Host and Executive Producer Jeff Probst chats with EW after the first elimination of 'Survivor 46'.
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00:00 Even though you're playing a game, you can still,
00:02 both can exist, that I want to blindside you,
00:05 but I really don't want to hurt your heart.
00:06 I'm not going to tell you I'm voting for you.
00:08 This is Survivor, dude.
00:09 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:13 Jelinski was in trouble, and he kind of saw
00:17 that in the first three days.
00:18 He put himself in situations to do the sweat task.
00:21 He put himself on the journey.
00:23 He put himself on the puzzle.
00:25 Those are big decisions, and if they work,
00:27 you can cement yourself and have good standing in your tribe.
00:31 If they don't work, you can be in trouble.
00:33 I thought it was honorable tonight the way
00:35 he owned his mistakes, finally, and tried
00:39 to see if he could recover.
00:40 And that seemed to be the question is,
00:42 is there a way for a guy who's saying he doesn't want to lie
00:46 and his feet hurt and all the injuries he had
00:48 to survive in this group?
00:50 And clearly, there wasn't.
00:51 Just from the outside, I would say it
00:53 was probably the right choice.
00:55 Not that Jelinski couldn't play a different game
00:57 if he played again, but these first three days,
01:00 those decisions you make often are very telling
01:04 at your first tribal council.
01:06 And I felt bad for him because even
01:09 though he seemed to think it was coming when it happened,
01:11 he did still seem shocked.
01:14 And it's hard.
01:16 When you hear somebody tell their story
01:17 and they come out here and they play their best version,
01:21 and it's not good enough.
01:23 But that high and that low and the contrast
01:26 is what Survivor's all about.
01:28 And that's why we have a vote.
01:30 And that's why a torch does get snuffed,
01:32 because when you get to the end, what it means
01:34 is it didn't happen to you.
01:36 You survived tribal after tribal after tribal.
01:39 That's the game.
01:40 There's been a weird thing sort of happening lately
01:43 that I've been picking up on, which
01:44 is this feeling that it's OK to just be good.
01:48 I tried.
01:49 I'm going to quit.
01:50 I tried.
01:51 I've done that enough.
01:52 My feet hurt.
01:53 And I don't have any stake in it.
01:57 But you can't quit and then say something
02:00 about the word "several" meaning seven,
02:02 because it's in the word.
02:03 That's just not going to fly.
02:05 So yeah, I was pushing back.
02:06 And Jelinski finally did own it.
02:08 It took quite a bit of work to get him to own it.
02:12 And I think that justifiable ethics, the way we couch things
02:16 and the way we see it is one of the things that's
02:18 so interesting about Survivor.
02:20 If Q had had a different partner,
02:22 I'm not sure they would have quit.
02:24 My guess is Q realized, I can't do it alone.
02:27 He's going to give up.
02:28 So let's just stop now.
02:30 Let me cut my losses now.
02:32 And that's probably one of the reasons Jelinski's gone.
02:35 It's interesting to hear his words up in the voting booth,
02:38 because he was clearly trying to sell Jess as the one to go
02:42 and make it feel like it was him to blindside her.
02:46 And he clearly had no idea that the entire tribe
02:50 had turned on him.
02:51 That's the brutal part of the game.
02:53 And the irony is, here's a guy who said, I don't want to lie,
02:56 and five people lied to him.
02:57 The one thing I didn't want to hammer Jelinski on,
03:01 but he did seem to have a bit of this happened to me,
03:05 this happened to me, I had no chance.
03:07 We've done a lot of sweat challenges.
03:09 No one has ever failed.
03:11 And no one has ever quit.
03:12 We test our tasks and our challenges
03:15 so they can be successful, but they require work.
03:18 So he painted it as though it was impossible.
03:21 It's not.
03:22 We tested it a lot.
03:23 We could probably do it again next season
03:25 and it would be accomplished.
03:26 Just happened to be his feet were hurting him.
03:29 I don't know how bad they are.
03:31 They sound pretty bad.
03:32 So that's real.
