We Made the Jet Lag Crew Watch Big Brother 26 | #BB26

[00:00:08] Hey everybody, what's going on? Rob Cesternino. Happy Friday here on Friday afternoon as we have gotten together for some special BB26 coverage as I am joined here by two people who have been chronicling both the show's jet lag and the getaway here on RHAP. First,

[00:00:29] a man on very little sleep right now as the live feeds came back. It's Taren Armstrong. Taren, how are you? Very excited. You know, we gave some tasks away for this podcast and

[00:00:42] I'm very excited to see in what mood they were taken. It was very kind to call them tasks and not a punishment to start us off. And of course, always wonderful to be back with you, Sasha. So excited? Question mark. You know what? This does start my journey

[00:01:03] of being like a dictator. Whoa. Someone that is really good torturist. It's only day one, Sasha. Listen, I'm a good torturer, I believe. So that's how I'm here. Okay. All right. Well,

[00:01:17] we are joined here by two of the people behind jet lag and the getaway. It's Ben Doyle and Adam Chase. They have watched two nights of Big Brother and are here to talk about it. Ben and Adam,

[00:01:32] how are you? Good, good. Rob, I am to understand that this feed is live, right? So anything we say about this television program, you cannot edit out. That is correct. Very good. Chat is very

[00:01:48] ready. OK. And we're live streaming. We have a busy afternoon after this. Taren and I are going to be taking patron calls for the BBQ&A at 3 p.m. Eastern. Ben and Adam, it is my understanding that

[00:02:02] neither of you had ever seen an episode of any of the previous 25 seasons of Big Brother prior to the two you watched for this podcast. I actually had watched maybe two episodes of it in like 2016,

[00:02:18] but I had essentially no recollection of what occurred. I have never seen this show before. Yeah. Look, I'm going to level with you guys. This show sucks. I don't know what we're doing here.

[00:02:37] Okay. On that note, okay. So let's just say that we have a lot of people who are watching who are Big Brother fans that may or may not be familiar with jet lag and the work that you two do. Let's

[00:02:51] start on a positive note. And could you explain jet lag for any people who know Big Brother but may not know what you've been up to? Okay, sure. So jet lag is... So imagine Big Brother,

[00:03:08] but instead of it being 16 people, it's three, sometimes four. And instead of them being in a house, they're sort of traveling around the world. And instead of BBAI Ainsley, there's sort of thoughtful gameplay and strategy. Okay. So it's the complete opposite of Big Brother.

[00:03:42] It's like a travel competition show. It's like The Amazing Race, but much more DIY with much more sort of nitty gritty travel strategy involved. Sort of like pulling a lot of what

[00:03:54] was happening in early seasons of The Amazing Race, but with a lot more depth in the strategy. Yeah. And a lot less production value. And jet lag is beloved. Ben and Adam are

[00:04:06] working on a brand new show, The Getaway, which you can see on Nebula. And of course, Taren and Sasha had covered jet lag and are covering The Getaway, which is a little bit

[00:04:21] of a social strategy meets a little bit of a prank show where everybody on that show thinks they are the mole in a mole-esque competition show, which I highly recommend. And Taren and Sasha are bringing extensive coverage of The Getaway right now. Yeah. It's very fun.

[00:04:43] I mean, yeah. The way I would pitch these guys to the Big Brother fans is that they're brilliant game designers and they're great show creators. And if they were in charge of Big Brother, it would be the best show ever. Wow.

[00:05:00] I, in fairness, I think I had less of a negative reaction to Big Brother than Ben did. I have a lot of thoughts that I'm ready to share, but they are not all negative. I think that there were some positive aspects to what was happening.

[00:05:15] See, Ben is a reality TV girly, though. You know, so I think Ben has some level of like what a show should be. Your vibes? Yeah. I watch a lot of reality TV that I love and I love a lot of terrible, terrible reality TV.

[00:05:33] And will I be watching the rest of this season of Big Brother? Probably. Oh. Okay. But you know, I'm, I'm, will still, you know, I, I, I'm many, there are many wolves inside of me. Ben, what are the horrible reality shows that you do watch?

[00:05:50] All the, all the dating shows, all the, every Love Island, Love is Blind, all of those, I'm watching. I've watched almost every season of Survivor, which is just a good show, to be honest. Amazing Race, also good. All, all the,

[00:06:08] all the dating shows are pretty terrible, but I eat them up every single time. Big Brother has more successful moments than Survivor. I think Big Brother has more successful marriages in The Bachelor. Did you know that? So, so I hear on, they said it on the-

[00:06:28] Shout out Hottie. Yeah. What was his name? Matt. Matt. Matt. Matt said this. I have some thoughts about Matt. Please. It is funny to me that Ben has instantly become what all Big Brother fans are. Correct. I hate this show, but I will continue to watch it.

[00:06:47] In record time. Y'all see the chat. They're all like, roast us, drag us, humiliation kink. It's here. The thing, the thing about this for me is that like, this is an actual thing that happens in my life constantly that we are now making a podcast about.

[00:07:03] Like, these are two people that I've met recently that I, that I have a lot of respect for. And I have to explain that my life is dedicated to this show. That I spend a hundred days straight every year,

[00:07:18] like paying close attention to it, making tons of content about it and thinking very deeply about it. And I've been doing this for like a decade and watching the show for my whole life. And then when they're like, oh, that sounds so interesting.

[00:07:32] I love the way that you talk about this show. And they go to watch it. They don't talk to me again. And so this is, you guys are getting to experience a piece of my life in real life in this podcast. Look, I like you as a guy.

[00:07:58] I think that I, I have sort of several questions for you. So, sort of, did you, have you, in terms of the live feed stuff, right? In terms of you spending this time every summer, has this always been your livelihood when you were doing it?

[00:08:17] Or did you start out love of the game and it became your livelihood? It was, it was the love of the game. See that I think reflects poorly on you unfortunately. Oh my god. To be fair, I was a child.

[00:08:29] I was sort of hoping you were going to say that it had always been your livelihood, which I think would kind of be better. That you have to remember Big Brother was good at one point. Yeah, I was going to ask this. Did this show used to be?

[00:08:44] Yes, I am an immigrant. Mind you, I lived in America one year and my stepdad introduced me to this show because him and my stepbrother watched this DVR'd every single episode. The BB8 onwards. And it was fun. You got to watch something. They were fights, they were drama.

[00:09:06] And now it's just hotties on TV. Yeah, I mean, should we get into the episode? Can we talk about what's occurred? I feel really ready to sort of discuss what's happened. I would also just like to say as I'll borrow Sasha's title of BB apologist of that.

[00:09:26] This was probably, I feel like that these two hours of setup were just dreadful, but that I feel like maybe not the truest representation of what the rest of the show is going to be like. The premieres are usually some of the worst episodes of the show.

[00:09:47] But in addition to that, the reason I think that the show has the longevity that it does and the fan base that it does, and certainly the reason that like, you know, I'm able to make a living off of the show is the live feeds.

[00:10:01] Those are truly like the piece that makes it so unique and interesting. And the ability for people to kind of like buy into the degree with which they want to invest their time is also like a key element. So we are, of course, like discussing the episodes here

[00:10:20] and the premieres here. But I do want to pitch you on the live feeds once we finish talking about the episodes. How do you watch the live? Yeah, how do I get to the live feeds?

[00:10:31] I will just say from a technical, just from a straight off the rip, from a technical perspective, this was one of the most difficult to watch television programs I've ever. I was in the family group chat. I was like, do we have Paramount Plus?

[00:10:43] They were like, no, I make a Paramount Plus account. I go in there like, no, you need Paramount Plus with Showtime. Yeah, with Showtime. I don't know what kind of psychopath has that. So I'm back in the family group chat. They're like, no, we do have Showtime.

[00:10:56] I'm on the Showtime app. They're like, Showtime doesn't exist anymore. So then I have got to go do the upgrade. I look. Did you get hacked by Ainsley? Yeah, I think that every executive involved with this show should be in jail. Oh, yes.

[00:11:10] Well, my understanding, Ben, is that that is more true than you may realize. Sort of Julie Chen Moonves. There's there's a complication to the Moonves of it all. Yeah, my understanding that raised some eyebrows for. Yeah, I found that to be interesting.

[00:11:28] Well, I learned I learned that she used to sign off as Julie Chen and only started adding the Moonves on there after the sexual assault allegations came out. Kind of an incredibly interesting choice with that timing. That was also coincidentally.

[00:11:45] Yes, that was also coincidentally when she started signing off with Love One Another. Love One Another. Yes. Well, I was fascinated by Love One Another. I thought Love One Another came later. Well, she was experimenting with different signs until she finally settled on Love One Another. Yeah.

[00:12:03] I mean, what here's what I loved about when she said that. And because this is a part of the show I really enjoyed was when at the end she goes, I'm Julie Chen Moonves, love one another.

[00:12:14] And what I loved about that was that it was so many words that sounded so crazy when put together. It was only like six words and it's so nuts when you hear them. And then you think through like there's so, so, so much meaning in those six words.

[00:12:33] It's kind of incredible. It's sort of like for sale baby shoes never worn in terms of how much meaning you can fit into six words. Julie Chen Moonves, love one another. It's a rich. Has some of the densest kind of meaning that one could possibly fit into those,

[00:12:51] that number of words. And I thought that was kind of incredible. I think we've taken that for granted nowadays. You know, it's, we've been with, we've been living with it for so long that yeah.

[00:13:02] It's, I mean, I don't even want to unpack it because there's so much to unpack the whole. I could talk for half an hour about all of the meaning that is in Julie Chen Moonves, love one another. Well, we only have so much time here with you today.

[00:13:17] I know you all are very busy with all of the shows you're producing, so we should really get back to the two night premiere of Big Brother 26. Look, I'm ready. I'm ready to break it down. How does this work? Let's break it down.

[00:13:34] So, so the, the beginning of the premiere, this is like always the same. The way that they're introducing the, the, the house guests that we'll be seeing in the season. It's, you know, it's changed slightly over the years, but basically since the start,

[00:13:51] it's been packages from home them. Oh, it's a key. I'm going to the Big Brother house. Yeah. I had a question about this. Those are what's, what's happening there in terms of, so like it was clear to,

[00:14:08] I picked up from context that a big key means you get to go beyond Big Brother. Like I managed to figure this out using my incredible sort of sense of, of what it means. Deduction. Context. Sort of my amazing sense of deduction.

[00:14:22] But like, it seemed like they were trying to suggest that this was a surprise that their family had somehow acquired the key. That's how they surprised them. Secretly and then they found the key.

[00:14:35] But then the footage is far too good for it not to have been a camera crew that was sent there. And in fact, at one point, one guy had the key and then ran into a boom mic operator.

[00:14:51] And so I was like, if this was on cell phone footage, I would maybe be able to believe, oh, maybe you, you, you, when you put in your application, you put in like a close loved one

[00:15:02] and you say, if I get in, give them the key and then they'll hide it for me and then I'll find it. But like this was obviously filmed on a television camera. Right? So like it's, it's complete, it's complete fabrication. Right? Like there's no.

[00:15:17] I can tell you how this works. Basically when you get far enough in the, the, the auditioning stage, you, uh, they, they tell you you're a finalist.

[00:15:33] We're going to bring a film crew out to your house to film a package in case you end up on the show. Uh, and then they surprise them with the key. You are officially actually on the show. Um, now, nowadays that doesn't really fool anybody.

[00:15:49] They all know what's happening the second. They don't actually send film crews to anybody that won't be on the show. The alternates, they probably do. So, uh, there is, they still get a key. Uh, I would imagine they probably do. So, uh, yes.

[00:16:07] So, um, so yes, if they're sending a film crew to your house, you're getting a key and anybody that knows the show knows that. Um, so it is still possible to get a genuine reaction from somebody who's like completely new to the show.

[00:16:21] But most people, they know what's coming and they also know what's expected of them. They've seen the show before they're supposed to act surprised. Sure, sure. This this is this makes sense to me. Yeah.

[00:16:34] Um, you have anything that you want to say about this part of the show or you've been very quiet. Look, if you can't sort of suspend your disbelief for the first like. Well, it was like 12 minutes. So actually is like a lot of the show. Yeah.

[00:16:50] If you can't get over the key, wait till you hear about the sentient AI that just took over. Yeah. OK, but but sorry, but this was this was my this was my thing about the key. But please continue. Yeah. So so we get introduced now.

[00:17:06] Usually how this works, we it's we sometimes split the house into two halves like they did here. Um, but but oftentimes we'll get like all of them in the first episode and it will be even longer.

[00:17:20] And they love to do these little like, like, oh, man, my type is really tall women cut to right. Right. I noticed this. Yeah. Well, I was I was really into they did what here are some of my positive things that I

[00:17:36] had to say about Big Brother, which was like they had a few good jokes, one of which was pairing Madeline and Joseph back to back on the intro where Madeline goes like, I really want a tall like hottie.

[00:17:48] And then it goes to Joseph and he's like running on the beach, getting tired. And he's like, I'm really short. And I was like that this is fun. This is some fun editing.

[00:17:57] Um, and the other thing that I do have to say for the introductions of the players was like, and I don't know how much people who don't make reality TV shows think about this, but I was like, you know what?

[00:18:09] What they're doing is obviously like a very played out. Let's do a little package on these people. But they made the smart decision of making it extremely active, being in a bunch of different environments and doing a lot of stuff.

[00:18:23] Because like a really lazy reality show would have somebody sit down in a chair and that you would just they would talk about themselves and you would have the first 12 minutes be all people in an interview chair footage.

[00:18:34] But instead, like there's so many pieces of footage from so many different places and they're running around and they're fishing and they're, you know, by the pool, they're on a boat. Like you don't get that bored.

[00:18:48] You don't get as bored as you could get getting introduced to these people. There's a cut every five seconds to them doing something else and they're talking in all these environments. And I was like, that is a little piece of production that like is subtle but very smart

[00:19:02] because otherwise you would be so just dead bored. We go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, I will just say one interesting thing that I know that like this is something that I think has happened with a lot of long running reality shows.

[00:19:16] But also it seemed like all of their introductions revolved around how much they loved Big Brother. Yeah, as someone who had never watched Big Brother, I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:19:29] But like that's that was very interesting to me because I know that they do that on Survivor and they do that on The Amazing Race. But like these shows take on such a meta quality that like I'm sure is good if you've watched all 25 seasons.

[00:19:42] But like I think creates some friction as a new person going in because you sort of feel like you're outside of this like club that already exists. What's funny about that is that this cast probably has the fewest amount of like fans in a while.

[00:20:01] It's pretty, pretty non fan heavy. But but you're right. They still they still want to push the like everybody loves Big Brother. Look how much do you this person loves Big Brother. What a phenom, Big Brother.

[00:20:13] One thing that I liked about well, I say like one thing I noticed about these player introductions that I guess is probably consistent across most reality TV shows was just like because I watched less of this style of reality TV.

[00:20:29] It was so jarring to me that you would just be introduced to a person and they would be like, hi, I'm Tucker. And then their next sentence would be like, my dad is gay.

[00:20:41] And when I found out at first it was tough, but now I've decided it's cool. Like you would just immediately like this to be like, my name's Kimo. I live in Hawaii and I'm gay. My brother died a few years ago.

[00:20:56] Like just the second sentence out of their mouth is just like the most intense piece of personal information about them. It was crazy to I felt insane watching this happen over and over again. Here's the thing, though.

[00:21:14] As soon as that happened, Twitter went psycho, more psycho than we normally are, where I was like, I will die for Kimo. What does he need from me? Oh, my God. That's my king.

[00:21:26] So that they know that we are crackheads and that when they put out stuff like that, it is for us to be like, this is my king winner. Oh, my God. Mind you, they might go home first. That's the other thing is my Twitter feed is ruined now.

[00:21:43] Yeah, yeah. You guys, I was what happened? You why? Why is it? Why ruined? It's just pictures of BBAI and nothing else. That's like my Facebook feed. Look, I literally just opened Twitter and Rob, you're posting a pic of BBAI. That's literally the first thing that comes up.

[00:22:06] What did I say? I I just made me think about and this won't be funny to anybody that hasn't watched our show, but it really made me think about like, what if like we started a season of jet lag

[00:22:19] by being like we're here in Europe playing a game of tag across 16 countries and then it just cut to like one of us being like my dad and I don't get along. So just so you know, listen, we've had we've had my dad and I don't get along.

[00:22:37] My dad's a gay. I'm gay. My brother died to what y'all have missed is people kissing their dad on the mouth. Oh, sort of like Tom Brady style. Yeah. OK, yeah. Yeah. Cody, California. And listen, that's a winner. But sorry, we haven't even gotten through the introductions.

[00:22:55] I feel like I how long is this supposed to go? I don't have any idea. Big brother or this podcast? This podcast. Listen, whatever, whatever you've got, I'm going to love with you guys. I don't got a lot going on right now.

[00:23:10] So you are a big brother fan. God. Oh yeah. Yeah. So this I will say this next part is kind of unique to this season. I don't think we've quite had two of the same episode back to back before.

[00:23:28] What they've been doing for the last few seasons is the premiere will be live, that people will be up on stage, walk into the house. It'll all be live. They'll do competitions. Somebody will win a competition. But this year they decided we're going back to pre taping.

[00:23:44] But they still pre taped like live to tapes. Assumedly. It seemed like there wasn't a lot of editing done and it was still formatted as though it were live. So because of that, they just made two of the same iteration of events.

[00:24:00] Almost like they were like, all right, we've budgeted for one premiere episode, but they want two from us. How can we make that happen? So, in response to that, we get like a very short kind of

[00:24:16] like they're running around the house segment, which used to be a staple of the show. Of like they're running around the house. They're introducing themselves. Now that's very much cut short.

