Survivor: Cook Islands
Jeff Probst Media Teleconference

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Transcript by SurvivorFever.net

Question:  Let me ask you about some of the reaction to the new alignment of the tribes.  Have you been surprised at all by the reaction and what are your thoughts about it now?

Jeff: I think when most people hear the idea their first reaction is to flinch a little bit.  It's a sensitive topic and we understand that.  But I think if people give it a chance they are going to be surprised at the results.  I think there are some who are probably very familiar with Survivor and still just don't think this was a good idea.  That's a fair and valid opinion.  I also think, in addition to people who are familiar with the show and just don't like the idea, there are a lot of people who have never seen Survivor, have absolutely no idea what they are condemning but are using this as a platform for their own agenda.  I hope that all the people who have their megaphones out condemning the show before they've ever seen a minute of it will be just as vocal when it's over.  And if you still don't like it after you've seen it, shout it out.  But if it surprised you or your expectations were reversed, I hope you'll be just as vocal. 

Question:  You guys did the casting or the picking of the contestants a little bit differently.  Could you talk a little bit about actually having to go out and reach out to people to fill out these teams?  And how that made things different?

Jeff:  Once we decided that we were going to have the most ethnic diverse cast in the history of TV as far as I know, it required us to go out and find these people.  We don't have many minorities that apply to the show.  So we did go to church groups and we did go to cultural centers.  Literally, it was the biggest casting endeavor we've done in 13 seasons.  In the beginning it seemed like a daunting task.  What we discovered in the process is, we found the most fresh cast of people that we've had going back to season one.  Because we're finding people who aren't Survivor savvy. They haven't applied to the show.  In a lot of cases they didn't even watch it.  Which is another interesting thing.  When you build a show and put a majority of the people on the show white and you have white people watch it, it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We got into the Hispanic community and we start finding people who think, 'wow Survivor, it sounds like a very cool idea.  You mean I live on my own, I get to build shelter and fish and I could win a million dollars.'  When we were in the room we start looking at these people and we go, "Wow, we're having fresh points of view again."  We don't have people coming in saying, "I'm gonna be just like Colby."  Now we have people coming in saying, "I think it's a pretty cool idea that I can get out there and fish.  That sounds fun."   All of a sudden the show in our minds re-birthed itself.  Which is a direct correlation to why we started the show the way we did this season.  We start the show exactly like we did Season One.   Because Mark really reconnected with his original idea for the show.  Immediately during casting I remember Mark saying, "This is like Season One. Let's start the show like Season One."  For all of us it really did reenergize us.  I'm telling you, if you watch this season you'll feel that.  I think you'll sense a freshness.

Question: I understand that more of the cast than usual seem to have show business ties.  At least one of them has been on a lot of sitcoms.  In spreading out the net did you find yourself with more bartender/waiter and actress wannabees than usual or is there a reason why so many people seem to have some attachment to show business?

Jeff:  I could be completely off my rocker here but that seems absolutely wrong.  I'm thinking of the people that I know on the show and what they do. 

Follow Up:  Let's see...Jonathan Penner...

Jeff:  Jonathan is a writer and a producer

Follow Up: ...and was on Grapevine, The Naked Truth but those were guest spots.

Jeff:  Jonathan is a working person in show business in Hollywood.  We knew that.

Follow Up:  ...Somebody who used to be on The Grind on MTV?  A guitar player and a heavy metal...this is somebody else's research...

Jeff:  I want to do this.  Don't misread me.  Guitar player is Billy Garcia.  He's a heavy metal guitarist.  It has nothing to do with Hollywood.  What's interesting about him is he says "I believe in the church of metal."  That is one of his quotes.  He's not show business, he's a musician.  He's passionate about music and heavy metal. 

Follow Up: A cop who has been a technical advisor on cop movies and appeared on several one shot cable reality shows.

Jeff:  Who is that?

Follow Up:  Cristina, she's a cop.  She's been a cop her whole life but she has worked in show business.

Jeff:  Let me just tell you, Cristina is not only a cop, Cristina is a cop who was shot in the line of duty in a somewhat notorious shootout down in Santa Monica, I think on the pier.  Her father was a cop who was killed in the line of duty.  To put Cristina in the category of an actor, somebody looking to try and find a hole.  Cristina is a cop in her blood. 

Follow Up:  I understand but it seems as if you tried to find people who...and this has happened in the past...who were a little more likely to be interested in some aspects of show business. 

