Love, ALS, and Life After Survivor with Jonathan Penner
So Your Parents Are Old
Vanessa Grigoriadis
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Jonathan Penner’s wife Stacy Title was diagnosed with ALS, their life changed with shocking speed. He joins Vanessa to talk about caregiving, survival, and the hard-won wisdom of staying present even when everything is getting worse.
Connect to resources through Compassionate Care ALS (CCALS). You can also read the Vulture article about Stacy’s fight to make one final movie: Walking Time Bomb.
To connect with the team, find us on Instagram and Youtube, or shoot us an email at soyourparentsareold@gmail.com. We want to hear from you!
Lily Houston Smith is our senior producer; music by Mark McAdam and Amber Devereux.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, welcome back to So Your Parents Are Old. |
| 0:10.0 | This is Lily Houston Smith, the show's producer. |
| 0:13.0 | Something that caretaking can really bring out in a person is perseverance. |
| 0:17.0 | It is so hard, brutal sometimes, dealing with paperwork, the hours on hold with the bank or the pharmacy, all of the emotional stuff. |
| 0:25.4 | And today's guest knows a lot about perseverance. |
| 0:28.7 | In fact, he was a competitor on not one, but three different seasons of Survivor. |
| 0:34.5 | This is Survivor. |
| 0:35.9 | Somebody's going to win a million dollars, and they're going to have to cut the throat of the guy next to them at some point. That's Jonathan Penner. He was on seasons 13, 16, and 25 of Survivor. And he had a deep love of the game. We have 30 more days ahead of us. You can't just think about tomorrow. You have to put yourself in a position that you can be there in 30 days. You have to think about that now. On one of the seasons, |
| 0:58.6 | Entertainment Weekly called Jonathan Penner a fan favorite because of his entertaining confessionals. |
| 1:04.1 | Like when he mutineated in Cook Islands and blew up his old alliance and landed himself on the |
| 1:08.9 | outside. Here's what he told the cameras. I'm the wandering Jew without a tribe. I'm living a mutineer's life, man. I'm on the outside. I've made the game much harder for myself. He was also given to blunt assessments, like in one Cook Island's moment, when he thought he'd successfully grabbed a chicken during the marooning, only for a fellow castaway |
| 1:27.8 | to let it get away. |
| 1:29.1 | I can forgive her, right? |
| 1:30.9 | But I don't have to forgive her because she screwed up my chicken. |
| 1:33.8 | But Jonathan's time on Survivor is not what he and Vanessa are talking about today, though |
| 1:38.0 | he will talk about it a little. |
| 1:39.9 | It's about a much more difficult experience he went through, not on camera. |
| 1:44.6 | Something else that he survived. |
| 1:47.1 | Near the end of 2017, his wife, Stacey Title, was diagnosed with ALS. |
| 1:52.2 | And three years later, the love of his life passed away. |
| 1:55.6 | She was only 56. |
| 1:57.6 | Now, something I love about working on this podcast, even when we get into heavier topics, |
... |
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