and would leave the store empty. And so my father said, wait, I’m going to figure this out for all of you. Started, right. Started a factory in Kabul and send it, you know, direct send to Bloomingdale’s. And we ended up going there for four years, I think.

Jason Elkins (07:48.72)
Sounds like a good business.

Alexander Souri (08:00.782)
And we would spend only three months at a time, you know, to get everything established, come back to New York and then fly back two months later, do two months. It was on and off. It was a lot. But, and I was pulled out of school for it and I was tutored in Kabul. and so while I’m not Afghani by any means, we were there. And the long and the short of it, it just brought me back to what I mentioned to you about my, us being almost stuck there.

My mother and I were literally on the last two seats out for the flight to Delhi before the whole place just got taken over. yeah. So it’s kind of watching this on TV is like very…

Jason Elkins (08:39.206)
So, but you were, you were there. Yeah. And you were there off and on for, it sounds like four years, several months a year for you said four years before that all happened.

Alexander Souri (08:50.87)
Yeah, yeah, and after that my parents, yeah, tell me.

Jason Elkins (08:53.146)
What was?

Well, I was going to ask you, let’s talk a little bit about what that was like, because that’s kind of a, kind of a big deal for someone to go live in Afghanistan for a few months every year. I know you were young, but I’m curious what you recall.

Alexander Souri (09:05.366)
Yes, especially at…

you know, mean, Afghanistan was an incredible place. Really, was very beautiful. It was very colorful. There was so much culture there. I mean, I remember it quite well. We were originally at the Intercontinental Hotel because there was no other place for us to live in the beginning. And that was incredible. And then we moved to a house. And, you know, I mean, it was…

Like I said, it was kind of unscripted in the sense of I didn’t have a routine. I just got tutored and then I was just exposed to Afghani culture, which is really, you know, beautiful. Like it’s a great culture. Sadly, it’s been in crisis or turmoil for ever since that time, which is hard to believe. But the people with stand, you know, have withstood that. And then.

You know there’s a lot that i remember and i was also young so i was treated differently i mean people were very kind to me as a kid and but on the last few days of of when the coup was kind of really in the background happening i think some of the you know some of the tension was was was rising up and i mean i was privy to quite a traumatic experience you know as expats

the and you probably know this, kind of expats all gravitate to a certain area in a developing country because there’s you can get proper food or drinkable water. And there was a restaurant that we used to everybody used to go to and all the waiters were fun and they pinched my cheeks, blah, blah, blah and all that. But when I was going also in those type of cultures as kids, you can go out in the streets in India like kids roam around like not like in the West.

Alexander Souri (11:03.586)
It’s very common for a group of kids to play outside and be on the streets and I was one of them. And sure enough, know, one day, two of the waiters came crashing through the window and they were fighting and it was the start of all of it.

Jason Elkins (11:04.742)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (11:22.774)
You know, and I was just like, saw that and I ran home so confused. I don’t think I could run home quick enough. And I think two days later or a day later, we moved to the hotel and then off we went. And then my father took six weeks to get out. That’s really what I remember of all that. So.

Jason Elkins (11:39.59)
Wow. It’s, it’s probably not the most interesting thing you said, but it’s one thing I do want to ask you about is you mentioned kind of expats. mentioned being a kid. You mentioned being out playing with the other kids where they always other expect. Here’s where I’m going to go with this. And I don’t know if that’s right, but you don’t look like the blight, the blonde hair, blue eyed kid that came from the U S you look like you probably kind of could fit in as a child. Did you feel that? Do you remember that?

Alexander Souri (12:05.452)
Yes, mean, yeah, the only part that I mean, you know, I was a New York City kid, you know, skateboard arcades, you know, so so on a physical appearance. Yes. I mean, like, you know, and but I wasn’t dressed with traditional like Afghan wear. So I was kind of, you know, dressed with more modern, not modern clothing, but Western clothing, I should say. And so.

you know, on a certain level, yes. And then I had my mother who was French and white. So we’re together. So it was kind of like unusual. Yeah, it was unusual to for any anybody from the outside looking in, you know, or just observing. So yeah, it

Jason Elkins (12:40.582)
I was guessing that.

Jason Elkins (12:54.49)
I did you did you happen to read the book I think was just called kite runner kite runners. And I was just wondering if that.

Alexander Souri (13:01.142)
Yes. There’s a scene in that movie. Yeah. Yeah. So. Right. So, you know, I was talking about this whole thing throughout my life and, we were in Delhi waiting for my father for six weeks. then at one point, the U.S. embassy said they had found him and that, know, there’s a scene in the movie. I don’t want to rob the book. The book is incredible, too. But in the movie, there’s a scene where they get trucked out.

Jason Elkins (13:08.241)
there was a movie too, right? Yeah, I forgot that. I’d read the book. So.

Alexander Souri (13:30.794)
It’s the father and the son. And my father, we had no idea if he was even alive for six weeks. And when he came back and he told us like the journey he had made through Pakistan, they had literally hid him in a compartment under one of those trucks. They were smuggling people out because they knew they could get money, you know, like to do that. And so he had traveled like through the mountain ranges, like in a wooden compartment that they were hiding him.

underneath a truck. yeah, that movie really hit home and, you know, being having had that experience as a kid and then you come back and you you have these cultures and just the various cultures that I go through. was in France and I tell my friends who are my age, you know, this is what happened to us and my father, you know, and they were like looking at me like, like, wow, we don’t believe it. Like, that’s crazy. But

But when I saw that movie, was like, that’s it. That’s what happened. It was kind of like it was a visual reality now. So yeah, very, very close. it triggered, know, it triggered is the right word. It really triggered some stuff in me because it was because I knew that culture growing up. I wasn’t fully immersed in it because I didn’t live there full time, but we were there regularly. So, that had a profound impact.

Jason Elkins (14:34.768)
Wow, my gosh.

Jason Elkins (14:54.384)
Just curious, like, this probably sounds really naive, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I read the book. I probably saw the movie, but help me understand why it was so hard for your dad to get out. Why did, why were there people that didn’t want him to get out was just helped me understand the politics.

Alexander Souri (15:13.122)
don’t think it was, yeah. I don’t think it was a question of, I mean, I’m sure there were people that didn’t want him to get out in a sense that there was an opposing force trying to take over. I think what had happened was, and I’ll just give you this in a brief preface, because it’s a very interesting story, we had left and he had stayed at the Intercontinental. That was the only safe place for journalists or any type of expats to stay. But at some point, the communist-backed

coup, the communist-backed Russian coup, was basically shelling every place and they started to shell the hotel. And my father was, you know, just staying in the hotel wondering how to kind of figure all of this out. He was in the bathroom and one of the shells hit the swimming pool and he was, think, on the third floor or the fourth floor and the

It was a direct hit to the swimming pool and lurched all of the or launched all of the water up to the to the floors of the hotel. And he was knee deep in the bathroom in a second. And he just he was just like, oh, my, you know, like, imagine being in the bathroom at, you know, in one end of the room. And then the windows shatter. All this water comes in. And two seconds later, you’re in needy water. And so he was just shocked and then just literally packed a small bag.

Jason Elkins (16:36.676)
And he can’t even imagine. I mean, he probably can’t even imagine like, where did all this water come from? Right? Yeah, I get that.

Alexander Souri (16:39.234)
But it was so surreal, like how is water… Yeah, it’s not… Totally, totally. And so he packed his bags and he ended up going, like a movie, went into the hallways, saw some people. I think he teamed up with, he met a ZDF, like the German news crew that were filming and they were like, stay with us. And he’s like, of course, this is press, less chance of being shot at.

So he followed them and then they were in the streets and then at one point they were like, we’re going to go this way. And my dad was like, no, we’re not going out there that way. And that’s when they said, well, we have to go to work. So, and then my father said, okay. And he stood, he stayed put. They went that way and they all died. So it was, they all got shot from a gunship, which was a terrible story. and he kind of remained in the city and then hid and.

somehow found a way out and literally was, you know, smuggled out of Pakistan in a truck and had to wait until it was clear.

Jason Elkins (17:52.594)
I’m still curious because I want to, do want to ask this because I think of conflict zones. Oftentimes there’s hoards of people walking to the border. It seems like people don’t care if they, I know that I’m, I’m naive or ignorant about this, but it seems like people can leave. It’s no big deal. We don’t care if you leave, but it’s what it sounds like when your dad had to hide like

when they were going over the mountains, who were they hiding him from? And if he was found, what would those people have done with him? Do you know?

Alexander Souri (18:27.374)
Oh, I mean, think it was the yeah, I mean, I don’t you know, I was totally I remember like I this story happened a long time ago. So the best of my recollection is and you know, I was a nine year old kid and I all I remember was drawing pictures of planes with my dad in it, you know, like, you know, these as a nine year old trying to get him home, like trying to will him home. But I think what they were I mean.

Jason Elkins (18:38.111)
I know, I know it’s not fair to

Jason Elkins (18:51.973)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (18:56.61)
he had also told me stories that like the the the The communist-backed coup basically, you know literally dragged out all of the royal family, you know, and it was Quite traumatic, you know, they dragged them out behind a tank and you know, it’s really intense stuff happens So they were out to stop anything and anybody that was from the old order and they don’t kind of ask questions, you know

Jason Elkins (19:16.55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (19:25.388)
Like that’s the thing that I saw in Dubai. And I think there is still a lot of order in Dubai and the UAE government’s probably doing an amazing job. But in times like that, you have to shift from the mode that you’re in in terms of perceiving systems and expecting them to work. They very quickly come undone and nobody has the…

I don’t want to say the foresight, but you have to kind of switch gears and go, okay, this is a whole different scenario now. Like there are people trying to get to Riyadh by car, you know, there’s a lot going on, like morality, ethics, things change and not to be negative or, you know, fear mongering, but you can’t get into a car now with a driver and expect.

Jason Elkins (20:10.342)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (20:22.508)
the same type of outcome. I’m, you know, like the guy’s going to be speeding, there’s material falling from the sky, even if it’s not aimed at you. There’s a lot going on, you know?

Jason Elkins (20:34.372)
Well, I’m yeah, I imagine you’ve got people, many, most people probably are terrified. And then you mix in a few people that maybe are a little bit more opportunistic than they are normally, or they’re more concerned about resources and you know, how am I going to come out of this? How’s my family going to come out of this? It could just, it just sounds like chaos, right? Yeah. Because, because even with your dad, like

Alexander Souri (20:55.991)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (20:59.842)
Yeah, I think it’s a little, it’s the.

Jason Elkins (21:04.198)
Yeah, because I saying like even with your dad, yeah, yeah. But, but at the same time, you know, there was a lot of risk to him because there are people panicking about what’s happening and maybe they don’t care about, um, you know, messing with a truck driver, but they might care about having someone from the U S or somebody that’s, know, an, expat that maybe has some sort of value, that type of thing. I don’t know.

Alexander Souri (21:04.578)
That was way worse.

Alexander Souri (21:30.944)
Yes. And, and, know, every situation is different. I mean, what my father had to go through, he was also very Indian. He also had an Indian passport. He was, you know, so there’s a lot, you know, there’s a lot there. He wasn’t like a white man that was trapped in a country that was, you know, like in Afghanistan, where, you know, there’s, could be a prize over your head. You know I mean? So

Jason Elkins (21:38.586)
you

Jason Elkins (21:58.95)
Okay.

Alexander Souri (21:59.694)
It was easier for my father, even though he didn’t speak the language, Pashto, but my father was a wild guy. mean, he knew how to be and how to figure it out. And at the time, now we don’t have that much cash around, but cash was king. And I think he had a factory, he was making stuff work.

Jason Elkins (22:18.842)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (22:25.52)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (22:29.1)
You know you you have to you know in those countries the the dollar was very strong and you you know you just had to make sure that you figured out you know your your your exit strategy You know and he got lucky he got really lucky there’s no but I mean there’s no buying your way out of that really it’s luck faith and Goodwill and money, you know all mixed in and and fingers crossed it worked and thank God it worked for him

Jason Elkins (22:59.716)
So what happened when he got back, because he met you guys in India, it sounds like. I’m guessing that his whole business plan was kind of out the window that he wasn’t going to be making stuff in Afghanistan and selling it for a while. how did, so did that disrupt his business completely? What did, what did you guys do?

Alexander Souri (23:14.264)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (23:18.442)
No, because he was just he they had a really my mother was a designer of sorts. I mean, she really was a and they had brought back a lot of tailors from India and they were doing you know, they were in L and Vogue and all that stuff with their little kind of niche designs. And so they were doing well without Bloomingdale’s. But Bloomingdale’s was an opportunity. My father was a businessman.

And it also alleviated this kind of uproar every month, know, every, yeah, of buyers coming in and leaving the place with like racks on the floor. so, mean, you know, and it was just an opportunity and also, you know, like, I think we all kind of, especially I get the sense from you too, we travel a lot and there’s a lot of like real joy in…

in dynamically moving around the globe. I love it. I love being, you know, visiting other cultures and doing business in other cultures and trying to get things done and seeing how cultures do it differently and, know, where they place their value, where we place our value. You know, getting a concept like relief Riders off the ground in the U.S. or any other place. I mean, it was started in the U.S. but like, for instance,

getting a concept that involved horses, medical camps, riding over terrain, being out there for long periods of time, not a lot of insurance companies will insure you in America. The liability is high with that. And in India, they’ll write a contract on the back of a…

Jason Elkins (25:00.814)
You

Alexander Souri (25:09.024)
matchbook and say, okay, we’re good. And they’ll actually keep to it. And they’ll be like, so, you know, it’s and then after the years, it’s no longer about the contract. They just like you. They love what you’re doing. You love them. They provide, you trust them. And there’s nothing to be said. It’s a hey, how you doing? Let’s get to it. I love that.

Jason Elkins (25:30.498)
This is just what we do. And you bring up a good point. It’s a very small example, but I notice as I travel, I see so many things. was like, yeah, you can’t do that in the US. The land of the free, the home of the brave. And I’m not knocking the US. Please, anybody listening to this, I’m not knocking it. But I remember that when I lived in Belize many years ago, we were out in these neighborhoods around the city and the guy that was with me, he was a Brit.

Alexander Souri (25:32.342)
Yeah, it’s what we do.

Jason Elkins (25:58.41)
And he’s like, yeah, people here just kind of build where they want to build. do kind of what they want to do. There’s no HOA coming around saying, you can’t use plywood for your house, that type of thing. And he, you know, being from the UK, he made, made some comment about like some of these places are where things, you know, there is some freedom and I’m not saying it’s better, worse. Nope. I’m not trying to draw that line, but you can do things with building in some places that you could never do in the U S with the housing codes.

Alexander Souri (26:06.243)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (26:26.276)
Just look at markets. know, went a couple of days ago, I went to the largest market in the Americas here in Mexico City. And the way that they’ve got, you know, meat, meat is a good example. Like the meat markets, when you go to markets and see how they sell meat. And I’m like, yeah, coming from the U.S., everything’s got to be refrigerated at a certain temperature. There’s a health inspector walking around with a thermometer. It’s like, that’s why I’ve never seen those things in the U.S. You know, you’ve got Kroger and.

Alexander Souri (26:45.812)
Yeah, not gonna fly.

Yeah, yeah, no, not gonna fly.

Jason Elkins (26:55.364)
and Walmart and stuff like that. And here it’s like, wow, it’s in your face. That’s the meat and it’s the whole animal laying out there at four in the afternoon. So anyway.

Alexander Souri (27:03.31)
Absolutely. With the occasional fly, know, flying around. You know, it’s, yeah, completely. I get it. I mean, we see that, that’s actually, you know, we see that more elsewhere than in the US or Europe for that matter, you know?

Jason Elkins (27:09.942)
I remember.

Jason Elkins (27:22.068)
huh. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. So, so walk me through, you said you were eight or nine when you left Afghanistan. This whole, this whole situation was.

Alexander Souri (27:22.134)
It does, it’s a thing.

Alexander Souri (27:32.578)
So, yeah, after Afghanistan, a year later, my parents put me in a boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, which was also a very tough experience for me. And actually, know, not in retrospect, but it took a while. But after my father died, I realized this full circle of…

India and me going to that school and coming back and working and starting Relief Riders primarily as India being its flagship country. So I basically went to school in the Himalayas to the Eaton of India as the school puts it.

Jason Elkins (28:21.296)
So did your parents then, it sounds like you’re saying the whole family kind of stayed at India. There wasn’t, or did they go back to New York?

Alexander Souri (28:27.822)
No, no, no, no, no. So yes. So what happened was after Afghanistan, we were in India for a bit. We all went back to New York. And then a year later, my father decided that I should go to school in India at a boarding school. And they were still like operating the business in New York. they brought me over there for the first year. But then after that, as a nine year old, 10 year old, you know, up until the age of 12 or even

Yeah, 12. I was basically flying unaccompanied to Delhi on what was a 24 hour flight back then. And I was doing it maybe two or three times a year.

Jason Elkins (29:06.886)
How did you feel about that at the time? you remember?

Alexander Souri (29:12.994)
Well, so there’s feeling what I felt at the time and then moving from that point onwards and then feeling how I felt about that at the time. So there’s two different feelings. right. So, you know, the whole reason I started Relief Riders was based off of the experience I had at that school in the sense that, you know, my father, I felt that my father had what had really happened was

Jason Elkins (29:21.248)
I understand that. Yeah. Walk us through that. Walk us through the shift.

Alexander Souri (29:41.228)
We were a French household. My sister and I and my mother spoke French. We spoke English because my father spoke English. He did not speak French. But my father felt like I was definitely growing up and I didn’t really have like the sense, the taste, the feel for India. And so in doing so, he basically

said, you know, Alexander has to basically get a sense of his Indian roots and, you know, I’m going to send him to this boarding school. And I think for my father, you know, this was a big source of discontentment for me with my relationship with him, even though I really loved him and he was a great guy. He was a very loving father. But my father came from a

It goes back, his father was the first Indian to go to university on a full scholarship at Rutgers, the first Indian to go to university in the US, which is kind of crazy to think about it in 1912. There had been a lot of Indians that went to school in England because of the colonization, but none. He was the first to go in India and he went to Rutgers on a full scholarship and he was roomed with Paul Robeson. And I don’t know if you know Paul Robeson, but

He was an Olympian. He was a very famous singer and a communist. And they, he was a man, you know, like he was a African American and they put the Indian man and the African American man together, you know, as roommates in the same class. And both of those gentlemen really faced kind of some wild adversity and challenges. And, but they were both Phi Beta Kappa.

And they both got the gold key of the college or the university. And they’re very, they’re very well known. mean, my, my grandfather was still hanging in the Rutgers university auditorium up until 2010, which is crazy. An Indian man with a tassel, you know? And so my father had, even though my father was like the sixties generation, very cool, very hip, very hippie, if you want, if you will, he still had a bit of that.