03:32 Those things can happen and make it hard to get around,
03:35 but you got to own it.
03:37 And I'm sure that was a part of the group decision
03:40 as well, is that if you can't own it here,
03:42 then it's hard to maybe trust you to own it in the future.
03:45 I'm not out there.
03:46 I don't know all the minutia.
03:48 I don't know all the details.
03:49 I just see the big picture.
03:50 I think Jelinski is going to look back and think,
03:53 I could have played it differently.
03:54 I hope he doesn't beat himself up.
03:56 Survivor's a game you play.
03:58 You take a shot.
03:59 It works.
04:00 It doesn't work.
04:01 But all you can do is play your game.
04:03 Jelinski played his game.
04:05 It didn't work.
04:06 He got voted out.
04:06 One of the hardest things to translate to the audience
04:10 is how real it is.
04:11 And we can say all we want.
04:13 Think of the last time you were hungry
04:15 and you got hangry and all that stuff.
04:17 But you're talking days.
04:19 And as Jelinski said, sleeping on bamboo,
04:22 it's not comfortable.
04:24 You do it because it's the best alternative,
04:26 but Survivor is difficult.
04:28 And I think seeing Jess try to deal with that
04:31 several times tonight, struggling with her words,
04:35 that's real.
04:36 And hopefully she'll get over that hump
04:39 because some players don't,
04:40 and they're never able to fully form a sentence.
04:42 And the reason that matters is
04:44 if you don't have all of your faculties,
04:46 it's hard to make an argument.
04:48 It's hard to persuade.
04:48 It's hard to remember your lie.
04:50 It's hard to play this game.
04:52 It's hard enough to play it
04:54 when you're on all cylinders are running,
04:56 but every day just takes a little more away from you
05:00 and depletes you a little more
05:01 and makes it a little more difficult.
05:02 And every time you come here,
05:04 that fire is burning behind you
05:05 and you want to leave with it still burning.
05:08 There sometimes is a separation between watching it at home
05:12 and trying to understand why it can be so emotional
05:15 and being the player for whom it is emotional.
05:18 And a lot of that is deprivation.
05:20 Also, not just food and sleep,
05:22 but deprivation from trust, people that you can talk to.
05:26 You don't know who you can trust out here.
05:28 And then suddenly it rains or you're hungry,
05:31 or you go look for coconuts together
05:33 and you form a bond that you can't believe
05:35 you formed with this stranger.
05:37 And then you lose and realize you have to vote somebody out.
05:39 And if you have empathy, that can happen.
05:42 Even though you're playing a game,
05:43 you can still, both can exist
05:45 that I want to blindside you,
05:47 but I really don't want to hurt your heart.
05:49 I don't think anybody wanted to hurt Jelensky.
05:51 He's a nice young guy,
05:53 but I'm not going to tell you I'm voting for you.
05:55 This is a survivor, dude.
05:56 So I think that's where the emotion comes from.
05:58 It's this conflicting collision of playing the game,
06:02 but knowing you're playing it with other people
06:03 who also want to play the game.
06:05 One of the biggest changes in the last year, really,
06:08 is we took on new cameras and made the investment
06:12 to change out the way we shoot the show.
06:14 And that allowed our teams to come in and say,
06:16 we can make it even more cinematic.
06:18 And it's hard to probably see right now through your iPhone,
06:21 but it's very dark out here.
06:23 I mean, it feels real.
06:25 It does not feel like you're on a television set
06:27 that's being shot and going to be broadcast on CBS.
06:30 That's because we can shoot in lower light,
06:33 and then we have teams that are able to say,
06:34 I can light this with fire and just a few lights scattered
06:38 to get maybe just a key light on somebody.
06:40 But it feels cool, and I like it.
06:43 And Tribal's bigger now.
06:44 We have more space.
06:45 There's more depth.
06:47 I'm waiting for a group of people
06:48 to get up and do one of those conversations at Tribal
06:51 to see how far back they're going to go on the set
06:54 and how far we can carry them, because we never
06:57 know what's coming either.
06:59 (bell chimes)
07:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]