Why ___ Lost Survivor 50 Ep 12

[00:00:00] If you lost Survivor and you're feeling down, David and Jessica will turn it around. They'll break down the rules and we'll show you how. You played yourself and got voted out. This is why blank lost. And this is why blank lost. Baby, this is why blank lost.

[00:00:33] Welcome back to the 10th anniversary year of the Why Blank Lost podcast and 25th anniversary of Why Blank Lost as a Concept. I'm David Bloomberg. And even though I predicted Sari would go this week, it doesn't make me any less sad. Hmm. Same. My co-host, Jessica Lewis. And we have our special returning guest, Sam Phelan, to talk through two really huge players this week. Yay! Welcome back, Sam. Yeah, happy to be here.

[00:01:01] This is like you guys invited me to a funeral without telling me that that's the funeral. Not just Sari, but we lose the great Rick Devins here this week, too. So there's plenty to mourn. I think two players I'm sure we'll get into that just had incredible runs and were so fun to watch. Gameplay aside, everything else aside, two of my favorite characters from season 50 that made it the most memorable. So very sad to see them go. And I'm surprised.

[00:01:29] Another thing that I'm sure we'll talk about in predictions later on, but I'm surprised that we are pushing both of these people out the door before the finale, because I think these were two of the more rootable, you know, forces that we have left in the game that I don't have to look forward to next week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All very valid points and a very sad, why blank last episode to come. So here we are. Yes. But before we get into that, Sam,

[00:01:57] how have you been doing since we talked to your last season? I'm doing good. I'm very busy, but you know, I'm, yeah, I'm loving life a little bit. You know, doing, doing my work in sports and, you know, day to day grind and whatnot, being a cat dad and a bit busy work body, trying to get my workouts in and kind of day to day, but time flies. I like, I looked up, I'm like, wait, we're at the end of season 50. We're already in the spring. So can't complain too much, but I'm good. Yeah.

[00:02:26] It's already time for, you know, the, the cub socks series. So, you know, it's already here. Yeah. We're, we're about to get, here was the crazy thing is that we're going to meet the survivor 51 past in a preview next week, which that was really mind blowing to me for, you know, we were introduced to the concept of season 50 before I even filmed survivor. It was before we went to go play 47 that Jeff kind of teased this idea of all returning players for season 50.

[00:02:56] And I feel like it's kind of been hanging in the back of everybody's mind ever since, whether you were on the Island playing back at home, hoping to receive the phone call in the casting process or in this buildup that we had of, of anticipation for the season. And now here we are, it's about to be over. Like this is crazy, you know? So, and it, you know, it, it's just like the reminder of, you know, every year that goes by the further removed you get from playing,

[00:03:24] the more you're like, wow, that feels like forever ago that we were talking about my season, but all good things, I suppose change is hard, but, but good at the same time, I excited for whatever survivor brings post survivor 50 and seeing what I guess what takeaways they have from the new era that can influence the next iteration of the game. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, according to Jeff, we're not going to have to wait long for returning players again.

[00:03:53] So we'll, we'll see what that brings. Yeah. But also I don't think I've seen any cast leaks about 51, which is just mind boggling to me. Right. Especially there they've done, they're done filming right now. Like I, Oh yeah. They've finished filming and I mean, you would think so. Right. With the live finale and stuff. So, but yeah, I mean, outside of like survivor David, I I'd be remiss not to mention too. Like,

[00:04:20] I think part of the reason time flew for me was because we, I had a great winter rooting for my Chicago bears. Um, I had a great winter and a great spring rooting for, uh, our fighting Illini. And, uh, you know, sometimes I, this is what I ask of my sports teams is get me to the next one. Is like, can you be competitive enough to get me to the net? And that's what I loved about, uh, you know, the last few months in particular is I was like, Hey, I was,

[00:04:50] I was putting all my effort behind the bears. Once the bears were eventually eliminated. I'm like, I have a great Illinois team to, to back here. And they get all the way to the final four. I look up it's MLB opening day. So it's been, uh, you know, kind of nonstop without really dragging my feet, but do you want to shout out the bears in the Illini? Because, um, I know that you have the same rooting interests there. Yes. And then of course there's the shooting, the shooting, the rooting interest we don't share, which is the Cubs.

[00:05:17] Uh, and, uh, so, you know, they, they had their, uh, survivor, their survivor 50 day, which I'd love to show everyone, except the, uh, on the 50 is this yellowish green that my green screen really does not like. So, uh, but yeah, there was, uh, there's of course the, uh, the Cubs survivor 50 night. So there's that, that overlap for me as well. So, uh, I, I would, I would love if survivor would do a survivor night with my favorite ball club.

[00:05:47] I don't think they're going to do it though, because they're front runners. You hear that survivor, you're front runners. You won't go and hang out with the white socks at rate field. Do I blame you? No, we don't want to go hang out with the white socks at rate field, but I'd like you to think about it. Maybe think about, think about, think about thinking about releasing a white sock survivor hat. Cause I would buy it. I might be the only one, but I would buy it. Well, listen, I'm going to jump in here. I'm not going to, I'm not going to talk about sports for a minute,

[00:06:16] but talking about weird connections with companies and survivor. I got a gift the other day. And look at this, look at this box. Whoa. Dogfish head with survivor 50, right? Isn't that fabulous? I got this lovely little buff and I got this lovely little glass. It's a survivor 50 glass with dogfish on the back. And I'm not even a beer drinker. However, coconut etiquette, everyone.

[00:06:46] Ooh, you lost me at coconut. Oh, it says hazy. I don't know it. Well, with coconut and passion fruit. So there you are, but I'm not a beer drinker. However, it is an IPA. So, you know, maybe, maybe it tastes delicious. I don't know. I'm curious enough to try it for sure. I was going to say, they may lose you with just about any fruit from what we saw, Sam. That's a very fair point. That is a very fair point. Let me tell you what though, coconut,

[00:07:14] like Jessica, I'm sure you can relate to this a little bit, but by day four, I mean, I think my body was like throwing up, rejecting coconut anytime I put it in my mouth. Not me at all. I hated it so much. I had never really had a chakra, right? But like, it was okay. But I think, I think the big thing that for me was like the variance in good coconut to bad coconut because you wouldn't really know until you started like drinking it or eating it or whatever, if it was like, it tastes good or tastes bad.

[00:07:43] So you get some bad ones in there. And I think by day four, it was just like, we need another flavor. So it was just rejecting from my body as soon as I would try any coconut. So even now it's hard. My wife and I went to Jamaica about six weeks or so ago. We went on a trip to Jamaica and everything is coconut something in Jamaica. And I was like, all right, we're going to have to get over this real quick because, you know, it's open bar at the resort, but it's all coconut rum. So.

[00:08:13] Oh, that's hysterical. Yeah. I will say I was not a coconut fan until I went and played on Survivor. And then all of a sudden, all I was eating was coconut. And I was like, wow, this is actually really delicious. So now I like coconut, but I like fresh coconut. Like I'm not interested in like the candies that have coconut in it. Like I want an actual coconut cut up and just eat it. And I think that's delicious. So I was in the opposite camp where I all of a sudden I was very much looking forward to coconut while I was on the island and then off of the island, just fresh coconut.

[00:08:43] So, yeah, I probably enjoy all of the coconut flavored things in Jamaica. The trick for any future Survivor players out there is to cook your coconut. You just put it in the pot and just just char it up and it might look burned and it is a little bit burned, but it starts to taste a little bit, in my opinion, like mushrooms. It's very good. It's mushroomy kind of. People have said it's kind of popcorn a little bit. Yeah, coconut popcorn. That's what we called it. It was so good.

[00:09:12] A little like shards of coconut and just dump them in the pot and cook them and then it becomes much better. Palatable, I would say. It's a different flavor. That's a different flavor. Yes. Should you lick the coconut first? Stick your tongue into the coconut first and then just say, you're going to cook it anyway. Probably not. That was horrifying. That was horrifying. Yeah, it was a tough watch. Also, who wants to eat dry rice? Like, I mean, just dry rice.

[00:09:43] I've tried it before with like dry pasta, you know, like relatable where I was kind of like, I don't know, I'll just like pop a couple of it. It's awful. Why would you do that? It's got to get stuck in your teeth. Yeah. Just the poor guy was so hungry. And the thing is, he was talking about how hungry he was and I didn't eat anything at the auction and this and that. There was a secret scene the day before of him going to both camps and feasting on their rice

[00:10:11] during the split tribal stuff. So that he ate so much that he was full. Now, listen, I want to comment generally about rice real quick. Can we take, because one thing that I will say that I cannot wait to hear from some of these old school players that have played on season 50 have played in the no rice era. And obviously they've gotten rice recently. We've kind of heard some behind the scenes of like,

[00:10:39] hey, is Rizzo wasting away so much so that they need to just like give them a bunch of rice? I'd be curious what the difficulty level is compared to like, hey, old school with rice. And I mean, like sometimes I throw on these real old school seasons and it's like they've got a fruit basket and like, you know, stuff like this to start the game. It's so much different than what you have of like having nothing to start the game. Now, I would love to hear some contrasting of, you know, because just from my experience,

[00:11:08] it did so much for day to day life, having just like that leaf full of rice every day in the post merge versus like early on when it's eight days, maybe of not eating anything. So want to hear more about that. But if there is a reason to give people rice, I think you've seen it play out a little bit on season 50 because we have now had not one, but two and maybe even three disputes and spats because of rice at camp.

[00:11:37] And this is the good stuff that I think a lot of people miss about old school survivor and about, you know, I hear the critique all the time, right? We don't see enough of the people surviving on the island. And one of those elements is, do you agree to make this much rice or that much rice? And do you agree to let the pot boil or lick the rice while it's dry? And people just kind of do things in these contexts that are annoying and grating to people.

[00:12:07] And so I want to see more of that. And, you know, we don't get this scene with Jonathan. We don't get Emily and Sari bickering about the rice earlier in the season if we don't have rice on the beach. Yeah. Listen, we had a whole food issue at the when we got to the merge and they gave us like the merge feast, basically, which was a whole bunch of food in in like a container of sorts. And somebody stole a bunch of food and buried it. And then that turned into

[00:12:37] the whole thing. Yes. I mean, so like all of a sudden everyone was like, where did all the food go? And it was in a jar buried by Taylor. So, yes, I completely agree that those moments are really incredible moments because you're already in each other's space 24-7. Every little thing that people are doing around you can set you off. You can be annoyed. You're dealing with everybody's personalities and then you're hungry. And then on top of it, you have these food issues that are rising

[00:13:06] while you are hungry and it makes it that much worse. And there were a lot of instances in my season where like food became an issue and it was something that set people off. And we've seen it time and time again. I don't remember her name, but one of the players in a much older season, she threw all the rice in the fire. Do you remember this too? Like she's like, yeah, yes. Yeah. And so alumni of the University of Illinois. So like these things happen. So I, I very much think that it's, it's a great added component to the game

[00:13:35] because you do have these spats, but you also allow players the ability to actually, I think, play better because they're not starving and they're able to put more into the challenges and they're able to actually like focus a little bit better. So there's something to be said also giving them sustenance for that reason as well. Yeah, that's, that's the key for me. I mean, everything you, you said is absolutely right, Sam, but the key for me is always, if you want them to play the game, you need to give them

[00:14:04] a little bit of sustenance so they can play the game. So they're not just sitting around because they have zero energy, zero ability to process everything. And so let me add another thing here too, because as you were speaking there, Jessica, I started to think like what I would do in your shoes on Millennials versus Gen X when Taylor is hiding food and burying it in the sand. And what I think is really interesting about this is the fact that it

[00:14:33] kind of like fuels a vote, you know, like it gives you a reason to vote Taylor off. Yeah. But then the other side of that is it gives you a reason to not vote Taylor off. And one thing that I think is fascinating that doesn't always translate through the screen for a viewer is when we talk about the social game of Survivor and there are things that you can do on the, there is just general island aura I think that players have

[00:15:03] of are you respected? Are you, are you somebody that just kind of has this aura of winner about you? And if the answer to that is no, as much as you might be well-liked or you might even be able to play a good game, there's just kind of something about you that doesn't allow people to vote for you at the end and it can come down to things like how you behave around camp. Do you help build the shelter? Do you do crazy things? I remember on season 47 there were little things like we had,

[00:15:32] we had gotten all of these eggs from our, we had exchanged the chickens for eggs and we had all of these eggs and then we were like preparing actually this is before we exchanged the chickens rather that the chickens had only laid like two or three eggs but we had two or three eggs so we were going to make eggs and as we're getting ready to go cook them Andy like dropped the pot and it broke all three eggs into the sand and so like I thought it was hilarious I was just sitting there laughing but like you could see Annika

[00:16:02] like stormed off down to the beach angry she's going to go like talk to Rachel and be like you won't believe what Andy just did so I'm sitting in the hammock like laughing my ass off and just like you know like I can't believe that this is reality right now but it's like it's things like that can kind of compound to be like even if I like you even if you play a great game there were just like things that I'm like this is unserious and because it's unserious I can't vote for you at the end so now Taylor is burying food

[00:16:31] hey we might all like Taylor Taylor could get all the way to the end and win a bunch of challenges whatever but you're doing something now that is actively making everybody else upset where we know you can't win so now maybe is there a reason to be like hey come to the end with me Taylor you know it adds a fun variable of like gameplay of do you take the vote that gets you to the next round do you take a vote that keeps you safe or maybe helps your alliance build numbers do you try to like weaponize the guy that's on the bottom and that you know

[00:17:00] is like looking like a zero vote finalist it's a fun variable that adding things around camp things like food things like comforts things like shelter all of those things become part of the overall strategic game in a way that they don't as David said when we're all just laying around being like this sucks huh you know and so those are the things that I think people often miss when they talk about 39 days and watching the survival aspects of the show yeah and I do think that

[00:17:30] oh I'm sorry I used to talk about you know in the in our predictions later yes not quite to that extent but yeah but yeah there is something to be said about that third seat and how you're going to choose to try to fill it and who you're sitting yeah and I think that was a big discussion that we did see this episode and those were conversations that people were having not necessarily for all of those reasons but yeah I mean I really do think that there's a lot to be said about who do you decide to sit there with

[00:18:00] and is it someone that you're doing it because you know no one's going to vote for them and is that person a threat right like maybe not at this stage at the final five but I think we see now let us transition to the episode here but like I think we see with Tiffany at basically both tribal councils here the idea of hey Rizzo has an idol and he could be somebody that everybody wants to take to the final three if you're someone like Tiffany who's trying to figure out what your path is to just get there you're confident

[00:18:29] that you can win if you can just get there that person who's got their ticket punched in your eyes that person is a threat to you now and needs to go even if you feel like you can beat them if everybody's planning on having this person next to them at the end that's one less spot that there is for you at the end of the game absolutely yeah yeah like I said we'll talk about some of that at the end after we talk about Sari and Rick Devins now I do want to say the big twist

[00:18:59] in this episode was so weird because follow me here they had a challenge they strategized and then the whole group went to tribal council and just voted someone out and then they did it again what is that all about what is this sorcery it's like survivor 101 now I don't disagree but if I'm going to play devil's advocate these were probably the two most boring votes of the season where we had two unanimous votes so

[00:19:29] yeah yeah but you know what I'd much prefer that sometimes than the last thing we talked about with you know Jonathan and getting devoted to separate tribals and all of that I think was insanity so I'm okay with this being boring good said no I didn't I didn't I didn't mind that one the two that I that one I think was neutral I'll say I love love the double duo twist I think that's a fantastic twist oh we did not like that one

[00:19:58] going forward I won't mind it as much because people will know about it although they obviously won't know about it if it pops up on 51 but right going forward people will know if they come in and say pair up people are going to be like okay we have to strategize why we're pairing up kind of like in squid game you know the very first squid game the challenge people didn't necessarily know although they maybe should have

[00:20:28] known should have watched squid game yeah yeah you know that oh you don't want to pair up you know mom and son or boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever but by the second season of it people were like hold up there let's figure out do we want to be together do we want to be a part that sort of thing yeah so going forward as long as people know I'm okay with it it was the main the main fact that we talked about this so I don't want to go too much into it but the main part was that they didn't know why they were

[00:20:58] pairing up which puts them at a disadvantage strategically and I agree with that I will say though like that does exist for every twist that has ever been added to the game all the way down to like hey a hidden immunity idol right like there was a there was a time and place where people didn't really know what a hidden immunity idol was like how it was like supposed to be played they messed around with it having to be played before the votes were cast for a little bit you know like it took some time to kind of find its footing yeah and you know sometimes it

[00:21:27] takes hey you got to get it out there so that now the existence of this twist or advantage can impact the game but I think like the general format of it moving forward as you said David I think that it'll be really fun and good because I do like the extra layer of strategy that it adds to you know like who you target who you pair up with and you know it's an it's a simple thing that you know what we always say is let the players play and this is an example of like it isn't the

[00:21:57] control of the players it is on the players it just gives them another like thing that they have to account for without meddling a little bit too much in the decisions and the results yeah so this week as a result of the non twist we will look of course at the games of both Devins and Sari to see what they did right and what went wrong by comparing their gameplay to a set of guiding rules for winning I originally wrote way

[00:22:26] back after season one and have been updating ever since we'll use all the non-spoiler information available to us from what we see on TV interviews social media and secret scenes and the newest published version of the rules can be found by going to robhazwebsite.com slash yxlossfeed and clicking on the link bubble for of course the survivor rules but before we get to the rules we always have some other things to discuss and I say always

[00:22:55] and we do have a little bit this week but less than usual it's very limited this week because as I just mentioned there thankfully weren't any twists to talk about and most of the action was indeed leading up to the Devins and Sari votes since we got two full cycles in one episode. Under normal circumstances we would probably talk about what we see in the edit and you know who will win who will make it to final three but with the finale being next week

[00:23:25] that'll go into our predictions like I mentioned earlier so instead of using that here although we've already you know I'm sure people are like wow you've spent a lot of time already yeah you know it was fun time though and we will do all that discussion of the edit and how we think things are going after our conclusions and social media information when we normally do our predictions so make sure you you know stay tuned don't change the channel or

[00:23:54] anything after all of that and you can hear what we have to say because it's you know with the predictions it tends to be for the finale a bit longer than usual with that said I can't disappoint people we do of course have our regular segment for the season the CBS mornings crew is wrong about blank and now you may have noticed that I just enunciated that a little bit better because my son told me I need to be careful because apparently all season

[00:24:23] the way I've been saying it I've kind of merged mornings and crew and it sounded like I'm saying the CBS morning screw which would be funny if I were purposely calling them like morning screw-ups but you know so so I got to enunciate a little bit better there but what did the clueless CBS mornings hosts do

[00:24:51] wrong this week well Gail King wasn't there so it was somewhat better but they still made their usual clueless mistakes one of the co-hosts whose name I looked up earlier in the season but have since forgotten and don't care enough to look up again still can't pronounce Ceri's name he calls her Suri like rhymes with curry even right to her face he's like Suri what do you think about

[00:25:21] this Suri about that stop it learn her name for God's sake and he thinks Devon's is still doing local news which he's not now I understand asking him to do a shtick and yes Rick did it on the season itself and it's still fun don't get me wrong but the co-host clearly had no idea that that was old news well but they didn't ask your favorite

[00:25:50] question I know I I'm sitting there I'm watching waiting how are they going to work in the question we were all expecting the question that annoys me every single time and they didn't ask it no one said so who do you think will be the last person standing who do you think will win the segment ended I almost fell off my couch watching it maybe they've been listening

[00:26:21] I honestly so earlier in the season I started to surmise that maybe it was someone in management stupidly making them ask that question but the fact that they didn't when Gail wasn't there takes me back to my original idea that it's been all Gail being completely clueless all along and without her the others didn't want to jump in on that nonsense maybe that's what it was then it was all Gail's fault I just like somebody should have put a stop

[00:26:50] to that question like that they do monitor all of these things they've got somebody there in person listening to all of it after the first one you feel like they're like hey can we cut that from the from the itinerary there right I don't know I guess they I guess they like it as long as the people are well prepared to answer it you know and not caught off guard I can imagine that if you're a jury member that it would catch you off guard a little bit or maybe they feel like it's okay because the the winner was not

[00:27:20] revealed at final final tribal council like it has been for the new era so we votes are not read yet yeah Jessica I'm sure you had no idea who was going to win your season all the way up until the the live finale that's where you found out for the first time where everybody else voted we had no idea we had no idea what was going to happen yeah yeah I mean that was a sad that was a sad night at ponderosa for a couple of people and a very fun night at

[00:27:50] ponderosa for one particular individual so yeah no you didn't know yeah I think the first couple of people were probably taken off guard and stammered through it if if we look back at the history of it one particular person who is known to be a horrible liar did a horrible job lying like literally looking at the ground and doing all of her tells that we saw on the show and other people yes they redid the question they learned

[00:28:18] to not you know answer the question that was actually asked of them but again if you keep asking the same questions and no one is actually answering that question change it so yeah yeah well a question we will not have to deal with probably ever again because I doubt that I doubt that for survivor 51 they'll be back on CBS mornings so so you know we we had our run

[00:28:46] and it's over now but besides that I did want to double check do either of you have anything or anyone else you want to discuss before we get to the rules I'm ready I don't yeah let's do this all right well there are we're of course other things going on I'll post you know some of it to my TikTok and YouTube at David Bloomberg's at David Bloomberg TV and before we get to how Rick and

[00:29:13] Suri did or Suri we we want to mention that the rules we're about to discuss come in a shorter and much more colorful version yeah as a poster yes they didn't go to Rob has a website dot com slash YX lost feed scroll down click on the link and order it and in addition you can get the poster on a t-shirt and you can get the checklist on a t-shirt so

[00:29:42] again go to Rob has a website dot com slash YX lost feed for all of your Y blank lost merch needs yes well Rick Devins and Suri were two of the biggest players this season but in different ways Devins was out in front in everyone's faces making waves playing with exuberance Suri was behind the scenes mastermind

[00:30:12] aligned with everyone and seemingly never in any danger till now how did they end up going out back to back why did the others decide to vote each of them out at this moment in the game at RHAP we know Survivor and we know why Rick and Suri lost now the first and most important rule is of course to scheme and plot obviously both Devins and Suri know how key all of this is in

[00:30:41] Survivor though as I just mentioned they went about it in very different ways Devins is obviously more open and freewheeling in his dealings not in a sense that he would make and break alliances willy-nilly because actually he was quite the opposite played in a way that should have made people like Joe proud due to the amount of loyalty he showed to his allies but he had the understanding that Survivor is a game and sometimes you

[00:31:09] have to lie and not tell people things and also in the way that he was willing to put it all out on the table not being afraid to make a move when he believed it was necessary as he said at times when there was chaos he could often flourish yeah I do think that something to be said about Devins it's so impressive is his ability to like find a balance that I

[00:31:38] think so many players have a difficulty finding where you can play that loyalty game but at the same time you can kind of wreak havoc for people around you and and it's it's a really impressive maneuvering and he actually explained it very well at one of the tribal councils where he was like no look at I was willing to put Rizzo's name out there and I and I wanted to vote this person out like he's he's open and honest like this is what I'm doing but I'm not going to vote Emily on a revote because

[00:32:06] that's how loyal I am and and he's it was just a very interesting dynamic to see because I do think that people like Joe struggle with that idea of being loyal and what that means whereas someone like Rick is actually like putting it out and for everyone to see like no I actually am really loyal and I'm not just saying that I am completely I'm an open book like you know exactly what I'm doing because I'm I'm telling you what my game is and I'm not making anyone question where my loyalties lie but I'm also willing to work

[00:32:36] with you so it's it's a really incredible thing that he was able to do that I just don't feel like very many players are able to pull it off that way yeah Rick to me I don't know if Rick plays very well from the top but I think the best thing about Rick Devins is that he's one of the best players at playing from the bottom in Survivor I just think that's where he's meant to be that's where he shines he is this this showman and there is elements of him and his personality that just kind of

[00:33:06] come out in a really lovable way when his back is against the wall he adopted a strategy this season that I used a little bit on my season that I feel like everybody else should which is what you mentioned Jessica that honesty can be a weapon and when you are on the bottom being able to present everybody else in the game with this idea that I am so honest I'm telling you I'm coming after Rizzo but guess what Stephanie's not telling you what she's doing Jonathan's not telling you what he's doing I'm airing

[00:33:35] everything out right if you're another player in the game there is this sense of yeah I'm scared of Rick but I also like I can box Rick in and know what he's doing I know exactly what's coming from him where some of these other players are a little bit more shaky he does a really good job of doing that it's the Game of Thrones quote chaos is a ladder and when you're on the bottom that ladder is great for you to climb up some rungs and what he did in this season was find himself at the bottom

[00:34:04] quite a few times and he used chaos as a ladder to push himself to this final seven very similar as I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit later on because I have a lot of more in-depth thoughts on this very similar to his Edge of Extinction game that just was like a little bit more short-lived here didn't have quite the same run but there's a lot of similarities and so this is just who Rick Evans is he's an awesome character I can't imagine season 50

[00:34:32] without him I enjoyed the emotion emotional vulnerability that we saw from him throughout the season especially in this week's episode there was something about that comment about looking at the stars that I really got me emotional and gets me emotional even thinking about it because I felt like I was in his stool and I felt like I was I was right there with him that I thought was really cool to watch play out so I loved Rick I will

[00:35:00] always love Rick you could put Rick on every season of the show in my opinion and I would I would have a great time yeah so yeah it was it was all the things you guys mentioned yeah and you both brought up that Mr. Beast tribal council where he completely blew up Jonathan's and the other woman's spots even before he flipped the coin and was safe yeah we discussed that at the time but he said he knew he was at risk and they foolishly gave him a ton of information that he he used to explode

[00:35:30] those spots and he told Mike Bloom that this was the move he was proudest of in the season noting nothing personal came out of my mouth I didn't say oh so-and-so is a bad person or anything it was strictly gameplay they told me too much information now I'm sharing with you and they were completely flummoxed they were just they were just shaking their heads being caught in lies that were so obvious it caused Tiffany to point out it didn't

[00:35:59] make sense for the other woman to tell the person she's trying to vote out that she had an advantage and Rick said in interviews that when he saw Tiffany and Sarit jumping into the discussion like that he knew he was in a good spot yes and this again it's such an incredible reaction because I do think that there's this idea or this construct where I have to keep talking because I've started this thing I've I've sent this people in this space and I and I want to keep the momentum

[00:36:27] going and he was like nope I did exactly what I needed to do I just I sprinkled some some things in into the world here and now they're all reacting to it and it was it he just has such a great ability to read a room and responding kind which is again it's an incredible thing for a survivor player to have that ability because you are not fed your your brain is not working at the the speed it normally works at when you're out there and you're realizing like your

[00:36:56] thoughts are not coming as quickly as they should but he was still able to read that space and the way that he did and respond the way that he did and he was doing that throughout the whole season he always was reacting to what was happening around him in an appropriate way for his own game not necessarily for other people's games which made it so lovely and I really you know I really appreciated that about his gameplay so much one thing Rick is awesome at is I think of the people on this cast he's one

[00:37:26] of the more aware contestants about his perception about how the other players view him in the game I think that that's an underrated skill especially on a returning season is understanding what how big of a threat are you in the eyes of the other returning players you know everybody's a returning player everybody thinks that they're you know God's gift to survivor and whatnot but like actually accurately putting yourself in that totem pole and knowing how you're perceived is really important and I think he does that really

[00:37:55] well because we see him kind of weaponize that throughout the season this idea that I'm Rick I'm Mr. Chaos I'm I'm you know I'm this big showman that's always going for the biggest baddest move possible that is clearly how other people think of him but if you're Rick and you know that right you can try things like he does with Emily you cannot be afraid to like blow up a spot when you feel like the heat is on you you know I've got nothing to lose of course I'm gonna flip the

[00:38:24] Mr. Beast coin and so there there is just like a sense that Rick understands how everybody else views him but because you know Rick is chaotic and Rick is messy which are not necessarily bad qualities by the way that he can use that chaos and that messiness to air out other people's laundry and be an asset for other folks in the game and so I really enjoy watching that because so often we see people

[00:38:52] who don't accurately have a perception of like hey am I a jury threat am I not a jury threat like it's very like disillusioned as far as how people actually view them and I don't think that's the case at all with Rick and it's fun to watch somebody turn this reputation that he has into part of his game strategy yeah yeah now there was one person that it turned out he did not necessarily have a great read on going back in time a bit to his

[00:39:19] original tribe we know he had some issues with that one person who was not so happy about the way he played and it started with an admitted uh bad unnecessary lie that devins told joe but that could have been it get past it and move on not with joe though uh as we saw sari sarcastically say to devins at the time uh let me see I don't think that's my line on

[00:39:48] survivor yeah so uh sometimes it pops in and it plays perfectly and sometimes not so much uh but yes you know that was the uh that was the famous uh sari quote there and you know joe doesn't like that concept which something i'm sure we'll be discussing uh when he loses in the final three next week but uh it it uh it turned into a huge

[00:40:16] blow up with devins saying at the time i am over it with him as a game player you're a survivor player bro we're allowed to lie and backstab what are you doing this is like going on to the football field and being like i'm a pacifist sorry i don't touch people good luck for your team trying to play with you and we're his damn team now they eventually hugged it out and devins thought all was okay but we've been seeing all season

[00:40:44] long from joe's perspective that it most definitely was not uh that's a different issue but it does kind of play into what you said he he had a good read i mean he still knew joe didn't want him around so that that part was a good read he just didn't know joe had wanted him gone every moment of every day uh you know from that point forward and they they seem to be fine now according to rick so that's good uh but

[00:41:11] you know just looking at rick's overall strategic game i thought his you know his strategizing was good and just the biggest issue was that he christian and emily got outplayed by the other person we're discussing today i so i'm gonna not to rehash this too much because it was obviously like episode two or whatever that we saw this i am on joe's side of this argument

[00:41:39] i am and i look i love rick devins i could say you know i in case we it wasn't clear i'm a huge huge huge rick devins guy um but i do like look i understand hey it's joe is a frustrating variable to play the game with is that how i would play the game no do i think it's good for the show hell yeah you know like i i think i think people like joe make survivor great because i i think a

[00:42:05] a varying moral compass is we need more morality needs to be on a spectrum with our cast we need people who maybe are disillusioned in their own morality and live on 500 hypocrite hill or whatever seri said hypocrisy hill i think that's great tv but i will say yeah you're allowed to lie in survivor absolutely if you get caught in a lie though i don't think it's outrageous that

[00:42:32] that person does not trust you and wants you out of the game moving forward and takes that personally and what i i thought it was a bit odd that like joe catches rick in a lie joe is like what the hell bro i kind of want you out i don't trust you now and then everybody's kind of freaking out over like oh joe's not okay with lying it's like well you lied to joe you had this idea that like well you're he's we're his team on the football field and he doesn't want to hit people it's like

[00:43:00] actually it's like you tackled your own teammate and your teammate was like what are you doing dog like i don't know why you would do that and that's kind of what happened here so like if somebody lies to you you should not trust them you should want them out that being said lying is also part of the game i think both those things are true i didn't like how this spiraled throughout the season into this kind of like actually you should lie lying is amazing and then like this other cohort of people who said if you lie you're a bad person

[00:43:30] and should like be out of the game which is obviously so hypocritical of everybody on this beach i didn't like how it kind of turned into this bigger picture argument it can exist in a vacuum of like bad move by devins got caught not great joe wants him out that's fine but also i think rick did the good thing of like trying to repair the relationship and keep working with moving forward so we don't have to have an in-depth discussion about that but that's a thought that i needed to get off because

[00:43:57] i feel like i i haven't liked how that's been like treated by the other players in the game of like how dare you lie it's any one of you you catch somebody else lying to you in the game and like again that's my guy we saw rick devins on edge of extinction calling out ron and julie being like you guys are liars and snakes you guys just wanted me to go home you were lying to me all day it's like yeah when people lie to you you don't trust them and you want them out

[00:44:23] that's fair and that was a fair reaction from joe at the time even if he is you know being a little bit of a baby about it throughout the rest of the season and like needs to get over it right because that is another part of survivor is hey you're mad at devins for a round four days later you got to be able to like let bygones be bygones and try to go on with the number in the game yeah let alone two weeks later right but for sure also i do want to say i from everything we heard in interviews

[00:44:52] there was more to that blow up than we saw and that is what that's where i feel unqualified to speak on it because i'm like yeah you guys know better than than i do for sure yeah because like every player there was a quote from almost every player in that episode against joe yeah and then people like savannah come off the show and in interviews say things like everyone on the beach was saying this about joe so

[00:45:20] i i think that based on just what we saw i totally understand what you're saying and yeah i think that there was i think he blew it up a lot more than we saw and you know even going into the going into recent episodes it wasn't just i'm upset he lied to me it's i i couldn't figure out why i'm not having fun oh it's because of rick oh yeah well and there's this like general idea too like it's a

[00:45:50] fast rick is one of these people um i love that he kind of pointed out in his exit press rick has this i don't know like there's just this stereotype of rick as being a chaotic messy distrustful like player and when you actually look at the resume rick and david on edge of extinction they are locked in rider guys yeah he's like this is my guy this is the only guy i know that i can trust and he he's willing to go

[00:46:19] down and be the only vote with david when they're like the targets of everybody else in the game then he's on an island by himself and he's looking for anywhere anybody that'll trust him he does that this season with emily like it's just like hey it's us two and then he's on an island again but rick is a very loyal player right and it's like just because he's deceptive and this is like obviously the nuance that the honor integrity folk don't see or can't justify in their own brains is like just because he's deceptive to the other

[00:46:49] alliance yes doesn't doesn't mean he's not a good ally to have rick is an ally you absolutely want to have he's right 100 yeah he's creative he's a shield he's loyal he's everything you could possibly want in an ally but there's a lot of people that get scared off by the theatrics and um and can't get over that but you know we see this throughout survivor history there's actually quite a few people um i know it's a completely separate conversation we don't need

[00:47:16] to give this guy any airtime but like uh gabe from my season has a theory that russell hance is actually one of the most loyal players the show has ever seen you just don't think of it because you think he's this he is this nasty villain to everybody else but if you look at him with his foa foa folks you know he takes him all the way to the end he locks in with parvati on day one and takes her like all the way to the end he doesn't turn against his alliance so sometimes there are players

[00:47:43] that like you view as like oh that's messy and chaos but if you really look at the root of who they're riding with they're very loyal yeah yeah we could get into a huge discussion about that but we won't uh so uh yeah and i will have more to say about some other of those more nuanced views i don't remember where i'm saying it but i have it in here somewhere yeah one more thing sorry just about this

[00:48:10] because this came to mind i meant to mention it earlier i mentioned how he plays from the bottom yeah um it is very much this as well this idea that on two seasons now we have seen rick be like hey here's my people and i know who i'm against um and i've been in that spot on my season where i was like hey it's me and genevieve against seven other people it's us against the world kind of a thing and you're very much aware of where the dynamics lie but why i think we love rick devins why i think

[00:48:38] rick devins is awesome tv and it's what he says out there is that he's just he's fun he's positive the game becomes so much more fun to play when you're very when the lines are very clear to you when there's no more of this like i'm having to manage every have my finger in every single pot and manage relationships and not know where i can trust and look over my shoulder like when you kind of know here's who's with me here's who's against me how can i make waves in this like push and pull

[00:49:07] back and forth i think the game becomes a lot simpler and it becomes so much more fun and i think that's why we see rick and we're just like this guy's so fun because he you know he doesn't have to worry about whether or not he's actually with jonathan or not like he knows all right jonathan's on the other side now is there something that i can do to fix that and it it leads to this very like joyful jovial child-like spirit that he brings to the island uh that's really fun to watch

[00:49:35] yeah all right well we can move on to seri uh and as i uh said a little while ago she outplayed the seal of four alliance or at least three of the seal of four alliance uh by by leading them on until she decided not to do so anymore which mostly coincided with christian bringing up ozzy's name but devins

[00:49:59] said in interviews that she had clearly made her decision earlier and we basically saw that when she told us ozzy is a number one alliance christian is a number three and that's really the key she had this huge web of alliances going emily told rob that after the merge quote everybody was thinking that they were working with seri steven described her on know-it-alls as effortlessly dominant took more effort to say

[00:50:29] that word than it did to uh going back to her original tribe savannah noted to rob how quickly she was in with devins christian and emily not to mention ozzy of course so quote she wasn't going anywhere and savannah also told dalton ross she is truly a social and strategic queen she truly embodies what it means to be an incredible social player and an incredible gamer and strategist from my position it looked very much

[00:50:55] like christian was pulling the levers and calling the shots but even more powerful than christian where he has his two other close allies you have seri who has a way of just getting to people getting people to do exactly what she wants and then seri has control of ozzy christian devins and emily that's one person seri low-key has the majority in the tribe just because she's that freaking good

[00:51:23] yeah she really is that freaking good and it's scary because when you really look at who seri is she is the type of individual and i sam you're actually talking about this earlier who realizes what her qualities are the perception of herself she totally gets it she knows i'm not good at challenges she knows i'm not good at finding idols she knows the things that she is not going to excel at but she knows what she is good at and that's her ability to form relationships and have social

[00:51:53] capital and have the ability to communicate with individuals in a way that makes them feel heard and makes them feel important to her and it's that it's kind of like rick is so good at the rick things she is so good at the seri things and the fact that she is able to make every person that she has a conversation with really walk away from that conversation that person walk away from that conversation going wow she's with me like this is this is great like seri wants to play with me and that makes them

[00:52:23] feel significant in her world which allows her to maneuver through all of these relationships without making anyone feel like she's backstabbing them or that she's choosing someone over them she's making them all feel important for a different reason and it makes it very personal and i it's such an incredible talent to have when you're playing something like survivor where we've talked about it when you when you feel like someone's lied to you and you feel like someone's been disingenuous how that can

[00:52:50] affect you negatively seri lied to people constantly but it just didn't feel like a lie you know where they'd come to her be like we want to vote an ozzy and she'd be like okay that sounds like a good idea but it wasn't for her and so she would she would react differently and she would and i i thought it was really incredible how she described the i'm not going to fight in the forefront to keep someone i'm going to fight in back here i'm going i'm going to do in a way where no one necessarily sees that

[00:53:19] that's what i'm doing because i realized that will put my game at risk and so her ability to find that balance was just so incredibly impressive loved that about her so much and i don't think we've ever seen anyone play survivor in this way the way that seri does she really is just just insanely insanely good at what she does i thought seri was um better this season than we've seen her in a while

[00:53:46] but just from a how active she was point of view i don't like i don't know game changer seri makes it to this very same spot i seem to remember and obviously some of this could obviously be the edit um it didn't seem like we saw as much of seri being as in to this yeah and and this version of seri was really refreshing to me because i didn't know that goes for a lot of these four five time

[00:54:14] players that were coming back is like how in they would be um and she seemed to be having a lot of fun and be very invested and be very like committed to playing hard and i really liked that um i i my favorite thing is watching how how she interacted with people and you can even see hey she's bashing joe and her confessional and she's having a conversation with rick being like well joe oh

[00:54:41] you lied on survivor but then she's also sitting on the beach with joe cracking up laughing at his little impression of rick that he's doing and she's like finding a way to be like hey joe and rick are beefing with each other and both of them are talking to me about it and i'm making both of them feel good and warm about it because she's she's laughing and giggling and egging both of them on so watching her little one-on-one reactions and how she speaks to people i that was my favorite part of watching

[00:55:09] seri on the season i will have when we get to some of these rules i will have some critiques of seri's game here um which i think had a lot of potential and a lot of really good and kind of went wrong here over the last few weeks with how she deployed some of the agency that she gained um and but yeah i mean it was it it's so good and it is what you said jessica like her ability to to have people and i

[00:55:37] like that she lies to people but she finds a way to sort of um it's very tony-esque she finds a way to push it back onto them right that was hagi on tony would would blindside you'd be like well the thing is you actually went to woo and you were trying to talk to woo about maybe and so then i had to turn it around and i had to get you before you got cast because you went against the alliance and that's like tony's whole thing and and so now tony has betrayed everybody's sitting on the jury but some

[00:56:05] of the people like wait was it my fault that i actually backed tony first i think seri has a way of doing that too where she's kind of like you know like as much as she would be like i can be mad at rizzo because this she's like blaming ozzy ozzy shot himself in the foot or like oh you you know christian you did this so like i had to vote you out you went after ozzy so i had to vote for you you know like so now if you're christian and you were you know talking to seri and she's at the final tribal he's

[00:56:32] like you backstabbed me seri you just like complete what he's like she's like well you were here ozzy was up here you came like what do you want me to do and you justify her actions uh and she does a really good job of doing that so that it's not just like oh sorry about you i had to do what i had to do there's like a reason behind everything which i think helps her social game helps her strategic moves not be held against her from a social perspective right yeah yeah i'm looking forward

[00:57:01] to what you have to say because i i suspect i know what it is and i already have arguments against it so we'll see how that goes if i'm right if i'm right uh but uh you know talking about her different alliances and how she had to turn on them which obviously you know if you have that if you're aligned with everyone you're gonna have to turn on them uh i think i mentioned this in a previous podcast i know i did in a video but every time this topic comes up all i can think of was when

[00:57:28] she got into a big argument with cory on big brother and she said well i didn't want to be in 75 alliances because we know she actually did want to be in 75 alliances right and that's how she controlled so much of the game yeah the difference was and i i think i mentioned it here she wasn't caught yeah i mean people talked about it but she wasn't like called out you know it was just yeah it's just what

[00:57:54] she's doing and like you said jessica the ozzy thing was a perfect example of where people should have figured it out but she had a way around it they'd come to her about ozzy boom they'd be gone and obviously there was some magic going on there and you got to it which was the part about her

[00:58:17] hearing them out not arguing and we we especially saw that we didn't see it so much leading up to this point but we especially saw it in the split when jonathan came to her for permission to vote out ozzy which by the way permission you had to get permission from from you know uh from the head of the mafia and she was like oh yeah sure which apparently was how she was all the time the difference

[00:58:44] was as you said jessica she would back channel normally this time she couldn't because of yeah the split that terrible split yes and so she talked about this she said that she learned from heroes versus villains when she fought so hard to keep candace and it cost her the game so you know i i'm sure we've seen people do this before i just can't think of who off the top of my head and i certainly don't

[00:59:12] know of anyone who did it better and to the point that we talked about this last week emily went to to discuss voting out ozzy because she literally thought it was seri's idea that is how convincing seri is in agreeing with you oh it's her idea and you know we have the ghostbusters provisions of the rules here that says if someone asks you if you want to be in an alliance or in this case make a specific

[00:59:39] move you say yes we went above and beyond that she said yes each time and then immediately set about turning it into a no yeah it's just amazing absolutely amazing i have a lot of thoughts on this but this will start our debate so we can move it along and come back okay well tiffany well what rule are you looking at for that maybe rule two uh well i don't know we'll see when you bring

[01:00:06] it up but tiffany said in her episode nine video for people who don't know i've referenced these a couple times tiffany's been making videos each episode she tends to post them the day the next episode is on so i usually don't see them until afterwards but um you know she answers questions and stuff like that i haven't seen anything that's even remotely a spoiler she's very good about that but she said in her episode nine video that seri had the most impressive game at the time

[01:00:34] she saw it out there but even more so watching everybody would run information through her even the people who were not working with her and again you know i just talked about this with jonathan going to uh seri about ozzy uh tiffany uh when tiffany approached jonathan at final seven about going after rizzo jonathan was like i'm not making a move without talking to seri so she gave people good

[01:01:03] feelings by making it seem like she was on their side right up until the moment when she wasn't and another good example was that you know the woman that seri has known for so many years who said all sorts of things about seri in her interviews telling mike bloom seri is constantly saying to me you're like family we're going to the end it's going to be like me and parv i swear i'm not going to write your name down i mean up until the night she votes me out she says this to me she's good at what she

[01:01:30] does and i believed her now i i have to say i don't know if i believe seri said exactly that considering seri shot down another thing this woman said uh you know in her interview she's like i i didn't say that she has revisionist history but uh uh she also told dalton ross about seri i think she's a manipulator but good on her you know what i mean seri is made for these games she's cut out

[01:01:57] for this yeah i want to know what this debate is going to be i mean we can kind of it i don't know well we'll save it we'll save it okay all right okay now another thing seri of course did was basically strategizing for her entire alliance how many times did we see ozzy or someone else come up with some plan that we at home realized was a bad idea and then seri would swoop in to clean up the mess and get people back on track even in this episode tiffany and jonathan this may be where the

[01:02:27] debate comes tiffany and jonathan wanted to switch the vote from devins to rizzo but seri kept this from happening and now some people maybe sam's about to have said this was a mistake on her part for example rob said on know-it-alls that she should have kept rick so that the focus would stay on him but then seri told rob in her interview that she knew devins wanted her out uh was really

[01:02:50] beating that drum and would not go to the end with her so she couldn't keep him i do wonder if there was some middle ground she could have tried but with devins it's so difficult because he could find an idol or win an immunity challenge at any time and you you just don't know um okay so this is not exactly where i'm gonna where i'm gonna jump in uh but i i wanted to go back to a little bit of what

[01:03:17] you were saying with the 75 alliances and just highlight another thing that i think seri does very well because you also bring up the idea of by the time people realize that she's against them it's when their name is being read as being voted out right we see this with you know a number of people throughout this post merge of like oh i guess i wasn't that close with seri well now i'm out of the game or you realize it and now you're you know firmly on the bottom she also does a really

[01:03:44] good job of doing things like voting out stephanie and then keeping jonathan close enough where jonathan still feels like he has a relationship with her and needs to check in with her on different things um and one thing that i think that seri does very well in order to do this is she makes any agenda feel like an us agenda um it's it's why we and our group need to do things and she presents that to

[01:04:09] every group that she's speaking with and then sort of figures out where she can fit in that like where she actually votes with all of these plans to best position her game now this is a really hard thing to do you know one for like the actual social chops that it takes to be able to pull this off but then

[01:04:32] also to be able to puppeteer things without it blowing up um it is so hard i had a brief uh brief stint my pre-merge was a lot like this on on my season where you know you're kind of like running the show and you have like your your finger in every pot and you're you know you have every relationship and you can have your will done regardless of what you want to do and it's so hard to not get people

[01:04:59] to cross check information or not get people to be like hey what are you doing you know like when you vote somebody out usually their allies are going to be like so you weren't actually with us they'll press you they won't trust you they'll be angry with you and it's so hard to maintain that and what she does a really good job of is like i mentioned earlier justifying why she does the things that she does but then also presenting things as like a group decision of like why we needed this

[01:05:25] why we need to do this in order to preserve her options for as long as possible and i mean you see that when she votes against coaching chrissy she still goes to the next tribal council with jonathan and stephanie thinking that they're with her and like that this old school alliance is still in tech even though she just took a very clear shot at this old school alliance and and that is a really masterful thing to do it is find a way to and then like hey rick devins maybe doesn't want to work

[01:05:54] with her here now that she's like voted out christian and voted out emily and it's very clear what sides they're on but rick is also on the on the bottom and he doesn't really have a ton of people that you know can rally around him to vote out seri so uh that's another thing that i i think she deserves a lot of credit for it's it's so hard people don't realize how hard it is with how much survivor players talk to be playing a two-faced game and also not get caught playing a two-faced game that

[01:06:24] that's right that's tough stuff yeah i mean this this goes back to brian heideck in that beloved season thailand uh you know when he was doing exactly that he had each person convinced he was with them he had the web of alliances and then he would viciously stab them in a lot more viciously than seri uh you know stab them in the back and they would never see it coming and we have seen this web

[01:06:51] strategy used um i talk about in the rules a few of the the times we've seen it dom and wendell kind of acted as one person together with that web strategy uh carson in 44 acted similarly with that web strategy and so obviously you know like we're seri you don't always win doing it but uh you know you can you can use it but it like you said it is very difficult and i think i even mentioned this in the

[01:07:18] rules you can do this you can try it but damn if two people to the wrong two people talk you're cooked yep yeah and that's all i tell you and it's it is so so stressful like i i mean i remember early on early days of my season i i had andy locked in as like my number one i had sierra locked in as a number one then i had this four-person alliance with me sierra annika and rachel i had the idol in my sock

[01:07:44] and i andy was telling me that he found the idol and put it back and then i was i pinned it on annika so now andy thinks annika has the idol and wants to vote her out meanwhile i have the idol and all the girls know i have the idol and i'm just sitting here like every time i was in a confessional i'm like if one person goes and talks to andy on the beach right now i could be so cooked that our next tribal count like it's just so hard and stressful and so to watch somebody like sari do this from day one

[01:08:13] and then like run it as long as she does with the level of composure that she has it's oh and like you said dom and wendell do it maybe as good as it's ever been done it's a lot easier to do when you have a second person that's kind of like helping you with that and like you have to do it all yourself which she does have to do here and what i think she does a really good job of you know twofold i think she convinces a lot of other people that they are her dom and wendell and it's like hey riz

[01:08:42] you and me we we we both build this web of alliances and we protect each other people don't realize how close we are hey me and oz people aren't going to realize how close we are she kind of does this with tiff and she has enough people that kind of think that it's really it's the two of us that are building this web that allowed her to singularly build a really big web um but it man i get stressed talking about it thinking about it let's see you know so she's dealing with it for 20 something odd

[01:09:12] days here it's it's impressive yeah yeah yeah now one thing that helped with all of this uh or i don't know if it helped or or knowing it helped her but you know it was a perfect example of her understanding the whole game board so like even though nobody told her as soon as tiffany won immunity sari knew

[01:09:38] she had become the target uh in interviews she shared a little insight into how she realized it noting to dalton ross that you know we saw that scene of her asking rizzo what would happen if tiffany won immunity and he's like oh i i don't know uh and sari said i'm like what do you mean you don't know because i knew then if tiffany were to win they would come from me and i wondered at the time was that why they showed that scene because one thing we often hear from good survivor players is that if you're

[01:10:08] hearing about a fake plan they don't have details and clearly rizzo saying he didn't know indicating indicated he was probably lying or someone had lied to him about what would happen in that instance and sari knew it she wasn't able to do anything about it but it just showed again how well she understood all of the pieces on the board yeah and i think that that really comes back to

[01:10:35] the relationships again because she she knows the relationships that she has with tiffany and she knows the relationship she has with rizzo and as soon as rizzo is not sharing information with her that's when the red flag goes off you know where you're like but wait it's irregular yes right this is someone who has been sharing information with me the entire game almost to his own detriment and now all of a sudden there is no plan so i i really do think that that again just it it speaks volumes of her

[01:11:03] understanding each person individually and how the relationship that she's formed with them has developed over time and then she can utilize that to her benefit because then she can use that lack of response that she would normally get from rizzo to know i i know exactly what's going on right now yeah yeah all right well i think we can move on to the second rule which says not to scheme and plot too

[01:11:27] much and to keep your scheming secret and this is an interesting one for devins because i i think everyone's first inclination would be to say no he didn't keep it secret he was very open about what he did but that was really only the case when he was in a situation where he needed to do that or that people you know knew ahead of time that he would be and one reason and i i started to reference this earlier but

[01:11:56] uh one reason for his big argument with joe aside obviously from being caught in the lie was that devins did want to keep certain things secret he told mike bloom i think our difference in opinion is i feel like as an ally i'm taking care of you if i'm protecting you and if i'm never coming for you if i'm looking out for our interests but i don't think that means i need to tell you all my secrets

[01:12:25] but i think joe from watching the season it's like he really wants you to tell him all the secrets and be filled in and yeah i i agree with him on that devins definitely knew you don't need to tell everyone not even your allies you don't tell them everything and i think he was right and we did see that from joe uh you know we saw it when someone else talked about oh when i told him about my uh steal

[01:12:52] a vote he got very upset and you know formed off because i hadn't told him sooner he really did feel if you're my ally i need to know every single thing but devins is right you don't need to tell them anything that doesn't impact them directly well and i think that this is a very hard balance to find again and this is this is i just have to compliment rick for finding this balance even though it did

[01:13:19] frustrate people like joe your allies do expect you to be sharing information and we see this time and time again on seasons of survivor when someone finds out after the fact like why didn't you tell me about that i thought we were in alliance together i why didn't i know about this thing and and you have to be ready for the response and i think that unfortunately joe is just not someone who can necessarily play survivor on that type of level where like oh no that does make sense rick

[01:13:48] that i didn't need to know that information uh but but the fact that rick recognizes this that no that's not directly going to impact this person so they don't need to know because really information is so important and so significant when you're playing survivor because now with the advantages you know maybe you don't want to share everything with everyone because there might be someone who has an advantage that can steal something from you and so it's playing survivor at a different level recognizing

[01:14:15] how this could impact this person but not necessarily that one and so i agree too i think that this is one of those very difficult situations where you have to decide who needs to know this information but if you decide someone doesn't need to know what's your response going to be to them if you get called out on it because that can negatively affect the relationship that you have with that person so you have to be ready for that conversation as well because it's likely going to happen when that person finds out

[01:14:46] yeah i mean rick is absolutely in the right in that regard that um and but i'll say like it is tough you know like i you hear that your ally has something or you know did something that you didn't know about and there is a level of like well are you closer especially if it involves other people if it's a steal a vote and it's like hey this person or an idol that they didn't tell you about but nobody on the board knew about i think there is a level of like okay fair you were looking out for

[01:15:13] yourself but if it is like wait you had to steal a vote and john knew but i didn't know all of a sudden that is like are you closer to so and so than you are to me that can be very concerning so i get the initial thought from from somebody like joe why that would be worrisome but there's definitely a level of composure and nuance that's required to be a good survivor player of being willing to put that

[01:15:37] like initial gut feeling reaction aside even if you're pretending to put it aside right to maintain this relationship and this alliance that he doesn't seem to be able to do uh but rick is absolutely correct and we see throughout the history of the show that you can have somebody's back and yet you also know hey like there's one winner and if you have a leg up on your own alliance like it's nothing like it's like if you make a five person alliance you're still thinking about who's your three in the

[01:16:07] five yeah you should you should be thinking about that if you're smart and like you should know where your outs are hey when we get to the final five do i have a path to get to the end with this group uh and if you're not because you view that as like disloyal i think you're a step behind what it actually takes to get ahead in the game and um i think rick does a good job of looking out for his people but also keeping rick's things rick's things so that he has an independent resume to stand on if

[01:16:35] he does get to the final tribal council um which is an important aspect of anybody's game is you don't want to be lumped in with everybody else in your alliance you have to stand out yeah yeah yeah and you know we saw in this season just telling one other person or two other people all of a sudden you get to merge and everybody knows everything right yeah i mean yes like rick is rick is closely aligned with emily throughout the entire season and emily's telling everybody everything so like

[01:17:05] just because you tell your closest ally a piece of information doesn't mean that it's not going to go anywhere and it's like better for your alliance because it can completely kill your alliance if it gets to the wrong years yeah yeah well and i think that that's an interesting point too to bring up as well as is when you tell your alliance the information is also significant because we saw christian kind of screw that one up right when he decided to tell emily like on the mat like as things were happening

[01:17:32] like hey by the way and she was like i don't know what's going on anymore and so it's not only like knowing what to tell them it's also knowing when to tell them and how to tell them because if you throw something on someone like that at the last minute then you have someone like emily who's like i'm gonna go tell everybody what you just told me because this doesn't make any sense to me so it's just one more component that you have to be cognizant of yeah like you don't have to tell them i've had an idol for the last week and a half hey right i found an idol yeah yeah you know they

[01:17:59] don't need to know the whole backstory to it yeah um so yeah i don't think this was an issue for rick this overall rule and i i also don't think it was a problem for us to read i talked earlier hang on real quick because i think like this stuff out in the open i do think this is that this is the rule i have the issue with for rick okay um here it comes i i don't disagree with any of like this stuff that we've said obviously i fully agree with all of our points my thing is and and rick

[01:18:28] says it himself and it's what i love about that like if there's one thing i love about season 50 it's this and any returning season it is the fact that oftentimes the winner of this season the people that go very far that do very well are the people that correctly adjust from their previous mistakes it's the people

[01:18:52] that kind of understand what went wrong understand why they didn't win or why they won in the case of our winners right and then are able to make the necessary adjustments to that what i find interesting is that so often people come out of the game and they don't understand why they didn't win they don't they didn't listen to why blank loss they don't know and they they or they just have like kind of a disillusioned sense of what costs them the game and so the adjustments that they're making are not

[01:19:21] the right adjustments i think charlie is somebody we see that with on this season who has this thing my number one didn't vote for me and that's why i lost and that becomes so ingrained in his head that it affects his gameplay and there's it's like there's other things that are are the reason why you didn't win and there's other things that you can do better this time around to ensure you get that far again right but the other thing here is that there's there's always going to be a handful of people

[01:19:48] who know the adjustments that they have to make and yet they succumb to nature and i think ozzy is one of these people yes who is like oscar oscar oscar and then he goes back to ozzy and he has these emotional outbursts after tribal councils and he gets a little too confident towards the end and goes home with the idol i think coach is one of these people who you know like he knows better than to be like

[01:20:13] haiku coach who's running the show and rubs people the wrong way and from what we hear he does fantastic at the social aspect of the game so often we're like people kind of like him right up until they don't because he becomes old coach again and kind of goes back to his old ways and uh rick has a quote at his boot tribal council where he says i was trying to build relationships and do this kind of like

[01:20:39] social game this time and i couldn't help but become old rick and i love it you love it as like we all love it as viewers but is old rick really the way to win the game is this showman loudest guy in the room flashy gameplay is it the way to win the game i don't think so because regardless of whether or not like regardless of hey was it wrong to necessarily keep things secret the one thing was clear is that

[01:21:08] publicly rick is perceived as a schemer rick is perceived as this guy that's making all these moves and by proxy he's perceived as a huge jury threat and now you have a little too early in the game at 987 made yourself the guy that is at the very top of the chopping block totem pole and he did this in edge of extinction and goes on this great run with immunity challenges and idols and almost hits the one

[01:21:33] outer to win the game and he does do it again here where you go from being in a great maybe like solidified position within an alliance that has legs to go far to then being a little bit loud to make yourself the center of attention and oftentimes being the center of attention just means that you're the easy vote out for everybody else in the game looking to advance themselves so if there was a rule i think that you could nitpick and critique rick on it is this plotting a little too much scheming a little too

[01:22:02] much doing it all a little bit too loudly even if all of it's fair and he is overall like a loyal player um it does make it the rick devins show at tribal council every week yes other players are going to want rick devins out naturally uh you know as part of that and it's like hey even if he survives at seven he's gonna go at six he's gonna go at five you put yourself in that spot where you need the five immunity challenge wins in order to get to the end and i just don't think that's good gameplay

[01:22:31] um yeah like or ideal gameplay should i say for like any player going in and i think i think rick knows that and i think that's why he's like self-critical at the uh at the tribal council here being like he can't get away from himself he can't and i love it and that's why we love him and that's why i say put him on every season of survivor but also like if you could dial it back just a little i think you could actually just like win every time so i interpreted him saying that a little bit differently

[01:22:59] oh okay my interpretation was he was doing it until he couldn't anymore so basically once sari had made the decision i am cutting from the seal of four which of course rick found out once she voted out christian he was i don't know that he had any other option i don't know who he could have

[01:23:25] gotten in with sari had made it clear you two are on the outs we heard lots of people talking now he didn't necessarily hear this but we heard lots of people talking we got to get rid of the middle people a bad name for them but that's what they were called we've got to get rid of those two we've got to get rid of those two once they were at that situation there was no way i mean joe we know was

[01:23:50] certainly never going to work with him jonathan did not want to work with him aubry did work with him for a time but also knew i can't work with him long term sari didn't want to work with him there's there's just not too much there though there is like sari splits from the seal of four after rick does his fake idol fiasco at tribal council because christian he's not going he's not going home at that tribal council like it seems it seems like from everything we've heard that there

[01:24:20] was enough votes to take out coaching chrissy where he could have like maintained his spot and you you do this thing that obviously like pushes a couple extra votes on to to coaching chrissy and gets them out almost unanimously but it does now make this contingent of rick christian and emily very top of mind for everybody else in the game is like that needs to be dealt with and rick having

[01:24:46] the idol um saves him and actually pushes the target onto christian before it pushes it onto him um but i do i do think there's an argument to be made there that there were that was a set and i think from christian's you know perspective or and we hear from aubrey and from christian aubrey's kind of like yeah this is great that rick did that because now this makes rick the center of attention we hear from rizzo and ozzy saying this is great that rick did that because now everybody wants rick

[01:25:14] out we hear from christian being like this is not good because this you know that he didn't seem too pleased with the fact that rick went and pulled the fake idol when he did when that could have been used a little later in the game it could have been so i do think that there's an argument there that sari got pushed against that group based on this idea of making making that group a threat when if you stay a little quieter for a round um one christian is probably an easy target to go ahead of you

[01:25:43] anyways uh you can always then pull the fake idol thing and try to like get yourself another round with your friends still in the game like there there was a lot of different avenues i think you can go from there um so i don't it's an interesting conversation yeah i think it is a debate that cannot be answered because you know rick said in his interviews and he thought he realized he might

[01:26:07] be sick but he didn't know and as he said i don't trust what people are saying now yeah because people are looking back and changing what was that is fair that happens a lot yeah revisionist history so so he said and we talked about it at the time you know we we say we always say if you have an inkling if you have a real idol and you have an inkling that you may be the target use it don't hold

[01:26:33] on to it so the same kind of applies to a fake idol you know if you have a fake idol and you think you might be going pull it out so i can't argue too much with him having done that here's here's an interesting one this is a side debate i just kind of thought of even so let's say that that's okay right right maybe the play is uh one thing that i i admire so much about a rizzo and what how he

[01:27:02] plays the game and what he said throughout his two seasons now is seven is four is two is 11 is 15 like i don't care i want to win or it's you know what like you're playing to win the game right should rick have held on to his idol with that same theory in mind when emily is going like you kind of know that the you know the votes are probably going to go on to emily because you have

[01:27:27] this idol that you're very publicly going to play and if you hold on to that idol emily goes out the door now you're at seven with an idol that has to be played like there there's just like oh and nobody really knows that it has to go at seven and we've seen rizzo like bluffing with the idol and stuff rick has bluffed with fake idols in the past um that is like that to me feels like the hey i'm gonna take a swing and if i go out with the idol in my pocket because they sniff it out and like

[01:27:54] vote vote me out at the at final eight going out at eight or seven doesn't really matter to me but like having that idol with me at seven could be the thing that propels me to six to then win a challenge to then get to five and like you start to close in on a world where you're in the final tribal council yeah um i think that rick was thinking the same way that emily was this is a game-winning move if we're talking about that if you two can work together to get rid of sari he plays the idol

[01:28:21] though and like that's the thing is like you know the maybe he doesn't need to right right yeah like i think and that may be like is it loyalty to a fault for rick there that he's like this is a game winning move for me and emily but was there a game winning move for rick specifically that requires throwing emily under the bus um you know they stack votes on emily you say see a girl i'm actually not going to play my idol but i'm going to be alive at seven with an idol and an opportunity to get sari

[01:28:49] or get some legs in the game and go go a little bit farther um so it like there is an element of this is a game-winning move if both of us pull it off but i think it's a game-winning move for emily because emily pulls out sari there you still are at seven with rick devins having a note like a publicly played idol and still being a big threat where he can go home before her and now emily has legs to get to the end yeah yeah i think i was going to say something earlier and now i can't remember

[01:29:17] what it was but the the oh i i think it goes back to just you know interpreting the game in the moment also yeah i think that um you know even going back to when he pulled the the fake idol and the timing there of when sari had cut him everything that you had brought up um i do think in sari's mind that alliance was already cut i know that we didn't see the action of it until she until yeah christian is

[01:29:47] kind of bob and weave between the two sides it's like hey take out coaching chrissy then take a shot against the other side yeah exactly and so and that's pretty much what she was saying all throughout and then like i said earlier when when christian came to her about ozzy she was immediately like well ozzy's my number one christian's like a number three alliance so she had already made that her mind up even though so even though it happened after the fake idol play i think the wheels were set in motion for

[01:30:16] that before you know like maybe a couple of votes before the fake idol play and so um so i don't think that the fake idol play i guess a correlation is not causation you know we would say i think that he was already on the bottom he just didn't know it yet and so once he did know it and started doing all these big things i i think at that point like i said this is a discussion that could go on forever

[01:30:44] and i don't know that we would have an answer yeah as to did he you know did he go back to old devons because he had to or the thing here though like with this play because i i can hear that now i and agree with that you know is that he was already on the bottom and like i said chaos is a ladder for those on the bottom and like a great job of making chaos one of the things i think he could have done

[01:31:12] better this time that he does very well in edge of extinction is find the times to try to like tuck onto his rung and not be so worried about like climbing the ladder um you know we see edge of extinction he blows up some spots but then he also is like all right there's a tribal council well david get david goes home and he's willing to like you know pick up lauren for one vote so that they can vote against ron clark and then you know once chris underwood comes back now he has a guy that he can

[01:31:40] work with and like granted hey the uh the idols and the uh the immunity wins are doing a lot of heavy lifting they're helping him ingratiate himself with people because he has safety which is obviously a tool to uh right you know like strategically align yourself with other people but i think he does a really good job of like not every tribal council needs to be rick doing something and you know if you can take one off and then maybe you know blow something up the next one like there then you give

[01:32:09] yourself like more legs and it does feel like here and maybe this is just causation of his positioning being different this time around and he doesn't win immunity he doesn't have the same number of idols but uh it feels like every round he is the center of attention here and he never allows it to kind of like pump the brakes on him ever so it's like hey his realistic path to the end on this season is win win win win win win win all the way to the end yeah yeah i mean i do think a lot of it was just the

[01:32:39] people were focused on him and sari was keeping the focus on him and other people were too when you have this many other threats in the game they all want to point to someone else and he was the easy person to point to and like you said yeah he never got he never got a tribal council off he you know i think part of that is the new era game you don't have a day off yeah there wasn't a day yeah that's actually a great point because we we talk about that with the down day right in the three-day cycle and like

[01:33:07] how much in 39 day survivor can things change over the course of three days where it's like oh well rick was gonna go but now the war dogs pissing everyone off so like he's gonna you know he's gonna go next now because he's doing too much and you don't really like in new era survivor you wake up the next morning you're already planning who you're gonna vote out that night and so it's kind of non-stop and it gives uh it gives you less area to hide that is a great point yeah and when when you

[01:33:36] don't have the down days and then when you're also losing the people that you've been aligned with and it so it's like the domino effect it's like it just keeps kind of going in that trajectory it is very difficult to try to get your footing again without pushing all the way down on the gas which rick kept doing because he's hoping to make something happen because you really don't have the opportunities like you did before where he did have those extra days or he did have that that time he wanted to go look for an idol and he was told not to and he was like crying in the

[01:34:05] hammock because this is not how he plays survivor and so you know i do think there's something to be said about feeling like the pressure is on and there is no ability to take your foot off the gas because of the speed at which the game is moving yeah yeah all right well now we can move on to sari uh and uh you know i i i think she was fine here like i said even with her 75 alliances even the players i quoted

[01:34:30] earlier who talked about her being aligned with everyone never actually put her in danger at that point right again because as i mentioned earlier emily told rob everybody was thinking they were working with sari and this is an incredible skill we've we've seen it from good players before but probably never done quite so well the ability to be aligned with almost everyone and have each of

[01:34:58] them believe they are your true close ally while everyone else is being fooled we talked about it earlier it is incredibly difficult to pull off it usually leads to problems in this rule but not for sari yeah no she was the queen of the hammock yes everybody came to her at the hammock yeah i agree she was great here um i have actually a comp for sari that i will get into uh when our debate finally

[01:35:24] gets sparked david but i'll i'll let us try to figure out when this debate is i know i'm i'm so intrigued it's like throwing me on their toes here always keep them wanting more you know love that all right well we could move to the third rule for uh for uh devins uh which tells players to be flexible so sam what did you think of rick here yeah i mean rick is kind of like the most flexible

[01:35:51] he you know he he's so unpredictable and so unexpected uh but i think that's what makes his game really compelling it's what a lot of people don't like about his game is how um not rigid he is you know and i think that's makes him great tv um i think but i think rick like i said before too and you see this over the course of his career edge of extinction season 50 regardless like this ability

[01:36:15] to diagnose i so i think rick was very he played the game face up on edge of extinction for eight days or whatever it is or 10 days until he gets voted out and he gets blindsided and he gets this second chance to come back into the game and i think that kind of like unlocked this feeling inside rick

[01:36:40] of that guy that i was for 10 days that went home or like that's not what i want my survivor experience to be this idea of like oh i was trying to play by the book with my allies and then i went home unexpectedly and like that's just it and so he plays this very free loose game that is flexible and ever-changing but it's fun to watch and it but i think that carries over here into season 50 um so i

[01:37:05] have no issues with his with his flexibility and i think that it's a oh you know a blessing of an opportunity that he gets being on edge of extinction and having this second life and a blessing for all of us as as survivor fans because without that edge of extinction twist we don't come to know rick devins like we do now as viewers and he has brought so much to the show over the last uh you know over

[01:37:29] two seasons on it yeah very true the one good thing to come out of that twist the only good thing for underwood baby i know as a person great guy but you know we'll we'll leave it at that we we uh did enough on the pot the why chris won podcast that we did chris came on to do his deep dive with

[01:37:51] uh with rob and was like oh bloomberg man yeah he said the same thing to me when i met him i was like i'm sorry yeah yeah but but yeah i think devins was obviously willing to work with just about everyone uh unfortunately for him the same was not true in reverse once the merge hit he christian and emily were erroneously named as the middle people middle yeah others basically shunned the idea of working

[01:38:21] with him he had those two he thought uh sari and aubry you know until they believed it was wiser to go in a different direction and you know not for lack of trying on his part though yeah for sure so sam now i have a softball question for you all right how about sari's flexibility the most flexible again

[01:38:46] you know like sari's whole game is uh yeah i said rick was the most flexible i guess i forgot about sari because yeah i mean she's she's miss options that's her that's her survivor mo is um give yourself as many give yourself as many paths as possible and maintain those paths as long as you possibly can to not have the doors closing in on you you see the writing on the wall when you are a survivor legend and you're a great player like sari is to hey at some point you know the walls will be closing in

[01:39:16] and i'm not sure i have the physical ability to clutch up and win a challenge when those walls close in um and so it is imperative to every good sari fields game to maintain as many relationships and as many strategic avenues as possible and she does it again here in season 50 maybe arguably as good as she's ever done it in terms of the web of alliances we've seen her be great socially all the time in

[01:39:42] the past and she is great socially i don't think this is necessarily pound for pound her best game but i do think that this is the best job she does of flexibility and um keeping her options open yeah yeah i mean you know we just spent quite a while talking about her many alliances the way she moved through them with such ease uh you know devins talked in his interviews about how strong

[01:40:09] this the stila four alliance was but again at some point sari realized her other alliances were better for her so she dropped them and that was the case over and over as the game progressed she had we talked about the web she had many paths forward and she could change them as circumstances dictated it was even something she talked to about uh regarding joe she talked to rob about it saying

[01:40:34] to me and survivor sometimes you have to be a little more flexible yes you know obviously true yes very true so we can move on to the fourth rule which tells players not to let their emotions control them now jessica we know devins certainly played with a lot of exuberance did that translate to his emotions playing a role in decision making i don't think so at all i mean i really think that he was and i've said this before he's able to find such a good balance with everything that's going

[01:41:04] on the only time i really think we saw any type of an emotional response was the issue with joe that we've already talked about that maybe there was some reaction there where he was getting frustrated with how joe was responding to him and so maybe that was coming from more of an emotional space but again we don't know what else happened on the beach it sounds like a lot of things happen with joe so that was probably fair in a way for rick to respond the way that he did but overall i think all of the

[01:41:33] decisions that rick was making came from a game place and he wanted to further his own game and so he was willing to do whatever he needed to do even if it was to make a big show of something it was all game mechanics it wasn't an emotional response in any way shape or form and i think if anything he was able to kind of keep his emotions in check because there were things happening around him that were a

