Roland Welker

The following is a conversation with Jordan Jonas, winner of Alone Season 6, a show where the task is to survive alone in the arctic wilderness longer than anyone else. He is widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest competitors on that show. He has a fascinating life story that took him from a farm in Idaho and hoboing on trains across America to traveling with tribes in Siberia. All that helped make him into a world-class explorer, survivor, hunter, wilderness guide, and most importantly, a great human being with a big heart and a big smile. This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation. Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode, I'll start answering some questions and we'll try to articulate my thinking on some top-of-mind topics. So, if that's of interest to you, keep listening after the episode is over. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. Support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas.

You won Alone Season 6, and I think are still considered to be one of, if not the most successful survivor on that show. So let's go back, let's look at the big picture. Can you tell me about the show Alone? How does it work? Yeah. It's a show where they take 10 individuals and each person gets 10 items off of the list. Basic items would be an axe, a saw, a frying pan, some pretty basic stuff. And then, they send them all, drop them off all in the woods with a few cameras. And so, the people are actually alone. There's not a crew or anything, and then you basically live there as long as you can. And so, the person that lasts the longest, once the second place person taps out, they come and get you, and that individual wins. So, it's a pretty legit challenge. They drop you off, helicopter flies out, and you're not going to get your next meal until you make it happen. So...

Can you just speak to the place you were, the Canadian Arctic? It looked cold. Yeah, we were right near the Arctic Circle. I don't know, it was like 60 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. It's a really cool area, really remote. Thousands of little lakes. When you fly over, you're just like, "Man, that's incredible.

Let's step to the early days of Jordan. So, your Instagram handles Hobo Jordo. So, early on in your life you hoboed around the US on freight trains. What's the story behind that? My brother, when he was 17 or so, he just decided to go hitchhiking and he hitchhiked down to Reno from Idaho where we were and ended up loving traveling, but hated being dependent on other people. So, he ended up jumping on a freight train and just did it. Honestly, he pretty much got on a train and traveled the country for the next eight years on trains, lived in the streets and everywhere, but he was sober.

I'm going to take the freight train next time. So, how'd you end up in Siberia? I'll try to keep it a little bit short on the how. But the long story short was I had a brother that's adopted, and when he grew up, he wanted to find his biological mom and just tell her thanks. And so, he did. He was probably 20 or something, he found his biological mom, told her things. Turns out he had a brother that was going to go over to Russia and help build this orphanage.

If you survive and that can be- So, you mentioned you've learned about hunger during these times. When was the hungriest you've gotten that you remember?

Just because you mentioned Gulag Archipelago, I got to go there. You have some suffering in your family history, whether it's the Armenian, Assyrian genocide or the Nazi occupation of France. Maybe, you could tell the story of that, the survival thing, it runs in your blood, it seems. I love history. I find so much richness in knowing what other people went through and find so much perspective in my own place in the world. I have the advantage of in my direct family, my grandparents, they went through the Armenian genocide. They were Assyrians. It was a Christian minority, indigenous people in the Middle East. They lived in Northwestern Iran.

Yeah, I've been listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this. He has a way of articulating things, which are sometimes hard to understand in the moment, but when I read it carefully afterwards, it starts to make more sense. I've heard him talk about religion and God as a base layer, like a metaphorical substrate from which morality of our sense of what is right and wrong comes from, and just our conceptions of what is beautiful in life, all these kinds of higher things that are fuzzy to understand, that their religion helps create this substrate for which we, as a species, as a civilization, can come up with these notions. And without it, you are lost at sea. I guess for him, morality requires that substrate. Like you said, it's kind of fuzzy. So, I've only been able to get clear vision of it when I live it. It's not something you profess or anything like that. It's something that you take seriously and apply in your life. And when you live it, then there's some clarity there, but that it has to be defined. And that's where you come in with the religion and the stories, because if you leave it completely undefined, I don't really know where you go from there. Actually isn't a funny to speak to that. I did mushroom. Have you ever done those before?

Have you been able to accept your own death? I wonder. You wonder when it actually comes, what you're going to think. But I did have my dad to watch, confronted in as positive a manner as you could. And that's a big advantage. And so I think when the time comes that I will be ready, but I think that's easy to say when the time feels far off. It'll be interesting if you got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow and stage four. It'll be heavy.

What do you think it would take to break you, let's say mentally? If you're in a survival situation. I mean I think mentally it would have to be... Well, we talked about that earlier I guess. The thing that I've confronted that I thought I knew was that if I knew I was the last person on earth, I wouldn't do it. But maybe you're right. Maybe I would think I wasn't. But I think I can't imagine. We're so blessed in the time we live, but I can't imagine what it's like to lose your kids, something like that. It was an experience that was so common for humanity for so much of history.

What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on, the future of human civilization? If we talked about gratitude earlier, look at what we have now. That could give you hope. Look at the world we're in. We live in such an amazing time with-

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Jonas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me try a new thing where I try to articulate some things I've been thinking about, whether prompted by one of your questions or just in general. If you'd like to submit a question including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama.