For three years, real-life survival expert and explorer Josh Bernstein had what I considered to be the coolest job on TV. I’m an avid historian, so probably a lot of people won’t award the same number of cool points to the job or Bernstein that I do, but I’m okay with that. When I was a kid, and even now, I dreamed of doing what Bernstein got to do on The History Channel’s Digging For The Truth: The Complete Season 1 DVD Set.

As a kid, I grew up on the novels of H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and reprint pulp magazines of Doc Savage. All of those books, at one time or another, featured lost civilizations or historical conundrums that experts have argued over and wondered about for hundreds and thousands of years. Josh Bernstein got to saddle up horses, camels, motorcycles, and jeeps to ramble around the world in an effort to bring light to several of these puzzles. These explorations weren’t without peril, though. Bernstein risks his life through long, high climbs, flash floods, and the real threat of bandits.

I think part of what really makes Digging For the Truth work for me is Bernstein’s obvious enthusiasm for what he’s doing and what he’s working on. Even before The History Channel discovered him, Bernstein had been involved with survivalist schools and was a double major in anthropology and psychology. He worked his way up from a student at Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS) to CEO.

Throughout all of the episodes, Bernstein remains eager and attentive, a teacher to the television audience as well as a student of the people he meets while researching a subject for the show. He is extremely intelligent, educated, and reachable. I always got the impression that if I ever met him, he’d sit down and talk and be just one of the guys. That’s the same quality that makes Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, so appealing.

This first-season DVD collection offers 13 adventures. As always, Bernstein sets up the question he wants to answer, ascertain, or illuminate for his audience. He doesn’t always get answers, but the journey is fun and a lot is learned along the way.

“Who Built Egypt’s Pyramids?” and “Nefertiti: The Mummy Returns” first aired on the same night. I wish they’d broken them up on the DVD set because they seem too similar in some ways. In fact, some of the people Bernstein talks to are the same people. It probably made sense to shoot them at the same time, or close to each other, and maybe sitting through them in a single sitting when the show was new was all right, but they do have a degree of sameness that may led uninitiated viewers into believing the shows are all going to be about the same. That’s a disservice to the DVD collection.