[01:41:59] little frustrating and that were probably things that that could have caused him to respond differently than he was when he knew that the middle was being targeted when he knew that you know emily was was going to be the focal point when he knew that sari was turning on him there were things that could have caused more of an emotional response but i think he still looked at everything from a strategic standpoint and how can i still move forward in this game despite all of these things that are

[01:42:25] happening around me so i think overall he did great here yeah i mean i think um i think there is like a slight little bit of like emotion dictating his decisions but i think it's all in a good way i think i think emotion is kind of like paramount to rick devins and who rick devins is as a survivor player i think it's what makes him so rootable for a jury is that you're watching a guy i think some of the

[01:42:51] showmanship is some emotion it is a little bit of like take that i'm back against the wall i'm kind of kicking the door down um but i don't think that's bad because i think like i said i think it it really makes him endearing to a jury it makes him really rootable it makes him real and uh emotion just from rick as far as a viewer is concerned is one of my favorite things about him um he's one of his edge

[01:43:16] of extinction journey is one of the most fascinating i think we've ever seen in survivor and i think it carries over here a little bit it's very similar i relate to it a lot and it's part of the reason like his his quote about about the stars and stuff makes me very emotional is because i you know you see this version of rick in edge of extinction and here that is this he's just this really confident

[01:43:43] fun um energetic player that that you think like is just having the best time and doesn't take the game too seriously and he seems very strong and level-headed like all of these great things where you're just like ah like but there is a lack of vulnerability behind some of that stuff and yet when we get close to the end of the game um you know like he does he's very uh he's rick the the

[01:44:11] energetic rick all of edge of extinction and then he loses the fire to chris and jeff is kind of talking to him about it and it's not until his journey is over and he and he kind of like takes a moment to reflect on what he just went through and how close he got and how disappointed he is but how proud of himself he is at the same time and i just think that it's a really beautiful thing to watch and what

[01:44:36] i loved about this iteration of rick is that you see a little bit more of that emotional awareness while he's doing it and he is taking the time to look at the stars and to appreciate what's going on around him um in a way that he maybe didn't his first time around and probably missed for a very long time while he wasn't playing um and so like i just find i find his emotion from a guy who seems to be

[01:45:01] kind of emotionless and confident and and all of the stuff and like the way that he plays the game to know that what's going on internally and to have him share that with us as viewers i think is really cool um so it's not gameplay related but i think it is it is you know essential to who he is as a character in the survivor lore and and why a lot of fans love him so much yeah yeah even when he did

[01:45:27] his little dance for the camera he noted yeah you know in his interviews nobody else was around to see that you know i walked off and people were like where's rick going now and then he went off rick's going to dance yeah rick's going to dance uh so yeah i agree with everything you both said i do want to mention some people might say that he shouldn't have voted against sari the second time after the tie knowing that the vote was going against emily i think that's equally strategic as it is emotional

[01:45:54] yeah that is strategic for sure exactly exactly changing your vote in that situation is meaningless sari knew what he tried to do it's ridiculous to believe you could suddenly get back in the good graces just because you changed it when the math was obvious so yeah that was common sense and strategy not an emotional and a loyalty standpoint yeah the strategy of being like hey i maybe i can come to

[01:46:18] sari next round and vote and like work with sari where she might feel like if i'm like yeah i tried to vote you out last round sorry about that here's why i did that but maybe we can both be benefit like we can both help each other moving forward like there is that's more believable if you're sari than if he's like sari i you know i pivoted i was like loyal to you at the end you know like now it feels phony and that's kind of what i was talking about earlier with like honesty is like a weapon there is a

[01:46:46] sense of this is what it is and i'm going to lay it all out there that then gives you a sense of empowerment of if i can be blunt with you and tell you straight up what i'm thinking maybe you're more inclined to believe it and then have you know a sense of like i'm you're a a variable that i can quantify so therefore i'm more willing to work with you than if then somebody who i still don't know if they're actually with me or not because they're hiding their allegiances right well and he

[01:47:13] actually did that i mean we've talked about it already where he was willing to say rizzo i wanted to vote you out or i was willing to say your name i mean so like there is something to be said about just that honesty component of it like no this is what my game is and so you can get some more footing if you're willing to have those types of relationships and you can admit to people no this is what i was doing and then in addition to you have to think about emily because

[01:47:38] if he's if he ends up in the final three and she's on the jury she knows that he's loyal to her to the end and and i think that that can help get a jury vote as well so there's something to be said about maintaining that loyalty but then also having the ability to have that honest conversation if needs be with sari because you're not lying to anybody about what you're doing it's it's very apparent and he's he's utilizing it in a strategic way so it's just it's a it's a nice little package that

[01:48:08] he's putting together even though it's a shitty spot excuse my language to be in because you do have to like maneuver it in such a way where you're like yeah this is going to be terrible going back i'm voting for sari again and i might have to deal with this but i think it it can benefit him in more ways than people realize yeah yeah now of course uh sari has been a master of this area for a long

[01:48:32] time and it's really a requirement for playing the the game the way she did you can't have a bunch of allies that you know you're going to need to cut and be emotionally attached it just won't work yeah we saw and heard about several examples of her connecting with people while preparing to get rid of them uh early in the game one moment she was comforting savannah when savannah was being emotional

[01:48:57] the next moment ruthlessly voting her out uh i mentioned earlier the woman sari has known for years talking in interviews about how sari said a number of emotional things to her while leading her like a lamb to slaughter and we even saw it at the very end of this episode sari talked in interviews about how close she is with aubrey how aubrey has been at her house uh this she didn't say in the episode but later in interviews uh was the first survivor player to meet her granddaughter things like that

[01:49:27] but when sari realized she was the target she knew it was kill or be killed so she tried to flip it against aubrey i think what she's so good at doing is utilizing other people's emotions against them and not letting her emotions get in the way of the decisions that she's making and that is just a gift that she has where we've talked about already she can make other people feel so important so significant like her number one and then savagely takes them out of the game

[01:49:56] but nobody holds it against her it's it's a really fantastic thing to see i mean just to know that she's the relationship she has with ozzy and the relationship she had with rizzo and how she had to balance all of that and really i mean i think at one point she referenced having to babysit joe so she's very aware of other people's emotional needs and that's what she steps up and that's what she's able to kind of control and almost manipulate but in such a way that they don't know that that's what's

[01:50:26] happening so i think overall like that's really her superpower here is just utilizing other people's emotions against them yeah superpower is the word it is the ability it's what makes her scary to everybody else's you can be such a good social player that also doesn't really have any true allegiances or loyalties because you're able to remove emotion from it and play as cutthroat as you need to which is why she's great uh it's why she's very scary but um yeah she's kind of the example i think

[01:50:55] for this rule um moving forward for future players oh yeah yeah and we even saw this back when she was on the traders you know the exact thing you you talked about jessica using people's emotions one reason that the two faithfuls she brought to the end was so mad after the game besides the fact that they didn't understand the game was that she made them feel so close to her emotionally they would talk about how the three of them were going to do certain things with the money and the other two talked

[01:51:24] about things they were going to do for themselves or for their families and she encouraged that and she knew she needed to do it as a game move to ensure that they would take her to the end so she could win they didn't understand that and i think they're still bitter about it till today but i do wonder and this kind of just came to me i don't know exactly what type of nurse sari is but i do wonder if there's some not every nurse is going to be like this obviously but as a nurse as anyone in the

[01:51:54] medical field but especially a nurse because i think nurses tend to spend more time with patients than doctors do sometimes if there's someone there you know you have to take care of them you it doesn't matter you may know their terminal yes you you have to be there emotionally for them well you many nurses do uh you know and i think she is probably like this obviously i haven't you know seen her

[01:52:24] on this aspect but i just wonder if that played into it that she knows how to to deal with people but also she knows you know they're they're not going to be here forever right she might be accustomed to dealing with people and some of their worst times of their life and then to have that bedside manner and to make them feel like this is okay and that they have someone with them it very very well could

[01:52:52] come from the work that she does and she's also a mother so i think there's a lot of components there that really are working to her benefit and you know what to lean into and you know what to avoid and if she's leaning into that caretaker kind of mode it's clearly working every season that she's ever played in every show she's ever played yeah all right well the fifth rule reminds players they need to pretend

[01:53:17] to be nice and play the social game now sam we saw at least one person who hated devins in the game with the fire of a thousand suns was that due to bad social play on rick's part which you have brought up somewhat already or did he generally do okay in this role yeah i mean maybe that one example was due to bad social play but i also think you know if we're if we're taking you know rick and his at his word and

[01:53:42] what he's kind of said in his post-game interviews and stuff he seemed to have a good relationship with joe down the stretch you know game gameplay aside um and that to me is the social game that to me is where it really where it really hits home is hey joe might not have wanted to work with rick the entire game because if he didn't like how he played but did they connect enough on a human level that

[01:54:08] if rick was sitting in the final three and joe was on the jury would he have would he have voted for him maybe maybe not but also who's he sitting next to uh and i do think that we saw you know rick with ozzy you know bonding about personal stuff and um kind of just being enough of like an open person to to connect with a lot of people in a real way which she says was a big focus of his his game this time and i do think he did a good job of um at least pretending to play the social game but i think

[01:54:37] one of the things about rick that makes him very good is his ability to put game differences aside to bond with people um i think he did that a lot in his first season and i think you see him do that a lot here as well despite being on the bottom he seems to have good connections with a lot of the other people in the game yeah yeah i think this was specific to joe uh you know i mentioned this earlier even going back to their initial big argument everyone who was interviewed or talked

[01:55:05] about it took rick's side and when we saw joe complaining to people aubrey was just kind of like okay didn't give yeah yeah yeah or even when he tried to prod her into agreement sari actually fired back uh to point out the flaws of what he was saying it would have been easy for everyone to jump on the bandwagon but they weren't interested and you know devins told mike bloom i was surprised during the season how much i was on his mind i'm not a bad person because i'm playing a game hard

[01:55:35] i keep all my commentary to gameplay i just did not realize that i'd gotten under his skin as much as i had as a game player so yeah i think it was a joe problem not a rick problem there and you know rick's wife told him have the spirit of playfulness and he definitely did i i mentioned at the time how much i loved that he called joe and jonathan smug sons of bitches and said they can't wipe the smile off my

[01:56:03] face and you know he wasn't out there to hurt or bad mouth anyone he was there to play a game and have fun and i think he he did both absolutely yeah so jessica uh moving on do we even have to ask this question technically it's our job to do it uh i know it is our how do you think that she did in the social game oh my gosh um like i said she was the queen of the hammock the fact that you have

[01:56:33] people multiple people this season who are saying well we have to check in with sari first we have to ask sari and that she was able to just create this world around her where everybody really she was like the mafia god out there you know we're like no there's a fear too which is unique to sari social game is like everybody loves her everybody wants to make sari happy but i think you're also like a little afraid

[01:57:01] of the of what happens if you have to come back and have sari not happy with you yes if you've not explained to sari ahead of time what you're doing and she finds out after the fact you were going to be in trouble she and so i just it is it's so incredible that she is able to create those relationships where it is yes you you fear her but you respect her and you're only going to do what sari says is that you're allowed to do and the fact that even and i realize it's aussie but he's like oh thank goodness

[01:57:30] she came back and told us what to do i mean it was it was stunning it was absolutely stunning to see the amount of people who were like we have to ask her first like we need her permission we are not going to seek forgiveness and so overall i mean she is just the epitome of what you want in a social game when it comes to survivor and there there would have been no one i truly think and i know we've said if she makes it to the end she probably i mean i think most people would say she's going to win

[01:57:58] but it's it's not because of just her being a legend it's the relationships that she's able to create with people who would be sitting on that jury despite the fact that they got voted out they would probably all still think gosh sari was like my she was like my number one out there she was she was looking out for me and i think i think that's really an incredible space to be able to create if you are sitting in a final three that you have just all of the jury like not upset with you even

[01:58:27] though you are someone they fear in this game they're still willing to put you on that pedestal and say wow you you really are a great player and i i overall just just amazing just absolutely amazing in this role something she does really well is um establish a power dynamic within her relationships which i think the only time we sari has not done this well is on heroes versus villains where we kind of see her like she's with her friends she's with other great players and she's kind of like

[01:58:56] oh well amanda like what if we kept candace blah like and she you know she's kind of like on the back foot of trying to argue with other people but every other season that we've seen her in this one especially which credit to her because it is you know a returning legends kind of a season is is as soon as you have a relationship with sari it's not just that you have a relationship with her it's the power dynamic is that she wears the pants in this relationship and whatever sari says is going

[01:59:22] to be what goes whether you're ozzy or you're rizzo or you're d or like whoever you are she's the final decision maker even if you're jonathan you feel like i need to go check the three to make sure i have permission before i do this and so i think that that not only helps her control people a lot more but it also helps her command a lot of respect if she was to sit in the final three where um you know she's not having to claim other people's moves as her moves or claim moves that we made as a group as

[01:59:49] her moves um it's kind of understood that like this power dynamic she has the power and i follow her orders and because of that she's you know has so much more win equity in the game um but that's a hard thing to do is like establish that power dynamic right off the bat uh it's just kind of like the way that she carries herself and does play the social game that allows for those relationship dynamics to to be a thing yeah yeah i mean she's clearly a master at the social game she talked in

[02:00:18] interviews about how she does it bringing people in meeting them on a human level and so on but to me it's such a personal skill that even if she explains to you how to do it expecting someone else to replicate it is like having michael jordan explain how he made his shots and presumably therefore you could do the same no there's just something about him you can't describe

[02:00:43] it to people you have to be that person some are just naturals and sari is one of them anyone who has spent any time around her has felt it even in this game when people came in knowing and saying we've got to go after her they end up joining with her and working with her instead unless your name is jenna and you know we saw how well that worked and as joe said sari is brilliant i've never witnessed

[02:01:12] a human being manipulate a room so gracefully as her and it obviously didn't succeed all the way but it sure kept her around for most of the game until the reality of the final three situation and a two million dollar decision hit people and kind of shook them loose yeah yeah and that leads us to rule six which warns against being too much of a threat uh but you know both players who went out this

[02:01:40] week were seen as being able to win it all if they got to final three and that meant they had to go and even though we were just talking about sari we'll start with devins because he had built you know an interesting resume it included risking it all to double the prize the fake idol flipping the vote against those who were trying to get him out by revealing all their information all these things

[02:01:59] we've talked about and the key was that those main things were done at tribal council in front yes yes yes and he talked in interviews about how juries are starving for anything interesting to happen and he gave it to them other people could certainly see the reactions of the jurors and know that they

[02:02:24] would be inclined to vote for him over many of them and as aubrey said rick's antics aren't just antics they make him a real threat to win yeah yeah there is so much to be said about putting on a display at tribal council because unfortunately and this is something i've kvetched about throughout the years when you are on the jury you don't get to see what's going on back at camp all you're learning

[02:02:50] is what you're learning from tribal council and then you're learning from people who are coming out of the game and sometimes they can put their own spin on things and sometimes they can express it to you in a different way right it's crazy that that would happen and so you really are hungry for information and so you go to tribal council and you you learn things that you didn't know before you see things that you didn't see you're always curious who won immunity and so anything that you

[02:03:17] can gain when you are sitting there is going to be beneficial to the person who is providing you that information while you're there so yes i think his his read is is completely correct and the more you can put on display in tribal council the more you are going to be at the forefront of those jurors minds when they're voting yeah i look i'm i would criticize rick for this because

[02:03:41] of what i said earlier i think it kind of bleeds into number two with doing too much arguably to become such a big threat that you go out i don't know if i have a leg to stand on in terms of criticizing it only because i i feel like my biggest flaw was kind of doing the opposite was i i was very very conscious of threat level in the game i was worried because i was the biggest guy on the season because i had controlled my tribe pre-merge because i had like a rumored idol i was i was hyper hyper focused

[02:04:11] on threat level and so a lot of tribal councils i tried to downplay myself as much as possible right i tried to not give jeff anything and make myself small as to just kind of like let the plans go as they are while secretly trying to work behind the scenes to control things and get to the end now it worked in the sense that i was able to control things and get to the end but i didn't necessarily account for

[02:04:36] the fact that as you said jurors are putting their own spins on what actually happened in the game so now my story as i played is not being told to the jury until i'm sitting there at the final tribal council which is a difficult spot to all of a sudden try to change people's minds that already have it in their heads yeah even if they've done what andy did and told you know told them exactly

[02:05:00] what your game was i mean like even if they have this idea that like it's not that they didn't necessarily respect you or whatever it's like if they have their idea of who they're voting for going into final tribal council two hours of explaining your game in detail even if it's like whoa that was a lot more than i thought i didn't realize all of that that changes my perspective a little bit it's very rare that you'll find jurors actually willing to change their mind and flip

[02:05:25] their vote and so as much as i would love to be like hey rick dude you can't become too much of a threat don't stop doing all that stuff i i sometimes look back and i'm like sometimes i wish i would have talked that talk a little bit more at tribal council and let people know like hey what's going on over here i'm i'm doing this thing just so you guys know and maybe you don't get to the end if you do that but i think that it is sometimes a necessary risk that you have to take in order to have people

[02:05:53] thinking and and you know it's also about feel um understanding who's on that jury who's being sent to that jury do you have somebody going to that jury that's advocating for you and telling your story or do you have people that are making it all about them i feel like i had people that were going and making it all about them and because of that my story wasn't being told fairly or correctly and then i didn't do what i needed to to advocate for myself in front of the jury so um all that being

[02:06:22] like i would love to say rick didn't do good here but i think that it's it's kind of a case-by-case basis of trying to feel out what you need and it's undeniable that while he became a huge threat he's also a viable win candidate if he sits in the final three seats yeah and i think i agree and the other thing too which is to play off what you said there sam about the who you're putting on the jury and this is something we mentioned previously if you do have someone who's advocating for you you

[02:06:48] want to keep that person advocating for you which is why we go back to emily he didn't turn on emily even when it it appeared to make sense because he knew that that loyalty mattered and so when you look at what the jury consists of and who is sitting there you need to be certain that that person is going to continue to advocate for you and you don't want to turn them off by doing something other than what you would normally do for that person and so i i think that you know that's