[00:24:25] There is one thing that I think I don't remember if it was specifically called out in the episode, but like the first four people to go into the house, they were all fans of the show. They were like the four fans of the show on the cast.

[00:24:38] And there is a well-known curse in Big Brother, which is that the first person to walk into the house has never won a regular season of Big Brother. And so all four of the people going into the house know the meta strategy

[00:24:54] of I'm going to hold the door open and let somebody else go in first. So it was three people all trying to shuffle around and not be first. Except for Tucker, who was like actively like I'm going to break the curse and wanted to be first. Sure.

[00:25:10] Tucker, who sorry, let me go to my Tucker notes. He's from New York. Oh yeah, no, I loved Tucker because I liked when Tucker was like, look, I'm Tucker and I'm not the simple guy people think I am.

[00:25:25] I have a crazy range of interests from biking to working out. You must understand which I love. They're casting. I loved it when he said that you would never expect. No, well, you look at that guy and work out. You're like, I bet he works out.

[00:25:46] But this guy doesn't seem like he would bike to. And then he tells you that he does. And you're like, OK, we're dealing with a Renaissance man. I didn't realize kind of where we were at. We weren't familiar with his game. Yeah, no, I was.

[00:26:01] Is he an Olympian? I think he must be. I think that he won sort of the gay dad Olympics, which is sort of the only other thing that we learned about him. Yes. OK, but then so they go in.

[00:26:17] Oh, I had another question for you about this and apologies. I have so many questions here. Just the timing of. Sorry. Is the studio actually like connected to the house? Like, did they really walk through a door into the house? Is that real? Yes. In Big Brother.

[00:26:37] Well, what used to be Big Brother Canada, that was it. What it is fake. There's like a whole series of things and it's just a stage. Big Brother US, though, has always been the actual house. Back in the day, Julie was in like a separate little room

[00:26:53] and then they'd walk over to the house. But then they turned it into like a big stage. They're really just in a big studio. OK, OK. And so, yeah. Another question that I had is the audience real or is that fake crowd noise getting pumped in?

[00:27:10] Because it seems like it couldn't possibly be real crowd. It is a real audience. Yeah, well, really. But is it is it real, real or is it just like people that work on the lot sometimes? Yes.

[00:27:22] So it used to be very real in the sense that like you could get tickets to go see Big Brother. Yeah. Then Covid happened and there was no audience for a while. Then it was like only crew in the audience, like clapping.

[00:27:36] I'm not entirely sure what I'd really do. Yeah, but I'm just saying that for the premiere night, I don't know how necessarily they you know, they had this audience and they trust them to not leak anything. But it might have been real people.

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[00:28:58] Yeah, let's talk about it. I want to, but I feel like I've dominated the conversation. I want to let you guys, you know, share where you're at on BBAI. And then Ben and I can weigh in.

[00:29:09] You know, Taryn and I have gotten to talk about it not once, but twice. But Sasha, we have not gotten to hear her thoughts on it. Here's the thing, right? How embarrassing are you, big brother? That's what I must know, right? Like have a modicum of sense. Okay?

[00:29:29] Use a normal graphic designer that can actually create something normal. But no, y'all have to literally, we have the clown nose on, but no, they have to add the makeup to us. Because why are we sitting here watching this shit twice, right? Are you not embarrassed?

[00:29:48] That's how I feel about stupid Ainsley. So Ainsley is cool. Okay, whatever. I love her. Let's be friends. But the actual, because she's like a real person. So I'm not like talking about. Oh, you like the actress? Yeah, the TikToker that she was.

[00:30:03] See, I hate the actress and I like the cartoon. No, no, no. We love women on this podcast. Okay, only there's one on here, but that's fine. Listen, okay? But the thing is, and what they made her, that bald blue, blue man group avatar looking what the hell?

[00:30:24] Why they did that? Why? I'm going to be honest. I disagree. I love. That's crazy. Well, except for the loving women part. I do love women, but also I love the cartoon. I would say that it set back of the AI revolution like 20 years.

[00:30:41] And that for me, that's good. I loved how sort of campy it was. I love that they don't seem to know what AI means. No, that's what I like the most. It has nothing to do with AI. It's great. I love it.

[00:30:58] I really, I love the animation of the robot Ainsley. I love there are so many parts of it that I love. One is that it makes, there's no internal logic at all in the sense of like,

[00:31:16] so she has a form where she looks like a person and sounds like a real lady, but then she switches to look and also sound completely different. Yeah, there's a lot of lore, Adam. It's a very sophisticated program.

[00:31:34] You might not get it, but you know, try and keep up. It's only your second episode. Yeah. Right. I mean, I did, I will also say I love, as Ben mentioned, it has nothing to do with AI and what AI is,

[00:31:47] sort of completely untethered from that as a concept. I really enjoyed imagining where the meetings where this was decided on, where like presumably like some very old studio executives from two levels above the actual people who have to operationally do this stuff.

[00:32:04] We're like, AI is big right now. We got to get AI in the big brother. What if the whole house was run by an AI? And then this mandate probably just came down from some executive vice president.

[00:32:20] And then the poor designers of the show just had to be like, okay, I guess so. And just sort of cobbled together Ainsley to make some guy who like read a Bloomberg article about AI happy. Presumably. It's amazing. It makes no sense.

[00:32:40] I also, if we can now start to talk sort of actually about the game design stuff, which is what I found fascinating. Makes no sense. Make no damn sense. They get them all out. Well, I will say I loved the giant eight box that they all stood in.

[00:32:56] I thought that was a fun piece. We need to get one of those. I really enjoyed that. I loved that they didn't show how they got them into it because my guess is that it was very annoying and complicated. Um, but anyway. The whole thing that like, look,

[00:33:12] and I get that people may think this is hypocritical because we made a whole reality competition show where the thing is that we trick people. But they tricked people in the laziest possible way, which was just to fully lie to them,

[00:33:28] which we did not do on our show. We did not lie to them. They just get them up there and they just present them with this insane thing of like, hey, there's a lady that wants to be in the game

[00:33:40] and you can vote if she's in the game or not. Which first of all, and I want to hear from you guys who are more experienced with this. Like it's an obvious no, right? What possible incentive. Do they do this on the red? It was her dream.

[00:33:55] She's a surfer girl and it's her dream. So they have done similar things in the past, usually with returning players. The most famous incident was season 19 when Paul, who had played on the previous season, was a like temptation.

[00:34:13] If somebody took the temptation, which was like a cash prize, then Paul would enter the game. And that was disastrous for the players because Paul as a returning player dominated the game and like screwed them all over. And how many weeks safety? Eight?

[00:34:31] Like four, three or four weeks of safety. They had a friendship bracelet, sorry. Yeah, it was a whole thing. So it is something they have kind of done in the past. They've done this twist in other international versions of the game as well,

[00:34:45] where you vote somebody in or the audience votes somebody in. Shout out my bestie Kirsten, one of our podcasters. Yeah, they didn't get voted in. Yes. So it is theoretically something that could be done. But Adam, you're completely correct. The obvious answer is no,

[00:35:03] unless you're able to piece out or parcel out like, oh, this is a trap. They want me to say no. So maybe I should say yes, which appears to potentially happen with some of the contestants. So I did like that, like again,

[00:35:18] Matt was I think the only person who clocked that something was off, which I liked about him, was that others noticed this. Matt, they go to him and he- There's a video of Leah later on being like, I knew it. But I don't know if this was like,

[00:35:35] you know, humans don't want to look stupid. The thing about I knew it is that contestants will always say it no matter what. But like for instance, Joseph, when it was revealed that like, yes, like he was kind of like celebrating

[00:35:50] before he even knew it was an advantage. As soon as they found it, it was fake. He was celebrating, which is something I think you would be less inclined to do if you genuinely thought that you were voting yes to bring somebody in.

[00:36:02] So it implied that Joseph may have known. And Joseph is a huge fan of the show, very much like in deep. So like the implication there for me was that he definitely read the situation. My favorite piece of logic was the woman on the first episode

[00:36:18] who voted her in, because she was like, she's so bold that she's gonna get voted out. And it's like, you voted her in so you could vote her out? You do that. You need the reps. I feel like I was frustrated,

[00:36:34] again, from a game design perspective of like, you, they built up this vote of like, are they gonna let this person in or not? And then it was like, oh, the vote had no stakes. She's there regardless. I guess it has stakes in the sense that like,

[00:36:48] if you vote yes or no, then this thing happens to you. But I found it frustrating to be like, you've presented these stakes to the audience, right? The audience theoretically should be invested in the stakes that you have set out for them.

[00:37:03] And then the stakes that you told them to care about were completely made up. This thing was gonna happen no matter what. And now this other thing is going to happen, which like, I'm not saying wasn't, I guess it's interesting that that's how it worked out.

