The Watch - Where Does Netflix Go From Here? Plus, ‘Survivor,’ Emmy Nominations, and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ | The Watch

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

The trailer for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ dropped today and we’re incredibly hyped (0:44). The Emmy nominations seem disjointed and unrepresentative of the TV landscape (7:34), and Netflix reported major subscriber losses this week—is this a turning point for the streaming service or just a bump in the road (15:35)? Plus, we break down the changes coming to ‘Survivor’ for the 40th season (46:17).   Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Bobby Wagner, Kaya McMullen, Riley McAtee, and Lucas Shaw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. It's the season finale of Big Little Lies on Sunday, so make sure to check out our final episode of our live after show with the ringers Amanda Dobbins and ESPN's Mina Kimes. You can tune in on Twitter to Big Little Live right after the episode ends. Also, this week's 2019 Open Championship marks the final major championship of the golf season. To check out Fairway Rowland where Joe House is joined by a cast of Ringer and Golf World personalities for everything you need to know heading into the weekend. You can find new episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to today's episode of The Watch. Really packed show today. So I have Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg News join me and had a really interesting conversation about Netflix, Netflix loss of subscribers in Q2, what it means for them going forward, where Netflix is positioned next to all these other streaming services. as they arrive in the fall and next year, Disney, Apple,

Comcast, AT&T, HBO, Max, whatever, Hulu, which will be part of Disney. It's going to be a really weird time because I think a lot of changes are going to happen to people's watching behaviors, their wallets, what they're spending their money on, where they look for stuff. I was also joined later in the show by Riley McAtee

who came to talk to me about the changes in Survivor. But first, I wanted to talk to literally anyone who would talk to me about this, I wanted to talk about the Top Gun trailer. Top Gun, colon Maverick. It's trailer dropped today, Thursday. A truly, like, amazing moment. It's been a while since there's been a near riot

in our Slack and in our office over a movie trailer. It happened 20 minutes after Top Gun with Cats, but for all the wrong reasons. But I don't think I've seen anything unite us as a staff like I did Top Gun. And not even men, women, old, young, And speaking of Old Young, I'm joined by Bobby Wagner. Hello, Chris.

So Bobby, he produces the big picture. You can hear him on the MLB show. Bobby is one of our podcast producers like producer Kaya. Kaya say hi. Hello. And Kaya is not joining me in this segment because Kaya saw the top gun trailer and shrugged and said, it seems like a guy movie. I'm really happy for you guys.

She doesn't understand that it's a religious experience. That's what I like to call the Amanda Dobbin stance. I'm happy you guys have things you enjoy. Bobby, this is like Field of Dreams where I'm your ghost dad and you're like, you want to have a catch and instead of a baseball, we're throwing an F-16 at each other. This is the most important thing that's happened to me in many years. Explain to me your relationship as a younger man with Top Gun.

I think Top Gun is the first adult movie that I saw that was like Campy. I have a deep relationship with it because I watched it a lot of times with my sister growing up because we enjoy the Kenny Loggin soundtrack quite a bit. and also frequently strive to be the type of person to play volleyball on the beach and jeans with no shirt on. I came into watching Top Gun thinking that I was going to be watching a serious movie the first time I saw it. Okay. And I think the people who made it probably thought that they were making a serious movie at the time and it sort of evolved. Yeah, I don't think they think it's unsurious.

It's just that what it looked, like all the gestures, which are so perfectly fixed to the time when it came out, have become kind of ironic over the years, right? Yes, exactly. I love everything about Top Gun. I love the masculinity. I love the latent homo eroticism of it all. And I just kind of like when people are in jets. Tom Cruise in tight spaces is very important to me. Yeah.

Tom Cruise pulling 5Gs and giving the middle finger to a mig over the Indian Ocean is like a fucking really important thing that happened in our culture. I think maybe Donny Kwok had the best comment in our slack about it where he said that Top Gun taught me how to give the middle finger to people. It really did. It taught me how to give thumbs up and middle finger. It was a great movie for hand gestures. So this movie, it obviously heavily, heavily features Tom Cruise in the trailer

to the incredible expense of every single other person in this movie, including Jennifer Conley, Miles Teller, Glenn Powell, Ed Harris, John Hamm, and countless others I'm sure I'm not thinking of right now. But you would not know that anyone else is in this movie because it's just like Tom fucking Cruz. And that's it. Colon, Maverick. Now, Andy and I laughed a lot when it seemed like Tom Cruise was going to gently hand off the football to Jeremy Renner and let him take over Mission Impossible.

And then he was like, nah, not today. That's like one of your longest running storylines. I don't know if there was ever any conversation about truly bequeathing the Top Gun franchise, which is not in essence like a franchise really, to Miles Teller. This is the only franchise I support, by the way. But I don't care. It is so exciting to see this. It looks like it's literally a shot-for-shot remake of Top Gun. It does look like that.

I was curious. I was going to ask you about that, whether that would bother you or not. No, it's not full metal jacket, dude. It's okay. It's like, it's not, we're not talking about, like, you know, John Luke Godar movies. We're talking about Top Gun.

If we're going to make Top Gun again, I don't want it to be about, like, drone pilots. You know, I don't want to have to confront that part of the geopolitical, military industrial complex. I wanted to be dudes. breaking the sound barrier over white sands. You don't want to be accused of knowing nothing about Pakistan. No, I don't.

I don't want to get into a zero dark 30 debate. I just want it to be beautiful to look at, insanely loud, dudes with mustaches and aviator glasses, and beach sports. I completely agree with you. And I think one of the things that I maybe am jealous most of is that I never got to see Top Gun and theaters. Yeah.

And so now the opportunity to really make an event out of this for me is something that I can't even express how excited I am about this. Like, this actually is my Super Bowl. That's maybe the most overused phrase at the ringer. This is my Super Bowl. I think it's definitely like the movie of next year for us. I just, I'm sure I will be, somebody's going to be like,

by the way, there's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie coming out in May or something. But like, I just, like, when I saw this, I was like, I wish this was out tomorrow. I would probably spend like $500 to see it tomorrow. It's the only time I've ever related to you guys talking about Triple Frontier. So, Kay, hearing me and Bobby talk about this, are you there opening night? Not opening night, but, you know, I'll go see it. Everybody is so muscular.

