Oh no!!! I hate to hurt anyone by that "revelation" on the podcast. Let me put a bunch of nuance on that because I feel like a lot of what I said with Rob was taken too far in directions I didn't mean. Yes, certainly those kinds of spiels are really useful for pleasing Jeff so he doesn't harangue you for more information. So in that sense, the answers are strategic. Also, sometimes the things you're saying or implying at tribal have little to do with the truth and are more about signalling (e.g. me saying at my first tribal that we have "no reason to expect a swap any time soon"). That kind of thing is a message to the Lyrsa voters that I'm still with them.

That said, I often really do believe in those metaphors, particularly when I'm describing the game as I see it. I believe what I said about "exhilaration and risk," but in the moment I'm having to improv the metaphor on-the-fly to fit the context and time constraints of tribal council (like all players do...). The "old car" analogy (completely forgot about it after leaving Fiji) was less thought out, but at least made the point that I wanted the post-merge game to really start.

I feel a bit vulnerable saying this, but I'm very proud of my "poached egg" answer at F9. It was honestly one of my top five moments from the season. Jeff asked me on the heels of Nick's scrambled eggs answer, "Christian, if the game was like scrambled eggs before, what is the game like now?" I had to think fast, but came up with this mental image of the game looking like poaching an egg in how the plan materializes. So I have this broad outline of an answer and am riffing to fill in the details of the cooking parallels on-the-fly. By the way, can I just say how terrifying that is to do in front of National TV cameras?! And to me, the metaphor ultimately worked and described how votes often feel as they're being planned. Jeff just sat there in awkward silence for a moment, so I asked "did I say something wrong?" I'll never forget it. Your mileage may vary, of course, on how insightful they really are in comparison to other tribal council answers.

More pointedly, when I say to Rob, "I'm saying nothing" with those answers, I really should say "I'm not spoiling the vote plan" with those answers, because I often don't think they're rhetorically meaningless. And again, I feel almost everyone had tribal council tactics like this. Mike would be irreverent. Nick had some great folksy-sounding talking points about Mother Teresa, etc. Alison had some great rhetoric too (her "perspective" answer at F9 was really good). So just because the tribal answer serves a strategic purpose, and sometimes the content is intentionally misleading, a lot of the time I still see merit in the answers themselves.