[02:07:15] something else he would have had is that people advocating for him on that jury and would have been speaking to his gameplay because you have christian there you have emily there and then you also have the antics that everybody's seeing so it's like a balance that he was going to have should it he found himself sitting in final three right yeah right and i mean what you talked about sam you know it's a tightrope it is a difficult tightrope to watch you have to or to walk you have to be not too much of

[02:07:41] a threat to get voted out but a big threat to win so that people will know it and yeah we obviously talked about that in your season it also goes case by case to just like the thing is so many people it frustrates me think that they have to like downplay their threat level and so they're like i'm not going to make moves because i don't want to become too much of a threat but i'm also like you're not a threat so you're like you're not you know if you're one of the people that can hide in plain sight and

[02:08:11] kind of like play under the radar then your objective should be to become a threat to do more to become a threat versus like worried about your threat level but if you are somebody who naturally is threatening to other people in the game your goal needs to be to downplay your threat level right so like there is obviously a balance to it all of like and that is the entire premise i suppose of

[02:08:36] survivor is like how do you get to the end while also making sure that you are somewhere in a middle spot where you're comfortable enough to be at a final tribal council and be able to sway enough people to your side and if you do too much one way or the other um you're either not going to get there or you might get there and not have as many votes as you hope for yeah i think it's you know and we've talked about this before but like in this part this season you had devins who was a threat up here

[02:09:05] and continued to be a threat because uh you know he told dalton ross i think i've shown in the past that i can find idols and i can win these immunities at the end so i don't think it was a bad choice to get rid of me and other people talked about those exact aspects so he was already up there yeah but i don't know how he could have reduced it and then you have aubrey who started down here and knows okay

[02:09:28] we're coming to the end i slowly need to make sure that i'm getting rid of the bigger threats the people who are claiming credit for the actions that i took or we took together and then i need to be able to take credit for those actions so she's slowly rising with the hope that she will be there at the end sort of i mean adam did it on your season obviously jessica uh marianne did it in her season those

[02:09:56] sorts of things where if you're a big threat the whole time like you said you need to downplay but the problem is if the last thing the jury sees is you downplaying yourself yeah you know they you know may have short memories they're not going to remember something that happened like oh sam was in charge uh well and it's i pre-merge and it's also like the you know we talk about the revisionist history of it all but it's also like you know the thing with survivor players is always people don't see

[02:10:26] the show back and everybody kind of like lives in their world where they were the main character and so like your version of events doesn't necessarily line up with their version where they're the main character of the story then you're selling them something that they may not buy like initially and so it's like hey i haven't seen this from you at tribal council and you're telling me something that doesn't necessarily line up with my perspective of the game or other somebody

[02:10:53] else's perspective because everybody's viewing themselves through the same main character lens and which so you need to find like enough of a common thread of like where you fit into everybody's story that is both like accepted and verified by everybody but then also like respected enough by everybody to be the thing that um and some of that can get very hairy especially when you're talking about subjective you know decisions you know like who was in charge of this who who had this idea

[02:11:22] first who influenced this that way and there are things that you can do that are more objective things like playing an idol or winning an immunity or playing a fake idol or doing these things that like we've seen rick devins do throughout his seasons that are objective and nobody can take them away from him and that does raise your threat level but i think it also gives you undeniable equity in your own journey yeah yeah and i think that's why like kyle we saw handled it so well because he was able to

[02:11:52] start explaining what he had done and he had camilla on the jury verifying yes what he has done yes and by the way congratulations to kyle new dad yes and then also kenzie mom of a uh for a second time there it's been uh weeks of uh survivor winner uh you know parent babies so uh but uh but yeah and you know when it

[02:12:18] comes to to rick in his last tribal council sari said devins is viewed as the biggest threat currently and we know what happened next which once he was gone she was viewed as the biggest threat and quite frankly she should have been seen that way before and devin said that like even in his uh cbs warnings interview he was like well i wanted to go to the end and i could sit next to anyone but how can i be

[02:12:46] the biggest threat when sari is sitting next to me there's just no way um and you know aubrey told us moving on to sari if sari sits in the final three she wins rizzo said to aubrey she a thousand percent wins if she gets to the end rizzo told us if i'm sitting at the end with sari she's clean sweeping the jury even going back a couple episodes emily said when i'm looking at who i want to vote for in

[02:13:10] the winner i would want that to be sari and devins replied everyone knows if she gets to the final three she wins and that kind of talk was how sari knew she was doomed she told mike bloom that when she asked joe like about the approaching vote honest joe said well sari you know nobody's going to sit next to you and win yeah well and i think it's interesting that you know this is kind of like

[02:13:38] where her ability to play such a great social game it allowed her to go as far as it did but it's also where her inability to like win immunities and find idols works against her because there is always this idea that i can keep sari with me as long as i need to because she's going to benefit me she's going to help me we're playing the game together so you you're creating that bond but you're also

[02:14:04] cognizant of the fact that i don't have to worry about her like i do a rick devins who might find an idol or who might win immunity and then when we get to that final seven six five area things can get a little bit scary because she might win and so this is the the only flaw that you can really find in her game is that she's able to last as long as she did which is crazy because she thought she was going to go out like one or two because everyone sees her for who she is which is an incredible

[02:14:33] survivor player but she's not that threat at that end where she might win an immunity or might find an idol and she's aware of that too so it's it's very interesting to see that you know how her game develops through the social game that she can play but then the understanding that well we know that we can take her out later because she's not going to win an immunity later and this is the question

[02:14:58] with sari that i think exists is like how much is great social manipulation and strategy how much of it is the other players not really worried about voting out sari at the final 11 because they're like we can get her at six or five or whenever we can vote her out and it doesn't really matter and unfortunately i mean like you know she's played six times and she hasn't made a final tribal council like

[02:15:26] could you put i think you could put sari on 20 seasons she probably makes the final seven on like all all of them does she ever win like i don't i don't know because of what you said like there is just the very especially now that she is this legend there is this there is this very clear like if she gets to the end it's almost a lifetime achievement towards she just gets there that everybody knows that they can't go to the end with her and so therefore they're always going to take her out and she

[02:15:54] can't win immunities or like find idols she doesn't find idols to save herself so this is where i want to start the debate possibly and criticize sari i think she mismanaged a lot of her agency throughout this game i think the only viable path ever for sari to win the game is to go with people delusional enough to sit next to her oh yeah she wanted to i think she but she votes out stephanie he votes out

[02:16:24] coach she votes out like these are people that that's who she needs to go with go with steph who's like your ride or die coach probably believes he can beat her i think you need to at least temporarily even if you won't go to the end with you obviously work with rick devins to take out a rizzo because rizzo smart enough not to sit next to you i don't think she should have voted out d d is a winner who's sitting there i'm desperate for somebody help me like somebody give me a lifeline i'm a winner

[02:16:53] use that person you know like and i think that she was very worried about maintaining her options and her avenues that she kept kind of like nothings in the game in terms of their threat level but all of those nothings are also smart enough to realize that them compared to sari is not a fair fight at the end and they're going to take her out so you like her best game is survivor micronesia

[02:17:18] where she is with other huge threats to win and amanda and parvati and if she gets to that final tribal council and it is a final three does she win i don't know but it's close that's her best shot is going with people like that and then convincing them i just don't see how it's a viable path to go to a final six with a jonathan rizzo aubrey tit like tiffany these people and then expect them not to turn

[02:17:43] around and vote you out and so that's where i think she misplayed her hand is the old school alliance is more of the alliance that i could see stephanie being silly enough to think she can beat sari at the end and going with her i can see coach convinced himself that this is his redemption coach 4.0 and losing to her at the end christian wanted to go to the end with her too yeah yeah like and i'm but christian's another one of those people christian's aware that his threat level is on the moon

[02:18:10] and so like there's a world where christian beats sari at the end if he's got the right combination of jurors it's i think that's a fun final tribal and that might just be the best outcome for both people obviously she's not the person in control of ozzy going home but like ozzy going home is critical to her for that reason right that he is another person who might just be silly enough to go with her and sit with her oh yeah um oh yeah he wanted to he thought he was gonna win somebody who needs

[02:18:38] shields and so my comp for her in the game that she played is kyle fraser actually uh you know when we talk about somebody who had those one-on-one relationships and those options everywhere i look at well like people talk why didn't mitch make a move well a lot of that is kyle feeling like hey you're with me joe you're with me shaheen you're with me camilla's with me and we know that

[02:19:02] his alliance is actually to camilla but eva joe shaheen mitch all of these people at the final six believe that they're with kyle and he does a good enough job of also going to the end with the they can beat him so that he sits there nobody realizes that kyle's the biggest threat in the game until he's there and he wins and i feel like that is where seri should have gone rather than like at no point should she have ever tried to take out a threat she needed to go jeremy collins mode and

[02:19:32] everybody that people view as a threat is somebody i need to stay and everybody that is kind of a nothing people i'm not thinking about those should have been her targets every round yeah so i somewhat agree with you but i'm also going to push back in some things you know with with coach and that other woman i feel like coach talks this is going to shock everyone coach talks a big game

[02:19:56] um i think by the time he got to the end he would have realized he couldn't beat her and he would have taken her out if he had she's a woman and we've seen coach do this with women before in the past true he doesn't think he can lead to a woman and then he does yes uh the other woman seri had already heard through the survivor grapevine that she was coming for seri

[02:20:21] and that's hard to get out of your head and she lied to seri's face yeah multiple times yeah i mean i do i do understand that it's hard to get it out of your head kind of a thing right um now she did want ozzy she talked about that's one reason she was so dedicated to keeping ozzy because she knew ozzy would take her to the end right that's part of what the split vote twist killed was putting ozzy in

[02:20:46] charge of his own fate instead of keeping her in charge of it um she wanted to keep tiffany because she said tiffany would take her to the end she thought maybe christian would take her to the end but she wasn't sure but of course christian wanted to go against ozzy who she knew would take her to the end so i do think that what you're saying makes sense if you could pick and choose those people like if you could say let's keep d and let's keep christian but not have christian go against ozzy

[02:21:15] and you know you have to weave it all together but each of those people had their own ideas and so i feel like she had to keep focus on the ones she knew for sure and she you know she knew certain people would not she knew rizzo was loyal to a point but that yes he would turn against her at some point right she knew jonathan was loyal to a point but at some point he would turn against her

[02:21:45] there is no like a general like precedent that is set at the merge call it right where we are we're big game hunting you know it's like you know and big game hunting does not help you if you're sari and like there and one of the things that i think it's my my favorite game ever is is jeremy collins on on cambodia because i think what he does so masterfully is set this this precedent of like

[02:22:11] hey these people who nobody's worried about those are the people that we actually need to take out and all of us that's we should actually all come together and work together and go far because the only chance any of us have is doing that you see throughout a lot of the new era i mean you mentioned marianne earlier but i mean erica marianne gabler it's a run of of three seasons in a row really where we're doing this you know next groundhog that pops his head up gets whacked and you know you

[02:22:38] need to be the last groundhog like you you need to just be like the tallest head on the totem pole when you get to the end even if that means five of the biggest threats in the game all go out before you and you're kind of left with meh at the end of the game it's like it's a viable win strategy but you know the real thing is those people that nobody's worried about should to win are are actually the win candidates nowadays yeah that is like and nobody seems to like jump on that

[02:23:08] train ever is is like hey this person you're not worried about is the person you should be the most worried about yeah i don't think it's nowadays i think it's been going on forever i mean rob and drew talked about it in their podcast this week you know the lions and the hyenas situation from winners of war it is and they talked about this it is so difficult to get the lions the threats to all agree

[02:23:33] with each other to go to the end together it is almost impossible because it's always a game of i think this person's going to turn on me i just don't know when so i have to turn on them first right yeah and you also want to win in the final three so you're also there's that selfish which is fine to be selfish it's a million dollars right so you want to bring somebody with you that you know that you can be as opposed to this idea that i want to beat the best and so i only want to be sitting

[02:23:59] next to the best and so it's it's a very difficult and i i i agree wholeheartedly sam that this seems like the i i've always thought about that third seat like who's the person who they're dragging into the end away from someone else because oh you know this person doesn't matter well maybe you should worry about who that person is because they could sway a vote they could take a vote you never know what's

[02:24:24] going to happen with the jury and so there's so many components that you have to be cognizant of that you have to think about yeah and i think what's really interesting about this whole construct is was season 50 filled with enough lions to really give sari an opportunity to make it i don't think it was and i don't think it was either and i think that's fit that maybe that's on just casting again

[02:24:50] because there is a general like hey if boston rob plays again yeah you can't win tony can't win parvati can't win none of these people can win unless there's enough lions on the cast to allow them to have like a place to hide or people disillusioned enough to believe that they have a chance against them and when you cast enough like relatively normal hyenas who have their heads screwed on straight

[02:25:16] you know like it just isn't it's inevitable and so like she does do a good job of making it very far here obviously and perhaps she is just you know one one thing away right like if tiffany doesn't win that challenge and tiffany goes home then sari's at five who knows maybe she gets real lucky and it's a puzzle immunity or something like that and she beats everybody else on the puzzle who

[02:25:42] knows you know it's right right hard to imagine she wins her first career immunity after 40 something tries of it but like it's possible and maybe that is the thing that ultimately gets sari to the end of game but you know she it's as close as you can come basically it's just kind of and it's the unfortunate part of these seasons it's why we often see hey kelly wentworth goes on a deep run when at

[02:26:06] the time she's kind of like a why is she huh she's on the cast uh you know it's like parvati on even on micronesia is kind of a nothing when before she becomes parvati in full four right on micronesia you know you always see that these people who are sort of the understated like tony on winners at war is an anomaly of of having one of like the big loud characters on the season actually winning

[02:26:31] the returning season but that's a season with a lot of lions and so it's only a lot of he had and his second time out he had done so poorly yeah a lot of people remembered him for that instead of his first yes yeah and like tony tony has boston rob and parvati and sandra and and jeremy and tyson and kim all these people that he can hide behind is like well i'm not that person but right if it's

[02:26:58] not tony you see that end game is denise and nick and you know a lot of people that you wouldn't have thought would make it that far because they weren't very like high level winners that you thought of before the season and that shows kind of the the danger of casting a lot of hyenas yeah and that's the thing you know they like i said rob and drew talked about this if you're a lion your best win condition is yourself and two hyenas if you're a hyena your best win condition is three hyenas

[02:27:26] yeah and you know when i say this has been going on for a long time i mean adam i don't think nothing against adam i think adam played a great game he wasn't a lion though he was a hyena and he knew to wait for to wait and take out the lions at the end and that's why he let david get so far you know and then took him out and yeah all those all those aspects and so i also know

[02:27:54] or sari in particular in this season because rob has mentioned on multiple podcasts now and i'm sure others have too that yes sari should have kept these other shields because when they were around people were not talking about her but this is where i disagree i think people were not talking about her then for a reason i think you brought up sam uh that they weren't worried about her yet

[02:28:20] they you know i i have said in the past i didn't expect her to be taken out until this time if she made it past the first and second boot yeah this is exactly where i expected her to go because like you said they could leave her there without fear that she would go on some sort of run that would make it impossible to get rid of her so i don't think it mattered who was in the game at any particular

[02:28:45] point it was all about the timing she was good to keep around as an ally until people were starting to think about final three and that's when you take her out no matter who was or was it even if there were a couple of other lions in there i don't think you can distract from sari that long maybe she makes it to five instead of six but six was pretty much where i predicted she would go yes seven six is

[02:29:12] officially where i think you trigger into end game um like somewhere in between there is where the end game really triggers and i think it's kind of foolish before then to be thinking about final three uh but i think that you're foolish if at this point in time you're not thinking about final three and that's kind of where you need to where most people i think pivot their mindset from like how do i get far to how do i win and so it makes sense that you get to this point and all of a sudden sari starts

[02:29:40] surfacing on everybody's radar as a threat yeah and that's why we see uh you know we have multiple confessionals from aubrey talking about well now is when i have to figure out my final three now is when you think about final three well yeah i think that joe has been on everyone's mind for final three since like day one uh but uh other than that you know it's hard to drag it's hard to like why would

[02:30:05] people not want to take him out though like that is my question that i you know i remember when when we voted the saul vote on my season where i go and i blow up the plan and i tell saul that he's going home and there's all this chaos i was trying to rally people and and the reason the vote didn't come together is because people weren't happy with the alternative target that i chose which was sue i wanted sue out of the game and nobody else wanted to vote out sue and they remember being like

[02:30:30] why would we you know why don't we do kyle why don't we do a bigger a bigger player and i'm like well because everybody wants kyle out tomorrow and if saul's not going to go out right now it would be kyle if it wasn't saul so it's like you're just giving them their b option b like that's not what i want to do if i want to vote out if i want to blow up a vote i'm not trying to give you your plan b i'm trying to do the worst case scenario which is take out the person you had sitting with

[02:30:56] you at the end completely blow up your game board and now everybody's final three becomes way more open where they're like trying to figure out what the new three looks like that changes the hierarchy and the mechanics but for some reason so many people don't they don't have that vision to see like hey this person that everybody wants to sit next to i should probably uh vote that person out and a general rule i want to say because both of these votes are unanimous if a vote is unanimous it's

[02:31:24] probably not good for you make that a rule of survivor if everybody's okay if everybody is okay with this plan there is a better than 50 chance that it loses you the game there's a reason everybody else is okay with this happening it's because they have a vision right everybody's playing in a world where they win they win the game and so if they feel this vote helps them advance to their win path that's why they're doing it and you need to ask yourself why it is that

[02:31:54] everybody else is okay with this happening because so many people do what they think is intuitive which is take out the biggest threat or take out the the next person on the the chopping block and you don't realize what it leaves you with and for three voting out devins leaves her with a world in which she's the next person to go and for somebody next week voting out sari here is going to leave them without a viable path to get to the final three and you have to ask yourself why everybody else was so on

[02:32:23] board for this plan i don't know why we don't like unanimous votes are dumb they shouldn't exist they like they should never happen there should never be a unanimous vote in survivor there's no way that one thing is actually good for everybody else left in the game so that's my two cents on it it's just that they think it is because if everyone thinks they can be the one to take joe to the end well then that's good and they don't think about the fact that well what if someone else wants i mean