What is there to not love? Yeah, I mean, like, why wouldn't you want to see Glenn Powell just dappled in oils? Getting ready to run... Everybody is so damn oily. Getting ready to run Cliff Kingsbury's offense on the beach. Let me see the first top gun and then I'll get back to you guys. Okay, that's great. Well, we can continue to have a series.

of Top Gun conversations over the course of the next 12 months. Sounds great. Okay. The rewatchable Top Gun. Top Gun has made me realize how much of a hypocrite I am because I think I criticize the Game of Thrones a lot for kind of going back to the hits. And then I saw Tom Cruise pull the hood off of a motorcycle that he was going to ride down in the air hangar, the airplane hanger. And I was like, it's the same music. Please inject this into me.

There are shots. Like there's a shot of Miles Teller playing piano, which is just Anthony Edwards playing piano from 20 years ago. All right. Or whatever. You know, it's just unbelievable stuff. crushing movie death for me other than Lion King. All right, that was Top Gun. Kai and I are going to talk a little bit about Emmys, and then we're going to talk to Lucas Shaw about Netflix.

All right, thank you, Kaya, for enduring me and Bobby's Brofest. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Emmys. All right. Okay, so I'll probably call Greenwald on Monday and get his takeaways, because I'm sure he's seeing something here that I'm not. I don't necessarily want to debate what didn't get nominated as much as sort of take a step back and talk about the Emmys in general, which is essentially that while I don't have any real huge,

with a lot of the stuff that got nominated. For instance, drama series, here's the nominees. Better Call Saw. Love that show. Bodyguard. Really enjoyed that show. Game of Thrones. Legacy. It's going to be the farewell. Okay. Killing Eve, I didn't like it as much as the first season, but fine. Ozark, I didn't like it as much of the first season, but I still liked it a lot.

Pose Succession, obviously Succession was my favorite show of 2018, and this is us. So that's a fine group of shows. It's a lot. I don't think that there's, like, it doesn't feel competitive when it's that many shows. It's like if it's that many, why not 10? But I think that as television and what we define as television at least plays a bigger and bigger part in what we watch,

I would love to find out whether it's like having the Emmys twice a year or just figuring it out where it just feels like it's more of the time that it's trying to memorialize. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, it just feels extremely disjointed, basically. Especially I think now because it's split across

something like HBO and NBC, which is like very structured and traditional style of television and like as far as release schedules go. And then you have like Bodyguard and Ozark, which feel like they premiered two years ago at this point? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like you have like this real dissonance about when you're sort of judging things. I think for the Oscars, what happens is, yes, it's about the year. But the Oscar movies, for the most part are condensed into that crazy four-month run. Right. Or maybe late September in the case of like a Martian kind of thing

or like, you know, stars born last year. But for the most part, you have this like really condensed, incredibly intense period where all these movies are coming out, all these people, everybody has their takes on them, and all the conversation is happening at the same time. And then we turn our eyes towards awards jockeying and you have a couple of awards show that kind of, kind of lead up to the Oscars, and it culminates through that.

Now, maybe by the time you get to the Oscars, you have fatigue about awards, and you would just like to have stuff come out and whatever. That's fine. But with the Emmys, I just don't know what we're, I think we're just kind of still in this nether region where it's like, well, what is the actual time period it's assessing? And whether or not there's just way too much category gerrymandering, essentially. So explain that to me.

What do you, because that's something I'm confused about with the Emmys, and I've been hearing a lot about this week is this idea of like category fraud and category gerrymandering and like you even get something like Gwendolyn Christie who gets to nominate herself for an Emmy and it's like how does that work? Yeah and I think well the shows put themselves forward for Emmys

and they decide what episodes are going to be put forward for nominations. I believe that actors and can say like I am going to put myself up for supporting an actor. I'm not really sure about how the acting process works. I do know for the writing, you know, David, Benioff, and Dan Weiss put forward the finale of Game of Thrones for their, for their

Emmy consideration for writing. When it comes to the category gerrymandering I'm talking about, like, I'm not under, I don't really know if I understand how succession is a drama, but Mrs. Maisel is a comedy, right? Right. I don't know necessarily how Fleabag is a comedy,

but killing Eve is a drama. I understand that they, Fleabag plays a little bit more for laugh lines, but it does seem like the shows that go into certain categories don't always make a ton of sense. In the past, there's been a lot of controversy about limited series. So this year, I actually do think that these series are limited. We will not be getting more seasons of Chernobyl, Danamora, Fosse Verdon, Sharp Objects are when they see us. Those are limited. But then you get into what's a TV movie. You know, Black Mirror Bandersnatch is an extension of Black Mirror. It's great

that I got nominated, I really enjoyed Black Mirror Bander Snatch. But wouldn't that necessarily be part of the Black Mirror series, right? Right, right. You get into the same thing with somewhat with Deadwood. You know, Deadwood is like, it was a television movie specifically. It really was, but it was also an extension of Deadwood, which was a long-running series. So there's a little bit of confusion there. I think a lot of it also is just like the sheer amount of people who are nominated.

So in lead actress, it's Amelia Clark. Jody Comer, Viola Davis, Laura Linney, Mandy Moore, Sandra O. and Robin Wright. That's a huge field to be choosing from. And I don't know necessarily that you're going to find that it rewards someone overwhelmingly for their performance over the course of the year. Yeah, I mean, it just gets into, like, it's just so starkly different from the way that, like, the Oscars operates. And, like, it just feels like they should not be compared to each other. like someone like Robin Wright should not be in the same category as like Jody Comer.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, like you get into sort of like, well, what are we really evaluating here anyway? Right. Because performance and people's reactions to performance are so varied. In the movies, I think what you tend to see with the Oscars is it rewards something that puts actors through a defined physical obstacle, you know, whether or not it's like losing a lot of weight or pretending. But I think that they're often very sure.

showy performances in the Oscars that are obvious leading candidates for an award. Another example just really quickly of category gerrymandering is Mahershal Ali, who is amazing and true detective, is nominated for lead actor in a limited series or movie. It's True Detective Season 3. I don't understand how that could be considered a limited series except for the fact that it doesn't have a regular release schedule the way Grey's Anatomy does. Right, and that it's like an anthology and that each season

is different from the previous. Yeah, so it'll be a really interesting thing to see as we, you know, and I talked to Lucas Shaw about this in a few minutes, as these streaming services essentially replace the way we understand traditional television watching. And as they operate under their own schedules that have to do with their own financial forecasts and their own quarters and their own fiscal years, how on earth do you make that ascribe to any kind of Emmy

consideration. How does that fall into any kind of calendar that the Emmys are looking at? And should you just basically say, look, January 20th, 2019, or 2020 to January 20th, 2021, that's the Emmy year. And then the Emmys themselves and the voting gets pushed up a little bit. I don't know how they'll react. One thing that you know is just that you see a lot of saminess here, a lot of Game of Thrones, a lot of, a lot of Ozark, a lot of Better Call Saul, although not for Racie Horn, which really sucks. You're not really getting the widest swath of stuff here, considering how much TV is being made.

Yeah, and that's a good point, considering how much content has been pumped out this year. It's really just like, I want to say like 10 main shows before you start getting into like the reality stuff like that and the like the comedy stuff. It's really just pulling from the same 10 group of things. Yeah, it's like the entire cast of Game of Thrones essentially in here. the entire cast of Fleabag, for instance, is essentially in there.

So it'll be fascinating to see how this plays out. I have my interview with Lucas Shaw coming up. Lucas Shaw is a writer for Bloomberg News, and he writes really well and really informative stuff about Netflix and just the streaming wars in general. So we'll get into our interview with Lucas Shaw, and then after Lucas, I'm joined by Riley McAtee to talk about Survivor. Thanks for listening to The Watch.

All right, now I'm joined by Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg News. Lucas, I'm really glad you came by. I have to admit, I've been reading you for a while, and I'm a little nervous because I feel like we try to adopt a position of knowledge about the streaming wars here on the watch. And yet you're probably way more informed than I am about what's going on. And you were sort of on the front lines of reporting about Netflix's subscriber loss, which was revealed yesterday. For people who are sort of wondering what that means, can you just give me like the broadest of broadest outlooks on that? Sure.

So if you step back a second, you know, most people, who use Netflix know it's really popular service. And over the past eight to ten years, it has ridden a wave on the stock market and more broadly just in consumer attention like we have not seen before. It went from being a three or four billion dollar company to a $150 billion company, all because it kept adding customers at a really rapid rate every single quarter, every year for the past eight years, pretty much ever since it had streaming. It set a new record with the number of customers it added. And the only way that that narrative takes a hit is if it has a blip or if it shrinks. And that's what it did in this most recent quarter,

where not only did it shrink in terms of the number of customers that it added in the U.S., but the number of customers that it added outside of the U.S. was significantly smaller than it said. So every time a public company is going to release their earnings, they tend to issue a forecast of what they're going to do in that quarter. And so Netflix had issued a forecast for the second quarter that wasn't great. And then it went way under that, to a degree that it had never missed before. If it misses its forecast a lot, it's usually because it goes way over it. And so the reaction was immediate.

Its stock plunged like 11% in five minutes. And it lost, if you want to think about it. So it lost like $20, $22 billion in market value. So it lost like a CBS. CBS Corporation, the whole company, CBS, Showtime, Simon & Schuster book publishing. That company's worth like $19 billion. Netflix lost that overnight. Okay.

So is it actually that bad? or is that just more of a perception thing? It remains to be seen. So if it is a sign that growth is going to slow long term, it's really, really bad because Netflix has been able to borrow money, been able to fund all these programs, expand like crazy, become perhaps the biggest producer of TV and movies in the world. Because it keeps growing and because of confidence in the company, it has run at a loss, or it technically reports a profit, but it spends more money than it actually.

takes in. And it gets to keep doing that because people believe in it and it keeps growing. And as long as that story holds, there are no problems. Once there's a problem in that story, they have to scale back. And there's a lot more questions. And that causes all sorts of headaches that we don't know because we haven't seen it in this era of Netflix. There's also a possibility that it is just a blip. For whatever reason, the second quarter has been a really balky one for Netflix. It had a really bad second quarter three years ago that if memory serves it blamed on the transition to chip-based credit cards, the executives yesterday basically said that that explanation was BS and that they still don't know what happened three years ago. And they have had off quarters before.

And that's my understanding what the CEO Reid Hastings, what the chief content officer Ted Sarandos, they have told employees, don't worry yet. If we have a couple of these quarters in a row, then you should worry for now. We missed one. And they issued a very optimistic forecast for the third quarter of seven million. Which is the Stranger Things quarter. So you pointed in your piece for Bloomberg, you pointed it basically two big reasons why these numbers. might have dropped off. One was the race prices for subscription for membership, essentially,

and also a weaker slate of programming. Is there an actual correlation between the popularity of the programming on Netflix on any given quarter and their subscriptions going up and down? I don't know, because they release such a volume that it's hard to know with anything. If you look back at what they put out in the most recent quarter, I guess they certainly didn't have a hit as big as Stranger Things because there are only one or two shows on Netflix that are that popular. But they release 100 plus programs. They, you know, they had the Ava DuVernay miniseries when they see us. They had that Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler movie, Murder Mystery that they say was a huge hit. They had a bunch of programs that a lot of people watched. That wasn't enough. So I guess

if you take them at their word, then yes, it depends on that one or two show, one or two big shows can make all the difference. Yeah, because I was thinking about this. sometimes I don't know in what terms to think of Netflix. Like, am I supposed to think about it in the way that I've traditionally thought about HBO, which is that if HBO has a show like Game of Thrones, people will probably go evangelize for that show, and someone will say, well, I don't want to be left out. So I guess I should spend the X amount of dollars per month

that add that on to my cable bill or get HBO now so that I can be part of the Game of Thrones thing, where I've become a fan of Game of Thrones and now I can't live without it. Is there stuff on Netflix that people can't live? without, or is it simply the totality of the service that they can't live without? And if that's the case, what do they have to do to sustain that in the face of this increased and coming competition, right, from all these other streaming services? And I think you've actually there identified a really fundamental tension within Netflix right now, because for its history, it has wanted

to be a service where the totality of it is what mattered. You signed up because Netflix replaces TV, right? You can go there for stand-up, you can go there for documentaries, comment, drama, movies, whatever you want to watch, they will have. But they're now entering a world where they're working with some of the biggest creators in TV, some of whom work in the building that you guys look out of. Those people expect to be treated special. They want their shows to be events. And Netflix is going to have to make some of those individual shows feel like events,

both to satisfy the needs of the talent and because it will help draw in new customers. It's what they did with this season of Stranger Things, but that was an anomaly for them. They don't normally do that. because, you know, it does feel like when you, and you're talking about Shonda Rhimes, you're talking about Ryan Murphy, the way that I see Netflix every day when I turn it on, it hasn't changed in a while. And it's very, very, it's pretty much like a, it's, it's very democratic. You know what I mean? Like, you just look and like the Aziz slide is as big as the true crime doc slide.

And sometimes it's there and sometimes not based on my algorithm. And it does feel a lot like flipping through the channel guide on your cable box because You just never know what you might find. And to be, I'm a big fan of a bunch of shows on that, on the, on the service. But more often than not, just because of the volume, I think I probably have the reaction that you and I would if we were just like looking through our cable guide right now. And it was like a housewives rerun, a house hunters, a sports center, a movie I've seen before, but may watch again. It's like. If there's nothing else on.

It's like a lot of eh. And then what we, but I think what we trained ourselves for as so much talent has migrated towards what we like. loosely to finest television, is like events. And like you can't miss this. And Reese Witherspoon is on this or David Fincher's directing this or something. And we feel like we have to be there for it. But then I'm not sure if that actually jibes of what Netflix is interested. And sometimes I think I have this big complex where I'm like, why won't Netflix let me love it?

Like if they just put stranger things out two at a time, it would be so fun to like cover it over the course of a summer rather than we have three days. to get this done. Yeah. I would expect a redesign of Netflix, or maybe small alterations in the next year or two. I've had conversations with people at the company who've talked about trying to better tailor the service to kind of your time of day or your mood

or what that circumstance is you're viewing. Oh, interesting. And I do think that with some of the talent they're working with, like there were a lot of rumors that they would say create a special shelf, like one of those series of tiles on Netflix, for a Shonda or Ryan Murphy. Now, they can't do it right away unless they have a huge volume of programming. They may have adopted a different strategy, but they're aware that they need to play with it.

They're also in the UK, they're doing this. They're starting to issue weekly top 10 lists of the 10 most watch shows. And on their call with analysts yesterday, some of their executives talked about maybe trying to kind of position popularity within the service. So for the people who want to watch what they know other people are watching, they can find that. What that looks like, we don't know. but I think they do have to fool around and make it more appealing so that people aren't overwhelmed by the volume and don't just see lots of crap.

Yeah, so that's the question I was kind of wondering. Traditionally what would happen is a show is going to come out on HBO or FX or Showtime in about two months. We all know about it. They're sending out screeners. The shows are going to come out once a week. We can either, if we're enthusiastic about the show, we'll tend to talk a lot about it and drum up enthusiasm.

And then we go along this process and watch it episode by episode. with people and that's how conversation starts. That's how you draw attention. But for them, are they actually, is there any care about that conversation? Or do they think the conversation has to happen on their own terms? Yeah, I think they have historically not cared about that conversation.

They care about Emmys. They care about Emmys a whole lot. They spend a lot of money trying to win awards. It depends on the executive. Some of the top people there are aware of what Hollywood people talk about and how important that is, but historically that has not been core to the Netflix DNA.

They just want to create a fly trap that you come into and you get stuck there. And that's why, one of the reasons I don't think that they care about that, you know, there would be some shows where it would make sense to release on a weekly basis. They'd probably get more attention for them. If they had taken that when they see us, and instead of dropping all four episodes at once, meant that in May, every Sunday night you had a different episode or Saturday or you pick a night, I bet that show would have gotten even more attention.

and those viewership numbers that they released about that first month would be even higher. Yeah, because it's a pure viewing experience. You're taking out the idea of anticipation and reaction if you put it up as a binge. And I think that it seems like that the idea of putting things up in one dose and the lack of ads are there two core tenets that they're never going to deviate from.

Would you say that that seems to be, those are pretty like closely held? I think the ads more than all at once because they have fooled around with certain shows, especially for kids, they've started to take a property and then, yeah, maybe they'll have a, the first season will be released all at once, but they'll have individual episodes released between seasons because they know that especially with kids,

they need to keep them coming back for that thing because they want to rewatch it over and over. They're only 10 episodes. You know, kids can rewatch episodes a lot, but at a certain point they're going to get tired and bored. So I've talked to producers who say that Netflix has played around a little bit with that release strategy. I would be surprised with one of their big tent pole shows. But you never know. You know, they might at some point see, oh, hey, Game of Thrones when they released an episode every week.

Not only was it the most talked about thing on the internet for six weeks, but there are a whole podcast devoted to it. There's recaps every week. There is a benefit to that strategy. Do you think that – so let's cast forward a little bit. I would imagine that their next quarter will be a slightly rosier-picked outlook because of Stranger Things because aren't just coming back because – I mean, they have like a pretty strong second-hundred. half of the year, right? Between those two, although I question how popular orange is anymore. At this point, yeah. That show Casa de Papel, the Spanish show that was money high is pretty popular. They have some big, big movies. They have Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. They have a Michael Bay movie, which might not be

good, but it's going to be expensive. So they should have enough to bring people in, but again, it comes back to forecast. They said $7 million. That's a big number. That would be like their biggest third quarter ever, I think. Yeah. So they could have a really good quarter, but add five and a and Wall Street freaks out. And then that comes, they will report right before or right around when the new Apple service comes, when the new Disney service comes. And even if those other streaming services aren't eating into the Netflix customer base yet, there is a narrative that has taken hold that they're going to have to contend with for many years

to come. Do you think that we're beating up on Netflix a little bit because that's what we have to beat up on? But when these other streaming services are released, we'll have like a little bit, we'll have somebody else to pay attention to some extent. Yeah, I also think Netflix has been totally immune to the tech clash that's happened, right? Where Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, we're worried about these big tech companies that control our lives. Netflix hasn't gotten it because unlike YouTube, it doesn't have user-generated programming.

It's not as big as Apple or Amazon. It doesn't seem as imposing. You know, Disney really has more power than Netflix still. But I have detected throughout the year a growing resentment, a combination of some of the Hollywood people who didn't like Netflix in the first place with users who are, frustrated by certain things. You know, you can't love something forever, especially not a product that you're using every day. There's going to come a point where you don't like it. When you see the Hollywood people, what are some of the resentments that you hear? Oh, agents hate Netflix because it doesn't release ratings because Netflix buys out all of

their client's profit participation up front. Right. So there's not the same back end or what's called back end. There's not the same earnings potential. And agents don't like that because it caps their earnings potential. Most people find Netflix really arrogant to deal with. It's this culture of honesty and transparency, but that really only applies internally. They are not transparent with other people. You know, you meet anybody who works in Hollywood.

There's certain creative people who have really nice things to say about Netflix, but for the most part, people like to complain. Do you think that some of, is there something about the way that they make TV, you know, there's a bunch of shows on there that I think are truly excellent. but one of the complaints that you hear sometimes whether it's a movie that they've bought and put up like the Cloverfield movie or even something that I really like

Triple Frontier where people are kind of like did anyone give notes on this? Did this go through a sort of rigorous quality vetting process because it feels a little bit like you guys go make your movie and then we'll put it up and there's no actual like development process

or is there a really robust development process and they just haven't quite found their stride yet? Well it's volume. I mean think about how much they're making. I think they're for a certain number of really popular shows or ones that they've been working on for a while, they'll give

notes and be more involved and maybe give too much. But for the most part, either because they're stretched too thinner, because it's simply, the show's too low on their priority list, yeah, they're not doing a whole lot. It seems like they're almost like there's like an inversion. I was talking about this with Bill and Amanda on Bill's Pye

when this first happened yesterday. And it does seem like, for me at least, I get way more excited about Netflix shows that are debuting than Netflix shows that are on their third season. And I feel like an example, what would be a good example? Not Narcos, because I actually just really like Narcos. Bloodline was a good one.

Bill was talking about that. As Bloodline kind of like went on, you were kind of like, I'm finding it harder and harder to get, like, jinned up to watch this. And even outside of the Kevin Spacey stuff, Cards was like that a little bit, where I think it was a little bit hard to sort of sustain my interest in them, whereas I always get kind of jazzed up when I find something on Netflix or when something it finally drops on Netflix. I'll be really curious to see how Mindhunter does

because technically Mindhunter should be what Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul has been for AMC in terms of people discovering it over time because it didn't flatten out everything and you were a loser if you didn't know what happened on MindHunter. But I wonder whether or not it's picked up a lot of interest since it debuted almost, I guess, a year and a half ago. Why do you think that you are less excited about?

Like, does your lack of interest in season three of Bloodline or season seven of Orange, how does that compare to season two of Big Little Lies or whatever other shows you like when they come back? I think partially, partially it has to do with how it's being pitched at me. Like, I have to admit, there are several shows that I adore that sometimes I'll just turn on Netflix and I'll like, wait, this is back. You know, like it? So it's not even made into like a real event, I think. And partially it's because of the lack of structure.

around the viewing. And I never really know, you know, sometimes there are things like Dark where I'm just like, I'm just going to keep watching these until I get to the end because I want to find out what happens. But, you know, when it's something kind of lighthearted, whether it's one day at a time or dead to me, you kind of just like, it feels like it's just out there in the ether. And especially as you go forward, you know, you get distracted by so many new titles. I wonder whether or not that's something that they'd grapple with internally. Yeah. I mean, Dark is a good example for me because it's a show that I've always wanted to watch, have not. But if it's, it's, If I were to be told that a new season were coming back, I might say, okay, over the next couple of weeks, I'll carve out some time, I'll catch up on what's happened, and so then I'm ready for the new one. But there is no marketing like that from Netflix. They're changing bit by bit.

Like, their new chief marketing officer now reports into the head of programming. So everything is dictated by the studio. It just hasn't been the Netflix way to market way ahead of time. I remember being in the audience for a panel for the Emmys related to the first scene of stranger. things. And the creators of that show, the Duffer brothers, were talking about how they were so nervous before it came out because there was no marketing out of it. They figured Netflix just didn't care. But then they realized that when it hit and people liked it, then Netflix put

everything it had behind it and it blew up into a sensation. Well, and there is a sort of, there is a Netflix show phenomenon that happens. It happened with Stranger Things in the biggest way. It's in... Marie Condo. Yeah, Marie Condo. To some extent, the first season of dark, although I think it was a little niche, but like when Stranger Things came out, I remember it being like dropped and then a couple of people watched it and it was a real like old school word of mouth like you should really check this out

this is really cool and then it just caught on it was like something about like 10 days to two weeks after it had come out I remember it just being like everybody was talking about Barb and everybody was talking about the music and whether it was like too retro or whether it was everything about it seemed like it

owned a summer in a way that even this third season which I'm sure was as big as anything they've ever done felt like it came and went in like eight days after after it dropped. Yeah, I don't know that people will be talking about the new season of Stranger Things in a couple weeks. And even the discussion around this season felt less than that first one. Like I haven't, maybe this is just anecdotal and it doesn't matter. But it's not like my friends are coming up to me wanting to talk about the new season of Stranger Things.

There are more of them want to talk about Big Little Lies. Now, the audience for Big Little Lies is much smaller. Yeah. But it just doesn't feel like a like Geistie show. So I want to talk a little bit about what happens when Apple, Disney, HBO Max, and Comcast are around. How does that, in your mind, even off the top of your head, how does Netflix demonstrably different when those things are around? First of all, I mean, like the library, I would imagine, is impacted. That is a story that I feel has been pretty grossly overplayed.

Okay. A lot of things have already happened. Disney has already said that it was not going to renew its deal for movies. Those movies are going off. I forget if it's already happened or if it's happening. I think that Marvel movies are still there for a while. A few of them are still there. But those movies actually come back in like five, six years because of a quirk of that deal.

Oh, wow. Of the 10 most popular license shows on Netflix, two of them we know we're going to leave, which are The Office and Friends. Friends will leave at the end of this year. The Office doesn't even leave until the end of 2020. So, yes, those big media companies are pulling their shows off Netflix. It's slow and it's tedious because they made deals that gave Netflix rights for a very long time, shows that are still on the air, those don't leave Netflix until many years after they leave the air.

So all those popular CW shows, those are going to be on Netflix till like 20, 25. Those are going to be there forever. A lot of the Shonda shows that are still on ABC, those don't leave Netflix until at least a couple of years after they leave. So we have, like, Gray's Anatomy. ABC has to cancel that show if Disney ever wants Grays off of Netflix. So that doesn't change a whole lot, a little bit. What I do think changes just more competition. for time and energy and attention.

And Netflix, which has gotten away with really being the place you go for streaming TV on the internet, all of a sudden is not because there are so many other options. Now, we've had Hulu, we've had Amazon. You can obviously stream HBO or Showtime, but I would expect that you will see Disney just market the hell out of Disney Plus and put all these resources behind it. And how Netflix contends with that remains to be seen. Right. If the Mandalorian winds up being bigger than almost anything Netflix has ever done, what happens to Netflix, basically?

Right. Do they? Because Netflix will say when there's an outage on YouTube, for example, their usage will go up because that's their closest competition online. What happens when the Mandalorian is a big hit? Or is the fact that Game of Thrones is in this most recent quarter, one of the reasons why Netflix didn't have a huge quarter? Sure. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Do you think that there is ever going to be, what does a slowdown for Netflix look like? Or is it a bubble and it's either inflating and inflating or popping? Like, would there be a point where they're saying, you know what, we spent $150 million on Martin Scorsese movie? We won some stuff for Roma. It's been fun, but this is like the margins are just off for us here because we're not getting repeat viewings of Roma and the Irishmen over the years. They are definitely past the point of bubble popping and dramatic reversal. They have too many customers, make too much money, and it's their whole business. So it's not like we're going to see them. I could see Amazon and Apple just say we're out. Like we have all these other things we make money from.

