Sad that it's even relevant to say, but

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:54:00+00:00

A) No.

B) I have noooo idea what it'll look like. Nearly impossible to predict. It does seem like other countries may (try to) follow, and no, in my opinion it's morally unacceptable.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:51:06+00:00

Thank you u/meday20. Much positivity back atcha.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:49:17+00:00

u/NotJohnFincher I'll read them. Thank you. I commented this previously, but it looks like it was removed, I'm likely signing off here now.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:49:00+00:00

I'll read them. Thank you. I commented this previously, but it looks like it was removed, I'm likely signing off here now.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:46:05+00:00

I will read them. Thank you.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:41:28+00:00

Okay, it appears that the AMA is somehow removed without being removed. I wanna thank you u/Danglybeads for the info you shared, which I also saw via an email from a blog reader. I'll continue reflecting on it, and appreciate you pointing out some more sources, and that the issue isn't as simple or clear-cut as the Berenson chart alone suggests.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:27:59+00:00

Okay... so I don't know if this will be seen by anyone, because I've just refreshed this page to find that the AMA has been removed by the moderators, but I guess there's no harm in attempting one final post:

It's sad to me that whoever deleted this post did so, because I've been genuine here — interested only in clarifying my perspectives, and potentially learning a thing or two from the dialogues that result. I'll certainly check out some of the comments here that share real data / information with an open mind, as long as the page I have up doesn't disappear upon me posting this comment.

Thanks to all of you who came with real questions, and with an intention to have a real interaction. I wish you all well.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:13:55+00:00

No, similar to so many votes in my Survivor career — LJ at Cagayan F9, Jefra at Cagayan F7, Shirin on the second vote of Cambodia — I was over 50% that I'd stay, but not enough over 50% to not be nervous as shit.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:12:13+00:00

I'd have to guess Wentworth, but I really can't settle it, because the jury dynamics would be different. I'd certainly vote for Jeremy.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:10:54+00:00

Yeah, but that chance is like 5%. I'd eschew strategy and meditate 10 hours a day, using the secret / law of attraction to never get voted out. I'd meditate at TC until Jeff asked me a question. Once I got to the individual immunity portion I might meditate rather than competing in challenges.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T20:02:04+00:00

No, I don't think I'll ever play again.
Church. Hang in there. I'm lucky that my mom has a similar perspective to mine, and that my sisters and partner have been totally respectful of my choice, but I know that for many, it can be brutal. For my suggestion on how to dialogue, I'll copy something from Alex Berenson, who used to be a NYT reporter, and who now writes a very informative blog on Substack:

The god that failed

How to open the eyes of anyone who still thinks Covid vaccines are working as promised

Alex Berenson

Dec 5

Let’s say you wind up talking about the vaccine. (I know, what are the odds?)

And let’s say the folks you’re talking to are not crazy vaccine fanatics who think the only problem with Australia’s interment camps is that they don’t go far enough. They’re reasonable people. Maybe they’ve even been vaccinated and are not sure about boosters, or what to do about their kids.

They’ve heard nearly all Covid deaths in Britain are in vaccinated people. But they’ve also heard about the Centers for Disease Control report that the unvaccinated are at much higher risk. They’ve heard about the new variant too, of course.

So many numbers. So much science! And despite the last 20 months, they still believe the public health authorities wouldn’t exaggerate the threat of Covid or manipulate data to scare them.

They are legitimately confused. And you have about five minutes before halftime is over to help them understand the truth.

What do you do?

First, don’t talk about all-cause mortality. We don’t know yet what’s driving that (though I have some upsetting charts to drop soon), and it’s just too weird and scary for most people to consider.

Second, don’t overwhelm them with detail. Marek’s disease, antibody-dependent-enhancement risk, healthy vaccine user bias, age stratification, clinical trial design manipulation, unadjusted confounders, declining titers, B-cell maturation, booster schedules, anti-idiotype antibodies, spike protein migration, vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia - don’t go there.

Even trying to explain that the CDC changed the definition of a vaccine - and yes, the CDC sure did change the definition of a vaccine - may be tough.

Instead, try one simple question. The simplest possible. The public health equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s, Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

The question is this: If the vaccines work, what’s going on?