[00:37:18] But I'm like, it felt like bad, again, like bad game design to be like, no, the stakes were completely different. Because when it happened, I was like, cause I was invested in the vote. I was like, are they gonna, cause I immediately clocked that Ainsley was an AI

[00:37:33] because I had heard people talk about, is there gonna be AI in the show? I was watching it live though. And she was like, my name's Ainsley and she was wearing a Chrome dress. And I was like, well, obviously the AI. Yeah, Xenon. Yeah, exactly.

[00:37:45] And then, but I was like, I guess if they don't vote in the AI, then like maybe that will, the AI won't get to mess with them. Like, that'll be interesting. And then for them to be like, no, the vote, the AI is there regardless. It doesn't matter.

[00:38:00] I was like, then why set it up this way? Like, I don't know. For the coms. How would y'all write as, yeah, game designers, producers, writers, funny people. How are y'all writing the pitch for AI Ainsley? How would we do BBA? How would we do BBA?

[00:38:21] The head of Paramount just said, we need AI on Big Brother or your asses are out of here. We need her voted in. Can you, what is your pitch basically? I think that the obvious thing that you do, in my opinion, is that you have like some player

[00:38:44] or some number of players who are secretly AI for like a longish period of time. Now this is not, I'm not saying this is a brilliant idea because I'm coming up with this off the top of my head.

[00:38:54] But like, I feel like what you do is you have potentially some amount of isolation between players. Like maybe even for like a while you go like, we've split, like here would be something interesting. What if you were like, we've split the house into two halves?

[00:39:09] One half is you can't communicate other than through this text or voice interface, sort of like a love is blind situation with like two halves of the house. And one half of the house is all AI characters. And then you'll find that out whenever,

[00:39:24] or one person's an AI character. Or you could do a thing where one person is a plant from the studio and every line that they say is a generative AI chatbot responding and they just are playing. Whatever they say, they're doing what the AI wants.

[00:39:40] And like some of them are secretly AI. It's like, I think if you turned Big Brother into a giant Turing test where everybody has to wear an earpiece. So everyone knows like that this is happening, but nobody knows who are the AI actors

[00:39:54] and who are the real people. And you're trying to get rid of the AIs somehow. Like that would be, I don't know, kind of interesting. I love this idea. I would offer my pitch to make it even better. And I think you guys will like this.

[00:40:13] Okay. All right. Shades of the Getaway. We tell them there are AI players in the season, but nobody is an AI player. A fantastic, really fun way to do it. Classic sort of Getaway style twist. Would also honestly be equally fun

[00:40:29] if you just let a large language model play the entire game and just be like, what would happen if Chad GPT just did a whole season of Big Brother? It would probably be really, I don't know. I would watch that.

[00:40:43] I think we have a few podcasts based around that concept. I will say that just like broadly speaking, you know, I think that games are less satisfying to watch when the players involved do not know what the rules of the game are. And like, obviously,

[00:41:05] you've got to do that on TV sometimes because it, you know, it keeps up a sense of suspense and retention and whatnot. But like the other thing that kind of irked me a little bit, this episode was when they were talking about like,

[00:41:19] you're going to get a disadvantage or an advantage. And I know that they do, like they do this on Survivor. Also, they do this on a lot of different places. But like, I personally felt that it took, you know, took a lot of the stakes out of it.

[00:41:32] Because I was like, well, they don't even know what they're playing for. I loved so much. And there were so many clips of this happening. And it was so funny to me every time. There were probably across the episodes,

[00:41:45] seven different times they cut to people in confessionals going, I got to get the advantage because having an advantage is really helpful. And then other people being like, I don't know what the disadvantages are, but they can't be good.

[00:42:00] So I got to make sure I don't get the disadvantage. Like, I think I wrote down, oh, Tucker said the downgrades are never good. And I was like, hell yeah, dude. So true, dude. My favorite quote was from Brooklyn, who said, as a super fan,

[00:42:18] I know downgrade would be a bad thing. Us going in, we might have not known that. But you know. It was incredible. And like, look, I respect it. I know that like, you got to do that because then I'm here sticking around like an idiot

[00:42:35] thinking, well, I got to learn what the advantage and the disadvantage is. But you know, it does, I think, compromise the integrity of the challenges a little bit. But going to the challenges, if we want to talk about the challenges, I thought that the challenges were perfectly fine.

[00:42:53] I do not have really, I mean, Ben, maybe you disagree. I have some issues with the challenges, but I thought that broadly speaking, they were relatively well-designed. Like the spinning chair with the colors, I think has multiple things going for it.

[00:43:09] Like, it's a play along at home, which people love, right? You can really easily play along with that at home. It's like dynamic with the movement. It creates physical comedy with them like stumbling around. And it's really clear and simple.

[00:43:26] And like the buttons and having to press the buttons is really clean and easy to follow. I was like, that's a good challenge. I really like, I thought that was perfectly solid challenge design. I really did not have much of an issue with it.

[00:43:38] I will disagree because it was too hard. Oh, yeah. But I will also say that the game, like one smart way to do a play along at home challenge like they did here is when the play along at home challenge, like the player doing the challenge

[00:43:55] is at a distinct disadvantage relative to the audience. Like they had to be spinning around, but I was watching and I was like, yeah, it's blue, green, yellow, red, blue. I know that. I did, I wasn't spinning around in a chair.

[00:44:06] But then when you're watching them, you're like, they don't know what they're doing. I would have been great at this. So I don't know if you guys disagree, but from speaking as a game designer for that, I was like, that's a good challenge. I think that's nice. Yes.

[00:44:19] So challenges have been probably one of the more contentious issues in the modern era of Big Brother because they have become increasingly lopsided in terms of results. In particular, like athletic men have been winning a vast majority of them lately. And so in particular last season,

[00:44:41] that was really coming out. Men who work out and bike. I think men won something like 90% of the competitions last season, including the winner who just like broke more records and like all kinds of things. So then they did reindeer games,

[00:45:00] which was a spinoff show where it seemed like they had taken some of the criticisms. I think maybe it's worth a minute just to stop down and explain reindeer games. That might take too long. Imagine Big Brother All Stars where the people you actually wanted on All Stars

[00:45:17] showed up, but only for what? Only for six days and it's Christmas themed and it's all competitions. And the whole house is Christmas. But it actually turned out to be pretty decent. No, amazing. Sure. That's the elevator. There's also a woman named Christmas. She did not get invited.

[00:45:36] No, let's not. She might run the podcast over. Let's move on. So it is possible that they have taken some... And listen, Big Brother producers not known for taking criticism and making changes, but it is possible that the challenges have been adjusted.

[00:45:50] We have reason to believe that based on some of the info we have on the live feeds right now, as well as the competitions we saw in this premiere. All of them were new. Big Brother loves reusing competitions. Oh, really? These were all new competitions.

[00:46:04] And I do think that all of them were perfectly fine. And some of them were actually very fun. My biggest issue with the competitions, and I mentioned this on the podcast, I'm curious to see if you agree with me, was that one of my favorite ones was the,

[00:46:18] like smushing your face against the disc. Yeah. Thought it was very fun. But I thought the 60 second time limit was a little silly. This was an issue that I had. Before we get into that, which I'd really like to do in just a moment,

[00:46:34] I would like to mention that when you, Rob, said there was a lady there named Christmas, it made me start to think about, wouldn't that be a fun twist if, you know, instead of it's like, oh, it's all being run by secret AI,

[00:46:45] it's secretly being run by Santa Claus. That was Reindeer Games. That was Reindeer Games. Yeah. And then I had the idea, which led me to it, maybe this is gonna be an incredible new game show that I'm gonna make a lot of money off of. I can't wait.

[00:46:57] What if you had a game show called Secret Santa, and one person in the show is secretly Santa? You have to figure out which one it is. Yeah. Are you trying to remove Santa? Because I feel like that would land you on the naughty list.

[00:47:09] Well, you know, I really need to work out the details. This is sort of a billion dollar idea that I should probably kind of figure out. But just keep that in your head. A game show called Secret Santa, that's sort of like the mole,

[00:47:22] except one of them is secretly Santa. And I don't know what that means. And like the mole, you're taking quizzes based on how Santa-like certain people are. Well, like the idea of like the nice list and the naughty list writes itself.

[00:47:37] You're trying to get on the nice list. You're trying to get off the naughty list. Maybe it's that one of them, sort of like the mole, they are secretly the one deciding who's on the nice list and the naughty list, right? And that makes them the secret Santa.

[00:47:50] Are they all like sort of like the world's best mall Santas? Like we're trying to see. And one of them is the real Santa? Here's what I think it is for what it's worth, Rob. I think that they are all sort of portly men,

[00:48:06] but who have normal facial hair. But one of them used to be a mall Santa, but has changed his appearance such that now he looks normal. But in like the flashbacks, you'll show that guy with his full Santa deal and you'll be like, he is a Santa.

[00:48:25] And the rest of them are just people with body types where they believably could have been Santa. Every competition is like mall Santa themed. Like it's like who can do the best Santa and so that the real Santa has to like play their abilities down

[00:48:40] while still trying to do well in the challenge. Right, right. Yeah. This is good. There's something there. There's something there. Leah would love this show. Who would? Yeah. Leah. Leah. Chubby Chaser. Leah. Chubby Chaser. Leah. Oh yeah. I have some questions about Leah.

[00:49:03] Is she a cocktail waitress or VIP cocktail waitress? This is a whole genre of a Big Brother casting types. VIP cocktail waitresses. Well, what does that mean? My thing was like a multiple. We have had multiple VIP cocktail waitresses. On shows and one is a winner as well.

[00:49:28] So this is like a person they want to. Yeah. That cast just like someone from Texas A&M. You guys aren't doing a lot of bottle service with all of the spoils from jet lag. Look, somebody made a YouTube video called how jet lag made million.

[00:49:46] How these YouTubers made millions playing tag and that video came out. And I was like, where are these freaking millions that we've made? I would love to see them. Listen, I think I believe bottle service is a old person's game.

[00:50:04] AKA like me plus 30 type because you just get tired. You don't want to dance no more. You just like give me my little area and I want to sit. So when you're young, I don't get bottle service. I just don't really go to the club a lot.

[00:50:17] I sort of like to drink a cocktail at home. But anyway. It's also worth noting very briefly that you can basically put whatever you want in your job description for big brother. Yes. Oh, that's interesting. Sure. I did like, and I don't want to talk shit about Leah

[00:50:35] who I seem, I'm sure she's a nice lady. No, we love her. She hates men. But you know, she, I don't want to disparage anybody but I did think it was a little bit funny that she was like, she gets up there.

[00:50:46] She's like, I'm a VIP cocktail waitress, blah, blah, blah whatever. And people might think that I'm just another dumb blonde but they'd be wrong because I actually have an underwear company and it just got to like a shot of her with like a thing of underwear

[00:51:03] and like a whiteboard next to it with just like a very simple drawing of underwear on it. And it was like, this is my underwear business to prove how smart I am. And I was like, I do not know Leah

[00:51:17] that this is helping make the point that you were hoping is your whiteboard with just a drawing of a thong on it being like, I'm an inventor. This is actually a very common trope. I think we've seen this almost exact scene at least twice before.

[00:51:35] And the line of like, I'm not just a pretty face or like, I'm a lot smarter. Like just because I'm hot, people think I'm dumb. It's like basically, you know born with the birth of reality television and Big Brother because it's like probably the most common phrase.

[00:51:57] Like I think somebody wrote a book on like I'm not here to make friends but they could have written a book on I'm not just a pretty face. Sure. Anyway, but anyway, the challenges, the challenges we should talk about the challenge. So the chair-

[00:52:12] Taylor Queen please, how dare you? Taylor is winner of Big Brother. Whoa, what happened? Something popped up. Someone popped up. It was a comment from Taylor. People in the chat are able to weigh in and post their opinions as we're talking.

[00:52:30] I believe Taylor may have said a line that's somewhat along those lines. Okay, here's my question then. Did they make you say that? Because all of those intros felt deeply uncharitable to me. I feel like it's probably the evil producers. Taylor, I do not blame you.

[00:52:49] Taylor seemingly you were right in that they said that you won, right? So seemingly you were justified in saying this. Oh, very much though. And she was in a pageant, she's won pageants. Like yeah, Taylor was bad. So yeah, well I saw a picture of her.

[00:53:03] But yeah, she was not, at that point had not started any kind of clothing company. Sure. Taylor, do you now sell underwear or draw underwear? Let us know. Okay, moving on. She says not forced, but I had a title to pick it back up and explain.

[00:53:29] Yes, and not to speak for Taylor, but like she is very smart and knows a lot about like television and the way that people are portrayed. And she very much knew her role. And so I think was very much happy to, because she had the title to back.

[00:53:46] Taylor would like model the most gorgeous outfits and the girlies were unfortunately very rude and jealous of her because of it. Like Taylor knew, yeah, very much not girls. One thing that I think is interesting about, and sorry, there's so many lanes to go down in this conversation.

[00:54:06] There's sort of so much here. I see why it's a compelling thing to discuss. One thing that I think is interesting about the cast of these shows is that like, I feel like it can be easy to be like, these poor people,

[00:54:17] the producers are using them for whatever. But it's like, I feel like the people are using the producers too. Like surely these people who watch Big Brother are like, I bet I could get on Big Brother if I really painted myself as hot blonde,

[00:54:32] but sort of ditzy, but all this stuff, but secretly smart. Like I feel like they know exactly what they're doing and they are intentionally probably sometimes- But there's only three or four of those spots every season. I mean, famously, largely considered to be the best Big Brother player,

[00:54:51] Dan Giesling. Oh, the guy from the Traders. The guy from the Traders. He even, he wrote a book called How To Get On Reality TV where he explained how he essentially conned the producers into casting him by portraying himself to be a different version of himself.

[00:55:11] And so it is very much something that a lot of people that get on the show have read that book. Here's my sort of belief, is that I think that here's something interesting about that guy. If that's what you're telling me.

[00:55:27] It's like, you're like, okay, this guy is really smart and was really good at Big Brother and he's one of the greatest players of all time, but he had to trick them into thinking that he wasn't that in order to get on the show. Yeah.

[00:55:37] I think that is interesting in that, I think that game shows are better or at least should be designed so that they're better when people are all playing at the top of their intelligence. That's like a big principle that we follow. When we design our games,

[00:55:52] we are going to play the games. And so our belief has been like, it's most interesting to watch a person who is good at the game and understands the game, play the game. Like, because I think that's going to lead to the most interesting gameplay versus,

[00:56:06] you know, I think that a game is going to be worse if it's like reliant on people being not playing well in order to. I very much agree. This raises a big question for me, which is what is the gameplay of Big Brother?

[00:56:24] Like what, what, how much time do we have left? What do they do now? This is what I, I would love to explain this because we don't really get it in the premiere. But I do think the core concept, the core gameplay loop of Big Brother

[00:56:39] is actually very good. So, you know, Survivor is a game where a bunch of people go to tribal council every couple of days and everyone votes for one person to leave and anybody is eligible unless you have an immunity idol or whatever. But basically the strategy for Survivor

[00:57:00] is create a majority alliance. You will have, you will then have the majority of the votes. You can decide who leaves. It's that simple if you want it to be. Big Brother is different though. In Big Brother, everyone competes for the head of household role in the house.

[00:57:17] The person that wins the competition becomes the head of household. They get their own room upstairs, their own bed and the ability to nominate two other players for eviction. Then to skip a couple of steps, everybody votes on just those two people instead of everyone being available.

[00:57:38] So the HOH has a lot of power because they can basically say, I know you might want to vote this person out or this person out, but you have to vote one of these two people out. Because of that,

[00:57:51] you can't just make a majority alliance and be good because if your majority doesn't win the HOH, the person who does win can just nominate two people from your majority and you're still losing somebody. So it incentivizes you to develop more relationships outside of just your own group

[00:58:11] so that if somebody random does win HOH, you have an in with them. You can maybe influence them. There's a lot of ways that power can shift when somebody outside of the majority wins and nominates two people from the majority. Now the majority is fighting amongst themselves.

[00:58:29] Who's the one that's going to leave? We're not in power anymore. We need to suck up to the people in the minority. And now allegiances are shifting and all kinds of stuff can happen. See, that is compelling. That makes sense. It's like,

[00:58:41] I'm not sure if you're going to be able to do that. I mean, I think it's a good thing.

[00:59:15] I'm sorry, circling back though to the face thing. Okay. Because I do want to chat about the challenge. I feel like the only actually interesting thing that Ben and I have to offer is sort of people who design challenges and games. True.

[00:59:28] So like, I think we agree chair good. Face was interesting. Here was an issue I had with almost, with that, with face and chair though, which is that both of them were impossible to complete. And I think that then it just ended up being

[00:59:45] who only did a little bit of the task in a short amount of time, which in my opinion is like not a great way of doing it. It's like, so what actually, so it's not actually about, because I feel like you watch the challenge and you're like,

[00:59:59] the goal is memorize all of the buttons. That's really the focus of this. And for the other one, it's like get all the discs into the things, but that didn't really matter at all. All that mattered for the buttons was who hits four the fastest.

[01:00:11] They all only remembered four. And so the players were focused on remembering more, I think more so than they were focused on hitting them fast. When it turned out hitting them fast was all that mattered. And similarly, I feel like people were focused

[01:00:25] on get the disc into all three of the things as opposed to just get two discs in as quickly as possible, which was also the only thing that ended up mattering. So I feel like the better thing is like you want the primary objective of the challenge

[01:00:39] to be what decides the winner loss, not the sort of tiebreaker mechanic of time, but it was all tiebreaker mechanic all the time. But other than that, I thought like, based on the thing, good challenge, like fun, visual, simple, silly, face smushed, right level of difficulty

[01:00:55] other than the timer. Like you could keep it going, but it would fall off. I was like that again, solid game. You know, I didn't really have an issue with it. Here's my only beef is I think the fear boxes,

[01:01:08] I think they should not have had the plastic tubes. I think they should have let the scorpions touch them. I think they should have let the cockroaches crawl on them. Yeah, for sure. I was deeply disappointed that they were shielded from the creatures.

[01:01:24] They weren't scared of them at all, except the last row a little bit, but it was just like window dressing, which I felt like was a disappointment. How do you keep them from falling out? I don't care. You put the boxes on the ground and you have,

[01:01:37] you stick your face in the bottom. So the box is here with the creepy crawlies and your face goes. I like that. Yeah, that's what they've done on YouTube videos as well. But yeah, I'm thinking for shorties like me and Rubina, who's shorter than me, everyone. Wow. Yeah.

[01:01:55] How is if she voted no, how is she getting up there? They seemed pretty low. If anything, it seems like they could move also problem. I don't know. Our rule of thumb is if it required more work from them, they probably didn't do it. Exactly.

[01:02:12] Well, my alt also is that for the fear boxes, what it should have been, my opinion, is that you had the word written out in like blocked out letters and you have to stick your hand into a box full of cockroaches

[01:02:25] and feel the word and then go to it. I think that would have been a better version. The downgrade comp felt so much easier. That's the comp I would have killed it at if I could reach it. Well, I think I could. I'm not that short. Yeah.

[01:02:42] Again, like basically, and this sometimes happens, maybe more than sometimes, that like the competition itself wasn't actually the competition. The actual competition was just how fast can you run? How fast can you do this? Yeah, absolutely. Which is unfortunately what a lot of competitions come down to,

[01:03:02] which is why you often see large athletic men win a lot of them. Right. Well, it's especially weird because it's only the result of an extra rule that creates that problem, which is the time limit. They could have just not had that and it would have been fine.

[01:03:17] Yeah. Yeah. Well, the other thing about the box is that was my other complaint. And sorry, I'm sort of going roast mode here instead of being... Because again, I thought there were positive aspects of it. Please, roast away. My opinion is that...

[01:03:30] Wait till we play about the Zingbot. Oh, I saw the guy. There was that guy. Oh yeah, the Zingbot. He was like, I've got a Zingbot here. Yeah, I'm going to need that explained. Yeah. But I was also like from an audience perspective,

[01:03:45] the words were the same every time. So like, wouldn't it have been more... Like what was good about the colors was that it changed. So the play along aspect, you could play along each round. But with the terror boxes, whatever,

[01:03:58] like what they should have done is at least moved them around or had different ones with different words, like switch the letters or something. Like it felt really strange that like... I know the first one says whatever it was, like anxiety.

[01:04:13] So now I can't play along at home anymore, which was kind of the only fun that it was. Yeah. I mean, I think the colors actually didn't change either. But I think it was like... But did the colors not change? I wasn't paying attention.

[01:04:24] But I think it was fast enough that like you didn't... It didn't feel as repetitive. But this is a very common problem with individually timed challenges, which is that like you end up, especially when it's not just four, when it's like there's 12 people competing

[01:04:40] and each one of them has to run through this challenge and maybe you'll get a montage in the middle. But like you're basically watching the same thing with the same... The lucky part is we didn't have a ton of like diary room segments during this,

[01:04:55] where normally it would be like, so I walked out into the backyard and I saw four boxes and I was like, what's in those boxes? But all I knew was that it was really important that I needed to win this challenge.

[01:05:09] And then I poked my head into the first box and I saw snakes. Oh my God. And then they go through the whole thing. Why did it have to be snakes? They'll bring the next person in and they'll be like,

[01:05:20] so I walked out into the backyard and I saw four boxes and I poked my head into the second box and I saw scorpions. And mind you, most of this is production fed. So it's not even them like being authentic and their cadence.

[01:05:37] Blindside Butterbeans has been said on this show for like a Southern woman. Cause she's like, I... Yeah, anyway, I'm sure one of these two had- I think that's complete gibberish to them. That's one of the highlights of Blindside Butterbeans. You said blindsided Butterbeans?

[01:05:52] Yeah, blindside as in, you know, I blindsided this person in a vote or whatever. I don't remember. And- I believe that Jasmine was gonna be serving Blindside Butterbeans. Yeah. So she's doing a blindside, but because she's Southern, she had to add Butterbeans. She's doing a blindside.

[01:06:10] She's sort of adopting a kind of young black man who's really good at football. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe. I think it remains, you know, did it even really happen? We don't know. Sure. Yeah, so anyway, it's just, it's very fun. Like it's a very fed in that,

[01:06:28] at least if they were doing what Taryn was saying, right? And it was authentic to who they were, right? You should cast funny people so that they can just riff and it's normal, but no, they're doing the script and be more robotic than the AI. Yeah.

[01:06:45] Over time, like basically when the show first started, the diary room segments were supposed to be like a personal diary. Like it's like a therapy session where they talk to the, they vent their thoughts to the cameras. They'll be like lounging in the chair, laying down like,

[01:07:02] man, so today I had a conversation with Roddy and oh my God. But my theory at least for the change over time is that that's more effort to edit. It's a lot easier to sort of prep your episodes with,

[01:07:18] well, we know we're gonna need X in this spot. So when they talk to them, they're like, can you just talk about this specific thing? Can you say it in this way though? And so things get a little more robotic in the diary room.

[01:07:35] And that has been something that the fans have not enjoyed. Here is a quick question that I had. I'm gonna go off topic if you don't mind. Please. So Curtis, who I love, he was talking about the downgrades that he was worried about. He was like before-

[01:07:55] Wait, Cedric? Sorry, Cedric. 21 year old, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The army intelligence officer, sorry, Cedric. AKA playboy. Right, right, right. So Cedric said he was worried he would have to wear a lamb costume and prance around. Oh yeah, he didn't like that. Has this happened before

[01:08:22] or is he just sort of completely going nuts? No, that's a fair fear for a big boy. That's fair. I don't know specifically we've had a lamb, have we? No. But we've had other farm animals. Yeah, there were, there's been a carrot costume.

[01:08:40] For the redhead, of course, yeah. But is this actually a downgrade? Are people in the house like, I hate that this guy is dressed like a carrot. Let's get him the hell out of here. I can't look at this carrot anymore. It's inconvenient. Yes.

[01:08:53] Yeah, you have to wear it all week. Sometimes, yeah, the costume is cumbersome. Sometimes there were two women that had to live in a kayak. And that actually was in the army. And they had to live in a kayak. And that actually was a disadvantage

[01:09:07] because one of them was trying to game. One of them was Ceri Fields from Survivor. Okay. And poor Ceri was trying to make some moves and Miss Felicia was with her in the kayak the whole time. So essentially, we glossed. So funny.

[01:09:26] Then we have our Lord of the Latrine where they had to announce every time someone went to the bathroom. Anyone, not just them. Yeah. Great. They love their costumes. I will say one thing that you guys were spared from was, and maybe in Ben's case, it's not sparing.

[01:09:46] Maybe he would have loved to see this. But they can really get deep into like, this challenge is that you are going to run through a big butt that's farting on you. Oh, yes. And- I mean, that's awesome. Yeah, that's pretty great.

[01:10:07] And why specifically do you think Ben would love this? Well, he just loves the AI thing. He loved the campiness. Oh, sure. I thought you were just sort of suggesting that Ben loves big butts. Well, that's certainly possible. Is that the truth, Ben? Yeah.

[01:10:24] It was a compelling image that Taryn painted just then. Mm-hmm. And, you know, it really gets the wheels turning for me. You know, Adam, I think we're going to have to have some big design talk about this. We've never considered what if you had to run through

[01:10:39] a big farting butt before. It'd be like a wind tunnel. Yeah. I mean, hopefully you're getting some ideas for jet lag in the future. Yeah. Don't ruin my show. Yeah, let's do a couple other things from the premiere week. What'd you think about-

[01:10:55] We had an employee of a video store, Joseph. Oh yeah, Joseph. Here, let me find him. Toby Rodriguez. He had the mustache. Yes. Oh yeah. I liked Joseph because he was one of the only ones that was funny. He was funny.

[01:11:13] There is a brief story we could tell you, which is that Joseph Rodriguez is a meaningful name in the Big Brother community because a few seasons- It might've been the season that you watched a couple episodes of. It was season 18.

[01:11:29] There was a contestant named Glenn Garcia who was out immediately, first person out of the house. And later on during that summer, I believe, it was discovered that Glenn had been, or at least allegedly, had been using an alternate Twitter account called Joey Rodriguez

[01:11:51] to post on Twitter about himself and other things. And he would post comments under pictures of him and other women, things like, oh, so cute. You guys should totally hook up. And it was quite the scandal that we discovered that Joey Rodriguez

[01:12:10] was actually a fake alternate identity of Glenn Garcia. And now we have an actual Joseph Rodriguez on the show with a very suspicious mustache. Glenn was the original deepfake HOH. Yes. He would also post things like, hey, don't you guys think Glenn should definitely play again?

[01:12:29] Don't you guys think Glenn should get a second chance? And then also was talking crap about the people that were also on the season from this alt account. Joey Rodriguez, bless his heart. Look, are we all guilty of that from time to time?

[01:12:49] Sure. I do it on main. I have no shame. I do. Do you believe that they cast this man purely because he shared this name and it was like a big brother would never be that kind to us? You'll have to understand. They had no idea.

[01:13:09] We forgot about this. They probably never even knew about it, to be honest. OK, that part, because the thing is, when they released the cast, we do all the research for them. And then we have had people kicked off two days before the season's about to start

[01:13:29] because we are the FBI. They are vibes only. There was a contestant for season 24 that was released as part of the cast release, but then was cut from the season shortly after because they discovered that he had also been on the circle recently and hadn't told them.

[01:13:46] And they didn't know? And they didn't know. You might have seen him on the love show. Was Marvin on love shows? Oh, yeah. And America's Got Talent at the same time. That was, I think, the bigger thing. Competing networks. Yeah. Whoa.

[01:14:05] Marvin did go on Big Brother in Nigeria, though. So yeah. OK. He made it up to Big Brother. Ben and Adam, what do you think about another contestant that came into the house this week? Kenny is an undercover police officer and he's not going to tell anybody.

[01:14:23] Kenny, his brother, died of addiction, right? Which was the second sentence that he said. And there was a lot to take in. That's a lot. This is something that seems to happen across lots of reality shows

[01:14:33] is that cops do not want to reveal themselves, which is very funny to me because that there is literally no one who has ever seemed more like a cop than that. Yeah. Well, I also liked that Cedric immediately was like that dude has a tattoo on his arm.

[01:14:50] He seems like he's probably a cop. Yeah. Well, because this always happens is what it's all like. Chances, though. Come on. If it wasn't for that one thing. He had a cop accent. No, no one sounds like that. This has happened in Survivor like multiple times, right?

[01:15:10] Where there's been a cop and he's like, I'm not going to let anyone know I'm a cop. And then the next like three interviews are people being like, that guy's a cop. Do cops get voted out often on Big Brother?

[01:15:25] So one of the more dominant winners of the show was an undercover detective who played the game undercover and never revealed that he was actually a cop. And he was like, I'm not going to let anyone know I'm a cop. And he very much like dominated the season.

[01:15:44] Never nominated, right? Was never nominated. Yes. Like definitely one of the more dominant winners. And it seems like it would have come up. I don't know with that cast. We had people yelling, fighting. We had Ariana Grande's brother on that cast. And he made it far.

[01:16:10] Like Frankie, yes. So root loop dingus issues, like come on. Okay. We had much things to worry about. Okay. Can I bring up another contestant who I had a question who I thought was interesting is Lisa who introduced herself as a celebrity chef. Celebrity chef.

[01:16:28] And I thought that that was fascinating in that. Are you? Are you a celebrity? She's a chef for celebrities. She herself is not. Now she's a celebrity. You can't say that. That's not what celebrity chef means. That's the difference between that and VIP cocktail waitress.

[01:16:46] Aren't you saying like I'm a VIP cocktail waitress? Yes, she's a private person. Two celebrities though. There is a distinction. Celebrity chef is a known term. Celebrity chef is like Gordon Ramsay's a celebrity chef. This is a thing. Yeah, she's not on Tournament of Champions.

[01:17:02] So she's not a celebrity chef. If you all watch Food Network, you know. But yeah, she does know Paris Hilton. We have seen pictures. People hire her and she says, well, how famous are you? Let me see your Wikipedia before I cook for you.

[01:17:17] Well, yeah, I also found this fascinating. I was like, surely you're a chef for rich people, not just famous people. Like that would be a crazy. Well, it's LA. If you were like, no, it's just celebrities.

[01:17:33] If you have a lot of money but you don't have an IMDB, I will not make you spaghetti ball and eggs. I like the idea of her like advertising herself to potential celebrity clients by being on Big Brother. Like you may have seen me on Big Brother.

[01:17:52] Maybe this is her way of becoming a celebrity chef. Right. If she does well enough on Big Brother, she may now be able to call herself a celebrity. This is interesting. I like that. You know, apply for the job that you want or what is it?

[01:18:11] No, dress for the job that you wish to have. She wants to be Barbie with all that pink and that unicorn room. How did you feel about the house? Have you have you looked at in our house pictures? Um, I thought the house was ugly.

[01:18:34] In the sense that it is like, it looks like what it is, which is a cheaply built house, made to look nice and fancy and expensive. I, Ben and I live in a wonderful place called New York City. I don't know if you've heard of it.

[01:18:53] And this is a really common thing in like luxury apartment buildings where what they'll do is it's like a very cheaply built apartment that they have attempted to make look really fancy and luxurious through like appliances or finishes or whatever that like look really nice, but are crap.

[01:19:16] And that was what the Big Brother house looked like to me. Like it was like a house that was built cheaply because presumably they changed the house. I have to assume that the house gets changed up every season.

[01:19:28] And so like it seemed like a sort of slap, you know, a cheaply done remodel that was attempting to look really nice and fancy, but ultimately it was like pretty shallow and often kind of weirdly gaudy.

[01:19:42] Yeah, I know you didn't bring us on here for our interior design expertise, but the house was hideous. And I do love it because they also do this on like Love Island and stuff where they just like they bring them through the house

[01:19:58] and then they get interviews from all of them where they like force them all to be like, oh, my God, I it's so gorgeous. You guys did such a good job. I can't wait to live here. And I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know about that.

[01:20:13] Meanwhile, there's ants and roaches everywhere. Yeah, big boss. I must say big boss India. What a house. That's a house. OK, I have to know your thoughts on maybe even just the concept of the live feeds, because I think that when you don't fully understand them,

[01:20:36] I think it's very easy and perhaps correct to just be like, that's creepy as hell. My my read is the live feed sound very interesting. I can't seem to figure out how to access these live feeds. It is tougher this season, unfortunately.

[01:20:53] Would anybody sort of like to send me a login? And then I would be happy to look at the live feed. Does the general public have access to these or is it like just you in your house? So on Paramount Plus, if you have it,

[01:21:07] if you go to the Big Brother page, there will be like a tab that says live. Yes, you also do you have a log in to send me your login? Well, you could also go on if you have Pluto TV, which is free.

[01:21:20] Just go to the website or the app and you can watch the live feeds for free. Oh, great. I will say this is the thing about this show that I do really respect.

[01:21:32] But if I was a producer for Big Brother, I would hate that this exists so much. They do. They very much do. Because then you are like you cannot. You have no power anymore to to shape the narrative,

[01:21:51] because you would think you've got you people exposing them all the time. I would want to tell them how they change that or wants to. Yeah. I mean, you're completely correct. I think you've immediately nailed like the entire. Very good. Struggle that Big Brother has. Yes.

[01:22:12] Which is that they came up with this concept in like 1997 and developed it over a few years. And it was incredibly ahead of its time when it aired in the Netherlands originally. And then it's just been it's just existed for now like 25 years.

[01:22:34] And they, for the most part, you know, in the US at least, they still have a live feed, this sort of like archaic and yet still unique, almost futuristic sort of take on television. And reality TV is known for the edit. The edit.

[01:22:56] It's known for how deceptive it can be. And Big Brother, I think, would love to be that show. But it's harder to because the live feeds operate as this sort of like defense of many of the contestants if they're not getting themselves in trouble.

[01:23:15] From the producers, the producers have a lot less power, as you said, over shaping the narrative for these people over, you know, any kind of shady thing that's done. There are many of which happen in all kinds of reality television shows.

[01:23:30] And so they, I think, would love to pare it back. But it is also the thing that keeps driving the show. It's the only real edge it has over its competition in the modern marketplace for competitive reality where there's all kinds of shows popping up nowadays.

[01:23:47] The live feeds keep like a very steady, hardcore fan base talking about the show constantly, signing up for Paramount Plus subscriptions to watch. And yet, Big Brother is one of the most scrutinized reality shows out there because it's so involuntarily transparent, essentially.

[01:24:09] And so it's probably one of the more controversial, one of the most criticized while being, and this might be a controversial statement, one of the least bad of the actually competitive space. We're talking like The Bachelor. We're talking like other dating shows.

[01:24:31] Those shows get really bad behind the scenes. It's been well-documented. Big Brother, it's harder for them to do it. And so that's really interesting to me, this idea that these producers, they're almost reliant on this feature

[01:24:46] that makes their job so much harder and gives them so much blowback. And it's also just such a fascinating way to watch a TV show because you get to see the raw footage, and then you get to see what they turn it into in the edit.

