For those of you unfamiliar with Alan Kay, he was the season one winner of ALONE on The History Channel. The premise of the show was dropping ten contestants on northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia with very limited basic equipment, and seeing who could survive the longest without any outside influence. The participants even recorded their own video, so there was absolutely no contact with other humans.
Kay outlasted the other ten and made it a total of 56 days, surviving only on skills he had acquired growing up in Georgia. He lost 60 pounds and gained half a million dollars in the process. As a fan of the show, I grew to become a fan of Alan’s—not only because of his skills, but his approach. His balance and focus were admirable to me—from his knowledge of rich southern philosophy to his ability to quote great works of literature from memory. Alan Kay is a true renaissance man.