Alexander Souri (31:58.932)
in him and I felt that so and to this is another funny story is my grandfather wanted my father to become an admiral because when my grandfather got out of university he went back to India and got placed very high worked with Gandhi on the agricultural programs that he had like really hand in hand and in bringing electricity and and irrigation to villages.

huge, you know, very educated, very highly placed in the Indian government. And my, my, my grandfather wanted my father to become an admiral in the Indian Navy and placed them in the Naval College. And my father, and didn’t like, you know, you couldn’t control my father. He was like, he was like me, like we’re free, you know, and he last, he got into a fight and like, which is so unusual because my father is kind of like this, like,

guru kind of very, you know, he was like a yogi, you know, so it was hard to even think about him as getting into a fight, but you couldn’t control, he didn’t want to be in the Naval School and cause the ruckus. So he got kicked out and my grandfather basically was so high up that he begged the Naval College to just give him the education.

Jason Elkins (33:09.529)
It sounds like it.

Alexander Souri (33:22.092)
And they said, okay, we’ll give him the education on one condition. He never applies for the Navy. We won’t take him in the Navy. so like my grandfather was like, deal, he’s yours. And so like my father was like that. So I think my father had this thing where, know, when you’re a parent, you’re just trying to do the best you can with whatever you’ve been, whatever makes sense to you on how you grow up and, know, and as learning as much as you can.

Jason Elkins (33:31.43)
you

Alexander Souri (33:51.16)
to do the best thing. And I just think that’s what he did. It was very painful for me. But, you know, and it took a long time for me to really, you know, understand it. I’m way past the age of when he sent me and I have an eight year old now. And, you know, I often think about what he was faced with and also the chunk, the era that he was in. Like, you know, there was a lot of weird stuff back then that today

you know, wouldn’t fly, some stuff, you know what I mean? So we just grow, we consciously grow through time. You know, don’t have schools like that. The school that I went to, yeah.

Jason Elkins (34:30.2)
Alex… Alexander?

Jason Elkins (34:35.908)
curious because earlier in the conversation when you said you were spending a few months in Afghanistan every year you specifically said I was a city kid, skateboarder, kind of the more you modern clothes I know that was compared to the Afghanis but and then as the story progresses I hear you’re you saying yeah my dad thought I needed to get back closer to my roots and then I’m imagining

Alexander Souri (34:48.038)
yeah.

Jason Elkins (35:02.906)
maybe some kid, you know, the skateboarder kid whose parents don’t like the kids he’s hanging out with, they send them off to boarding school in Ohio or something. And your parents sent you off to boarding school in India. Was there a connection? Was he just not, he didn’t like you skateboarding or what?

Alexander Souri (35:16.014)
No, no, no, no, no, no. What what I could tell. And now as a father, I understand it more. I think he was really like, wow, this. You know, my son is is a New York City kid that’s only speaking French with his mother. And, you know, I don’t feel like he has any of my cultural attributes or my experience that I had growing up, and I want him to see it.

Jason Elkins (35:37.787)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (35:45.518)
I was a pretty good kid. you know, I probably complained a lot, but I wasn’t getting in trouble. I mean, we were, the arcade thing was kind of stipifying in a sense that I couldn’t believe that I was going to arcades, albeit they were two, three blocks away from my father’s store and I roamed, you know, but we weren’t, I wasn’t getting into trouble. never, you know, I never had incidents or.

I never got brought home. mean, the one time I jumped a turnstile in front of my father for the subway saying, hey, look, dad, can just, I can do this. And the cops stopped me on the 62nd street subway and the cop, and my dad was like, he like literally pointed the cop, was like, I’m gonna handle this. And like, just gave me a nice like slap. And I was like, okay, you know, don’t ever do that again. And the cop was like.

Jason Elkins (36:38.502)
Yep.

What about your sister? Did she go to boarding school in India?

Alexander Souri (36:47.988)
No, my sister, she didn’t get any of that because I think they realized that it was, you know, my mother, my mother was French and this was very hard for her. you know, and she was a Western. mean, she was from the West. Like you don’t send your kids halfway around the world to put them in boarding school. And so she was very upset about it. And, you know, my father was very stern about this. Interestingly, this,

For who my father was, this decision was like a concrete platinum, like you could not bend this decision. And it’s interesting as to why. And then if you start to look forward, like I learned how to ride horses in Delhi and then I rode my, I theorized the four years during that boarding school on horseback in the Himalayas on my own, because I was the only kid who knew how to ride horses. So when you,

So that’s the full circle of where that originates from. So when he died, it triggered this horse thing in me. Because I really loved my father and he was very cool to me. He just made a brutal decision that I couldn’t reconcile till after he passed. like everything, because it’s not a question of how, you know, he had to, I mean, he had to pass for me to grow as a man. You know, it was a rite of passage to understand.

Jason Elkins (38:04.624)
Yeah, yep.

Alexander Souri (38:16.81)
Everything I had to learn about myself You know truly not the you know like the real stuff that the seismic tectonic shifts that that everybody calls transformation which is you know a process of you know shedding emotion and projection and of who we think we are till we get to who we are So that that’s part of that whole story for me

Jason Elkins (38:36.219)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (38:41.665)
And so after.

Right. After school, you mentioned doing film work. did you go into film work right after boarding school or what else happened in there?

Alexander Souri (38:54.764)
No. So after the four years, basically come back. My mother had had it. She was like, you cannot keep me from my son like this. He’s coming home. My father was like, OK. And I flew back to the south of France where I am now and where my mother was from, the same city. And we had an international school literally up on the hill.

My mother said, you’re going to this school. I’m living here with you. you know, they hadn’t, they weren’t separated, but my father was handling everything. And my mother was kind of just, you know, transitioning me back from India because that’s a huge culture shock, even though, you know, I kind of was like, I’m okay. You know, like, and I ended up here for three and a half years. And then from here, I went to do a year in high school.

in Connecticut and that was even more intense because I, international, you see people from all over the world at school, you’re kind of, yeah, you’re different, but I know what you’re talking about because we’re all different. We’re all coming from different places. And then when I went to, I had no idea what a prom was and I was like, know, tried out for football and that lasted for 30 seconds because I played soccer and I was like, whoa, you know.

Jason Elkins (39:55.11)
You

Jason Elkins (40:04.933)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (40:17.806)
And then I had such culture shock that I started, you know, just, yeah.

Jason Elkins (40:22.779)
So.

So this was a regular Connecticut public high school type setting or even a private school, but it wasn’t an international school. my gosh.

Alexander Souri (40:33.006)
Yeah, rural high school. No, was a rural high school. was a VOAG high school. It was a really high quality high school and it was well reputed. But it was really, its merits were with like VOAG, know, something like it’s an agricultural. So we were really in the woods, a lot of cows, know, a lot of…

Jason Elkins (40:58.351)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (40:58.574)
Green, like near the Berkshires, Western Mass, Northwestern Connecticut. you know, it was interesting. was, but I wasn’t performing in school when I got there and they were worried about it. But it was all that culture shock that I had gone through. I just, you know, I had like literally, you know, smashed through cultures and just landed in Connecticut. And in 1984, you know, like,

Jason Elkins (41:04.717)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Elkins (41:26.694)
Wow.

Alexander Souri (41:28.876)
Which yeah, and it was in New York City.

Jason Elkins (41:34.83)
You know what? I moved around a lot with my parents. They divorced. I’d lived in other places. I moved a lot and it was hard like showing up at a new school. But you know what? I moved a lot, meaning like, you know, from Wyoming to maybe, you know, another state or another town or this or that. And, and, and it was still hard to show up or to fit in. Right. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (41:54.05)
Yes, listen. Yeah, moving is hard. You starting it’s starting over all the time and it’s it’s hard. It’s it’s also great. I mean, like everything, it has its pros and it has its cons and and the cons are heavy and the pros are glorious, you know, like and you just work through it the best you can.

Jason Elkins (42:18.31)
How do you approach that then with you said you’ve got one son?

Alexander Souri (42:24.621)
I have a daughter.

Jason Elkins (42:27.332)
Your daughter. Okay. So how are you approaching that with your daughter? How do you find that? That balance? I’m curious what your approach has been so far. She’s still pretty young.

Alexander Souri (42:33.516)
Well, my daughter doesn’t live with me. She lives with her mother in Bali, but they’re off on an educational program for my daughter in South America for six months. And I fly all over the world to see my daughter. I was never married. And I really chase my daughter around the globe, and then she comes to me. She was just here for Christmas, and she comes over the summer.

Jason Elkins (42:47.501)
okay.

Jason Elkins (42:53.136)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (43:02.22)
for a week and yeah, I’m very lucky to have her in my life. I’ve learned so much from my daughter. It’s just an amazing experience.

Jason Elkins (43:14.414)
certainly relate to that. I’ve got you know I’ve got a couple kids and my my son I’ve got a couple and my son I started traveling full-time I had traveled a bit before worked in the industry but I started traveling full-time when he was 14 or 15 his mom was not impressed we’d gone through the divorce and when I said look I’m gonna start traveling full-time she was not happy

Alexander Souri (43:17.326)
You’ve got kids.

Jason Elkins (43:40.282)
But I’ll tell you what, he’s had the opportunity to go to Asia with me and several trips to Latin America. And my connection with him now is better than it was when I was doing, you know, every other week with them in Phoenix, Arizona. And we’ve, you know, we’ve got video calls. We do video call at least once a day. And it’s been so good. And, you know, now he’s 19, he’s a little older. He’s working and going to trade school and he’s

Alexander Souri (43:45.068)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (43:56.174)
You know.

Jason Elkins (44:06.66)
not as able to travel with me, but I love that he talks about dad, when I get my job and take vacation, we can go on a trip somewhere together, you know, and it’s just, so it’s a really, really cool thing. It’s, I think it’s an, and a cool way to, to share that stuff with your kids. And it sounds like you’re obviously doing that with your daughter. So how did you get into film? Let’s talk about that.

Alexander Souri (44:17.282)
That’s awesome.

Alexander Souri (44:27.575)
Okay.

So I loved film growing up. I just took every opportunity to watch every film and knew everything about film. And I wanted to make my way to it. And very early on, I, through just incredible luck, I got hired by a…

the musical director of an orchestra who was also a famous flautist. And he played in the orchestra and this was playing in the Berkshires. And he hired me sight in the supermarket. I think he overheard me speaking French and he just didn’t understand what was going on. And he said, you, I will see you in my office at 4 p.m. And I’m like, why?

It was summer. just got out of college. I’m like, why? He goes, I’m to give you a job and you will come. And then he left and I was like, okay. And he gave me the address. And then he basically, this is a long winded story, but I’ll cut it short. I had worked for him. He had taken me out to all these cocktail fundraisers and all that. And he was just picking up $50,000 checks, like left and right. And I’d stopped them after the third party. And I said, listen, you’re just taking money from these people. You got to give them an experience.

so that they fuse emotion with experience and the next time they’re like, my God, let’s do this again, that was fun last year. And he’s like, yeah, great, do it, figure out something. And I was like, what? And he goes, yeah. So I came back and I did a pop-up art gallery, this is 1990, and I was 20 years old. And he said, you’re the producer and I’m gonna give you 10, I came with the concept and I knew of,

Alexander Souri (46:21.282)
known a few famous artists in the area. And I said, this is the concept pop-up 30 day thing, art auction at the end, black tie party at the beginning. I’m not sure how much it’s gonna cost. I did the budget and it’s, you know, 10,000 bucks. So, you know, he just said, okay, you’ve got $10,000, do it, put it together. And I ran with it and I ended up by chance 10 minutes later meeting.

A man because there was no place to sit at the coffee shop and it turned out to be Gerard Malanga who was Andy Warhol’s associate and started Interview Magazine and I said and I was mumbling to myself that I had just gotten ten thousand I wasn’t even talking to him. I was just scratching my head going how am I gonna do this? And he’s like what’s going on? And I said You’re not gonna believe this. I just got ten thousand dollars to do an art gallery and lo and behold. I’m talking to the man

Jason Elkins (47:06.415)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (47:17.944)
who started the factory with Andy Warhol. And he literally tells me, listen kid, I just moved here and I think this is a great project. I’ll do it with you. You don’t have to charge me, I’ll curate it. Like I had no idea how to hang paintings and like do photographs. these were like, what do you call that? Blue chip artists that were famous. it wasn’t like…

Jason Elkins (47:34.374)
You

Alexander Souri (47:46.624)
a podunk like, know, somebody’s kids got paintings that were gonna sell for $10,000 a piece, you know, it was like New York City and Boston, like artists. And that was the start of an incredible friendship with Gerard to this day, he’s now 85, he was 46 at the time, 47, just crazy. And really honestly became…

I’m not a mentor, but really educated me on writing letters and all that, informed me as like a producer. And at that, after that gig, I was like, I’m a producer. That’s it, you know? And having traveled around so much, I was always like, I’ll figure it out. Cause I had to figure out everything else in my life. And I, you know, at a very young age, I was like, I know, I don’t know how to do it, but I’m going to do it. So it’s going to happen and I’ll figure it out. And very much returning to Relief Riders.

Like who goes out in the world and says, I’m going to make a company that, you know, create a company that leads relief missions on horseback, performing medical camps and humanitarian and social programs. Like, where do you start with that? And that was the same thing. And I, you got to be honest with yourself. You know, you got to totally be honest and say, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know that I’m supposed to do this. And I, one foot in front of the other.

Jason Elkins (48:56.516)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (49:08.598)
And then lo and behold, 23 years later and like an incredible journey with highs, lows, accolades, press for a period of time that I couldn’t even believe I was getting. And just like, look, you know, I love…

Jason Elkins (49:23.387)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (49:29.454)
The joy I get is I created a company that actually served people without blowing apart your carbon footprint, or if you will. There’s no deception. You want to come, we’re going to go help. It’s going to be on horseback. I always have fun doing it, so you’re going to have fun because we always have fun. That’s what it is. We obviously don’t make a lot of money.

Jason Elkins (49:41.754)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (49:57.666)
The thing that I move forward with in my life is that feeling of like, that’s pretty cool, man. Like, you got away with riding horses across the desert and across the world helping people, like, and having a blast doing it. And that was, that’s, it’s just, I live on that. It’s kind of nice, you know? And to get back to your film question, sorry, we just had to tie that in. Yeah, so after that, I…

Jason Elkins (50:05.766)
you

Jason Elkins (50:17.978)
it.

Jason Elkins (50:22.63)
No, good job. Good job. You’re creating an experiencer.

Alexander Souri (50:28.798)
After that, I ended up having a crazy meeting with a German actor who was performing a piece at the actor’s studio for his membership entrance in front of Paul Newman and all the members. So they were accepting him as a new member to the actor’s studio. He had to do this one-man show. And I am having dinner with him at a friend’s house.

He was older than me and I didn’t realize like I was like he I think he was 50 and I was 20 and There was a whole bunch of people these were very fun friends who always had an incredible like a collective group of people show up very interesting and he’s talking to me and he’s saying I’m doing this piece and he goes know, you’re from India I go to India a lot and He’s telling me all this stuff and I’m like, yeah, know India I went to school there in the mountains and he’s like the mountains and I’m like

Where? I said, I lived in the mountains for a long time. It turns out he lived in the hill station that I went to school in for four, like three or four years. And I was like, what? You know, that how crazy is that? And so when he told me that we just bonded and, you know, by the end of the night, I said, listen, you know, I just did this art for music fundraiser.

Jason Elkins (51:39.482)
Wow.

Yeah.

Alexander Souri (51:55.598)
He basically had He basically created a one-man show based off of Franz Kafka’s report to an Academy which is a crazy another Metamorphosis story of a gorilla that gets captured by a German expedition off the Gold Coast of Africa and on the way back to Germany it learns how to speak English and then because of the crew coming down and Talking to him because they were so curious. He ended up

Jason Elkins (52:11.386)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (52:25.57)
you know, teaching the gorilla ended up teaching himself English and the piece starts 15 years later where he’s being asked as a gorilla, you know, at the Academy of Science and Letters what it’s like to live in human society, you know, a la Kafka where it’s really dimensional and really wild. And I said, listen, I’ll produce this for you up here. You do it at the members, at the actor studio.

Jason Elkins (52:46.863)
Okay.

Alexander Souri (52:54.316)
and we’ll bring it up here. And then I produced that show for him in an old vaudeville theater and we sold out, it was crazy. And he was a method man. He was in character in rehearsals and all throughout. I was talking to a gorilla and he was, he occupied and he was tall, big, and he walked around like a gorilla. It was crazy and it was a beautiful experience. I later met him in Auroville.

I would, don’t know, 20 or 18 years later, out of the blue, he was on a scooter. And I flagged him down. I’m like, Nikolaus. And he, couldn’t believe it. It was so surreal and, and, and, and karmic. Like I couldn’t believe out of the blue somewhere in India. I was in Auroville, like, you know, next to a pond at cherry. and I saw him driving in a scooter. I think I lost my mind. I was like, what? You know, anyway,

Jason Elkins (53:41.062)
That’s cool.

Jason Elkins (53:50.694)
That’s so cool.

Alexander Souri (53:50.966)
Long story, so I did that show with him. I met other people and we did another show and then I ended up developing a one woman show on Edith Piaf, which was off Broadway. And then I brought it up to the Berkshire Theatre Festival and that sold out. And then I just, I was, I love being, I love producing. love sketch, I love pulling concepts out of thin air.

throwing a schedule on it and then getting to work to mold it into shape and see what you can do. And that later, I realized that theater was very tough for me because I was everything I raised, I was raising 30, $40,000 as a 22 year old, which I was very lucky. But I was paying everybody, but not myself. And I was always struggling in the end. And so I kind of got a job working in film and

I worked for, you’re not going to believe this, but I worked for Douglas Trumbull, who basically was the special effects guru for 2001, A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and then later on had directed a lot of movies on his own and then was the creator of IMAX films. he hired me when I was just starting off to be his…

Production stills printer. I was also a professional photographer back then to pay the bills And he hired me and then I started so we worked on back to the future the ride for For was that Six Flags Adventure, which was a motion-based very like technological Ride and Luxor his second project was Luxor in Las Vegas. I didn’t work on that and then from there I

Jason Elkins (55:35.258)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (55:45.846)
I ended up just working in film as a producer and I was doing commercials. I was still as a special events producer producing fundraisers. So I would go to Sundance and I did a production there. directed produced and directed for commercials in China for the holiday in. And at the time the holiday in there was the biggest hotel in the world. I think they had 2400 rooms and two supermarkets, two pharmacies. Those huge.

Great and crazy experience in China and I think I believe it was 1998.

And then I worked on, I got, I came back and I ended up working on The Matrix. I worked for a company that was, that was called Innovation Arts and they had built the bullet time camera rig. And I was a supervising producer for the end of that project. And then moving on to like a host of other films. I think End of Days was another one. And also X-Men, the first film in X-Men.

