#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
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 nomadic 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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Hidden Lair for securing your AI models, Notion for team collaboration and taking notes, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for managing your business, LMNT for electrolytes and 8Sleep for naps. Choose wisely my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch, go to lexfreedman.com/contact.
And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by HiddenLayer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. I've got a chance to recently visit the GPU cluster that Tesla AI and XAI are building. And well, first of all, I was extremely impressed by the rapid rate of progress. And there's a lot more to be said about that. Maybe I'll have a conversation with Elon soon. But in general, I just want to comment how humbled I was by just the sheer scale of computation that a GPU cluster is carrying. And it's quickly growing. And just being able to see that in person, it makes it very visceral, very real, that these machine learning models have power. And that we as a civilization carry a heavy responsibility to make sure that we use them in a way that doesn't hurt others. And I think security vulnerabilities is the near term way of hurting others. So it's really important to minimize the number of security vulnerabilities, the battle to minimize the number of bugs, the number of attack vectors, the size of the attack vectors. On the machine learning models and on software in general is a worthy battle to fight. And so I'm glad Hidden Lair is fighting that battle, especially in the context of machine learning. Visit hiddenlayer.com/lex to learn more about how Hidden Lair can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. I've used it for a long time for note taking and I think the process of note taking is a science and an art and one I take extremely seriously. Writing is a process that's essential for concretizing your thoughts. Without that, thoughts are a kind of amorphous, ephemeral thing that just kind of shows up without a clear structure and leaves before you have a chance to really internalize it. So the process of writing does just that. It makes the thought more permanent. It gives it structure. And so note taking is a process that I think is essential to thinking. And I use bullet points and nest the bullet points and Notion does that extremely well. And so I use Notion to organize my thoughts. But I think they also do an incredible job of collaboration for larger and larger teams. And they integrate an AI assistant into the whole thing that helps you summarize and doing all the LLM things that you now expect, but they do that in a seamless way. So try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've set one up in a few minutes at lexfridman.com/store to sell a few shirts. There's something about the ease and scale and the efficiency of Shopify that always makes me think about the machinery of capitalism. And also because I've been beginning to read the history of human civilization, as covered by Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I suddenly feel humbled by the scale of it all and how capitalism as an idea, the modern version of it, is a relatively recent one, just a handful of centuries, just with the Industrial Revolution. And we humans have been battling with this idea, whether the means of production should be owned by the state or by the individual. And now everybody's talking like that's such an obvious thing, but it isn't. Every genius idea is obvious in retrospect. And the entire story of humans on Earth is a long chain of experiments. Successful and failed ones. And from each we'll learn. And we always rise. That's the fascinating thing about us humans. We always survive. We always find a way. That's actually one of the central kernels behind my optimism about the future of humanity. But anyway, back to a store. If you want to set one up, sign up for a dollar per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. All lowercase, go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. Actually, back to capitalism, because once again, business is at the core of the capitalist machine. I find that there is various communities now that dedicate themselves to rigorously analyzing the failures of capitalism at the edges. But in those communities, and in general, we don't often celebrate the positive impacts, the positive metrics over time that capitalism has resulted in in society. And I think just the number of people living in poverty decreasing drastically under regimes that enable free markets should serve as an inspiring notion for anyone who wants to build a business, for the very fact that humans build businesses, that we together keep trying. It's the craziest thing. To start a business is the craziest idea, because most likely you're going to fail. It really is the stupidest possible thing, except it is not. Except that dream is the very engine that enables progress. So I'm a big fan of startups, of small businesses, and grateful that humans take the risk. And I'm grateful that humans find a way. Anyway, NetSuite is a good tool to manage businesses. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex.