Alright, moving on to the survivor finale last night. As we talked about, this won’t be one of the top half. This probably won’t be in the top 25 when Dalton Ross gives his updated rankings of survivor seasons.
I don’t think this will be in the top half. In fact, it’ll probably be in the bottom 10 or 15, not because there was a terrible season. There just didn’t seem to be a ton of gameplay going on in this thing, but I can’t say I disagree with the winner. I gave you my opinions. I said I only see Savannah.
Winning this possibly Rizzo. But after last week’s response by the jury and what Steven said in his exit interview, I took the Rizzo thing back. And then I was thinking, Sophie’s really the only one. Christina has no chance and neither does Sage. And then Sophie was really the only one that had it, had any sort of chance.
And you know, Savannah ends up winning. The votes are five, two to one. And here’s the thing about Savannah. I know she rubbed people the wrong way. I didn’t have an issue with her whatsoever. I was fine. She was a deserving winner. And if you go on Savannah’s Instagram page, she’s been really documenting how hard she trained for this.
And it doesn’t mean because she trained hard. That means she deserved to win. But I’ve just never seen this from a contestant before. In regards to what they did leading up to leaving for the show. So she talked about on one of her Instagram posts, her pre survivor nutrition fasting routine. She would fast for 48 to 60 hours while working out, because she realized, okay, I’m pretty much not gonna be eating out there yet.
I’m gonna have to be competing in challenges. So I wanna train myself to work out while I’m fasting. She also said she ate nothing but Whole Foods. She cut out caffeine, sugar, and alcohol, and she wouldn’t take water during her workouts or even after her workouts to simulate what she seemingly thought would happen.
On Survivor, you don’t get water during the middle of a challenge. You don’t necessarily get water right when the challenge is over. So she trained herself that way. Maybe everybody’s been doing this in Survivor. I guess nobody’s talked about it. And that’s what makes me think nobody’s done it. ’cause I think more people would’ve told everybody, this is what I did to prepare myself for the show.
And then workout wise. She, she diagrammed her workout her Monday through Sunday workout. Also on her Instagram, Monday morning, she would do a leg strength workout. Monday night she would do hot yoga Tuesday morning. Involved a HIIT workout, high intensity interval training incorporated with weights. On Wednesday, she did lagree class or Pilates.
Thursday morning she did hi cardio again, mixed in with weights. Friday morning, full body strength workouts At some point, she said during the week she would try and do sprints at least once a week. Saturday was her rest day. Sunday morning she did another hit workout for cardio and weights. And Sunday night she would do hot yoga and you could be like, Steve, she’s just trying to pump herself up.
I mean, did you watch her out there? It’s clear. She was in excellent, excellent shape. She ran circles around everybody when it came to physical challenges, anything that was physical, she was the best person out there, you know. That’s not making stuff up, I don’t think. She’s like, Hey, I’m patting myself on the back.
She’s just explaining this is how focused she was, and it doesn’t mean like you don’t have to do this to win. Plenty of people have won this show and didn’t put in that strenuous of a workout routine, but she did. That was pretty damn impressive. Now I’m gonna be talking with Stephen Fishback later on today, so you’re gonna get a ton of Survivor talk tomorrow.
I’m just gonna give you some of my, some quick thoughts on last night’s finale. Number one, I wanna thank the president for only going for 20 minutes. On his speech yesterday I was talking about like, you know, he never does short speeches, so what’s gonna happen here? But then when I looked at my TV guide last night, or the guide on my, on my DVR, it had only.
Put in a 20 minute window for his speech. So I was like, oh, so this must thing must be timed out and they’re not letting him, you know, ramble on. And so I thank him for only going for 20 minutes and it only delayed the whole show by 20 minutes. And we got three hours and 20 minutes of a finale. So that’s the first thing.
I was thinking this thing was gonna go 45 minutes to an hour. He could go longer. No, it was. It was a pretty hard 20 minutes and he was out right at the 20 minute mark, I believe at eight 20 my time. He was done speaking and then they had like one analyst on CBS briefly go over what he said. Then they went to commercial break and came right back to the show, picked up where they left off.
Now here’s something that was interesting that I thought, and that is for the final immunity or the for the immunity challenge at. Second to last immunity challenge, which was the relay race. And then you had to do all that stuff and throw a ball and brought down a ladder and then go make a puzzle.
They had an advantage that you could win, and Sophie won the advantage because she found a bag up in the tree, and I’m like, okay, that’s good. What is this advantage gonna be? My guess was ’cause anytime they’ve had an advantage on like a relay course, you basically get to skip a whole section of the course.
Sophie’s advantage was when you get to the end and have to climb up a ladder, that’s also a puzzle. Sophie, your ladder will be half completed already. What kind of advantage is that? Especially at the end where there’s a giant puzzle involved. Look, we all know on challenges like that, all it’s gonna come down to is the puzzle and the way Savannah just boat raced everybody on that puzzle.
Sophie’s disadvantage could have been, Hey, your whole ladder will be already completed. You just gotta run up it. She still would’ve lost. I just thought that was a bogus bullshit Advantage half of your ladder. When what? When, when, when? Right. When you get up the ladder. You have to put together a puzzle that is huge.
Nobody ever has like a 10 minute headstart on something like that. Somebody always gets there first, obviously. And you know, the other people arrive maybe a minute, minute and a half behind, but it honestly doesn’t matter. Either you’re good at that puzzle and you know exactly what you need to do, or you suck at puzzles and you’re gonna get cremated.
And Savannah Creed, the other three, it wasn’t even close. Actually the other four, sorry. ’cause that was when Rizzo and Sage and Christina and Sophie were still in it. I mean, you saw it was a destruction. I just thought the advantage that Sophie got kind of sucked for her. It was like really half of a ladder.
Like, come on. If anything, I was thinking maybe half of the puzzle should already be built. That would be a huge advantage. Half of a puzzle was honestly not even an advantage at all. I don’t think so. I talked about Savannah on Instagram the last couple weeks and putting out her workout routine and what she was eating leading up to the show, and she was just, clearly, she was all about game.
I mean, we’ll get to the final tribal in a second, but the opposite end of that is sage. Clearly watching the finale last night, Sage really struggled and was bringing elements into her home life onto the island, you know, saying she just never felt that she was ever good enough. She was always the weird, quirky one, didn’t fit in.
And even at Final Tribal, she was still crying because she felt like by only getting one vote that was her past, basically resurfacing again. Nobody likes me. I can’t fit into this group. Only one person voted for me. So it’s really interesting because if you watch Rizzo’s social media, if you watch Savannah’s social media, Sophie’s social media leading up the last 2, 3, 4 weeks, even the last month, or hell since the show has been on all of ’em.
Super, super active on Instagram and Sage, God bless her, literally seems like she hates the show. I can’t tell her how she’s supposed to feel, but it’s just really interesting looking at it and it kind of gave it away that there, that she didn’t win because somebody that won the show wouldn’t be as dismissive of the show as she has been on the very few Instagram posts that she has even done.
She even made a post, I think it was like a week ago, about, I’m not basically not making Survivor my whole life. I loved the experience I had, you know, I had fun at the experience, but I’m not making it all about that and I wanna move on. And I’m just like, okay, that you don’t get that from somebody who won the show.
So not that she was gonna give away that she won. But the way Rizzo and Sophie and Savannah have been on social media, just very upbeat, very positive, always talking about the show, talking about how much they love it, posting pictures. It’s just a different vibe and unfortunately, I, I just don’t think clearly this show seems to be for Sage.
It seems like this show made her miserable. I hope when she got home, she worked through some things, maybe went into therapy because she really seemed to not have a good time out there. And it’s one of the few, because everybody that comes off that show basically says, I would go back tomorrow and do it.
I think if they asked Sage if she would come back, like if Sage were asked to go on 50, which was two weeks after 49 ended filming Rizzo and Savannah, they had two weeks back at home and then they had to flew fly back out to Fiji. I have a feeling if they asked Sage, she would say Absolutely not. That would’ve been my guess.
And you know me, survivor’s, my favorite show, and it’s also the show that I have zero interest in ever being on. It’s like, no, I don’t want to get bug bites all over me. I don’t wanna sleep outside. No thanks. If you put a mattress, a California King pillow top mattress in my backyard at night with one sheet and said, Steve, I want you to sleep outside in your backyard on this mattress with one sheet for one night, I’d say no thanks.
So I, I, I would never make it on Survivor, so I’m never gonna take anything away from anybody who goes on Survivor and could beats on these challenges ’cause they’re doing things that I would never do. And I’m not gonna say anything is ever easy on this show. However, and I’m not saying it was easy, but for a final immunity challenge that I, you also know me when it comes to this show.
My memory isn’t great. When it comes to final immunity challenges and recalling certain things that people did and said and competed in, but last night’s final immunity challenge I did not think was suit that just looked like a regular challenge during the season. I didn’t think that was suited as a final immunity challenge.
You know, when I talk to Steven, I’ll ask him about, you know, the balls that you have to put through the cage. They’ve used that one three or four times. Or an endurance for the final immunity challenge. I’m fine with those. This one was like, run in from the water. Dig yourself you know, dig some sand out.
Crawl underneath a log. Take two sticks that have handles on the end of them. Raise a ball up through a cage and then go do a maze with two balls. It just, I was shocked that that was the final immunity challenge. And look, I’m not saying I would’ve won it. I probably would’ve done horrible. I’m just saying, knowing the show and watching every season off the top of my head, that seemed to be one of the easier final immunity challenges they’ve ever had.
I want either endurance or I want something like the ball rolling through the cage challenge. That’s what I want for my final immunity challenge. But. It is possible, and I’m, you know, we’ll never know the answer to this because the creative team can say whatever they want, but if they would’ve made the final immunity challenge and endurance or a physical one, not that they didn’t want Savannah to win, I’m just saying going up against those three, Savannah would’ve destroyed all three if it was something physical and all endurance.