Um, and, um, uh, you know, so yeah, that’s just a lot of, um, yeah. So a lot of very lucky, interestingly enough, even though like film was my thing, I saw myself as a director, but I think technically I was hired as a producer and, um, and I kind of was on a non trajectory, if you will. Like there was no pro

Jason Elkins (56:58.48)
You’re cool.

Alexander Souri (57:20.686)
There was no career trajectory for me. I, you know, I was working in the business and I really loved it, but I was getting a little burnt out. So, and I was always like hired like as a, as a fixer. Yeah. Like a fixer producer.

Jason Elkins (57:32.132)
Let me ask you, let me. Yeah.

Let me ask you this, because your dad was still alive during all of this time. It sounds like he passed shortly around the time you quit film. And I just heard you say, I didn’t really. Well, that was what I was going to ask, because you said I wasn’t really on a trajectory, just kind of which maybe the stereotype for some Indian fathers is you better have a trajectory. So I’m curious, was he supportive during this time or how did that go?

Alexander Souri (57:44.214)
Yes. Yeah. Yes. He never saw Relief Riders.

Alexander Souri (58:03.497)
yeah, what?

Alexander Souri (58:07.928)
Well, you know, my father very early on felt like I should be like a physicist or a mathematician, which was really like odd because my father was like, cool. Like you wouldn’t you would expect him to say you need to like, it’s OK. Be an artist, be an actor, be whatever you want. We’re cool. He was like, you got to be a bandit in physics or math. And, you know, I was like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Everything I steered clear of. I was like, no way. And, you know, I think part of my

You know, the rebellion I had with my father was I didn’t want to listen to him after what he, you know, when he sent me to India, that was it. I’m 18. All bets are off. We’re gone. See you. Thank you. And, you know, I mean, I definitely didn’t want to do what he wanted me to do, but I feel like with that, I feel like I threw the baby out with the bathwater emotionally because I was kind of pissed at him.

You know, for for that whole experience for most of our life together, my adult life while he was here. And I don’t regret it because it was who I was. mean, I do a little, but then I really when when he passed and then you real like his passing matured me and made me realize and I put myself in his shoes so many times. And and I I I, you know, I don’t regret it. I feel bad that I wasn’t able to meet the man.

Like I kind of dismissed the man I wanted to meet. And that’s the sad part of it. I’d give my left arm to spend five minutes with, to just like hang.

Jason Elkins (59:47.76)
cuz

I can imagine because when you shared the story of how your grandfather wanted your dad to be an Admiral, right? In the Navy, you know, and your dad, no, but your dad was cool. He went and kind of did his own thing, kind of like you’ve done. But then at some point he made, it sounds like he kind of wanted you to be an Admiral in a sense, not, you know, not literally, but to go follow that career path that maybe.

Alexander Souri (59:58.57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:00:20.016)
would have made his father proud? I don’t know. It’s an interesting story that you’ve got.

Alexander Souri (01:00:24.918)
Yeah, I mean, the irony was that everything after India and not even I don’t know what was before because I was too young, but like, for instance, like I wanted to go diving at an early age here in the south of France. And my friend from school was like, I’m going diving. Come with me. And my mother was like, no way you’re not going diving. OK. And we called New York and we’re like, no, talk to dad. I’m going diving.

And she’s like, no, no. And by the time this whole thing happened, you know, and we spoke to my father, the boat was leaving the dock, you know, and I was like, you know, and and so but he was he was like, my dad was like, no, let him go diving. What’s the problem? And then the the other one, I during my my film career, I treated myself to a pilot’s license and then I just got really

Jason Elkins (01:01:05.508)
Mm-hmm. Ooh, yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:01:23.552)
Addicted to flying I love I’m so passionate about flying and I ended up getting a job With a ferry company and I basically was being trained as a ferry pilot So I ended up doing these four transatlantic crossings in a single-engine plane and when I did the first crossing Yeah, when I did the first crossing I got to London and then I we had a few days before taking the next plane back over the Atlantic So we pick up we drop planes off

Jason Elkins (01:01:41.062)
Wow, okay.

Alexander Souri (01:01:51.054)
Like, you know, drive the car from New York to LA, drop it off. Same thing with planes. I got here to the, you know, we had three days off before I had to be back in London. I said, I’m going to go to France and see my parents. And I got home at four in the morning or three in the morning. And I remember, you know, ringing on the door and my my my mom, my dad didn’t want to tell my mom that I was doing this. But my mom got wind of it. And then when my mom saw me come with my survival suit and all my kit.

Jason Elkins (01:01:52.292)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (01:01:55.899)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (01:02:16.678)
Well, yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:02:21.198)
She’s like started crying. I she’s like, what did you do? And you’re not going back. You know what mean? I was like, so it was just, it’s weird that, you know, he was trying to push me in that direction. Then after that, I think he was just like, yeah, do it. And then, you know, I came home with the wildest of projects. Like, you know, he, didn’t believe I was coming home with this pop-up art gallery where I had 10 grand to produce it. And then I was raising all this money for the shows. And then I was being,

Jason Elkins (01:02:26.182)
Aww.

Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:02:50.516)
flown to Sundance to produce a, you know, with Cheech Marin and a whole host of like Skunk Baxter from the Doobie Brothers. Like it was wild, like, you know, to produce stuff there. And then I had this very, you know, the Matrix and they were like, wow, okay, whatever. Very lucky. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:03:10.982)
It’s super cool. Hey, do you have you, I suspect you have reflected on this. Have you reflected on if dad did not send me off to India to boarding school, what, what trajectory? Yeah. Like, and it would have, do you feel like it would have been better? mean, what’s yeah. What is in your mind is like, well, tell me.

Alexander Souri (01:03:24.833)
None of this would have happened.

Alexander Souri (01:03:30.86)
Yeah, and I think that

Alexander Souri (01:03:36.12)
So that is the backbone or the spine of the book that I’ve always had in mind because my greatest revelation is that had my father not sent me to India, of course I would have had another life, you know, but had my father not sent me to India, I would have never have, you know, absorbed Indian culture the way I did to the point where when I go to India now, the festivals, I know what’s going on. I speak the language.

I, you know, like I feel I’m still like a Westerner when I they don’t see me as Indian, but I still feel it. You know, I plug into it and it’s like, and I I miss India. And yes, had I not ridden those horses in the mountains on my own endlessly as a nine year old or ten year old.

I, know, and had my father not to that. I don’t know if this journey, there would have been another journey, you know, like it would have been something else, you know, like who knows what was in store for me. It was very tough and it was not easy, but I really look back at my father in, in great all that, he had the courage to, to, to, to, do that, you know, like to, it’s hard. I don’t know how you can send your kid away. I can’t send my daughter like,

I couldn’t do that to my daughter unless she wanted it. And I’d be like, okay, if you want it, you got to be sure. You know, and it had to make, it has to make sense too. But so yeah, no, my, my thought, I loved the journey I made with my father. My, like I said, the thing I miss most is to just, you know, sit back on a bench, you know, in a late afternoon and just have a good laugh about all of this. I wish I could have done that with him. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:05:24.134)
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine.

imagine. One thing that I’m sensing with you and it really came up when you mentioned that you got a pilot’s license because I’ve had this kind of saying that I say to myself sometimes I’ve encouraged other people with it as well and it’s something along the lines of I don’t know where I’m going maybe you could you could word it differently but I don’t know where I’m going necessarily but I have faith in my ability to figure it out along the way.

And for me, that came up in hot air ballooning, since you mentioned you had a pilot that you learned to fly as well. For me, I’m a balloon pilot. And someone had said that to me at one point, that with a balloon, you don’t fly from airport to airport. don’t.

Alexander Souri (01:06:01.08)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:06:11.204)
generally know where you’re gonna land. just take off and you might, yeah, you might land, you know you’re going downwind, but you might land in a cul-de-sac somewhere, you might land in a hay field, you don’t know where you’re gonna land. And this older pilot said, well, you don’t know, you’ve got these people on the balloon with you, they don’t know anything about ballooning. And you’ve gotta get them wherever you’re going safely and you don’t know where you’re going.

Alexander Souri (01:06:11.918)
You go where the wind takes you.

Jason Elkins (01:06:33.668)
but you have faith in your ability to figure it out along the way. And I heard that with you a few times in this conversation, you know, with starting businesses or figuring out how to do this art show or whatever, and you didn’t necessarily know how to do it, but you figured it out along the way. And I think that’s what’s so fun about having conversations with people like you is like, you’re clearly like, just get started, take that step. How are we gonna get insurance for this company that we’re gonna ride horses into these?

You know, places and how are going to do all this? And if you didn’t have that ability, that faith in your ability to figure things out along the way, you never would have went. And I think you got some of that from your dad. sounds like.

Alexander Souri (01:07:12.504)
Yeah, yes, both my parents, both of them were travelers. Hey, I mean, you know, it takes a lot to go to Afghanistan in the early 70s, the mid 70s. And I think also India, you know. And so, yeah, like my parents were, I mean, my mother was Armenian and French and Armenian. And their whole, their parents or my mother’s parents, you know, had an incredible

Jason Elkins (01:07:21.847)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:07:40.654)
journey out of Armenia with the Exodus and Turkey and the genocide. So, you know, that was just one generational way in terms of you don’t know where you’re going really ever. And and you’re lucky to get there. So they I think, you know, epigenetically, it had, you know, been shared through the bloodline, if you will, or the genetics, you know, that that that this is just, you know, they’re they’re immigrants.

Jason Elkins (01:07:52.25)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:08:10.318)
So they try, mean immigrants is just a word, immigrants are travelers. You know, they’re not tourists.