Jeff:  If you said this to our casting director she would probably fall over from exasperation.  It was the single biggest casting job we've ever had.  It got down to where we were literally calling Miss Korea Town Pageant in Seattle, Washington to see if there were any females in the ages 19 to 30 who might be interested in Survivor.  That's how deep we dug.  So if we ended up with people who you can extrapolate out and find some pentacle  that relates back to TV or show business maybe it's just more of a sign of this world and that there's so much out there that sooner or later that everybody is connected 6 degrees.  I guess the point is, I don't have an answer to your question.  I get it.  I would say that I've always been candid. I've always been honest in what I feel about this stuff.  This is the most fresh, diverse, interesting group of people with completely varied backgrounds that I think we've had since season one.   To me it's not even worth spending much more time when we have so many more interesting things to talk about.

Follow Up:  Now that you've had this kind of casting.  Can you see them going back to this kind of casting in the future where race is not the issue but you just want to have a much more diverse group?

Jeff:  Absolutely.  I was delighted once this idea came along.  You know, Mark has a lot more at stake.  It's his brand.  It's his show, he's risking a lot.  And obviously CBS network has a ton at stake.  But for me, the white guy from Wichita who hosts the show...I loved...the minute everything was a go, I felt in my heart, we'll never go back, we can't.  I think Mark knew it as well.  We just reinvented our show.  It might not be as dramatic...you might not feel the impact of that - that we feel but it wouldn't surprise me if a few years from now people look back and say, "Remember when Survivor did that?  And all the hoopla?  And now it's more commonplace?"  That wouldn't surprise me at all and is why I think it's such a positive idea because you're going to see more ethnicities represented certainly on our show from this point forward.  Think about that.  A young Hispanic kid now gets turned onto Survivor because there's somebody he can relate to and it opens up a world to him.  Maybe he decides to travel as a result of seeing this show.  Or maybe he sees something in this Hispanic kid that he can connect with and he decides to go do what that kid does.  Just the possibilities of what could happen with this to me are endless. 

Question:  I wanted to talk to you about some of the locals coming from the Bay Area, Yul and Cecilia.  Yul, I know was one you guys had to reach out to the community to get.  Can you tell me what these people brought to the Survivor experience?

Jeff:  Yul was one of the most interesting guys.  He is one of the most interesting guys I've ever met.  Without question one of the smartest guys.  Scored incredibly high on his IQ test.  And not surprising, was the only person, who, when he found out how we were dividing the tribes, questioned it.  He said, "What I'm concerned is that what you're going to do is portray stereotypes."  And we said that we certainly didn't go for that in casting.  We weren't trying to stunt cast this show. As far as the people on the show, we're simply going to observe.  And Yul was fine with that.  I don't know that Yul is even a huge Survivor fan. 

Follow Up:  I don't think he is.

Jeff:  But he studied the show.  As somebody who wants to play this game and have a shot at winning he's studied the show.  I remember one of the comments he made is that he did feel the show had integrity in it.  He was not concerned about that.  We said, "We're not going to do anything differently this season."  Yul was fine with it.  Yul is a player.  You underestimate Yul, you'll be going home before he will.  Absolute fact.  Cecilia, I think Cecilia was much the same way.  I don't think she was, I could be wrong on this, I don't think Cecilia was super familiar with the show either.  Cecilia brings a completely different point of view to the show.  Cecilia is aware of her charm with men.  She's aware that is a valid way to play the game.   It's a valid way to live in society.  To navigate relationships with whatever tools you have.  Cecilia was one of the people that, when we were talking with people in casting we had extensive conversations, we spent a lot more time with people than we normally do.  I remember with Cecilia there was a lot of ethnic pride.  There was no question about her ethnicity.  No question about where her time was socially spent.  With who it was spent.  That's kind of what triggered us into dividing into four groups.  Initially we just wanted to have 20 people with different ethnicities but when we started sitting down and I remember distinctly with Cecilia, we started realizing, wow her life is steeped in culture that is different from ours.  Certainly from mine.  That's when the idea came that we should go with the positive thing of ethnic pride.  Let people have to figure out who to vote out on their own tribe.  Where in a sense all things are equal unless you have differences within your culture, which we discovered existed.  Cecilia was sort of indirectly involved in helping us discover the second layer of the idea which was the division. 

Question:  One of the things that struck me is hearing you talk about how diversity has energized the show, some of us critics have been asking you guys to present a more diverse cast on this show and on Mark's other shows for years.  I wonder why did it take you guys so long to try what a lot of critics were asking you guys to try in the first place.  And why were you so surprised that by adding diversity you would get a diversity of viewpoints.  Which is exactly what we have been saying for years. 

Jeff:  The first half of your question, why did it take so long, I have to preface this by saying, I don't run a network.  So I don't know all the decisions that go into that.  I'm sure if I did it would make more sense. TV is a business and at the end of the day it comes down to advertisers and all sorts of things that I don't understand.  So I don't know why television is taking so long to be representative of what this country is really like.  I only know that it's finally coming time with Survivor and CBS and I'm glad about that. It's time.  We aren't going to go backwards.  I hope we don't in my reign with the show because I will fight hard against it and there won't be any reason to.  The show is too...it is absolutely more interesting this season than last season for no other reason than we have different points of view.  You see people make fire in different ways.  In the first episode, there's one guy who has a headache.  There's another guy on his tribe who refers to headache as "you've got a case of the wind".  He starts to massage this guy's head really aggressively.  And he says, "You're going to get a little red dot but your headache's going to go away."  And you watch it and the guy goes, "Wow, my headache's gone".  And on camera, there, a red dot appears on his forehead.  You would never have seen that last season.  Because we didn't have that culture, that ethnic group, that background, that history, that point of view to life presented on the show.  As far as why am I surprised?  I'm not surprised.  It's a good question because you make me realize that if I really sat down and thought about it as a guy who grew up in Wichita, Kansas where racial diversity still is going strong.  There will be people in the South who will think something different.  So I guess I'm not surprised.  That's why I said those opinions of people who are criticizing us are valid and fair and they have their place.  All I'm saying is, you have to admit, you have to recognize you're condemning our show before you've seen it.  And that is not fair or just.  So keep the megaphone in your right hand and push that talk button again when you've seen the finale and tell me if this was everything you thought it was going to be.  Or if maybe it was a little actually inspiring and positive. 

Follow Up:  I think one of the reasons why people have been critical is not just because they are concerned about what the concept is but because they've seen how Mark Burnett's shows have handled race.  They've seen Gervase Petersen, Sean Rector, the Omarosas.  In the limited instances that Mark Burnett's shows have handled race divisions, they haven't handled them very well.  They seem to have cast people who were very stereotyped (?) including a black guy who can't swim.

Jeff:  Except for the first season I've been in every casting session.  I have thought that everybody we put on the show was going to be great.  With a couple of exceptions, we've had a couple of people who didn't perform well.  For the most part I've been very happy with everybody we've put on the show.  For instance, if you have a season and you only have one black guy and everybody else is white.  So you have 15 white people and one black guy and that black guy doesn't perform or that black guy can't swim or that black guy quits, it's like a beacon screaming that this is poor casting or this is misrepresenting or you're portraying a stereotype.  But if you look across the board at all the jackasses that we've had on the show who were white, all the people who are white who can't swim, all the people who are white who make the same ridiculous social mistakes, all the white people who are lazy, all the white people who are bigots.  You could draw a list percentage wise that would probably equal out.  It just so happens most of the people on the show have been white.  I think the observation you make is correct.  I think the conclusion you've drawn is not correct.  I can tell that like with Osten.  Osten was working on Wall Street, from a good school, ripped physically, one of the buffest guys we've ever had on the show.  And he was so well spoken in the room in terms of social skills.  We go in thinking Osten can win this game.  If he makes it to the individual portions nobody will beat him.  Not only does Osten not win the game, he doesn't make it to the individual portion because he quits!  Cause he's tired!  And worn out.  You can't predict that.  And Osten regrets it.  To this day he regrets it cause he knows he let himself down.  Sean Rector, couldn't swim, you're right.  We told Sean six weeks before, we've had a lot of people who didn't know how to swim.  Cirie didn't know how to swim.  She started taking swimming lessons.  Sean, it was a big thing for him.  Sean was on the boat before we get in there asking me if there are sharks in this ocean.  I said, "Sean, there are sharks in every ocean, man."  But one of the greatest moments ever in Survivor, didn't even make the show, is during a challenge with Sean where you had to dive down and get a shell.  There's five people and four shells.  So whoever doesn't come up with one doesn't get one.  A white woman bails because she can't dive.  Nobody says anything about that, she's out of the challenge.  Sean tries to dive, can't get a shell.  He's about to quit.  I'm sitting on the dock, I go "Sean look where you are.  You're in the middle of the Marquesas Islands.  You have a free shot at this.  She's already quit.  We're never coming back here and we're not leaving until you get a shell.  Sean looked at everybody, everybody started encouraging him.  Sean dove down, dove down, dove down, forth time he dives down comes up with a shell.  Now he lost in the next round but he overcame a huge obstacle.  Is that a negative or a positive? 

Follow Up:  Well, we didn't get to see it so we don't know.

Jeff:  No, you didn't get to see it because the show moves so fast and we had to keep the story going onto who was winning. That's one of the unfortunate things about the show.  We could do 90 minutes every week and nobody would be bored for a second but we only have 44 minutes. 

