'This Throne Only Has Room for One'

Jeff Zausch is playing for keeps. The veteran Naked and Afraid participant is one of 12 survivalists fighting to take home a $100,000 prize on the Discovery Channel reality series Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing. His aggressive approach to the competition hasn’t won him many fans among his fellow castmates, but he doesn’t care. His goal is to walk away the big winner, not make friends, he said in a recent social media post. 

‘Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing’ switches up the rules of the survival show 

Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing, which premiered May 7, adds an element of competition to the long-running survival series. A dozen people who’ve appeared in past seasons of the show are participating in a multi-phase challenge. In the first phase, six pairs of contestants must last 21 days in the wilderness. They’ll have to work together to find essential survival tools, and if at any point one person decides to tap out for a non-medical reason, the other player is also eliminated. 

In the second phase, the remaining players will compete in a group challenge. Then, in the third phase, whoever is left will compete in a grueling, three-day journey to extraction. The person who comes out on top walks away with the six-figure prize. 

Typically, Naked and Afraid participants rely on cooperation to make it through their time in the wild. That’s held true so far in the first two episodes of Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing, with most players bartering and sharing resources, even though they know they’ll all eventually be competing against each other. Jeff is a notable exception. He’s in it to win it, as he’s made abundantly clear.    

Jeff Zausch from ‘Naked and Afraid’ isn’t worried about making enemies

So far, Jeff’s approach to Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing has been to locate as many of the hidden survival tools as possible. That keeps them out of the hands of the other players and gives him a bargaining chip should he need it. He can’t understand why his fellow cast members aren’t taking a similar approach. 

“Interesting to see the others choosing to team up as one big group instead of treating this like the competition that it is,” he wrote in a May 18 Instagram post. “Can somebody please remind them that this throne only has room for ONE?!”

“I’ll never understand it, but going to just keep my foot on that gas pedal,” he added in a follow-up comment. 

Jeff isn’t joking when he says he’s taking the competition seriously. In episode 2, he and his partner, Stacey Osorio, lost their early advantage when they got lost and had trouble building a deadfall trap. As other players scooped up caches in the new location, a frustrated Jeff considered sabotage when he happened upon another team’s cooking pot.

Will Jeff’s strategy pay off on ‘Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing’?  

So far, it’s too early to tell whether Jeff’s cutthroat strategy will get him over the finish line first. But one thing is clear: He’s already started to alienate the other survivalists. Even his partner Stacey isn’t happy with him. She says she feels held “hostage” by his aggressive style of play. His non-cooperative style could leave him out in the cold when he needs it most, fellow competitor Dan Link says. 

“If one person has a different strategy than the rest of the group, do they deserve to be hated for that fact alone? Nope, not at all. But they better be prepared for others to eventually play by the rules which that person created for themselves,” Link wrote on Facebook. “Would you share with someone who’s tactics involve not sharing with you?”

“Simply put it’s a high-risk high-reward strategy,” he added, though “it could have the potential to pay off!”

In a separate post, Link indicated he’s approaching Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing differently than Jeff. 

“At its core, this is a survival competition. Not just a fight for $100k,” he wrote. Making moves that deliberately weaken other players and potentially put their health at risk isn’t for him, he added. 

“Maybe that is one way to play the game,” he wrote. “But when you are living it in real time it’s a tough sell for me.”

New episodes of Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing air Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on Discovery Channel.

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