We don't need Hollywood. We're done. That's not possible for Netflix. What could happen is if what happened this quarter repeats. If all of a sudden, instead of adding, you know, 28 million customers a year, it starts to add. 20 or 15. Then they probably have to spend less money on programming. They have to be more rational about what they're doing.

They can't just flood the zone with new shows. They have to act like a studio has historically acted, which is like, let's pick the ones that we really believe in and develop instead of just tossing full season orders at everything. Yes. That's what I would expect if there's some problems. Because the thing is their stock price would fall, and that's what would then make them have to adjust because they wouldn't be.

able to borrow money as easily. You know, they'd have to really report a... They can just pour money into development. Yeah, they'd have to show that they would enter what is kind of considered a more mature phase of a company where it's no longer just about growth, but it's about profit. I feel like I've, you know, in the last couple of days, had a bunch of these kinds of conversations. And the place that I feel like goes largely unremarked upon strangely is Apple.

I think that they've, it's been, despite the reveal of, you know, a little bit about the interface, a couple of the shows, some stills, maybe a trailer or whatever. We haven't really gotten too far into it. What are you kind of hearing and if you, you know, and what are you sort of feeling about the Apple service? Apple service will debut sometime this fall. They are taking a completely different approach from Netflix. Netflix is Spray and Pray.

Let's make a lot of really good shows. Some of that works. You have stranger things. You have Narcos. And then some of it is like a show Chambers that came out in April and nobody even heard of it and then it disappeared. Yeah. Apple is going to make a handful of very expensive shows.

with people everybody's heard of and use that as sort of a sprinkle on top of an app that it already has. Because Apple still is stuck on this idea that the TV, the process of finding what to watch online is too difficult, which they're probably right about it. They're about to be really right. They want to condense everything into their app,

which is also called TV, which is sort of confusing. And the problem is that none of the big streaming services actually want to play along with it. So Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, They're like, no, we want people to go to our app. We don't want them to go to yours. But it does mean you pay for HBO, you pay for showtime, you pay for all these other things. You can watch those shows within the TV app.

And then Apple will kind of sprinkle on their fancy originals as another reason to use it. What's not clear, will you have to pay extra? I think that if you don't pay for any other Apple services, you will have to pay some monthly fee. To watch the Reese Withers Spoon, Jennifer Anastren's show. Yeah, the morning show. If you do pay for something, they haven't said this, but my senses, you'll have you'll get grandfathered in. Like if you pay for Apple Music and the Apple News app,

I have a really hard time believing you're also going to have to pay for Apple Video. It just doesn't make any sense. What's there, what's in it for them? What's it, like, I mean, is it just to be in business with Tom Hanks or Reese Witherspoon or Damien Chiselle? Or is there, is it because they have a bunch of cash

burning a hole in their pocket and there are worse ways to spend it? I mean, what do you think is in it for Apple? There are two forces at work, I would say. One is you have the Apple Hollywood people who have wanted to do this for a while. They see Netflix having all this success, Amazon having all the fun.

They say, why not us? Then you have Tim Cook, CEO looking across the landscape. The sale of iPhones have slowed. You know, they're still making, they're still one of the most successful companies in the world. But there's only so much they can squeeze out of that product. There are only so many new people who need phones,

only so much people are willing to spend. And as the prices of iPhones get higher and higher, people try to take longer between buying new ones. So Apple's strategy the past couple of years has been to signal that, you know, on top of being a devices company, we're going to be a services company, which means they're selling you Apple Music. They're selling you news. They're selling you video. They're selling you all these other things that both further tether you to their device, the one that I have in my pocket, and maybe makes a little extra money on top of it. And if it doesn't, it doesn't really matter to a company with $300 billion in cash just sitting in Ireland.

Sure. Right. And then I guess crucially also they get into wallet and stuff like that. all of these things are linked by a payment service that they're sort of operating. Yeah, we've got all these tech companies with too much money, too much power. They don't really know what to do with it. And so they're going into all sorts of new areas because they can. Do you think that we're in a horse race and that there could only be a limited amount of winners at the end?

Because obviously it got kicked around a little bit. I'm not sure if it was ever something that was serious, but that Apple should buy Netflix. Right. Or that Netflix should acquire someone else's library or get into the acquisitions business. Do you think that we're going to have a couple of years of there being five or six streaming services and then a shrinking down to maybe two or three? The market can support more than two or three, because if you think about how many of the small niche ones you have for horror or whatever it is,

they all survive. Of the big ones, I give everybody at least a few years playing. Disney's not going anywhere. Netflix is not going anywhere. Apple and Amazon are question marks. AT&T, it's hard to see going. anywhere. And Comcast, I get really mixed signals out of that company, so I'm not sure what to expect. I'd assume that all six are in it three years from now, five years from now, I'd guess that

at least one of them is no longer in it. A lot of the, and you mentioned acquisitions, a lot of the big stuff's already happened. AT&T bought Time Warner, Disney bought Fox. Apple could buy something, but that would, you know, Apple buying Netflix would be the biggest deal in Apple history by a factor of 40 or 50, and that feels unlikely. Right. Also, given the current regulatory scrutiny of the big tech companies, I have a hard time seeing any of them pursuing a huge acquisition. Apple spent two years fighting to digest Shazam, which was a $400 million acquisition that nobody understood in the first place. So the idea that they're then going to go by the biggest online TV network in the world still seems far-fetched. Let's talk about for a second about the little guy. Right now, I was talking about this with Bill.

I think for people my age, maybe your age, a lot of people. are still, they have cable and plus Netflix, and maybe cable plus Netflix plus Amazon or something like that. They're carrying a lot of per month content cost. And the introduction of these services may introduce like a real choice for these, for the average consumer between,

do I finally fully cut the cord, even though I don't get to watch like Lakers games perfectly live the way I want to? Or do one of these services find out that there's only so much appetite for this stuff. As in, do the smaller services go away? Yeah, I'm kind of curious to just like, do you think that we're going to see most people out there have

for subscriptions to four or five services and not cable? Or do you think it'll be cable and two services and three that they don't have? And they're just like, I just don't watch the office. I don't have that service. I think it depends on how much experimentation there is with sports on the internet. Because, like, I still pay for a,

kind of an all-a-cart service from spectrum. It's not full cable, but it gets me enough. It means I get live sports. I get the basic cable channels, and I'm sort of covered. I have a hard time. Do you then pay for HBO? I pay for HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. I have to do the full bore.

