In this interview, Jordan Topoleski recounts a life‑changing medical crisis he experienced at age 14: a severe staph infection that ate away his hip bone, leading to four emergency surgeries and an 11‑day hospital stay. The trauma, highlighted by his younger brother’s tearful plea for his survival, forged a personal promise to treat life as "borrowed time" and to live with optimism and purpose. Jordan reflects on how this experience fuels his drive to make a global impact through his work at Arkive. He connects his outlook to philosophical ideas, especially Kant’s notion of the sublime, describing how moments of awe in nature, art, and theater provoke a contemplative stance that reshapes perception. He emphasizes empathy, noting that everyone carries hidden baggage, and discusses how theater and narrative allow an out‑of‑body perspective that deepens self‑understanding.
Chapters
What's the single individual event or moment that is having the biggest impact in the direction and approach that you have today?
In my personal life?
Yeah.
Great question. I think it's this event that actually happened early on in high school for me. I was actually in the marching band in my high school. I played the big bass drum, like the one you wear over your shoulders. You know, back then you're 14 or whatever. And I'd gone off to band camp where we like went to a local university over the summer for a whole week with the band. We marched like 30 miles during the week just to prep for the season. And coming back home, you know, I actually started to get a lot of pain in the side of my leg. And it was this really weird thing where like it started to grow more and more. I was like walking around with like this leftover cane we had in my house. My parents are like, okay, what's the issue with you? And And one day it was just like so painful. I was like, hey, I think we should go to the doctors. And my parents kind of took me in and they're like, oh, we think you have sciatica, which is like a back nerve pain. But they're like, oh, it's really weird. We've never seen this in someone over 40. Remember, I'm like 14 at this time. So I'm like, uh, okay. They're like, what do I do? And they're like, oh, like we'll get you into a specialist next week. Just kind of, you know, keep it going. And it's 2 or 3 days later and I like can't get out of bed. Like I literally like am laying there and like I can't go to the bathroom in my own bed because I can't get up anymore. I'm just yelling in pain. So, my parents picked me back to the hospital and they're like, yo, this isn't sciatica. Something's kind of funky going on here. And, what had basically happened was they took my blood and my white blood cell count, which normally is a sign of how your body's responding to infections, thing called your sed rate. It's normally supposed to be around 20, 25. Mine's at 140. They're like, wow, we don't know exactly what it is, but you have some type of crazy infection. We need to send you to a bigger hospital. I'd grown up in a little bit smaller, smaller of a town.
Wow.
So, they rushed me over there. And basically what had happened, I got a staph infection, which is something that's relatively rare to happen, but they thought I'd basically just tripped in a parking lot at some point a few weeks before and it just got infected. And what had happened, it had gone into my hip bone. And, because the infection had been there for 2 or 3 weeks and they didn't know, it had basically eaten away a lot of my hip bone. And, it was kind of just happening there. So, I had to have— I was in the hospital for 11 days. I had 4 emergency surgeries and just this really interesting moment for a few reasons. One was they told me at the end that 25 years ago, they hadn't invented the technology to actually cure this and actually filter—
Wow.
the bone out of your blood. Just like really crazy things.
25.
25 years ago. So 25 years earlier, had I gotten this, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't be around anymore. Um, just like a really, really, really wild notion to have. Um, second, uh, I think you're just like sitting there kind of experiencing this and this feeling of such uncertainty. And I was on tons of morphine and meds and all this other stuff, but like, remember moments of coming in. I remember this one moment that's probably the most formative, you know, impactful experience during that time is like I woke up from one of my surgeries and like my little brother, who is I guess 11 at the time, was like sitting there crying and he's just like, oh, Jordan, like I hope you don't die. You know, and to like see that as a 14-year-old, to like flirt with death a little bit and just kind of feel that so visually and impact your whole family in and around you and coming out of that is something that you can never look back on. And I think I kind of made it a promise to myself at that moment that's like, I'm living on borrowed time, and I need to recognize every day that I need to be an optimist. I need to go out there and really try and make the most of my life with the incredible amount of drive and incredible amount of passion and think about using my time in a way that's really impactful for the entirety of the world because there's a very real chance that I'm out of randomness, you know, you, you don't make it much, much larger than this. So, uh, you know, I still remember like 11th day, I wheeled out of the hospital in a wheelchair and it was the first time it was like, you know, late August, hot sun hits me in the wind. I just started crying. So I was like, hadn't been outside in 11 days. I'm like, ah, like Rocky at the top of the staircase. I'm like, we did it. You know, we made it, man. And you know, it's, it's, you know, no, no huge lingering effects anymore. I feel extraordinarily blessed. There's just this moment where you're like, Wow, this is really a very interesting life that we all live that can be taken away from you like this, because you just have to treasure it every day and always have a big smile on your face. Wow.