Question:  I'd like to go back to your comments about being a white guy from Wichita.  I'm a white guy who grew up in El Paso so I grew up with a lot of diversity.  One of the things this casting concept has done is kind of made me examine the lack of diversity in my life.  I wonder if it's made you examine what your life is like in terms of diversity?

Jeff:  It absolutely has. I grew up in Wichita and did not have diversity.  I had white and black.  The black community lived west of 13th street and the white community lived east of 13th street.  When I moved back there to go to college my girlfriend got me an apartment, I had moved away and she got me an apartment on 21st Street. That was not my area.  It was a completely different world when I lived there.  I had not been exposed to it.  I didn't know anybody who was Jewish.  I didn't know anybody who was Hispanic.  I didn't know anybody Asian-American.  So I had a very limited upbringing.  Actually through Survivor and going to all parts of the world I started meeting different people and we have 25 different countries represented on our crew.  Here's a story that just happened to me a few days ago.  Maybe this will speak to the naiveté of my life still at 44.  I'm at my dentist office, he's a white guy.  He brings in another doctor, he's an Asian guy.  We're sitting there and they're looking at my teeth.  I found myself without even thinking about it saying to the Asian doctor, "Where in Asia are you from?"  He said, "Oh, we're Korean."  And we had a little chat about Korea.  The only reason I had the courage to even ask that question or the knowledge to ask that question was because I've just spent 39 days with some people from Korea and I learned a little bit about the fact that Asia has Chinese, Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese and they don't necessarily get along. And there's a hierarchy within that culture.  Stuff that maybe I should know as a human being that's lived 44 years.  I now feel like anything is okay to ask.  I saw a guy this morning and I said something about being African-American and he said, "Actually I'm half and half. I'm white and I'm black."  He looked black and I'm like...God why did I assume he's African-American other than saying, "What ethnicity are you?"  This show has completely changed my perspective about how I view other ethnicities.  Not in terms of judging them but in terms of understanding that it's okay to not know something.  It's okay to ask a question because I'm not from this world.  The truth is, when I look around my circle of friends, most of them are white.  I don't know why that is.  When I look at most of my other friends it's the same situation.  I got back to what I said earlier.  The best experience that I've had on Survivor in terms of opening my eyes this season, I loved learning new slang.  In casting we would ask a person what they thought of other ethnic groups and hearing the stereotypes of what one group has towards another and especially what every group has toward whites, it's fascinating.  It gives you insight into how you're seen and how you see others.

Follow Up:  This season will we get a sense of people defying those stereotypes and the show is edited for maximum impact so are we going to see racial strife, are we going to see people defying stereotypes?  Without spoiling anything what can you say that we'll see out of this season?

Jeff:  At the end of the day I think you'll see that we handled it very responsibly and honestly and in an entertaining fashion.  We're certainly not setting out to portray the basic stereotypes that everybody knows.  That's a waste of time and energy.  It would have a negative impact and do damage.  We're not trying to do that.  On the other hand, we're not going to avoid anything that does happen out there.  These are simply 20 people.  Do the five African-Americans represent the African-American community?  You have to ask them and I did and, different points of view.  Some said "Yeah there's a responsibility."  Some said, "Hell no, I'm trying to win a million dollars and I don't really care what your color is if you help me get there."  It's a great question, it's impossible to answer unless you watch the show.  I can tell you that your question comes up on the show.  And in fact in the second episode the notion of stereotypes and when you perpetuate them comes up in the second episode within one tribe.  They have a debate about whether they're helping to perpetuate their own stereotype.  I mean by behaving in a certain way.  And it becomes an argument.  It's fascinating. 

Question:  Jeff, going back to why TV has taken so long to be representative of society but you really didn't address why Survivor has taken so long to get this diverse cast and what prompted the producers to go in this direction. 

Jeff:  What prompted us to go in this direction started out very organically.  Mark calls a meeting and five or six of us sit down, it's the same people every year.  We're the creative nucleus.  And we say, alright, what are the ideas.  And a lot of the time Mark already has the ideas.  He says, "This is what I want to do."  A lot of the time Mark will come in and he'll say, "What do we have, what's on the board?  What have we talked about in the past that we haven't used yet?  Maybe the time is right or maybe this cast fits in a little better.  Or maybe the location speaks to it."  And this time we sat around and we all felt that from a competition point of view, last season was very competitive.  There was a night where The Olympics, American Idol, Dancing With the Stars and Survivor were all on.   We're in our 12th season.  We realize we're still getting top 10 numbers but we don't want to lose that.  What can we do.  So we started talking about some ideas and this notion of what are we criticized for?  What could we turn on its head?  The thing that we're always criticized for is that "your show is not ethnically diverse enough."  In other words:  your show is too white.  That's a sensitive topic as we're seeing by all the reaction to this.  So we start saying, okay if we're going to do that and we could, we have to do it.  We cannot go half way.  We can't just have five people of color.  We have to have an ethnically diverse cast.  You know Burnett, he wants it to be the most ethnically diverse cast in the history of TV. Which suddenly becomes pretty inspired and interesting.  That's how that idea started.  And like I said, we didn't know that we were going to divide them into groups based on ethnicity until we started realizing how much ethnic pride there was and that became something kind of fun and positive and it became a creative idea.  In terms of why we haven't done that before, I'm not avoiding the question.  I'll get lacerated if I try to speak for Leslie Moonves and CBS.  I don't know why there is not more ethnic diversity and you're saying why not on our show.  I think it's about 85% of the people who apply to our show are white.  So we haven't really considered going out and finding other people.  We've had plenty of people, thousands of people apply, still every season, who want to be on our show.  We don't want people who are going to quit.  We don't want to have to convince you.  You've got to really want to be on Survivor to get on Survivor.  Because if you say something in the casting room like, "I think it would be fun to be on your show."  You're out the door.  We're not looking for that.  We've seen you and you quit in episode three.  So we had plenty of people apply to do another season, of 85% white people.  Once we decided to be more ethnically diverse we had to go out and get those people.  It wasn't a decision where CBS said, okay we're out of ideas, I guess we have to do this.  It came from a very organic place and suddenly it was a good idea. The time is right and let's do it. 

Follow Up:  I'm also wondering about the behind the scenes diversity on Survivor.  How many of the top production team or producers...how many people of color are in powerful positions?

Jeff:  There are definitely people of color behind the scenes.  One of our most senior producers is an African-American woman.  One of the most senior people at CBS who is involved in the show on a daily basis is Asian-American.  Our show is a rainbow in terms of the creative team which extends to the photographers, all of that team, 350 people who travel with this circus called Survivor - last season I think we had 20 countries represented.  We have people that are all over the world that are our technicians or our creative people or our editors or whatever.  I feel that the show is very diverse in terms of worldliness.  If you're asking can we have more diversity.  We could always have more diversity.  Sometimes I think Burnett in his own naiveté, his own desire for people to get along and be happy, I think Burnett is misread sometimes.  Conversations like this never come up.  I kind of feel like you're painting a picture of a bunch of white people sitting around in a room saying "I wonder what the minorities are thinking about this."  That is completely not the case.

Follow Up:  One last question.  What's your reaction to the sponsors who have pulled out of the show?

Jeff:  It's amazing how momentum can go.  I heard that GM was out of the show months ago.   This is me, I'm just the host.  I remember I made a joke that it must have been because everybody who won the car lost the show.  It became a joke on the show that I would say, "You're aware of the GM car curse? And you still want to win this car?"  "Yes, Jeff, I'm going to be the one to break the curse."  Well in 12 seasons nobody ever broke it.   I don't really know the reason GM pulled out but I'm telling you on my family's name, they were out months ago.  And it could not have had anything to do with race because we didn't even know that we were doing that yet. 

Question:  The Jonathan Penner situation.  Is this going to be like Hogeboom or do people recognize him and he fesses up to who he is?

Jeff:  Naw, whatever guest stars that we were referencing earlier, I don't know what they were but Jonathan is a writer or producer, that's what he is known for.  And his wife is a director.  They are a Hollywood family but no, you'll never recognize Jonathan.  You'll certainly, though, remember Jonathan. 

Follow Up:  No one in the competition recognizes him?

Jeff: No.

Follow Up:  And you say that we'll remember him.  Why will we remember him?

Jeff:  Jonathan is a great character. What was fun about Jonathan is, he is a writer.  He can be very entertaining.  He can be overly dramatic if it calls for it.  He can be understanding if that's what you need.  And he can lacerate you if he feels that's appropriate.  But he does it with such a delft touch that it's very entertaining to watch.  Jonathan makes an impact early on because he's such a good storyteller. 

Follow Up:  I count about a dozen people from California.  I think 7 from L.A.   Was that a function of this need to go out and recruit.  How did this end up such a California-centric group of competitors?

Jeff:  Probably in the sense that when we're recruiting we're able to spend more time and resources in California.  I can tell you that we've reached out across the country.  And I know because a friend of mine told that a friend of his just got a call from our casting director.  I said, "For what?"  He said, "To be on the show."  I said, "Who is she?"  He said, "Well she's Korean and she was Miss Korean in Seattle in 1994."  That's how deep we dug.  At the end of the day, you pick the 20 best people.  As much as we'd like to have somebody from Cincinnati and one person from Detroit that would be great because then you would get rooting appeal from those cities but you can't sacrifice that for the best people.  If the best people end up coming from L.A. then that's where they come from.

Question:  In terms of the sponsors who reportedly pulled out of the show, General Motors, Home Depot, Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola, Proctor and Gamble, and Johnson and Johnson.  Have all of those sponsors pulled out of sponsoring the show in recent weeks?

Jeff:  No, no it was what I was saying earlier.  Home Depot has been a part of Survivor for a long time.  We know who our sponsors are going to be fairly early on because we have to design...

Follow Up (interruption):  Did these sponsors pull out specifically because of the controversy over the ethnic casting?  The way in which you've done this season?

Jeff:  That's a question for CBS...

Follow Up (Interruption):  Are these companies still sponsoring...

Jeff:  If you're going to ask me a question let me answer or I'll say ask and answer and you can write whatever the hell you want.  I am the host of the show.  With all due respect to your question, I have never ducked a question in 7 years of doing this show.  I can't say for all of those you just said.  I know that when we started doing creative on our show for the first time ever, we didn't have any products that we needed to integrate into the show and that was a bit of a shock because we always have in previous seasons.  This goes back 8 weeks before we even stumbled upon this casting idea. This is when we're designing the challenges and the rewards and figuring out do we need to include Home Depot in some sort of a challenge.   CBS said "No, we're not going to have any sponsors in the show."  Why they pulled out could be many different reasons.  I would know if somebody pulled out because they heard about this.  The problem with your question is that we already shot the show.  So they couldn't have pulled out in the last few weeks. 

Follow Up:  So they pulled out in hearing about the show?  So you guys did not make any changes to the format when the sponsors began to make concerns?

Jeff:  None of the people you are talking about now were ever in this season.   We started doing our creative for this season five months ago.  None of them were in.  We start building our challenges.  We know our location.  We have our rewards and if that's the point where we say, "Okay this is going to be the Home Depot reward and what we're going to do is give them tools and get them to build a bathroom which will tie into the Proctor and Gamble reward."  CBS marketing came to us and said, "You have nobody to deal with this season.  We have no product integration in this show.  You don't have to worry about it."  It was two months after that we started casting and came up with the ethnic diversity.  We already had our challenges designed and starting to be built on location.  So simply from a time point of view sponsors were out long before this creative idea came to be.  And I'm not even certain we would tell them that.  I don't know that we would.  So for them to hear about it 3 weeks ago, they couldn't pull out if they were a sponsor.  They're already in. 

Follow Up:  Besides General Motors are any of the companies on that list not in this year, whether it's product integration or simply as a sponsor of the show in any form that have been in years past?

Jeff:  You already know your answer, you just want a quote from me.  I'm just asking you that when you write this story that you represent what I'm saying.  Only you will know if you're doing it because I'm really trying to give you an answer.  It's probably better answered by a CBS exec but I'm on this call with you and I know what you're going for.  There are companies who have been a sponsor in seasons past and they're not a sponsor on this season and to the best of my knowledge and what I was told months ago, those decisions where made long before what we were going to do creatively with ethnic diversity and division. 

Question:  Jeff, this whole thing with this ethnic diversity.  You guys could have been good citizens and gone out and created a great ethnic cast and put it on the air and been done with it.  I think what people are getting stuck on is the divisions that you created here.  What was the debate like going into this?  Should we do this?  Should we not do this? 

Jeff:  We actually felt that dividing them ethnically was a positive idea because it came from our discussions with them in casting when we kept coming up with the same theme and that was ethnic pride.  Which I have to be honest, when you are just talking to a group of quote/unquote white people, it doesn't come up.  White people are just mutts.  We're just white.  We don't have any ethnicity that we hang onto unless you break us down to, well, I'm Italian or I'm Irish or whatever.  So when you start talking to someone from Asia and you talk to another person and another person and you realize, wow these guys all have different backgrounds.  And they all spend their Saturday afternoons doing something different than I do.  And they date primarily within their own ethnic group.  And they still go back to Asia because their grandmother lives there.  Suddenly you start going, 'this is really powerful.'  And it's something that I'm not used to.  Instead of integrating everybody right from the start, now you have one black guy, one Asian guy, one white guy and one African-American guy why don't we start them in a grouping that would seem not only fair but also would show pride.  And now you have to vote somebody out from your own group and that complicates things.  How are you going to do it?  Because now it's going to come down to who's contributing and who's not.  And knowing what Survivor is, pretty soon, we're not going to leave you there for long, we're going to integrate you.  Now the question is, will you stick with your own ethnic group because you've already made bonds or simply based on skin color?  Or more likely will you look to make alliances with people who can provide shelter or provide fish or who you like?  In other words, people who will help you to the end so you can win?