The only thing physical about that final immunity challenge was. Climbing under the log after swiping away some sand. That was it. Everything else was, you know, puzzle related or hand-eye coordination related. If it would’ve been an endurance challenge, I just read you what Savannah did for two or three months leading into leaving for Survivor.
She would’ve wiped the mat with any of them if it was a physical challenge. So maybe the show said, look. We’ve got one physical beast in the finals here and three that really haven’t shown any sort of competition in a physical way all season long. If we make this a physical challenge, it’s not even gonna be close.
So I’m just saying, like I said, we’ll never get the answer, but I’m saying I think they looked at those four finalists and said we can’t make the final immunity challenge mostly physical. Savannah will just win again and it is just, there’s no suspense to this season. As for Final Tribal, I just wanna say this one thing before we head out and then we spend all day in tomorrow’s podcast talking to Steven Fishback about this show.
I thought Christina’s question at Final Tribal might have been the best question I’ve ever seen on this show when it comes to final tribal. Like, no one’s ever asked that before, and it wasn’t even a question. It was just, Hey, Savannah. And it was basically to expose Savannah’s social game. I’m guessing if Savannah could have named all a, a, a not a, not an accomplish, what’s the word I’m looking for?
I if they, if she could have named somebody in relation to all of the eight jury members, maybe that would’ve gotten Christina’s vote. But I think Christina knew that Savannah couldn’t, and she wanted to expose it maybe to get other people to vote against Savannah, but I don’t think Christina was ever voting for Savannah.
Who knows? But the, but what she asked her to do, I was a hundred percent all four, and she ended up. Not getting, you know, Christina gave her vote to Sophie and Mc gave her vote to Sophie. Sage gave his not sage Sage’s vote, came from Jawan, which we knew was coming, and then Savanna got the other five.
But in the moment when it was happening, I’m like, oh shit, I wonder if this is going to flip people because they don’t think that Savannah. Cared about anybody on the show and their feelings might be hurt that she didn’t care to know anybody’s names of boyfriends, husbands, wives, children, nothing. She only knew three of the, she can name names of three of the eight juries members, and Christina didn’t ask it of Sophie and didn’t ask it of Sage, which makes me think that she was wanting to expose Savannah’s lack of social game.
However, in the same breath. I don’t think Savannah has ever made it known that she was out there for a social game. Look at what she did leading up to the show. She put in two to three months of literally a bootcamp workout. She was all about game and being physical and winning the physical aspect. It didn’t seem like she cared about the social game, and she ended up winning five votes to two to one.
So. I do wanna give Christina credit because I thought that was excellent, and in years past, maybe that would’ve swayed more jury members because we have seen jury members that have voted for, I don’t care how you were physically in this game. Did you care to get to know your tribe mates? Did you ask questions?
Now maybe some of you think, what does that have to do with survivor? Why do you have to vote for somebody, uh uh, whether or not they asked you a bunch of questions about your life? That’s what I mean, every jury is different. You just don’t know what’s gonna hit with some jury members. And I’m sure Christina didn’t give Savannah her vote because she didn’t feel Savannah really cared about her.
And, you know, socially. It’s really, I, I just thought it was, I’m now wondering it’s not gonna happen on 50 because 50 was filmed two weeks after 49 ended, so they couldn’t see what had happened at that final tribal that we watched last night. But I’m curious, going forward, if that is going to be a mainstay question by somebody on the jury asking, Hey, could you name, you know Joe’s wife?
Can you name Alicia’s kids? You know. I’m wondering if that’s gonna be a mainstay, because I thought it was a really good way to kind of out somebody’s social game and does this person really care? Now, it didn’t end up affecting this jury. Five of them didn’t seem to care that Savannah could not name more than three acquaintances of the eight jury members, but I found it to be riveting.
Honestly. Anyway, thank you all for listening. I really appreciate it. Follow me on Apple Podcasts. Also rate and review, but you gotta hit play. It’s the only way it counts as a download. Sports Daily coming up in an hour from now. And don’t forget later on, wait today’s Thursday, so totally losing my track of days.
Here. Tomorrow will be your weekly podcast. What number is it? Episode number? What number are we on? 4 4 74 With Steven Fishback. We’re gonna have a whole discussion, 45 minutes to an hour on the Survivor finale. He comes on twice a year. We bring him on the week after or the week of the survivor finale every season.
And I love him. He’s the best. And don’t forget patreon.com/reality, Steve, later on today, if you’re a subscriber, $5 a month, $48 for the year. You will get that Steven interview about 15 to 20 minutes after I record it today. You get first access to all the weekly podcasts and you get to be a part of the live rewatch is.
And that’s the only place you can see that is on my Patreon channel. We’ll be watching two episodes of Saved by the Bell, the episodes where Zach breaks up, or excuse me. Kelly breaks up with Zach ’cause she falls for the manager at the max. Patrick Muldoon, that asshole, who then in the second episode, we’re gonna watch cheats on her.
Oops. Anyway, thanks again for listening. I appreciate it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