What an amazing story.
Yeah, I'm gonna leave it there.
I don't think it's necessary to comment.
I think you already had enough thinking about all this and It's just one of those things where you look back on it, and I think at the time I really didn't understand the impact that it had on me, but it just kind of knocked this sense of really being contemplative and trying to reflect on things over the years since and say, like, interesting, when you go through these exercises of talking to others, whether it's friends or whether it's a therapist, and trying to dive into, you know, what's really motivating you, I realized, like, everyone kind of has their story of baggage along the way.
Yeah.
an injury they had or, you know, tough relationship with their parents or, you know, a sibling that had passed away. You know, everyone's kind of carrying that stuff with them. And it's just really important to kind of think about that context in interactions with other people.
Yeah, I think you wrote a beautiful blog post on this. So I'm plugging in the sense that you go from— I mean, it's your blog post. You should know how to explain this better. But it's like, you know, you're very— we live in a a life that is like every day, every day, or when we rarely have the privilege of stepping back and realizing, okay, let's go back to zero principle thinking and think about why we're doing this. What are we exactly doing? And all the inner drivers and motivators. You finally can stop living paradoxically and actually You know, think, let it go.
Yeah, and there's this concept that Immanuel Kant talks about a lot. It's like the sublime. And he says like there's kind of this differentiation between beauty and sublime. And sublime is just like one level higher than beauty where it's all-consuming and at the same time all-removing. And kind of what that concept means, and you've probably felt it visually or Maybe you have. I feel this when I'm like, I've gone on a hike in the night and you're like maybe on a cliff or in the mountains or on a hill and you just like look up and you look at space. A lot of times it invokes feelings of this where you're like, wow, I'm realizing I'm just a small being here and like it's all-consuming all around me. But at the same time, it's like all fulfilling in a way too. I'm like, wow, like this is an amazing universe and I'm like the main character in my story, kind of controlling my own conscious pathway through the world and like— It's these experiences that like pause time, that remove you, that take you back, that's like beauty. And I think it's one of the reasons I just love art so much is because it encourages you to just take this reflective stance. It encourages you to just like take a step back and pause and say like, huh, interesting. Like maybe I haven't thought about that, but I feel like I believe it to be true even though I've never heard it before. All these different interesting pieces, but the contemplative nature of it is just Really interesting.
Yeah, it throws you off and then you're forced to just all of a sudden not behave like you do every single day.
I really like statement pieces for that reason sometimes, or it's like, maybe you have to look at it a few times, maybe you have to read the book a few times if it's a piece of literature, but once you understand the meaning behind it, you can never unsee it anymore. It's kind of this red pill a little bit.
No, I love it. You know what does that for me a lot? Theater. Interesting.
Tell me more.
Well, it's the moment where you're sitting there in theater and you're looking at the piece, and all of a sudden you realize that you've been looking at the piece. It's like, oh, what just happened there?
Did I just—
was I still myself? Where did I just go?
Where was I?
And so theater is my form where I really have that. And I appreciate in people the ability to do that in things that maybe other people see mundane.
Yeah, I guess if you think about it, you're literally like stepping out of your own shoes and putting yourself into, into a literal out-of-body experience in a way by being someone else.