Jason Elkins (01:08:19.322)
I think it’s a, yeah, I think it’s really something about immigrants on a much smaller scale. You know, obviously I’ve traveled, I love traveling, love cultures, but on a very small example of that is something as simple as I lived in Vermont for nine years. I was there running a travel business, so I was able to go travel, but the people around me were typically third, fourth, fifth generation Vermonters.

and we were small town Vermont and people were like, well, who are you? I lived there for nine years, went into the same convenience store three or four times a week for nine years. And every time I walked in, they looked at me like, who are you and why are you here? I didn’t go to high school with you and I’m not knocking them. I moved from there to Arizona. When I got to Arizona, I got on the call with someone to set up my cable or something and I had to go get a cable box.

And they said, oh, well, what neighborhood are you in? Where are you coming from? And, oh, well, you know, the interstate’s really busy right now. I’d suggest you wait at least 45 minutes before you get in and then come down and pick it up because the traffic and then I get there and someone opened the door for me and I walked in and they said, hello, how are you today? And immediately I was like, oh, people in Arizona are different. Not better. But then I was like, well, why is it? Well, because very few people are from Arizona originally. Pretty much everybody there.

came from somewhere else, pretty much everybody there had the experience of showing up with no friends, not knowing anybody, that adventurous spirit that, you know. So it’s like, people are just like, hey, welcome to the party. they just, so what I got out of that was people that will take a risk and leave their.

Alexander Souri (01:09:44.332)
Somewhere else, yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:09:51.34)
Like New York.

Jason Elkins (01:10:04.282)
family setting or those two or three generations and go somewhere new and do something new. There’s something a little different about their personalities, about their openness to new cultures, new people, new places, that ability to figure things out along the way. You just end up with different. I’m not knocking people from Vermont. I love Vermont. It was great.

But it’s just, it’s a different thing that I noticed on a different scale. And then you speak of your mom coming from Armenia, you know, her family coming from Armenia. That’s a major shift. I get it.

Alexander Souri (01:10:32.77)
Yeah, I mean, you know, and they got to New York in the sixties and that was crazy for them. You know, like that’s pretty wild. I have a feeling that what you’re talking about is I think it’s a combination of survival and thriving. You know, it’s that calibration of you go from survival to thrive, thriving. You know what I mean? You kind of you just like Cortez, you you set sail on the boat and

Jason Elkins (01:10:40.669)
yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:10:56.091)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:11:02.07)
You go and then the boats are gone. You burn them and then there’s no turning back and at that point you start thriving. Yeah, I mean which kind of is, you know, we didn’t talk about this, but in the last six years I became a yacht captain here in the South of France and I had the great, yeah, wherewithal to basically do technical trips. So I basically drive these boats, like these hundred foot boats,

all over the med to Tunisia, Greece or Malta, either to register them or take them out of the EU to not pay VAT taxes. And you just, you know, it’s an office, you look out the window of my wheelhouse and you’re like, okay, here we go. And you set off and you don’t know what’s gonna happen. I mean, you know, you just, and I love that.

Jason Elkins (01:11:52.922)
Yeah, I love it.

Alexander Souri (01:11:57.792)
I absolutely find that amazing that I don’t have to sit at a desk. I’m so blessed that I just, have a steering wheel. I have two levers. It’s a boat. got a crew and off we go. And for me, it’s travel. know, for the agency, it’s like, Hey, you got to take this boat to Tunisia, get it stamped, come back. We’ll see you in 10 days. You know, and I’m like, like, thank you. We’re gone. You know, and, and you hit.

Jason Elkins (01:11:59.46)
Yeah, I can tell.

Jason Elkins (01:12:16.184)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:12:21.444)
Yeah.

I love it. I love it. get it.

Alexander Souri (01:12:25.966)
Corsica sardinia. Yeah, I like you know, the same thing getting on a plane. We’re out of here. Boom, you know like you just you know and that Like flying not so much these days cuz I think I’ve just done so much of it and but you know I still love the fact that hey, we’re going to India You know, we’re getting on that plane and I don’t think about it And then when I’m on the plane, I’m like, wow when those doors close and then they reopen I am going to have the smell of India

Jason Elkins (01:12:33.88)
Yep, yep, yep.

Jason Elkins (01:12:47.44)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:12:54.676)
waf through my nostrils and it’s going to be amazing. And I love that.

Jason Elkins (01:12:59.77)
Yeah, yeah. I personally never feel more alive than when I’m on my way to somewhere new or not even necessarily new, but something just a different place. And it’s created challenges and problems in my relationships and in my life. I’m not going to lie. But it is, you know, I can get on, I can go down to the bus station and just get on a bus, sometimes just a random bus, you know, and I’ll just get on with my stuff and just see where I end up or, you know, or just, and I just feel like

Alexander Souri (01:13:14.154)
out.

Alexander Souri (01:13:27.17)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:13:28.486)
I get so excited just sitting on the bus waiting to go and people around me just mostly locals, not usually tourists, because I don’t tend to go to the really touristy spots. so I get that completely. Alexander, we’ve yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s which is not everybody’s like that. I’ve learned that, you know, I’m still learning that at 52. I’m still learning that not everybody I run into gets me.

Alexander Souri (01:13:38.69)
Yeah, mean discovery, exploration.

Jason Elkins (01:13:54.624)
and has the same desires and early on in my life it was really challenging because you know it caused a lot of conflict for being like what do mean you don’t what do you mean we just got all this we got a big bonus at work why would we buy furniture we should just go on a trip somewhere you know just you know people are not all the same but anyway hey we’ve we’ve discussed a ton of things i know you and i could probably come back and have multiple conversations

Alexander Souri (01:14:19.542)
We didn’t discuss anything about relief riders.

Jason Elkins (01:14:23.832)
Well, I know that’s where I’m going with this. That’s exactly where I’m going with this is let’s spend a little bit of time. You’ve done an amazing job of sprinkling into the conversation, but let’s get really clear so our listeners can get a real kind of feel for what you’re doing before we wrap up, because that is super important.

Alexander Souri (01:14:37.454)
Sure.

Alexander Souri (01:14:43.478)
Yeah, sure, sure. So for the last 23 years, I’ve been riding, I’ve been offering, we call them relief rides, and they’re humanitarian or relief missions on horseback through developing countries. So we have in India, for instance, it’s our flagship country and we, we

done a lot of work there and we’ve actually grown all of our programs. We go on a 10 to 12 day ride where we stop every other day in a village and we set up either a medical camp that offers free cataract surgeries, dentistry, gynecology. And then, so we’ll treat about 400 people or we’ll see 400 people at the medical camp. We’ll do roughly 50 eye surgeries.

And then we’ll, we have a slew of other treatments that we give for day treatments for ophthalmology. And then we also give away spectacles. So there’s about two, 300 spectacles that we give away for free. Everything is for free. And then all of our riders that come with us, not only does their ride fee pay for all of these programs, the horses and the tent, the tenting across the desert,

but it pays for the programs and they come, these riders will actually come and assist us at our medical camps where we provide them with details or jobs that basically are very useful. mean, we need them to do these jobs at the medical camp. And there’s no special, if you’ve been like a shelf clerk when you were 16, you can do these jobs. It’s just that we need people to organize triage.

you know and do all sorts of managerial jobs at the medical camp. The next day we’ll ride to the next village where we’ll go and do a school program where we distribute four to six months worth of educational materials and sporting equipment. We have a very dynamic and interactive question and answer period and you know a big share with the riders and the students. We literally ride our horses.

Alexander Souri (01:17:06.766)
the schoolyard, is so cool. you know, I can’t believe I got away with doing that for 23 years. We literally ride into the school with horses and then they’re all waiting for us because we tell them we’ll be there at like 10 in the morning and we show up on horseback, we bring all the horses in and they’re just 400 kids sitting on the floor and they’re just sitting there. And like, I love shattering the reality of like what school could be.

Jason Elkins (01:17:10.326)
cool.

Alexander Souri (01:17:34.01)
And we dismount and we go in and we meet them and it’s so cool. And then we allow them to ask us anything. We don’t allow them, we give them the opportunity to ask us any type of questions they have. And we give a full description and it’s it’s translated. And it’s very interactive. And we have a health and hygiene program where we teach them how to wash their hands properly with soap.

Jason Elkins (01:17:34.246)
You

Jason Elkins (01:17:45.872)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:18:03.566)
We used to deworm for 13 or 14 years. We used to deworm all the kids there, which was deworming 1200 kids over the course of a 12 day ride. But because of our program, our deworming program, we were able to, well, we got called in to UNICEF one day out of the blue. They’re like, hey, UNICEF wants to see you. And I’m like, what?

Jason Elkins (01:18:17.626)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:18:30.338)
They called us in and I brought my executive medical director with us and and they said, we understand that you’ve been running a deworming deworming program for 14 years. There was a pre-existing government program, but that had been it just went corrupt. was the money was taken. The medicine never made it to the school. And for 13 years or even longer than that, but for the 13 years we were doing it, it didn’t exist. And that’s why we chose to do it.

Jason Elkins (01:18:54.086)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:19:00.046)
And UNICEF said, you know, we are applying pressure now to The Indian government so we’re making like a three-pronged attack on the government to force them to restart this correctly We need all of your you know, bio data on the last 13 years and what areas you’ve done and lo and behold We gave all that information and the next year we were out of a job Like we didn’t have to they started it all up in one year. Yeah. Yeah

Jason Elkins (01:19:26.767)
No!

