Hartley Jafine

There's a lot of academic disciplines and a lot of literature that we could use to explore through the lens of Survivor.

Pitch it to our Dean, who luckily said yes.

Which is to the Dean of Survivor fan, I'm guessing.

She was not, but she was a very, she's a very innovative educator.

Her name is Stacey Ritt.

She was brilliant and started thinking about, okay, this could be a really cool way to talk about really complex concepts through a really fun educational medium.

So we talked about season one.

Let's just gloss over what happened in the last 26 years.

We're at season 50 now.

How has the show changed?

Is it adapted to meet kind of modern times?

Has it adapted to meet what reality TV looks like today?

100%.

The way the show has evolved, we talk about that in the class, Survivor really is a microcosm, a reflection of cultural, social, and political conversation.

Some of the things that were happening in 2000 would never happen in 2026.

The conversation on the show is really adaptive and reflective of the conversation that we're having socially, politically, culturally in our lives.

And so...

what we see on the show both in terms of the conversation culturally and also the gameplay.

The gameplay in season one, two, and three looks very different from the gameplay of 2026.

Do the players, the real studious players, watch every season and come up with a plan coming in, probably?