[01:25:01] You can see the game play out in real time. And it's so interesting. And the fact that it's live and there's people all over the country, all over the world experiencing the same thing as you at the same time

[01:25:13] constantly for 100 days, nothing else is like it in the world. And it's amazing and it's awful and it's just really fun. And it's why my job is what it is. It's beautiful. I have pulled up a live feed here on Pluto TV. Do you have an update?

[01:25:35] I agree that it is fascinating. And I am pretty compelled by all of the things. Oh, that's interesting. Joseph is shirtless. Oh! In a room with a bunch of ladies in it. But not Matt, boo. He's in with Angela and it looks like Chelsea.

[01:25:52] No, Matt's been shirtless for a while. Joseph just took his shirt off. He's in a room with Angela and... Chelsea. ...others. Is Chelsea... Which one was Chelsea? She got the downgrade. Yeah, the black woman. Oh, Chelsea is half hood, half holy. That's her. Yeah.

[01:26:15] She's half hood, half holy. No, I think that it is fascinating. This is the thing that we talk about with jet lag is like, you know, ideally if a thing is designed well, like I think that people crave a game feeling real

[01:26:33] more than they crave it being perfectly dramatic. And I think that this is something that can be really easy to lose sight of as a person who produces reality TV. I think that you get really caught up in being precious about what you're making

[01:26:46] in a way where you're like, well, I can shape this narrative. I can make this better. I can build it to be more classic drama. I can do these things and it'll make my thing better.

[01:26:59] But I think there will so often be signs where like in small moments, it will become clear that you have messed with the timeline. And once you lose that trust with your audience, I think it makes it just a much less compelling product.

[01:27:15] Like I just, I don't think that it... I think it takes away the whole reason that makes these things compelling. So I agree with you, Taryn, that like, I think that this is definitely the thing that

[01:27:28] is the sort of only thing that makes me interested in this show. Is that like, it has this crazy quality to it that also means that they have to tell you, you can really genuinely watch this play out.

[01:27:42] And I also like the thing of like, oh, it says they'll be right back. What does that mean? Does that mean someone's naked or something? No, that is to mean anything. Basically, they have a button there. The feed is on like a delay.

[01:27:55] So they will like prevent you from seeing things if they're like talking about production or talking about somebody who has had to sign a release, or they're singing a copyrighted song, or they just feel like not showing you what is happening. Sure.

[01:28:10] But yeah, I think it's like, I like also the idea that this show has different levels of depth, which I think is very compelling. And I imagine relates a lot to your job.

[01:28:17] Like I'm very compelled by this idea that like for someone like you, Taryn, if you want to, you can consume thousands, tens of thousands of hours, thousands of hours. I mean, if you count up all of the different feeds, right?

[01:28:32] Probably tens of thousands of hours across the season. If you count up all the cameras. And you can go to that level of depth, or you can just watch the show,

[01:28:42] or you can do what I imagine the listeners of this do, which is that like you watch the show, and maybe you tune in to get summaries of what's happened in other places.

[01:28:49] I think like allowing for different levels of depth into how far you want to go is pretty intriguing. Yeah, and another like interesting part of it is, again, I talked about like a lot of people experiencing the same thing.

[01:29:03] So this conversation that you're seeing, that you were just talking about those people, we won't get into spoilers right now because the live feeds are often ahead of the episodes, but I'm seeing live as we speak, that that conversation is actually very important.

[01:29:20] And it could be changing the plans for the week right now. It's happening in real time. People are potentially getting exposed, like plans are changing, targets are changing, and that can happen at any time. And you're just like, oh, it's happening.

[01:29:37] And it's so compelling, even if you're not there for it at the time to just like pull up Twitter and like, oh, oh no, this is happening. This person's getting exposed. Oh wow, I can't wait to catch up when I get back home.

[01:29:48] Or let me turn on the feeds right now so I can see what's happening. And it's just, it's another compelling, I think, element of it. And then a blue AI lady could come in and change it all again.

[01:30:02] Yeah, I have a question for the people who've been watching the live feed. I guess it's mostly true. Has Ansley showed up? No. Ben? So anytime Ainsley shows up, that would be a moment where they'd be right back. Yeah. OK.

[01:30:20] All right, Ben, Adam, anything else you it's on your mind about BB 26? Against the backdrop of of Taryn's beautiful articulate words. I came in swinging to this this live podcast and I've been, I think.

[01:30:44] Sold on this on this television program more than I was after watching those two episodes, which admittedly were bad. I think that we maybe got not the best impression of what this show could be by watching those.

[01:31:06] So I will continue watching and I will continue complaining probably on social media. Yes, welcome. This is like we betrayed you in the alliance, but then we convinced you to come back again. Yeah, sure.

[01:31:19] This is the circle that Taryn talked about at the opening of the show of that he describes the show in, you know, and puts it into a context of like, wow, I got to see that. And then that is what happened.

[01:31:35] And then you guys watch the show and you're like, Taryn, what? But then he sucked you back in. Now he gets you. Well, here's here's I guess what I'll say. My closing thoughts is that I think I think this is an oversimplification, but I think

[01:31:50] that like when it comes to shows and especially I think when it comes to reality competition shows, it's either the case that the show is in its bones interesting or in its bones not interesting.

[01:32:03] Like it's either in its bones, interesting and kind of good or in its bones, it's boring. And I think things that are in their bones boring, you can do a lot of stuff to try to like make them better or more compelling.

[01:32:14] But if the fundamentals of the show are not interesting, it's not going to work. Big Brother seems strikes me as in its bones. It is interesting. Like the bones of the show are a fundamentally compelling premise, especially with the live

[01:32:28] feeds such that even though I think on top of those bones is a lot of bad execution of various elements of it, it can't take away from that the core is compelling.

[01:32:43] And I think that is the mark of a truly great format and a truly great fundamental design for what it's worth. This is something we deal with in Jetlag where like we try to make games that like no matter

[01:32:56] how they play out, no matter if we like the small things work is the true concept something that's fundamentally interesting or not. And I think like when we've done a good job, it means no matter how it plays out, no matter

[01:33:09] if we do the small thing as well, which we try really hard to in its bones, it's interesting. And Big Brother seems to be, Taryn has convinced me, I suppose, that in its bones, it is compelling. And I imagine that's why it stuck around for so long.

[01:33:23] All right. If you want to see an example of good gameplay done right, check out what Ben and Adam have going on, not just on Jetlag, which you can see on YouTube, but on The Getaway, streaming now on Nebula. Yeah.

[01:33:42] More good reality TV for you to eat up. Incredible reality TV. You know, it's like, have you ever wondered like what would it look like if a reality TV show had like a funky little concept and was sort of made a little bit more DIY?

[01:34:00] That's kind of what we do. Yeah. So. And it's very good. And I think like, I think it's clear in how quickly you guys grasp like a lot of things about Big Brother that and I think hold a lot of similar thoughts about the show that, you

[01:34:20] know, you guys, you understand how to make good content, good television, good reality television, good competition. And and that's what I really appreciate about the shows that you make is that like I can

[01:34:34] unlike Big Brother, where I kind of feel like I'm I have to navigate what they give me to find the good stuff. I'm able to just like sit back and consume anything you guys make because I just know it's awesome.

[01:34:49] This is very, this is very kind, perhaps unwarranted, but much appreciated. Not unwarranted at all. Not unwarranted at all. Look at how we talk about the other shows we hate. So yeah, it's obviously like y'all.

[01:35:02] If you want to hear more about Taryn and Sasha talking about The Getaway or Jetlag, of course, you can hear that in our reality TV ReHapUps podcast feed or on our YouTube channel at RobisWebster.com slash YouTube. Sasha, what else is coming up for you?

[01:35:17] Yeah, as always, if you want to know what's going on in the world, if you want to know why something's trending, what's going on with pop culture, check out Mess Magnets where Carson McInnes and I talk mess on Robis' website slash Mess Feed.

[01:35:33] And Mike Bloom and I are inviting your favorite reality TV stars to talk scripted TV. So check out We Know, no, on We Know Scripted TV Feeds, TV for real. So check that out. Yeah, and for everything else, just follow me on Twitter at Fun Size underscore.

[01:35:53] OK, Taryn, you are on a marathon pace right now. What's going on? I'm in the middle of a 24 hour stream, so I will be heading back over to Twitch, although we do have a Q&A to record shortly as well.

[01:36:07] Yeah, we got another podcast coming up in about 18 minutes. Yeah, so I will hopefully grab some food to eat and then record a podcast. I have a plushie of my kitten that is currently on sale that anyone can go and buy with the link over on Twitter.

[01:36:27] And yeah, other podcasts and stuff going on that I'm sure people can find if they follow me. Yeah, everything we're doing you can get at Robiswebsite.com slash BB26. Hit that subscribe button if you're watching us here on YouTube.

[01:36:43] We love to get your feedback about everything we're doing here in the comments. Thank you again so much, Ben and Adam. Take care, everybody. Have a good one. Bye. Thanks for having us.