You and I are both pot committed. We can't be saved. So we're probably not the best test cases here, but I will not get rid of live. TV as long as there's sports. And I think that's going to keep going, whether that means I buy the YouTube TV or Hulu or Spectrum or whatever it is, most sports fans are going to keep buying some kind of live service. How many things they add on? Yeah, probably two or three. All the research differs. Some say two or three, some say five or six. A lot of the big companies look at it more in terms

of dollar spend. So most people are probably going to keep spending about $100 a month on this. And so if they're spending $40 on cable, that probably gives them space for three to four services, depending on how much it costs. Sure. The ones that I imagine having a hard time are those that are going for the masses but can't sustain that level of production. Or, yeah, investment, consumer interest, that's where you run into trouble. If whatever AT&T does with HBO Max, if they can't grow that HBO subscriber base significantly,

then they have a real problem because they're playing. planning to double the amount of shows they're making. If they don't double their customer base or triple their customer base, they're in trouble. Man, it's going to be really fascinating to watch this unfold over the next couple of months. I hope you can come back on the show at some point. It was really nice having you on. Lucas Shaw, you can read him on Bloomberg News. He's one of the sort of brightest voices writing about the streaming wars right now.

Lucas, thanks so much for coming on the watch, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Riley McItee is joining me right now. I wanted to talk to Riley about Survivor, because we heard about some rule changes coming for the 40th season, the all-winner season. There's going to be a 39th season, which still seems like it's like a satire or something. It's got involves like giant Easter Island statues of Boston Rob and Sandra. And you get to go to them for tutelage, but they're not playing.

So that's, that's coming soon. Yes. Right? That's the fall. Yeah. And that one wraps up at Christmas and then they have another one shortly after that in the spring. The one in the spring is the 40th season. Yep.

All winters. 20 years on the air. And we've had some, what are some of the names of the people? like some of the past champs who were going to be on it? So it's going to have Rob and Sandra. It's going to have people who haven't returned in like a really long time, like Amber or like Yule who only played one season. It's going to have legends like Parvety.

There's a bunch of recent winners, people like Michelle and Ben and Adam and Sarah and Wendell. And then it's got like fun characters like Tony and like Tyson. It's actually like a really, really great cast. So the cast excites you. There's like, oh, it's like, oh, I wish they could have gotten like this person or that. person like one or two, but as far as like all winners cast go. Are they bringing Joe back for another, another early exit? I don't, I know he's not on here.

Okay. So this gets announced. We've known about the winter season coming for a while. There's general excitement. But then they announced that they were going to add a couple of wrinkles to this season. And that's where Riley got pissed. So Riley wrote a piece for the ringer about this. Yeah, you're shaking your head.

Like I'm not representing you properly. But I think you're doing right. No, yes. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I feel like it's been like a long. simmering thing for me, but it's just, I don't know, man. They just keep tweaking the formula and it's like the basic formula is so good.

You're a traditionalist. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm like a crotchy old man. No, you're a survival. You know, you believe in the Constitution as originally interpreted, do you know? So what are the wrinkles that they're throwing in this season? Yeah, I'm like, I'm like Antonin Scalia or whatever. Of Survivor.

So they're doing, so last season they did this edge of extinction twist that we talked about a few months ago on this podcast where they had once you were voted out, a contestant could choose to go to Extinction Island, which was basically this desolate island that had no real resources and was a real pain to live on. But you could stay there and wait it out long enough and then eventually compete in a challenge to earn your spot back into the game. and they had two different instances where you could win your way back in. It was like right at the merge and then at Final Five. And the guy who was voted out on day eight, Chris, ended up winning the challenge to get back in

at Final Five, so way later. And then he ended up winning the entire season after only having played for, it was like 13 days or something. It was like less than two weeks of actual main game time and the vast majority of time, like four weeks spent

sitting on extinction. And even his eventual spoiler alert, his eventual victory felt not quite asterixie, but very like,

he got in not through a loophole, but it was a fire challenge. Like there was not, it's not a traditional survivor, build alliances, do, you know,

backstabbing and then win at the end. He came in and he made like one sort of alliance with Devons, with his idol thing that he had, that they have to split for a vote

and then had to like bring it back. And then, And yeah, he like made, he won immunity and like made a big move, like did the fire challenge thing and sort of impressed the jury the same people that he'd been sitting on an island with for four weeks. Yes. And was able to win. It's the most bizarre win. So you've got it's the most bizarre win.

So you've got it's the most bizarre win, but it's definitely the most bizarre win. Were you entertained? Uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like the finale episode was entertaining. But as a whole, I was like, that's not fair. This is not. Well, it should also just not survivor. It was just a different show than the one.

that I've been watching for so many years. Okay. Now they're adding another wrinkle to season 40. Explain that one. Well, okay. So in addition to bringing back Extinction Island for season 40, and this is all reported, I guess none of this is really official, but we know that the leaks are pretty reliable. They are giving the players money, which they've never done before. So the players can use this money to buy apparently rewards and different items and potentially even advantages in the game and they're going to be able to potentially pool their money to buy things that they share together and they'll also- And will their money to people when they are voted out.

Will their money when they're voted out? Yeah. I think that when they're voted out, it's been reported that they have to will their money and whatever they bought with the money to players that are still in the game. Adding like a big wrinkle of, you know, I guess you don't want to backstab somebody and leave them super bitter, not only for the jury, but also for the stuff that they might give you when they're voted out. For sure. But then it's not clear to me, so I guess you don't take your money to the extinction island that will still exist because if extinction island exists, they are never

really out of the game. Right. Although the execution of extinction island last season, after a while, that was actually one of the reasons why Chris was so surprising, is that for a while with extinction island, it almost seemed like they didn't quite know what to do with it, or that

they, because they spent a lot of time and a lot of footage there, I think almost at the expense of developing relationships with the people who are still playing the game. game. Because like a third of every episode would be spent watching, who was the woman who was there every day. Ream. Ream. Yeah, they'd always give Ream like one quip at the end. She was voted off first and, you know, to her credit, stayed through the entire thing. But then. Every time somebody then would come to Extinction Island, she'd be like, welcome to hell. Yeah. Buckle up. Yeah. And then, you know, and that came at the expense of there would be like eight people left in the game. And I was like, wait, who's this person? Yes. Which is a pretty weird sensation. Because usually by.

that point in a survivor season, you have your favorites. You have the people you don't like. If people, you know, have no chance. So, yeah, and in addition, because they had, like, four returnees last season, and those people just demand a little bit more screen time because we're already familiar with them. And then they had Devons who kind of dominated the season, plus the extinction island thing. It felt like last season was super hectic. Yeah, Devons found, like, an incredible amount of idols, essentially ran the game from,

like, a bunch of different angles, and then loses because a guy comes back and he has to make fire. Yeah. which didn't seem right. Well, Devons had also, he was the one who had been voted off previously and then won his way back in. I guess if Devons had never been voted off in the first place, I'd been like, wow,

a guy who just really ran the show for the whole season went out with the firemaking challenge except for I was like, you know what, Devons already got voted out once. There's no possible good winner for Survivor. All right, so when you get out of your article that's on the ringer, is this idea that Survivor,

and you break it down pretty easily, You're like, here's what Survivor is. Right. The variations on the theme, do you have like a sense of how much experimentation you are comfortable with? Because you basically break it down to three things, right? Yeah. So, I mean, the whole thing is that you want to control the game enough so that you're not getting voted out, and preferably the people that you want to get voted out are getting voted.