[02:32:52] aubrey brought it up with talking about rizzo yeah at one point when she tried to get the target on rizzo she was like well rizzo's just gonna take up a spot at the end yeah but we never hear anybody say that about joe because everybody wants joe at the end because they know they can beat him yeah it's just yeah i mean obviously they happen in in cases like i mean there was multiple times on my season where like you just vote where the votes are going for the sake of voting where the

[02:33:21] votes are going if you know that like you can't do anything about it but almost all the time if there was a unanimous vote i was probably trying to push against that unanimous vote because it's just like there's no way that this is good for all of you and it's good for me when we have opposing um you know we're in opposing alliances with opposing wills and somehow those are aligned on the same vote i don't think so yeah yeah all right well we can move to rule seven which covers idols and advantages and game

[02:33:50] mechanics and we obviously have a lot more to talk about here when it comes to devons uh compared to sari starting with his fake idol when he got up and pulled it it was amazing the looks on people's faces no way they would think he previously planted it there and i know some players in interviews claim that they knew about it whatever bs he told mike bloom when i talk about revisionist history dude you know that people will say things now that they didn't necessarily feel there like i mean like

[02:34:19] everywhere i mean everyone's like we knew it was fake and it's like well the whole next episode you're still acting like it's real and i noticed the same thing people were arguing with me online oh they said they knew it was fake yeah bs they said that and then the very next episode they're all like oh we can't vote out devons because he has an idol if you knew it was fake you wouldn't be talking that way right right exactly and i do think that this is a very risky thing to try to pull off but when you're

[02:34:47] rick devons you know how to do it and you know how to make it appear as if it's actually a thing because if you if you don't play it right it's it's going to scream fake he had to have christian in on it with him in order to to make all of this happen so the stars needed to align in order for him to really have it have the effect that he needed it to and yeah he was it's a very creative game move that we've not seen done and i think now he's kind of introduced this idea

[02:35:16] into the world of survivor where now we're going to use tribal council to hide idols and make everybody question moving forward is this real or not so it was a great great introduction to the game yeah so good and this is like the kind of like refreshing new stuff that you'd love a guy like rick devons for that you're trying to see because of you know what you said jessica too like i would love hey production hide an idol at tribal council next time yeah and then put a clue make it real

[02:35:46] but if somebody has to go find their idol at tribal council you know we saw adam klein do it they announced we'll never see it again we'll never see an idol at tribal council then rick does the idol at tribal council people believe it's real now do a real one at tribal council they'll think it's fake like it's the zigzag of survivor um and you need people like rick who are bold enough to to introduce new concepts and new things that you know we could argue night and day the merits of like the

[02:36:13] strategy of many of these things it's fun it's great tv um and it's why we want to tune in and it's why he was put on season 50 so i i i loved it and i thought that he does this better than there's a reason his reputation is like he's the idol guy because he finds like three of them on his first season he hides like three fakes that all get found and played like he's just the king of these of these idols and he weaponizes this to advance his game better than anyone on this cast yeah he

[02:36:43] planned this going in once they approved his pocket square you know he uh you know he planned it going in and then it was just even better when christian came to him with the the real idol uh you know instructions and everything and so and then he talked in his interview i think with uh dalton ross about how he had another plan that he was gonna get red paint all over himself like sue and act like

[02:37:08] he found an idol that way but but jonathan wouldn't leave his side long enough for him to enact that plan it might have worked who knows but uh you know that's just that creative thinking and then after people were starting to actually get suspicious because he kept not playing his supposed idol he turned it around he fessed up which i thought was a pretty good plan like yeah hey i don't have an idol i'm on

[02:37:32] the bottom why go after me leave me alone i'm no threat to you yeah yeah and again it's that knowing how to respond to the audience knowing how to respond to the information that's happening around you and if you want to try to remove that threat level from yourself you have to do something like that and again rick was very good at reading the room and understanding what needed to be done and when it needed to be done yeah now then of course there was the mr beast coin flip but this has been discussed

[02:38:00] a lot already for obvious reasons but in short i totally understand why he did it i i don't think most people would do it i would not recommend it in general but he said that while he he thought he had changed the vote and saved himself that way by revealing everything that uh jonathan and the other woman had done he could not be sure plus he noted that even if he did change that vote it would probably

[02:38:27] just swing back around to him the next vote so the added immunity idol was certainly enticing to keep himself safe for longer and as i mentioned at the time that is one difference between this mr beast coin flip and the one in beast games because on beast games there's no benefit to the flipper unless they end up winning there's no guaranteed benefit to the flipper here he was safe and had an idol so there was that

[02:38:55] added benefit that enticed him to flip the coin it's two rounds of immunity yeah right it's actually kind of three rounds of immunity because the next round is that double right so it's like it's the the split tribal twist and so you know that flip happens at the final 10 and uh rick goes from the final 10 to the final seven with one coin flip so it is it is heavy stakes but i don't think anybody would complain about

[02:39:22] having heavy incentive for a flipper in in that context because it is like your entire game is on is on a coin so right yeah yeah i wouldn't mind seeing that come back without the mandatory nature of it if i agree not been willing to do it forcing someone to right no rock draw for that no yeah no yeah and then the morning of his actual eventual demise devins of course was looking for an idol from the

[02:39:48] moment that there was any light at all we don't even know if there was an idol to find you know there were two of them did leave the game but rizzo still has his so production might have been like nope there's still an idol in the game we're not putting another one back in we have no idea right yeah so one last thing in this rule for devins and it's something i mentioned earlier that he talked

[02:40:11] in interviews about his viewpoint on idols or advantages and allies which was you know correctly pointing out he doesn't need to tell them all his secrets and this is something that we need to see from every player moving forward we have said this before you don't need to tell people about your right advantage right yeah right now as for sari at least for a change we don't have to talk about

[02:40:37] how she got screwed by other people's advantages uh she instead got saved last week by another person's advantage and that was in large part because as we just said sari kept her extra vote secret they could not plan around it they made a plan not knowing it was there and poof she drops it on them she takes out emily and you know it was the perfect use of an extra vote i have a question we didn't actually

[02:41:05] address this why did she and emily vote on the revo so it's because she had two votes and emily had one vote so it's the same reason we've seen before when someone loses a vote and then someone still has a vote they do it now to preserve the mystery of who does or does not have a vote or an extra vote etc okay

[02:41:30] so on on my season uh i lose my vote at the auction and then am in a tie vote with sierra at the final 11 and rather than the typical sam and sierra cannot vote because they're the two that are tied sierra is able to vote and i am not able to vote because i lost my vote at the auction okay so it is that same math that by allowing them both vote sari maintains a plus one vote advantage over emily but by having

[02:41:57] them both vote it's not revealed specifically that sari is playing an extra vote just in case you know for whatever reason in the future there is a need to kind of hide what's actually going on but um i think that i think that's like a new rule that hasn't been made officially like announced but that they're trying to make that effort to avoid loopholes since they've done so much vote manipulation yeah

[02:42:21] yes yes that's a great way to say it yeah i suspect jeff explained it and they just didn't bother to show it because they had a lot of other things going on that he said yeah he makes sure everybody feels good about it and stuff too i remember like on on our season right like he i think they show a brief bit of his explanation of like you can't vote you can vote he's good then before we go to vote he's like you're good with that right like we all know what's what's going on here and we're tracking

[02:42:46] the logic and they do a good job of reassuring everybody all right thank you okay so we can move on to appendix a which discusses players keeping their end goals in mind when voting and we talk about voting out the weak than the strong than the weak than the strong and we are clearly back in the area of voting out strong threats uh we've already spent quite a bit of time talking about that in rule six i we don't need to rehash it all two hours and 40 minutes into it uh but

[02:43:12] you know we heard from a number of people especially aubrey about how they were thinking ahead to who could beat them in the end and making sure that person was not there to do so i expect this trend to continue with the next two votes i haven't obviously made it a secret that i'm sure joe will be in the final three uh we discussed about a bit about rizzo uh you know as well

[02:43:36] this is when the strong players need to beware the most and this is the lions we we spent a lot of time talking about this so it it does make perfect sense that devins and then sari were cut down here perfect sense but sad yes yes and i yeah obviously this is well i don't know if it would have been any different had had sari kept devins around till six but at least you might have bought yourself another

[02:44:03] round which you know we did see at least from the hierarchy of rooting interests it was like devins has to go then tiffany has to go right and like then tiffany wins so maybe there is like hey if you take out rizzo at seven and then it's devins has to go tiffany has to go well now all of a sudden sari has a a puncher's chance in a fire making contest to get to the end so um i do i do think she might have

[02:44:28] lost a little bit of the vision of um end goal in mind when she went through some of these last few votes i don't think this is an issue with rick devins though i think you know he's looking for for any path possible and all of them are viable for him yes i do think what one thing we haven't discussed i don't want to go too deep into it at this point but i i believe it was rick said something

[02:44:49] to the effect that aubrey was the deciding factor in him going and so i do wonder if with the numbers even if sari had said no i don't want to do that if everyone else really wanted well i think out i think the big thing here is because well tiffany wants rizzo right and so tiffany wants rizzo rizzo doesn't want rizzo um right but i think maybe there's a world where hey if rick tiffany

[02:45:20] aubrey jonathan maybe maybe that's like joe definitely joe well i'm saying like would vote on rizzo like so rick aubrey tiffany vote on rizzo and then maybe they get maybe they get jonathan as the the last one um maybe that was like a plan that was discussed behind the scenes and aubrey just didn't really didn't want to do it and so that kind of changed the calculus but i don't know i've got a hard time being like anybody was the reason somebody went home in a

[02:45:46] sick zero vote yeah he just said well he said that she was the deciding factor you know it might not have been so even if sari had said yes let's take out rizzo instead they might not have been able to swing yeah they might have it's sari you know i mean but yeah you just don't know and like i said it was that was like one comment he made in an interview so it's like really hard to judge that yeah so all right we can go to appendix b which discusses of course the jury phase of the game

[02:46:15] both of our players this week have been making themselves look very good in the eyes of the jury though in different ways we discussed rick's actions and tribal councils earlier and he had told dalton ross in the mid-season interview i think people underestimate how starving the jury is for action and what a huge impact these moments can have on them and he was he was playing it up to them we talked about that showing them his moves so that he would be they would be ready to vote for him

[02:46:41] if he had made it right uh sari she didn't need to do that type of thing she demonstrated to the jury why she deserved to win by well putting them on the jury and then putting more people on the jury who would talk about how she was controlling everything and so on each new person that she put there was another who was likely to vote for her she didn't even have to pick and choose because eventually everyone figured out what she was doing and if they talked about her easily sweeping the

[02:47:11] jury votes when they were still in the game as many of them did they were certainly going to keep that opinion once they were voted out yep all right so it has been a long time but it is time to wrap things up for rick and sari so sam what are your well first of all sam did we get to all your points that you wanted we certainly did okay so then what are your final thoughts on them i mean it is uh

[02:47:37] it's devastating rick survivors favorite newscaster the man who um has this this charming wit when he's on screen and yet a really moving emotional vulnerability uh a guy who plays with joy set out to play with that that joyful kidful spirit uh as his wife encouraged him to do and he did that from the moment he got to the beach uh to the moment that he had his torch snuffed i can't imagine season 50 without

[02:48:07] rick uh i think it was a no-brainer casting choice even if it was originally from an alternates perspective that he ended up on here but he brought something new he brought something fun uh and he was a lot of fun to root for even if at many times rick is too much of a showman and too likable for his own good um so it ends up being the demise that you probably could have predicted that he would burn a little too bright and too fast but i'm really happy that we got to see him burn nonetheless um

[02:48:37] sari uh it is uh like you said david i think from the moment that she passed the first and second tribal council you had this feeling that we had a a really deep sari fields run in us and unlike a lot of the other old school players who maybe were shells of their former selves in this iteration of themselves sari seemed to be at her best uh the way that she navigated the social game had very distinct and

[02:49:04] intentional ways of speaking to people one-on-one and had everyone believing that they were her friend however it is outwith outplay outlast and as we've seen now through six iterations including international of sari's game one of those areas uh seems to always kind of be lacking and if she's not able to surround herself with the right people well father time comes for us all eventually and it

[02:49:29] came for her at the final six i think everybody was rooting for a sari win to cement her legacy and cement season 50 as one of the greatest seasons that we've seen had she won it uh but it does come to a rather predictable conclusion at the final six that breaks all of our hearts i enjoyed both of them i think they might be the two stars of the season uh and the two people that we look back on as

[02:49:54] the people we remember season 50 the most for it is fascinating that rick devins was an alternate for the season considering the impact that he has now had on the season and there was no chance on god's green earth that uh sari was ever an alternate she was always top of the list for this season so first call i'm sure so it's fascinating to see that they both had such an impact on the season despite

[02:50:21] the fact that we knew sari coming in was going to and we assumed that rick would but i think we were all like oh he was an alternate that's interesting but he was also chosen as an alternate why because jeff knew that if anyone could understand it and and and handle it it would be rick devins and that's because of the spirit that rick devins brings to survivor and his understanding of the game and his willingness to kind of go along with what's happening and then turn it into a rick devins moment and i think

[02:50:50] we saw so many of those moments with him so i'm so glad he was finally put on the season so we could see him be the rick devins that we all know and love but also the rick devins that we can respect as a survivor player because he has this understanding of how to play a game in this new era especially right where we have all of these these nuanced things these introductions these twists which we

[02:51:15] can't stand half of them but he's willing to step up and say you want me to flip that coin yeah i will i'll take that chance i will do that because i'm rick devins and so i love that we were able to see him do this in this season but i also love that we're able to see seri be seri in this season it was like we got to see the best moments of her as well we got to see the seri who is that mafia boss who is in

[02:51:41] charge who is controlling everyone's emotions around her and situating herself in a position that she thought was going to be the best for her but like we said were there enough lions for her to really do that i don't think there were i think she needed some more lions on this season however i wasn't making those calls i wasn't making those choices and so we ended up with initially an alternate and someone who was probably the first call on the season together going out the same time or on the

[02:52:09] same episode i should say but both playing the games that they know how to play and the games that we have come to respect because they both know themselves enough to understand their abilities they understand their capabilities they understand their strengths and they know their weaknesses and they lean into all of them when they need to and so overall they played the games we wanted to see and we respect so much that they gave us that entertainment that we're able to watch so sad to

[02:52:37] see them both go i understand why they did because they were really giving it a great run love them both and uh those are my thoughts on devins and serene yeah it was a sad wednesday night this past week rick devins was the only player this season to have appeared as a guest on this podcast so far so i you know but i hope and expect to have others in the future or other people who are guests return

[02:53:02] to survivor and of course jessica and i have had the privilege of meeting serene as well as others on this season but aside from those purely personal reasons both were huge players from this season serene was controlling so much and to echo what you both said it is inconceivable to me that rick was originally an alternate and i i truly can't imagine this season without him devins said within

[02:53:26] the game you play to win the game yes but have fun playing the game i can certainly get behind that he did both however like so many others this season he found himself on the wrong end of an alliance with serene that she decided to prune off he kept on fighting never giving up he used different methods from strategy to risk taking to pure audacity and it worked for a number of votes but as we so often see the more a player fights and succeeds the more they become a threat to win his actions to stop

[02:53:56] people from voting him out reinforce the reasons people wanted to vote him out there really was no alternative he had to fight every step of the way but he just eventually ran out of options in large part that was because serene put the kibosh on the one option that tiffany had brought up to try and take out rizzo instead because she probably controlled that vote in much the same way she controlled so many others all season long she did it with subtlety back channel scheming working out the

[02:54:25] strategy and convincing her minions to put it into play and of course an incredible social game that made everyone think they were her best friend and ally this placement is as i said where i expected serene to go out if she wasn't eliminated immediately once she got her strategic and social games going she was in it for the long haul and nobody was worried about her from a challenge perspective so there was no rush to get her out prior to now heck it seems like nobody is worried about anybody from a challenge

[02:54:54] perspective this season considering jonathan and joe are still around because these players know who the real threats are and they're not the muscle heads they're the brains of the operation i've previously talked about how it would be a risk to let serene get to five or better because you don't know what twists may come and clearly the other players saw it as well this was the perfect opportunity and was made even better by their original target tiffany winning immunity we're at a time in the

[02:55:23] game when as a player you know the threats have to go or else you risk them making it to the end and beating you serene was simply the biggest threat in the game and rick was not far behind serene was beating anyone if she made it to the end rick was probably beating almost anyone but serene though it likely would have been closer but both of them had to go despite or in some ways because of the great

[02:55:49] games both played in very different ways it was the only way for others to move forward and that is why rick and serene lost sadness all right well we will go through this next part quickly here we do have our predictions and i know almost three hours but i know around for those predictions because this is going to talk about the finale here uh we do want to mention that next week uh the podcast will be out about a

[02:56:18] day later than usual because you know we have to discuss why someone won and why four other people lost so it takes a little longer to get our notes together i do want to also quickly remind everyone that the rules we just discussed are available in poster form poster on a t-shirt form and checklist on a t-shirt form and you can find all of that at rob has a website dot com slash y x lost feed

[02:56:45] uh sam where can people find you online on twitter that's probably the best spot uh twitter x instagram uh i post a lot of sports stuff so uh if you if you can if you can deal with baseball and chicago sports content and want a little bit of reality tv or other television discourse mixed in there uh sam underscore phelan online uh sam phelan with just my name no underscore is the instagram handle but uh

[02:57:12] yeah go come check me out over there i'm instagram's gonna be a lot of cat content and travel content and then uh you know the the the twitter is going to be a lot of sports and uh occasionally some tv talk yeah we'll say you might oh i'm sorry what websites do you uh uh uh you know if people want their their chicago sports content because we have a contingent of chicago listeners here where do you go to find

[02:57:36] that for you we'll go to roundtable sports it's a it's a global sports media uh network here so we we do have teams of all nfl teams all mlb nba whatever you want a lot of college on there as well so white socks cubs bears i'm writing about all of them over at roundtable sports so there's lots of links and all that stuff on my twitter account too or you can just google it if you want to circumvent a little bit of social media use so they have an app too right yep yep get the app you'll get

[02:58:05] the notifications uh when when i write stuff uh about the teams and breaking news uh opinion pieces all all of that stuff uh going out well i i did want to comment on your game of thrones post that i might disagree with with your with your assessment there but that's something we can talk about that's another three-hour podcast that is another three-hour podcast for sure i was like