Alexander Souri (01:19:28.77)
You know that that was I was always hoping for that. You know, I was like, yeah, it’s a great thing. No, no, no, you know, obsolescence was success for me. That means that people are being taken care of. You know, so that that worked. That was an amazing moment, you know, for us. We actually later on ended up winning a an award from the United Nations, which was pretty cool. And it’s just been an incredible.

Jason Elkins (01:19:29.722)
Wow. So that’s a good thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:19:39.748)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:19:58.67)
You know just journey so that school program had the deworming the distribution of educational materials and the hand washing then later on in that afternoon we basically go and distribute livestock in the form of goats to below poverty level individuals mostly mostly we look for widows and women that are

You know that really don’t have anything or so the widows are kind of sequestered They’re considered bad luck because the husband died early And they are really like isolated and not cared for so we’ve go and we’ve in those villages we find them and then we basically also after like if there’s only three or four women that that qualify for that then we look for family, you know individuals or families that are like that really can’t work or

You there’s heavy duty trauma and sickness and we make sure that we get we give them a go we’ve been doing this for so long that that a lot of these villages have collectives, know, like we’ve been giving those villages multiple times over over the years and they’ve organized themselves with a goat herder and And they’ve had, know, literally had the goat herder Go and have the goats graze they bring them back. They milk them and as a collective they’ve made money

basically making cheese from the milk, selling the milk, and then also getting their form of sustenance in terms of goat milk for themselves to use. So that’s been an incredible experience to see.

Jason Elkins (01:21:38.937)
Mm-hmm.

Let me, I want to ask you, I don’t know if it’s the obvious question, but it’s maybe the question I’m wondering. suspect it might be the question the listeners are wondering realistically in your words, what is, what did the horses bring to it? Because I’m imagining all of these places can be reached by vehicle. You know? so I’m just going to ask you why the horses.

Alexander Souri (01:22:04.494)
Oh yes, yes. I mean, when I say yes, when I say yes and you know, a lot of these places can be reached by Jeep and at times it would take maybe four hours to do 30 kilometers because it’s like, you know, like you’re just bouncing around everywhere. So there is that. mean, you know, we do bring our, we can’t.

Our medical teams come in from the major cities. I hire them in Jaipur and I organize them and I bring them in in a car and then we fetch them in a jeep at the closest locations of the car or they come all the way to the camp depending on what access we have. But to really get into these villages, we go on horseback. But the most important thing about

The horses for me is the fun that it is that it’s symbolic. know, obviously this year is the year of the fire horse. So it’s a big year for us, you know, because we’re horse driven and and, know, without our horses, we would have never been able to do any of this. And so, you know, and then the horses slow time down, which is a really important factor. In the end, this is a humanitarian mission and.

It is also I don’t focus on this part intentionally because I know it happens and it doesn’t really matter because it’s going to happen. But it’s very transformational and without the transformation like it happens. You go out there on a mission where you know it’s like the hero’s journey. You’re open hearted. You realize that you’re going into the unknown and you’re trying to accomplish a lot of things and you’re doing it on horseback and time slow to slows down for you and you’re seeing you know

Jason Elkins (01:23:59.206)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:24:00.088)
Culture from a different perspective. You’re also on horseback, so you’re looking, you know, into things. And you know you you’re being allowed to have an experience by you know, the universe or you know, and the culture that lives there because they’re receivingyou, like we have hundreds of kids that just trail us. You know, like beautifully like you know they’re come running down and it’s a fantastic experience and.

Jason Elkins (01:24:08.229)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:24:28.715)
We’re always besieged at our campsites by all these kids, which is fun. And it can be, you know, like unsettling at first because you’re just like, I need to get some sleep here, kids. You guys got to go home. But, you know, they’re just so curious and.

Jason Elkins (01:24:29.124)
I love it.

Jason Elkins (01:24:42.598)
I

Yeah, yeah, I suspect so. Like when I visualize the difference, I’m visualizing a bunch of foreigners, know, tourists coming in on a van and climbing out of a van as opposed to showing up in town, you know, with a dozen horses on horseback. It’s a totally different way to kind of take to get there. And the reception would be totally different. That’s what I hear you. That’s what I mean.

Alexander Souri (01:25:11.272)
Yeah, and

Jason Elkins (01:25:16.174)
hearing and seeing in my head when you describe that.

Alexander Souri (01:25:16.584)
Yes, yeah, it’s it’s very much more organic. And also what I didn’t tell you is that we’re actually riding around Rajasthan, which basically Rajasthan is the land of kings and the land of kings. The Marwari horse that the breed that we ride is actually one of the oldest, I think the oldest breed of horses, you know, in hits in the history of of our in our history.

Jason Elkins (01:25:22.086)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:25:44.81)
I’m in a compete with the Egyptian Arabs and the Indian horses have lyre like ears so when you look at them you’re looking at a horse but it’s so different and so very handsome you mean as compared to other horses are beautiful animals across the board but they’re very striking animals and they were the. So these these were war horses for the Kings and there’s a lot of law in Rajasthan.

Jason Elkins (01:25:47.258)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Elkins (01:26:00.646)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:26:13.834)
like historical lore that goes way back how these horses were considered semi-gods or deities. And I’ll never forget this. know, early on during my ride, maybe 2005 or 2006, I was leading a group of 14 on horseback. And 2005 is yesteryear.

compared to today in terms of the transition, technological transition that we’ve gone through. Like we had in 2005, there were less tractors and more horse or camel driven plows or bullock driven plows than there were tractors. So it was a very different landscape. You know, for us, we had like the most ridiculous cell phones by today’s standards, you know, like the, the, the Motorola’s or if you will.

But that was it and they barely worked anywhere. So when I was writing at that time, you know, I approached this old man like I think he must have been like 100 and he was wearing a turban. He had like the thickest Coke bottle glasses and you know, it was the total movie, you know, not even looking up and he’s got his horn rim Coke bottle glasses moving with his staff. And I just stopped. I stopped all the horses.

Jason Elkins (01:27:33.36)
Right.

Alexander Souri (01:27:36.456)
and he just stops and he looks up and you can tell, like, it’s like, you can tell, like, this guy must have a real challenge seeing. And he says in Hindi, my God, the king is here, the horses have come. And I’m sitting there going like, my God, like the guy, just, you know, like memory has a strange effect on all of us. And it can be so like,

Jason Elkins (01:27:53.072)
Jeez. Wow. Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:28:00.453)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:28:02.068)
You crackling in terms of the emotional remembrance of it in terms of where you fish it out of your memory. And I think he had a very synaptic moment. And I was very moving to me like, you know, this guy could have been around in 1905 when the Maharajahs were all still alive. And so that was very powerful. I remember it like as clear as day of a reality to reality.

Jason Elkins (01:28:17.253)
That’s very cool.

Jason Elkins (01:28:22.756)
Uh-huh.

Alexander Souri (01:28:32.427)
converging. So yeah, so those horses.

Jason Elkins (01:28:36.294)
totally different way to show up than more the more traditional manners. also somebody that’s ridden, I’ve ridden horses. I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time on the back of horses, not as much as you have. And then also motorcycles are another way of where you you smell things differently.

You feel the air differently, you know, from going from the shade into the sun and just, you just feel so much more connected. Yeah, it’s, it’s just.

Alexander Souri (01:29:03.434)
It’s all about the wisp of air that that yeah, it’s about the wisp of air that curls around your cheeks when you gain speed I love that, you know, either I’m a huge motorcyclist to like like you I Even have a ride that we offer a custom ride if anybody wants to join us on you know Royal Enfield’s will go out there and do the same thing except on on Motorcycles I have to admit though Even though I ride a lot of horse motorcycles

Jason Elkins (01:29:13.21)
Yeah, and you

Yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:29:29.99)
Interesting.

Alexander Souri (01:29:33.45)
I prefer the horses for some reason. Like, if I have the opportunity to travel on horseback, it’s horseback. You know, like I was very shocked that I had that experience. yeah.

Jason Elkins (01:29:44.858)
How many hours?

Jason Elkins (01:29:50.726)
Well, I was going to ask you how many hours do your guests like if somebody’s thinking about this, but they’re like, don’t really know if they can spend a lot of time on the back of a horse. They haven’t done it before. Like let’s, let’s speak to that person that hasn’t been on a horse or is, or has been on a horse and their butt hurt for a long time. you know, how do you have that conversation with them?

Alexander Souri (01:30:09.994)
So let me start with the person that you initially, the type of person you initially mentioned, because when I first started this, so many people were drawn to this project or to Relief Riders, but I remember being on an NPR, National Public Radio program being interviewed, and after that, so many people called us, but they didn’t realize that you had to, they didn’t.

They were so like wanting to do it that they didn’t realize you have to ride a horse for that long and they didn’t know how to ride. They were just compelled and I I was like, like that there’s something there and what we did, which wasn’t done before is that we basically created two ride groups and we told people that because we were doing this for the humanitarian purposes, not really for the horseback riding is a plus.

Jason Elkins (01:30:47.188)
huh.

Alexander Souri (01:31:05.992)
for me and for the experience as a whole, but I needed to make this more accessible. So very early on, I basically created two writing groups, an advanced group, which obviously, you know, loped, cantered and galloped. And then we had a scenic group, which basically walked trot and eventually loped and cantered, but at their own pace.

Jason Elkins (01:31:09.424)
Mm-hmm.