Follow Up:  But doesn't that happen at every outting(?) anyway?  Maybe not in racial situations but my tribe versus your tribe?  People form relationships and bonds in these tribes to begin with. 

Jeff:  Well, yes, the whole reason that you divide people into groups initially is to try and give them some identifiable grouping.  So we've done old men/young women, old women/young men, and we've done men versus women.   All those ideas come from the idea that let's see if we can get them to say "okay we're this group", "we're the old guys" or "we're the women", "we're gonna beat the other team."  This was an obvious one.  Let's spin it though in a positive way.  Let's take four different groups on ethnicity, put you in this grouping, let you live together, let you figure out how you're going to vote people off.  Then let's see if those bonds stick.  Or if like in most cases they kind of get erased and replaced with the people who best help you get to the end.  The reason you say that happens all the time is because it does but when you talk about racial ethnicity I think it's interesting.  Because this is all just something we're all just trying to work through. I like to believe that most of us are in the middle and we want to live in a world in which we can all get along.  I don't believe most people are on the extreme edge.  To me this is a very worthy idea and the very least will promote discussion.  Like what we're doing right now.

Follow Up:  How long before the groups are mixed up? 

Jeff:  I can't tell you that.  I can tell you this, the creative line that you're walking in terms of how long to leave a group as a group before you split them up is all along the lines of...you're asking yourself, "how long is enough where they'll make a strong bond but not so long that that bond becomes so strong they'll never break it?"  Because for our show to work creatively we need you to really always be considering new options.  We want you to consider breaking that alliance.  Not because it gives us great arguments but because it keeps the audience guessing, 'are they going to stay with their original alliance or are they going to break rank?'  You're building to the climax.

Question:  Were there any incidents of bigotry or racial or ethnic conflict?  Or anything that was troubling?

Jeff:  You know, you really will have to watch. I can't comment on that, that's the reason you'll have to tune in to see how it all plays out.  

Follow Up:  You can't comment on whether you found anything upsetting? 

Jeff:  I found...let me think what I can say...my answer is not something I found troubling.  I was excited everyday whether it was a challenge or Tribal Council.  For the first time in a long time I had no idea what was going to happen.  And I wasn't sure that I was going to know the best way to respond.  I'm aware that I'm hosting the show and I'm white. So I have my own set of experiences.  How will I relate to different people and are there things that I'll miss. Or will I make judgments that are based on my own biases.  Who knows?  So for me it was enormously exciting to be vulnerable like that again and to be in it with all these other people.  Whatever happened out there is what happened.  I think when the season is over, and if I'm wrong I'll eat crow, I'll eat my words, I think it will go down as one of the 5 best seasons we've had.  We have heroes and underdogs like we haven't had in a long time.  And three love connections of varying degrees.  One of which is the strangest love affair we've ever had on Survivor and I would argue that you've ever seen on any reality show.  There was more fish caught than any of our past 12 seasons, octopus caught.  And a record number of blindsides at Tribal Council.  That gives you an indication to the level of gameplay.  That's a little unusual because these aren't seasoned players.  They understood instinctively that it's very important to not necessarily tell the person you're voting out that you're voting them out.  That's why it's good to have people who don't know the game that well play because they tend to have more of a gut point of view.   

Question:  You asked us to wait until we see it to form a judgment.  I'm wondering if the first episode without the last few minutes will be made available for pre-screening as it sometimes has in past seasons.

Colleen Sullivan:  No, unfortunately we will not be making the premiere episode available.  You'll have to watch it on Thursday, September 14th.

Jeff:  It's worth watching.

Question:   I just want to get the timeline straight.  When you guys decided to go and audition and pursue the auditioning diversely, when was it roughly that you guys started to talk about "hey maybe we should divide it up by teams."

Jeff:  It was during one of the casting sessions.

Follow Up:  Early on or last couple of weeks?

Jeff:  The way it works, our casting team, Lynne Spillman goes out and looks at lots of people and she whittles it down to about a hundred then 75 and then she presents to us about 50 or 60 people.  So it happens for us over the course of a few days.  By the second day is when we started noticing this theme. 

Follow Up:  There have been a couple of times where you kind of adjusted the challenges. In Men Vs. Women you didn't have many challenges involving raw strength.  When it was Old Vs. Young you didn't have many quickness challenges.  Can you think of any times when the challenges were adjusted a little bit to keep it fair because there might be some differences between the four groups? 