[02:58:27] what but anyway um so i am also uh blue sky and twitter at jessicalewis89 i'm on instagram at jessicalewis six seven eight nine i do not post as much content as probably uh sam or i know for certain david bloomberg because david bloomberg has become a social media guru he has a link tree so you can find all of his incredible content and all of the places that he posts so david bloomberg why don't

[02:58:54] you talk about your link tree yes you can find that at link tree slash david bloomberg you can get to go to all my accounts from there you can find me directly on blue sky as at david bloomberg and on the video sites youtube tiktok and instagram as at david bloomberg tv i continue to post two or three reality tv short videos per day right now almost all about survivor 50 although of course there was a big brother 28 announcement in there and you know we've got other shows like

[02:59:21] the traders new zealand coming up the traders india after that um so you can always find videos about those shows and like the traders canada finally came on to peacock you can go back and look at all the videos and podcasts i did on the trade are uh about the traders canada as well if you're catching up uh if you're in the u.s and you're just catching up with that now all right well uh

[02:59:49] predictions next time obviously the finale the players will whittle down from a final five to a final three and then face the jury i may have dropped some hints here along the way about what i think will happen uh now i'll just say it outright i'm not going to keep you in suspense i believe the final three will be aubrey rizzo and joe and my original pre-game winner pick aubrey will take home the two

[03:00:14] million dollars so let me explain wow uh this was i think more of a controversial opinion before this past episode because i i feel like all of the confessionals from aubrey talking about how she knows what she needs to do at the end of the game and all and she you know i don't think they are those are all in there for her to lose is it possible yes we have seen edits that that screw us over before

[03:00:43] uh i could jonathan get there and beat her and we'd look back and say well see she knew she needed to get rid of the threats but she let him through yes i just think the edit is setting her up to win it's been trending that way i'll say for a little while now some people claim it's been as long as since she got rid of genevieve or even before that or i don't you know she got rid of when genevieve was gone

[03:01:09] um i think it was just really in our faces this week we had confessionals of her saying things like when i'm hearing that rizzo's annoying people it's making me feel like someone i want to go to the end of the game with some of the old timers might not like giving two million dollars to a kid who drives them nuts uh she said in tribal council i think a really important part of the game is figuring out the timing it's almost like dismantling a bomb you're trying to find the people you can sit with

[03:01:38] at the end but you got to be really careful how you peel back the layers or the whole thing will explode in your face these were just among multiple scenes of aubrey talking about getting to the end and winning and why she didn't win her first time and what she can do to improve and what she needs to guard against and all of that is it possible all of this is a misdirect sure these are the

[03:02:01] survivor editors and they love to torture us but i feel like if it is it's almost malpractice on the part of survivor production because putting it all in our faces like that and then having a different outcome in survivor 50 of all seasons it is going to make the fans scream and riot yeah many people are already unhappy about sari being voted out if you follow that up with someone willing who was not

[03:02:30] shown to play a game that appears to deserve a win you are just asking for trouble we have seen this in the past people get very unhappy when you do not show some hints of how a person won these seem like more than hints um moving forward under the presumption that they really haven't gone completely off the deep

[03:02:54] end in the edit it seems clear to me that with jonathan taking all the credit for getting ozzy out and you know saying i think he talked about the same with sari and he'll probably you know take credit for that too aubrey has to get rid of him before the final three to ensure she doesn't worry about fighting with him over who claims responsibility for that tiffany said back in her episode 9 video that people weren't targeting joe or jonathan at that point because they were physical threats but they weren't seen as

[03:03:24] threats to win at the end uh she said quote being a physical player is not all that scary however at this point i do think jonathan has shown enough apparent strategy or at least he can make a claim to it you can't take the risk he has to go and the other person is of course tiffany herself who would have at least in theory gone if she hadn't won immunity against well literally everyone else but

[03:03:49] siri working together uh sari uh working together at this time you just did what you get you would i know yeah i didn't say sorry at least you know but uh you know i did let this the apple slip in there but i corrected myself um only one of jonathan or tiffany can win immunity so whoever doesn't has to

[03:04:15] go first and then they have to hope someone else most likely joe can beat the others at final four and you know put that person into fire making to to lose and yeah we officially don't know how the fans voted when it comes to fire making but considering they have gone against what i want and every other game related vote i'm sure they voted to keep it yeah that's one way or another one thing that's the

[03:04:39] unknown though right is the fire making thing yeah yes uh now one way or another i think this is how we get to a final three of aubrey rizzo and joe we don't really need to talk about joe he hasn't done squat in terms of the game he's managed to piss off some of his honor and loyalty pals by not appearing so loyal when like he informed sari about things that were going on and we heard some of that in

[03:05:04] interviews as for rizzo well he still didn't play his idol but there was never any reason for him to do so he knew the two plans in play were to go after sari or go after aubrey he seems to believe this will be some big resume move i think he's overestimating that much like he overestimated it last season a number of people including us have already said have said this but by going directly from one season

[03:05:31] to another i just don't think he recognized he wasn't getting the jury's vote last time and i don't think he will this time either and then we have aubrey who i've mentioned she's been talking about how she lost her first season what she needed to do to get the win this time unless we are being completely effed up by the edit again is it possible yes but i it's clear to me she wins by being the most

[03:05:57] strategic player left after having taken out the big threats she can make claims to all those strategies even i know some viewers are like no i don't believe that whatever if she's the only one left and she's the only one they can go with so those are my thoughts and i know that went on for quite a while that so i don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying but i am curious about two things so we have the jonathan and joe combo right they've been playing this game together since the beginning

[03:06:26] so decisions moving forward i think they're going to make them together so that's two votes instead of one so if they're looking at wanting to target people i think they're going to have more of an ability to do so and um their their votes are likely going to be together i think as far as like the jury makeup that we're looking at if you have a jonathan sitting in the final three he's got a lot of

[03:06:50] fans on that jury and so you've got a lot of people sitting there who might just say well jonathan was playing this loyalty integrity game with us better so than joe and so we want to credit jonathan so i do think that if jonathan is sitting in that final three he is a very he has a really good shot because of the people right so i understand everything you're saying about why aubry needs to target him

[03:07:15] but i'm curious because this is what the editors do they like to make people crazy um maybe they're showing us all of the things that aubry is kicking herself for doing previously because it's going to happen again wouldn't that be sick wouldn't that be very sick it would be it would be nasty to do

[03:07:38] to aubry nastier to do to well maybe not nastier but nasty to do to viewers as well i just it's possible you know we have seen apparent winners edits for people like jesse you know where it's like he's definitely gonna win he's definitely gonna nope there he goes uh yeah it's possible i can't rule it out i am uh you know in the past i have taken very definite stances like there's no way this person

[03:08:02] can win i'm not doing that this time i i don't think it's possible joe can win i i don't think joe can win i don't think joe can win i don't think rizzo's gonna win i think if jonathan is sitting in there he's got a chance i think if aubry is sitting there she has a chance however i am very ah there is something in my gut that is telling me they're messing with us and it's going to be a jonathan win and not an aubry win i don't i just i hate that that's what my gut is saying sam i know

[03:08:29] you want to say something i can tell like what are your thoughts here because this is messing with me a lot well i have i have a lot of thoughts um i i think it's going to be an aubry win i do i think i think as david said i think it's been shoved in our face here's quotes that we've gotten sequentially in episodes it's time to make people realize i really do mean business how do all these pieces fit into the board in a way where i have a spot at the end this is a full-on punching match to get

[03:08:55] to the end it's go time there's no turning back now those have all been in episode sneak peeks for the last four episodes running we are having it shoved in our face that even though by the way aubry's not really doing anything she's just kind of sitting there letting other people play she's claiming to take credit for everything even when rick devins flips the mr beast coin it is spun as aubry's master plan getting rick to do exactly what she wants him to do i'm not sure how that

[03:09:22] makes much sense yeah i disagree with the rick thing other stuff we have other stuff like she's got no better claim to the ozzy booth than jonathan does jonathan probably has a better claim to it yeah she's got no better claim to the cerevo than jonathan does jonathan might have a better claim to that one too but we're not being shown jonathan taking credit for this stuff in a way that's like this is what's going to help me win the game or being shown it from aubry's perspective yeah that's true we haven't

[03:09:49] heard from anybody else on their ideal final three concoction we haven't heard jonathan say i want to sit next to joe and rizzo because i can beat both of them or i'm not worried about this person or this or that the only person who's really talked about their win equity is aubry and i read that similar to david as well i think the edit is preparing us to they're trying to justify you know the the tallest blade of grass when all of the grass gets mowed being aubry and they're trying to build her

[03:10:18] up as much of a threat as possible so that you do feel kind of satisfied even if you kind of have a sure kind of winner at the end um and so i think that's kind of what we're getting here is this idea of like we're being told deliberately why this person is winning or what they think is their reason why they're winning because the game itself doesn't necessarily speak for itself um i would normally be

[03:10:43] very bullish on tiffany and just because of her i think she's played tremendous i think she's incredible i think she has all of the jury votes at this point if she gets to the end as like a social favorite uh she's strategically respected physically respected um she just wasn't really in the show for the first five episodes and so that kind of is like a disqualifier in my eyes of like yeah you know although i will say one word erica yeah yeah i i mean but i do agree with you generally that like

[03:11:13] i think that we've seen the feedback from 41 42 43 and really since then it's kind of been an in your face winners edit ever since you know like every single time since then it's a very strong winners edit they're clearly telling the winner's story through their perspectives and trying to make you satisfied that they won i would be surprised if on the 50th season they brought a tiffany or a joe

[03:11:37] out of nowhere to to win it in the finale um i think that while jonathan has friends on the jury it's really only coach chrissy steph maybe ozzy uh he might have made ozzy mad by blindsiding him i also think that he has a lot of pretty staunch enemies on the jury like he does yeah like if he's going against aubrey at the final i would assume that he doesn't have devins emily christian those are

[03:12:04] all of aubrey's friends i would assume that somebody like d isn't voting for jonathan tiffany might maybe votes for jonathan um i don't think he has three i don't think he has three either yeah so he's gonna vote for aubrey so i i don't know it's hard for me to figure out what cohort of six people vote for jonathan at the end if he does get there with aubrey is there a world where he goes with rizzo and joe and wins yes i do think that's very possible but i do i read it as a as an

[03:12:33] aubrey win that's kind of being shoved in our faces right now yeah i think you're right they want to justify you know because aubrey has played a quiet game like i said earlier she started here and has been rising up uh i think that they they want to justify and there's no and there's no flashy move like she hasn't done anything independently right like her moves are unanimously voting out

[03:12:57] you know ozzy unanimously voting out serene unanimously voting out like and so we're even like the ozzy thing right we're specifically told this perspective through aubrey's eyes of like how she actually took ozzy out by telling telling rizzo like that ozzy did all the stuff to her when we have also seen that like jonathan was intending to get ozzy out regardless by the time he arrived on that beach

[03:13:22] and yet we're told the side story about how aubrey made it happen i just think we're i think that it is kind of like a although i will say rizzo at least said the reason that he didn't tip off ozzy the reason he voted him out was because of what aubrey told him we have shown him saying that so i think she does have a good claim to that um i have a higher opinion i think of her game from for a number

[03:13:49] of reasons one she's my pregame winner pick not gonna lie two she has uh she has uh told me how how uh you know but she enjoys uh the way i analyze things hey i'm prone to flattery i'm sorry uh but even just aside from those things uh you know just watching the game yeah there are some things that are definitely debatable like did she get serene out i mean like i said earlier everybody

[03:14:18] knew they had to get serene out any any move that everybody can claim is like a movement nobody gets the claim in my eyes if you're the only one there who can make that claim yeah oh if she's if she sits with rizzo and joe i think it's like a no contest i think it's a more fiery final tribal council with her and jonathan but i do i think if it's her and jonathan at the end i think it just comes down to like you know likability she's old school and not part of this like old school alliance that rubbed a

[03:14:47] lot of people the wrong way during the game where it's like yeah chrissy and coach might vote for jonathan and steph but like when have chrissy coach and steph had their finger on the pulse of what everybody else wants in this game and it's like i think that a lot of people would vote against jonathan and be like yeah sure you're the next best thing here which is a viable win path you know and you know we see it a lot i just think that um it would be it would be underwhelming but again this is

[03:15:13] this final five which i think i feel like has taken out a lot of our big time uh people i love the game rizzo's playing i think that he's played like a really awesome fun game i just think for all of the reasons that aubry kind of laid out with an old school jury and him being the youngest on the cast and kind of an unknown quantity and like the survivor universe there is a level of pressure with season 50 to be like oh it's gonna go the win is gonna go to like a legend or somebody who

[03:15:42] like really deserves it and not that his gameplay doesn't necessarily deserve it i just think you know those same people that i list coach chrissy stephanie ozzy i think they'd have a really hard time voting for like this guy that they know absolutely nothing about at the end so not necessarily his fault but like the the setup of the jury doesn't favor him right especially when we've you know heard them talk in interviews all he did was lie around all day you know he he didn't do anything

[03:16:09] yeah he has a negative connotation through a lot of the interviews so far yeah which is part of the reason you kind of have to hate exit press sometimes but it's also you know right we can read into it too yeah all right so we've got two aubrys jessica what was your official well i i do think that the edit is telling us it's an aubry one for every reasons that you've both explained i don't think that her game has been like a rick devins like in your face everybody sees what she's doing and so they are

[03:16:35] trying to legitimize a 50 winner here by giving her credit for things that she doesn't necessarily deserve credit for i'm just very fearful that they're messing with us i really like i just feel like there's this part of me that's like oh god why they it's so obvious and in the confessionals that she's getting that she's winning and they're showing co-wrong and they're doing all and i just i hope to goodness that it isn't because they want to like make an example of aubry like oh look she did

[03:17:03] it again and we we rubbed her nose in it i just feel like that would be so wrong for so many reasons because i am nervous that a lot of the season has kind of centered around this honesty integrity loyalty faction that has existed and if there's some world in which a coach can get up there and be like see look at what we did look at this and we made this happen that just makes me there's just something

[03:17:30] about it that just kind of makes my thing that i think is missing there which and maybe we get it early on on wednesday and it kind of like adds a layer of whatever to it but like i think back to a heroes versus villains sort of thing where sandra's not this intuitive winner at all by any stretch of the imagination you're kind of like thinking it could go a number of ways but probably not to sandra and yet we do get the level of like well russell doesn't think i'll get the votes at the end but i

[03:17:58] don't know about that and it's you know like there is a sense of like these people don't think that like even with marianne it was constantly like i'm not what she say i'm not some goat to be herded or something and she's kind of like speaking of herself of like i'm not a goat they think i'm a goat but i'm not a goat and i think that if there was if there was a layer of hey it's kind of a surprise winner it's like a jonathan or it's one of these people that you know like a rizzo or joe who we

[03:18:24] are not sure if they have a jury vote behind them i feel like we would have gotten crumbs of their of this kind of like the jury might not dislike me like like they think you know whatever we yeah and i don't feel like we have that to kind of stand on right now and the only person that's given us that kind of content is aubrey with the yeah jonathan did make a comment about feeling like he was worth two million dollars yeah so here's the other thing he did he did there's a secret scene from this this

[03:18:53] episode it's only on paramount plus as far as i've seen not on youtube yet which they do weirdly but and i plan to make a video about this too but in the secret scene jonathan talks about it's from them getting tree mail about the second challenge and he talks about the importance of getting to the final three and winning that two million he talks about those things that we were just saying we would see

[03:19:18] as a quote on the show yeah we're going to win and i think the fact that it's a secret scene not on the show is telling yeah and i think i think you look at tiffany too like tiffany's played such like i think a really really good game um and like the difference between aubrey and tiffany would be like well aubrey was like clearly on the bottom first to go of her tribe if they had ever lost immunity

[03:19:43] tiffany wasn't necessarily next to go but she didn't really have any game worth noting uh early on in the season just because they didn't really go to tribal so she was just kind of like so that i mean that there was a justification there for her not being in the edit because you know what did we really need to see but it's like if tiffany is our eventual winner i do think they try to invest us in her storyline a little bit sooner than like final nine or wherever we finally started to see tiffany

[03:20:09] um and so like that would be one of the disqualifiers where it's like hey aubrey was clearly on the bottom of her tribe and yet we still were seeing a lot of aubrey content from that tribe where we've been able to track her story more consistently throughout the game yeah good point good point all right well as we wrap up this extra long podcast i want to encourage people to check the rhap patron program at rob has a website.com slash patron you get access to all the special

[03:20:36] patron only podcasts plus facebook groups and discord and of course you support long shows like this one and everything on the network by becoming a patron at rob has a website.com slash patron and also make sure you're subscribed to all the rhap survivor podcasts that we know survivor.com yes and thank you to everyone at rhap for all of the incredible content that you do create including the why blank loss podcast

[03:21:00] thank you to scott st pierre for leading the editing charge and the crew there at rhap we appreciate all of the work that you all do thank you sam for joining us today in this very long podcast and i'm sure my mother is going to be very excited she was so excited to hear from you again she very much appreciates you so she'll love a three and a half hour podcast i'm sure so thank you for joining us it was great as always you have incredible insight and david thank you as well for another great week and i can't believe

[03:21:28] that this is wrapping up next week this is crazy as sam said like the season flew by so fast yeah and allow me to say before we get out of here uh just in case you didn't get enough of my voice but in the 200 minutes that we've spent on this podcast uh wednesday night after you wrap up that live finale i will be in the driver's seat for the survivor know-it-alls with owen knight oh nice rob is out even

[03:21:54] fishback is out so they called it they called to the bullpen last minute uh and it my my rhap driving debut uh on the know-it-all so if you uh if you want more thoughts we we see if these predictions are correct uh go check that out on wednesday night after the episode in my finale as well that's amazing great yes let me add my thanks sam it is always great to have you on here uh we always hear from the listeners like yes sam you know we love sam so they will also be happy with this

[03:22:23] and happy with you coming back next week on the know-it-alls uh jessica thank you as always and you know we will see everyone back here again you know probably a day later so with y blank one and uh you know until then you can find us on social media bye you