Alexander Souri (01:31:29.404)
and aspirationally with an incredible, my director of logistics leads that group and he’s an incredible instructor. So they’re in great hands. Now, if you want to come and ride with us and you don’t know how to ride, you do have to ride, you do have to get on a horse for 10 to 15 hours. I mean, you just do yourself that favor. So you’re not, it’s not a foreign landscape, but if you do 10 to 15 hours, we’ll take you even if you just know how to walk because that group,

The scenic group is designed for you. You know, we accept whatever skill level you come. You just have to be able to sit and walk on the horse. You know, sit in the saddle and walk around. And if you can do that, you can join us.

Jason Elkins (01:32:16.59)
love that you chose to call it the scenic group and not the slow group. That’s good marketing.

Alexander Souri (01:32:20.522)
I didn’t call it that. One of the Riders called it that. And I was like, we’re going with that. And I have to say, you know, this is my most cowardly act. You will never see me in the scenic group. I’m always leading the advanced group. Terrible. I’m always like, we’re gone. But the scenic group is great. They’re never too far behind us. Really, they’re about, they’re five minutes away from us.

Jason Elkins (01:32:27.302)
you

Jason Elkins (01:32:35.43)
boy. What’s up?

Alexander Souri (01:32:49.802)
Because you can’t ride horses at speed for a long

Jason Elkins (01:32:50.886)
And then the person

And then the person that said, well, I went on a horse once and my butt hurt for a long time. They probably either, they’re probably not calling you or they already know what they’re getting in for. guess. I don’t know. you, does that one come up?

Alexander Souri (01:33:07.86)
Well, mean, the person that rode horses once or twice in their butthead, they’re still in the scenic group category. I think a lot of people that I did find during that that there was a large chunk of people that rode a lot when they were kids, but they had not ridden since. And then this was a perfect opportunity for them to get back into it. And for them, I just say, hey, go out, do like, you know, five, six hours, 10 hours, like get those muscles working again. And then the muscle memory happens.

And then it all works out. Not going to lie, the first day people are a little sore, but there’s so much going on in terms of the culture, the newness, the excitement, the travel, meeting new people, being in a group, figuring everything out that you really forget. You sleep well, let’s put it that way. You don’t ache after the first day.

Too much.

Jason Elkins (01:34:01.149)
Very, cool. And you’ve got all this information on your website because we’re going to have the link obviously to your website. Are they able to look at different itineraries, different options? And then obviously I know you’ve done a good job of making it easy for them to reach out to you. Is there anything about that process you want to share before we go?

Alexander Souri (01:34:07.915)
yes. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:34:18.495)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:34:21.898)
So just a few things and if you go to the main page of the website you’ll have the two rides. You can click on them, they’ll take you to or you can come to our upcoming rides and you can just have more of a highlights experience with that and then that’ll take you to the detailed itinerary page. You should just reach out to me with an email and I will answer it as soon as possible, as soon as I can, which is pretty soon.

The other thing is people should know that we are offering an early bird special for the month of March so that went out on a newsletter about a couple ten days ago so if they book for the November Pushkar fair ride or for the keemstar relief ride in the next I guess now 27 days There’s a there’s a discount. Yeah

Jason Elkins (01:35:10.564)
Well, so Alexander.

Alexander, don’t make anybody feel like they missed out on something because we’re having this conversation early March. But but what I hear you saying is that when those special events come up, those are on your website. So they need to like if they’re listening to this now, they need to click on the link or take a look and see what’s going on. Right? Because they might be listening this six months from now. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:35:18.814)
No, no.

Alexander Souri (01:35:32.402)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.

Jason Elkins (01:35:38.628)
Yeah, yeah. So, but the idea is that you’ve got special things and those are accessible on the website. And then, very, very cool. This is, what’s next for you? You got something big on the horizon, a new type of trip or anything you want to announce?

Alexander Souri (01:35:54.41)
No, we’re going back to the the pushkar fair, which is basically the world’s largest horse and camel fair in November That’s really exciting. It’s it’s a great trip because it’s a very auspicious trip it’s you know, India runs on the lunar calendar and basically it’s a very auspicious time where all the the so first of all all of the camels and horses

horses are brought, camels are basically herded and you’ll see on the ride like hundreds of camels going in a certain direction to the fair. And also you have a lot of like yogis and gurus and sadhus and like the spiritual class journeying to the only Brahma temple in the northern hemisphere of India. So

It’s a very, you know, like it’s wild. You just see like these guys all dressed. I’m like, you can see it. I think I have a film on my website where you have these like sadhus on, on, on all dressed in orange and walking with this elephant and there’s a fellow on, know, and they’re just walking by like a, it’s like surreal. Like you’re just in the middle of the desert on horseback and you just see this like elephant go by with like eight people walking in another direction. And they’re just looking at you like their heads turn and you’re looking at them and that’s not a word of said.

Jason Elkins (01:37:16.667)
this.

Alexander Souri (01:37:18.154)
You’re like, okay. You know, so you see a lot of amazing things on that ride. Yeah, and then the other ride the other ride takes us deep into the Thar Desert and I Really loved the push car ride and it’s a destination ride But the keemstar ride is like for me. It’s it’s it’s kind of I love it It’s it’s just a real adventure through the dunes over long periods of time

Jason Elkins (01:37:19.654)
That is so, cool.

Alexander Souri (01:37:43.238)
There’s a lot of drone footage of that landscape on our website as well and it’s a very intimate like Just portrait of the experience of what we ride through, know, like it’s it’s just and then we end up at this oasis, you know nestled by these immense dunes and It’s just breathtaking. Really quick. I I can’t wait for February

Jason Elkins (01:38:10.726)
That is so cool. Hey, so I don’t know if this is what you want to do, but I’m going to ask you because I think we’ve got some listeners out there that may have strained relationships with their fathers who are still alive.

Are there any last words or anything you’d like to say to that person that’s listening to this? That’s like, you know I haven’t my relationship with my dad a strain because he sent me off somewhere early on and whatever but you’ve had you have the benefit of Having been on the other side of it when he’s gone. So is there anything? Can you give us a closing words of wisdom?

Alexander Souri (01:38:44.936)
You

You know, I think no matter the dissonance, distortion, conflict, problem, no matter any of it, if you can realize that it’s there, you will never regret trying to heal that relationship. If you can understand that it’s sitting in front of you without reacting.

I feel like had I known that, I don’t know if I could have done it because I had to go through what I had to go through. knowing that now, I wish I could have gone back as a young man and just said, Dad, I know I’m upset. I don’t know how I really feel about this, but I understand you made your, I wish I could have just opened up to him and I was very hurt.

I have at times felt like a lesser person for not being able to give him his Relationship that he probably wanted from his son, you know Like I like I want my relationship with my daughter like I I want it, you know Like I want to have that I want and I don’t want to have it controlled. I just want it to organically flourish and grow with her and I I didn’t do that with my father and I find that

Like if you have any chance to.

Alexander Souri (01:40:18.484)
to fight for that in your mind, to put away what has, to tear down the wall that you’ve created because you’re hurt or one is hurt, understandably so, but to make the effort and to do it regardless of how it’s gonna be received. Because the only thing that counts is doing.

Jason Elkins (01:40:40.346)
Yeah, that’s…

Alexander Souri (01:40:43.72)
That’s the most important part. and cause you don’t know how it’s going to be received. It could be received and it could change and alter the course of your relationship with your father or, you know, or mother or whoever. And it could be just met with, you know, or not, but you, you did it. And that’s important.

Jason Elkins (01:40:44.816)
Yep.

Thank you.

Jason Elkins (01:40:58.392)
Or not. Yeah, or not. And you had the opportunity at least to share it. There’s not that I wish I would have said. That’s the thing a lot of people miss out on the opportunity is I wish that I would have said it when I had my chance. They don’t necessarily say I wish that. I don’t know.

Alexander Souri (01:41:08.52)
Yes. Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:41:15.476)
But that’s what I mean.

Yeah, no, I hear you. I think the thing about I didn’t know what I could have how I felt about that moment. That’s the other thing. So hopefully this helps somebody, you know, at that time say, OK, I don’t understand what this meant, what I’m saying. But I mean, I understand what he’s saying, but I don’t know how to get to it. But at least I can hear it. And.

Jason Elkins (01:41:30.597)
Yeah.

Alexander Souri (01:41:43.87)
I’ll try it and it becomes like braille like you’re in a circular room that has no light and you’re just on the floor trying to like figure out where the exit is or you know. But anyway.

Jason Elkins (01:41:55.408)
You know what it is, is it goes back to that I have faith in my ability to figure it out along the way. Just start the process and let it, right? So Alexander, thank you so much. This was a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you sharing so much of your time and stories and you’ve got a fascinating story. I’m so happy we didn’t start. Remember when I said, help me figure out how you got from where you are now and you said, well, my dad died and I went to India.

Alexander Souri (01:42:02.608)
Exactly. Yep, perfect.

Jason Elkins (01:42:24.006)
I’m happy we went much further back. So thank you for opening up so much. I appreciate you and let’s do it again sometime soon. Thanks, Alexander.

Alexander Souri (01:42:27.28)
yeah. Well it all starts from somewhere.

Alexander Souri (01:42:33.034)
Hey Jason, I just want to thank you for providing this opportunity to me to share. It was a beautiful experience for me and I hope your audience likes it. Thank you.

Jason Elkins (01:42:46.414)
You know what? I trust that they do and there’s a little bit of a self-asside of me is that I want to have these conversations and even if they don’t listen. So thank you. You and I had a nice conversation and I trust others are out there listening. All right. Let’s do it again soon. We’ll chat with you soon. Bye, Alexander.

Alexander Souri (01:42:56.808)
Yeah, thank well, I enjoyed our talk, man.

Alexander Souri (01:43:05.608)
Yeah, thank you, Jason.

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