Jeff:  What Mark wanted to emphasize this season...first of all we have some really fun challenges...great underwater footage and all sorts of stuff going on.   He wanted one element in every challenge, that was "thinking".  If it was as a group then you're going to have to work together or somebody is going to have to lead you through some sort of a puzzle element where you have to think.  We have very few challenges that are just based on brute strength, although we do have a couple, we didn't shy away from them.  His idea was - let's force these guys to work together in every capacity. And that goes back to starting the show with the boat full of supplies and you get 30 seconds to get off what you can.  You have to work together right now.  You just met each other, you better start talking because that guy's getting a spear and you're not. 

Question:  Were you especially sensitive to how you phrased questions at Tribal Council so that there wouldn't be any misunderstanding? 

Jeff:  No, and that's a deal I made with myself.  I've always approached this show from my gut. I don't have the best grammatical structure, I'm not an English major. I'm not always the brightest guy.  I shoot from my hip.  But slang was used that I didn't completely understand and I was pretty sure - the audience at home - there would be people who didn't understand it.  I'd say, "What does that mean? What does "snap" mean?"  And I'd get an explanation.  Whether that makes it on the show I don't know.  That's why I'm saying that it's so exciting.  For me, I decided to let my guard down and just be who I am.  I am a 44 year old guy born and raised in Wichita with my own set of experiences.  I just want to learn more.  If I make mistakes or I say something insensitive, I need to learn that. 

Question:  What about using 20 contestants, that has the potential to make this the longest Survivor ever?  Is that going to be the case?

Jeff:  No, what it does is, it gives us many more options.  I would prefer that we took 20 people every time.  It allows you to do fun things like get rid of somebody surprisingly.  It allows you to keep the Survivors on their toes.  Because they can no longer assume that every three days they're going to get rid of somebody.  We could get rid of two people tonight.  Or we could get rid of somebody from every tribe this afternoon.  We've got enough people to play with it.   

Follow Up:  You had 18 people one time and got rid of two of them right there on the beach, right?

Jeff:  No we had 20 in Palau and we got rid of two on the beach. This is the most we've ever had and I'll certainly be pushing to go 20 again because it's fun. 

Question:  Do you agree with the break in tradition and not show this to critics ahead of time?

Jeff:  Again, I'm not in marketing but honestly I'd probably make the same decision.  Because you are trying to get people to invest in this show.  We feel like if we get you to invest in the first episode, we have a chance of keeping you.  And we're hoping that new people will watch the show.  There's a certain point of mystery.  We don't want to spoil the surprise.  I don't mean to allude that there's some huge surprise in the first episode.  We just don't want to give it away.

Question:  You alluded earlier to the concept of rooting interest?  I haven't seen any particular studies one way or the other but it does strike me that one of the reasons people keep coming back to watch Survivor is they develop a rooting interest for an individual or for a team.  Have you considered whether people this season will be developing those preferences along racial lines?

Jeff:  In answer to the question of who will people be rooting for.  I think it will be varied.  It wouldn't surprise me if people initially are rooting based on ethnicity because they want their group to succeed. I can tell you that there is a point in the show where I'm almost positive you'll be rooting for underdogs, regardless of ethnicity.  I'm almost certain of that.  There's a turning point midway in this show that rocks it in such a beautiful way. And at the end of the day I think you'll be rooting for the people you like.  At the end of this season if you go back and look over it as closely as people are scrutinizing it now there is something to be learned from this and that is, you root for people you like.  If you're a white guy and you got a tribe of white guys who are all buffoons, I don't think people are going to be rooting for them.

Question:  You've mentioned several times the sort of pride factor that the different teams had.  Can you speak at all to when the teams do merge, whether that continues to keep a hold or whether people really do just start looking out for number one?

Jeff:  Well, I think from the get-go there's always a sense of looking out for number one.  This is not like any other reality show.  Survivor kicks your ass.  You never go to a hotel room.  You never have a shower unless you win a reward.  You never have a fresh meal.  It's hard and you're out there because you do want to win the game in most cases.  But in answer to the question whether the ethnic pride sticks once they are integrated, I think it's a very good question.  It is a...it's uhhh...how to answer this one...whether or not people stay together from their original groups once they integrate is a topic that comes up.  The question is, why would they stick together?   Is it just because we're both African-American?  Or because we have an alliance?  Or is it because we like each other?  Or maybe we're romantically involved?  There are a lot of reasons you might stay with somebody.  Adding the division of ethnic diversity is just one more reason that you might stick together from your original group.  I think you'll have to watch and see and find out if it was anymore of a compelling reason. 

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Transcript by SurvivorFever.net