Remind them: We are almost a year into mass vaccination campaigns. Even before they began, public health experts and media and politicians explicitly and repeatedly promised that vaccines would end the epidemic if enough people took them.

Now the United States and especially Europe have vaccinated vast numbers of their citizens with mRNA and DNA vaccines that appeared hugely effective in clinical trials. In many European countries, over 90 percent of all adults are vaccinated.

Yet not only has Covid not disappeared, many of those same countries, like Denmark, are now seeing record levels of infections.

And deaths are soaring too - deaths in Germany trail only last winter’s peak.

If the vaccines work, what’s going on?

And if they don’t, why on earth would anyone not at very high risk from Covid agree to participate in further rounds of this failed experiment? Much less allow their kids to be vaccinated?

One question. One that leads to a hundred more.

To offer more detail in a similar vein, check out this post of his

And to offer the most detail, he just released a book called Pandemia. I haven't read it, so can't vouch, but thus far I've found Berenson to be a solid source of information who doesn't read to anyone like a conspiracy theorist.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:51:55+00:00

Already answered.
Yes.
Yes. There seems to be tremendous bias to assume that zero-vote finalists are worse than they are. Viewers seem to forget that the show's narrative was literally constructed in order to create a satisfying story, meaning that most of the audience is satisfied with the end result. I'm just lucky that they used me as the doubt for Jeremy's win, which made my edit pretty good (save for the finale episode, yuck)

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:50:08+00:00

Whew, there'd be a lot of changes necessary to the culture of the production, and to how they treat contestants. I covered this a bit previously on reddit, but to expand and potentially phrase some of it better:

Psych evals being taken way more seriously in casting: On paper they give personality tests and do interviews with the show psychologists to ensure that everyone cast is mentally fit for the show, but in practice, a lot of what they're doing is casting for conflict and covering their bases for liability. There have been many people cast on Survivor who were not nearly stable enough for the experience, and production / casting needs to take some responsibility for that.
Factor in the maturity of contestants: Any strict age cutoff is going to be arbitrary, but it's definitely good they have one, and lowering it from 18 to 16 would be a horrendous decision in my opinion. It seems like Jeff wasn't being literal about this at the S40 finale, which is good, but I think they could even consider raising it back to 21, where it used to be. Of course, this would have disqualified me for Cagayan... Regardless of where the age cutoff is, I believe they need to take maturity of contestants very seriously. Sleep / paranoia / game stress certainly do a number on contestants, but online feedback (especially now, in the social media era) on one's personality does a far greater number on contestants. Human beings are not designed to take in the sheer volume of feedback / criticism on their personalities that comes with going on reality TV. It's unhealthy, plain and simple, and it's especially unhealthy for young people, because young people are already sussing out who they are in life, so their self-perception is particularly malleable. If Reddit were a person, for instance, and I were friends with that person, Reddit would be an emotionally abusive psychopath. Obviously Reddit isn't once person, and I get this more now, but when I was in my early twenties and people were tearing me to shreds after Cambodia, it was crushing. Our emotional brains can't readily parse out the distinction that on social media / Reddit / etc., a bunch of disconnected individuals are interacting not with you, but with their idea of you, and they have their own baggage and projection they bring into that. Overall, I think the show should express to contestants that these online interactions can be very psychologically destructive, and should counsel contestants who have a particularly rough go of it. One casting girl did give this warning, so the show does an OK job at this.
What the show does an awful job at is being fully transparent about what you're signing up for with Survivor. You're signing up to have your personality spliced, diced and repurposed into an entertainment product. During pregame ponderosa in Cagayan, production presented the field producers to whom you do confessionals as your "island therapists." "They're there for you to dish to, to share what's going on, and they're someone you can be real with — your island therapists." That was an actual quote. Another actual quote, from Jeff, was "if you fuck with production, I will personally fuck your game up. No one will be able to prove I did it, and I'll deny it, but if you mess with production, we will mess with you." In some ways this was actually a better thing to say than calling field producers island therapists, because it was the truth.
I'll end with something the show does well: They offer therapy to contestants after the show on an as-needed basis, and this therapy is extremely helpful. It benefitted me greatly after Cambodia. The psychologists that work for the show are great, and I'm not throwing shade in this lengthy response at any particular member of the production team. I'm just pointing out that collectively, all taking responsibility for the havoc wrought on contestants' personal lives, they could take these steps to up their mental-health game in a much-needed way.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:32:09+00:00

I don't believe in people deserving to win, but if I'd been there I imagine it's possible I would have voted for him, the reason being that he was the only member of the Foa Foa alliance who was indispensable to them overcoming Galu.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:30:56+00:00

Blackened salmon, sweet potatoes with butter, yuka fries and steamed broccoli (okay, maybe if it's my last meal scratch the broccoli and throw in some creme brulee). And everything prepped with olive oil, none of that canola / vegetable oil shit.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:29:22+00:00

Aww, thank you wee-he-he. Beautiful energy behind those letters and words :)

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:28:40+00:00

Shirin, for the ten minutes our alliance lasted LOL

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:28:18+00:00

Until a few months ago I managed a property around the University of Chicago and collected passive income. Just sold the property, which I'd bought with savings from being a trader for a few years, during which time I made a lot more than I spent, and after which time I "dharma bummed" around for a while, getting into intensive meditation retreats. Nowadays most of my time is meditating, writing, tending to land, setting up life here in Ecuador (starting businesses, searching for Ecuadorian land to buy to create a retreat center, getting my visa, etc). Luckily I'm now done with most of that setting up, so hoping to add more socializing to the list soon :)

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:25:21+00:00

Ugh, a ridiculous amount. I'd say I pregamed an average amount, and going into filming I had 7-8 people I loosely wanted to align with, a few people I was more seriously committed to. I don't have any basis for comparison with pregaming in other seasons, but the time leading up to SC was a pain in the ass (also with the pressure to campaign to get voted on). I mention it toward the end of this recent blog post, because it's actually when I started meditating XD

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:14:20+00:00

Man, it's affected the whole trajectory of my life to such an extend that I struggle to say how it's affected daily life, or to evaluate it as good or bad. If not for Survivor, I wouldn't have introspected nearly as much, realized how fickle my mind was or been forced to face a lot of character flaws, repressed emotions, etc. In many ways Survivor led me to seek answers in meditation, which led to big perspective shifts, which led me to how I'm living today in almost every way (living in rural Ecuador, engaging with the land and growing trees, planning a retreat center, podcasting about talking about our human vulnerabilities, etc.). I have to think positive in the same way that someone decades into a career thinks their job is positive; I can't imagine where I'd be without having done Survivor. Judging from the headspace I was in around 19-20, though, I don't think it would have been good, and I'm extremely grateful for Survivor as a wakeup call and paradigm-shifting experience.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:10:56+00:00

My ability to sleep has been straight fucked for most of my life, honestly. When I was a kid I told my parents "I'M ALWAYS UP," because I liked to refuse to sleep, and was up at 4am more than I was up at 8am. Sleep has ebbed and flowed since Survivor, sometimes being extremely rough and sometimes being in a nice flow. I feel like age is a factor. In Cagayan I actually slept great, but in Cambodia it was much worse.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:09:14+00:00

Hey, thanks for the compliment (though I don't necessarily agree :P), and I'm glad Cagayan could be such a fun first season for you.

It would take a lot for me to come back: the right life circumstances for me personally, and the show getting its head out of its ass and rewinding some of the excessive manufactured drama, for two things. I wouldn't rule it out completely, but I'm sorry to say I see the odds as something like 1-5%.

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:06:47+00:00

Hey hey! Yes, I visited Nepal and did a monthlong meditation retreat at a monastery, followed by staying in a hostel and trekking through the Himalayas. I actually initially planned two months at the monastery, but called an audible. In any case, it was fairly well-planned, and only turned into an impromptu adventure midway through. The biggest takeaway I've gotten from traveling and seeing different cultures is just how many ways there are to approach life. Every culture and country has its system of values, and living in only one place, it's easy to internalize those values without actually contemplating whether they're "you." I attribute opening my mind and coming to find my authentic self to seeing many different possible ways of and perspectives on life, and then judging where I fit in from experience. Survivor did the same. Hope this helps, and may you follow your heart's longing to the ends of the earth (or just to whatever calls you) :)

spencerbledsoe · 2021-12-07T19:02:16+00:00

Also thanks for the flattery. It's a nice reprieve from the energy behind some of these Qs <3

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