But you don't want to be so obvious in that control that you then become a threat and get voted out yourself. Right. And you also don't want that control to be so subtle that by the time you get to the end, if you make it there, the jury just thinks that you didn't do anything that you rode coattails. So you're sort of doing this balancing act where you want to be clear that you're doing stuff in the game, but not so much that you become a target. And that creates a ton of tension, especially with the fact that once you're voted out, you're out. it's over and done, except for this last season with Extinction Island, where you could get voted out and then come back. Right, right.

And so, what do you think? To me, the introduction of this stuff with winners. Now, you said before we started recording, that you would have liked to have seen this experimentation happening with newbies. But with winners, I actually kind of feel like this is really interesting, giving them a new tool in the toolbox kind of thing.

Well, so I'm all the way out on extinction island. Like, newbies are returning. Yeah. Returnees. Just, just, no thanks. The money thing is really weird and interesting, and I think is kind of a fun wrinkle. But, yeah, I'd be more interested in it in a newbie season, which you kind of, if you're CBS, your survivor, you have to sell anyways.

But the winner's season just sells itself. So I don't, you know, you don't have to add twists upon twists to sell the most stack cast that you've ever had in 20 years of doing this show. just do the normal formula and it'll already be awesome. Do you think that this is a gambit from Survivor to remain relevant?

Maybe. You know, my favorite theory that somebody tweeted at me was that because, so there are 37 winners now, I guess, at the end of season 38, because Sandra has won twice. Right. That these people had so much leverage in coming back that they said, you got, you know,

some of them probably were like, I don't want to come back and starve, so do something that I can get some food or some rewards or whatever. Interesting. And that they might have actually done that. And maybe they did, you know, if I'm going to come back, I need to be on the whole season. So you need to introduce some sort of like island thing that I can sit on, hence edge of extinction or whatever,

which is totally like not that theory. That theory is not founded in anything, totally tinfoily. But I was, you know, I think it's pretty compelling. Very interesting. Obviously, I made this passing joke to you. and you disagree with it, but I was like, Survivor is like Jeopardy to me. Like, it could just keep going on forever.

Why do you think it isn't? Well, it could go on forever, but Jeopardy never changed the formula. The reason Jeopardy is great is because it's the same thing. Yeah, but didn't they introduce, like, today it's all like teenagers, and today it's like... Oh, yeah, I mean, whatever. They'll do like their tournaments or whatever,

but the core show, Jeopardy is just you answer trivia and you're fast on the buzzer and that's how you win. Yeah, but maybe they should change Jeopardy because that Bobby Fisher dude just like ran the table on everybody, right? That was great. That's exactly why they shouldn't change it. Because when he does that,

would you be happy watching Survivor every year if it was just like someone's figured out exactly how to play within the rules of Survivor and dominates. Hell yeah. Yeah. Well, also because the game itself has changed over time even without different rule changes.

Like people found different ways of using idols. Like when the first players started to figure out, so I guess the hidden immunity idol is a rule change that didn't come about until I think like, like season 11 or something, that's the best rule change. That one they should keep forever. But, you know, people didn't realize at first that you could show somebody an idol and then use that to gain their trust and, you know, create an alliance that way.

So the game kind of will evolve even without rule changes, which is already interesting. But, you know, the thing that has always separated the best seasons from the kind of run-of-the-mill seasons is the characters and the cast. Not that twist. No one has been like, this twist was just so great that it elevated. the game to a new level. I think that there's a degree to which I think that there's been a little bit too much self-awareness on Survivor,

like where you have character or you have people who obviously are like essentially Survivor Scholars and it becomes five-degree chess all the time. So I like the idea of them giving people a few other obstacles or a few other things to think about rather than being like I've run an algorithm that tells me

I make my move in episode seven and I do this when there's this many people left and this is how I get to the final three. and I have to do a blindside on this day. I mean, we're getting kind of money-ballish on Survivor as it is. They cast a lot of super fans, and then a lot of people who, like, they build themselves as super fans. They are always, like, going to these confessions and they're like,

as a Survivor's superfan, I know that sometimes the immunity adiles are hidden under, like, trees or whatever. There's nothing like, all right, great. I've watched every episode of Survivor. I am a super fan, and then he gets, like, nuked on the second episode. That's great. Yeah, that stuff is great. It's by my lifelong dream to arrive at this island.

I'm in perfect shape. I will not lose. And then it's just like, get this guy out here. And then they immediately make like a rookie mistake, which is that they're just bossing everyone around in camp. Right. They get voted out.

It's like, you watch every episode and didn't realize that the asshole always gets voted out early. I just think that everything goes out the window for how hungry people are. Like I just think that that's like an underappreciated idea is just like, can you handle being hungry all the time? I super agree. Whenever people make mistakes, especially late and ones that are obvious, I'm always chalking it up to, you know what? If I'd lost 30 pounds after being outside all the time for 20-some days, I'd make a bunch of mistakes too.

And hadn't had a good night sleep in a month. Sleeping on bamboo? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it sounds like a terrible, miserable time. And they never focus on that anymore. But I think it totally affects everything happens. Yeah, they've deviated a little bit away from like, I have tons of mosquito bites and like foot rot. Yeah.

Which makes sense. We've seen it all. Yeah, I got that. I got enough foot rot in my life from the show. All right, well, Riley will obviously be coming on the watch. I hope a lot when the show finally, when 39 and especially when 40, we're all still here. If we haven't been wiped off the face of the earth by the top gun trailer, we will all still be here watching Survivor. Rylow come on and talk to me about it. Thanks so much for stopping by, man. Yeah. Thank you.