This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jeff Probst, the Emmy-winning host and showrunner of CBS's "Survivor." For the premiere of the show's all-star fiftieth season, he walked us through a day of filming the reality series on the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
"Survivor" is not a gig. For me and most people who work on the show, it really is our creative life. Every idea we have goes into the show.
The way we run the show has changed a lot in 26 years. In the early seasons, we went to a new country or a new island every season. That's an arduous task for our team because you're essentially building a city on an island, and then you're packing everything up and putting it on big shipping crates across the ocean. And when it gets there, you take it off, and you build a new city again. So the amount of work was huge.
For many seasons, me and the crew were living in tents — little single-person tents, and then we might have modular housing on another season. Once, we had very tiny trailers, and I mean tiny — they were maybe 12 feet long and eight feet high, and you had a bed, and that was basically it.
Now that we've filmed in Fiji for 10 years, we have a routine. It doesn't change the demands of the actual show, but it does help the prep, and it gets rid of a lot of unforeseen problems.
Working on "Survivor" is a 26-day event from the morning of day one. Even though your day might technically start at 6 a.m. when you wake up and end at 10:30 p.m. when Tribal Council is over, the work doesn't really stop until the end of day 26.
Especially when you're one of the executive producers, there's always a radio next to your bed, and there's a radio in your boat, and there's a radio everywhere you go because the show is a living, breathing organism.
The good news is there aren't many distractions because there's nowhere to go. We live on a little island, and there are no restaurants; there isn't a movie theater. Friends don't really come and visit, and you don't go out to dinner — there's nowhere to go to dinner. So your life is very small, and that makes it very easy to focus.
Here's a typical day in my life while filming "Survivor 50."
I wake up without an alarm to the sounds of the ocean
I have a home that is on the water in Fiji, so I wake up to the sounds of the ocean every morning.
When you're in the middle of the ocean, there is no ambient light, so it's very easy to go to bed early because it's pitch black, and it's much easier to get up in the morning with the sun.
Almost every morning, I work out, mostly for my mental health. I have a small gym — I have a few pieces of gear that I've collected over the years, and we ship them to this little house. We literally build a false floor for them so that we don't hurt the house at all. I do very straightforward exercises with weights; nothing fancy. It gets the job done.
I only do maybe 20 minutes, but I try to do it most days because I feel better when I do it. I feel like I let my body know, "We're going back into war, let's go."
I usually eat healthy, but I get cravings like the castaways do while filming 'Survivor'
We have a catering team, and they make about 100,000 meals a year for our crew. So they're on set early in the morning, making breakfast. They also make lunch and dinner, and are sending crew meals out to all our teams on various beaches.
I'm not a big eater in my normal life — I might eat one meal, or two meals a day at the most — but on location, I find my hunger increases. So I always have breakfast, and then around 1 p.m. I'm usually starving, and I'm often craving something. It's not always healthy. Sometimes it's a burger with fries and a lot of ketchup.
Whatever I'm craving, I give in to it. I don't judge at all because the environment is so different. I think in a lot of ways I do emulate or replicate the same cravings the castaways have. Maybe that is because you're sweating a lot, and your body's being deprived of certain things, like you're losing salt.
So I don't eat burgers that often, but on location, I have one at least once a week. Then, when I get home, I'm back to a pretty healthy way of eating.
Nothing on 'Survivor' is staged, so we rehearse the challenges with stand-in contestants
Sometimes, you start your day with a challenge rehearsal. That means we have everybody who's going to be shooting the challenge on that day, except the contestants.
We'll shoot the rehearsal with our Dream Team, who test the challenges. Because we don't get a second take. So our only chance to really look at how we're going to film the challenges is getting the Dream Team of people together and rehearsing it.
We will rehearse the entire challenge full-on. Then, when the players show up, and you shoot it, you're doing that with no retakes. We've never asked a player to go back and shoot a ball again. We live and die by our coverage.
Sometimes, I'll shoot a challenge with the players in the morning, have a quick break for lunch, and then 90 minutes later, I'll be out to rehearse the next challenge with the Dream Team.
In between that, I might drop by the art department to approve a new idol, or look at the wording on a note, or look at how we're going to hide an advantage, and see photographs of where it's going to be hidden.
Even while filming one season, I'm already working on the next one
The show never stops, and we're always looking ahead. We might be on shoot day three, but we're already looking at shoot day nine and planning what twists are going to happen and when they're going to go into the game.
The single hardest part of "Survivor" for me is being away from home. That has never changed.While "Survivor 50" is airing, we will be out shooting "Survivor 51," but "Survivor 50" is still being edited. So I'll be giving my thoughts on the episode, and making sure it's ready to be delivered to the network, and then I might very well end the day filming a Tribal Council that ends around 10:30 p.m.
You can have some really long days, but they're incredibly exhilarating because it's the only thing you're doing. You're not in Los Angeles, where you go to your favorite restaurant, and you're still able to catch your kid's soccer game. None of that exists. It is only you, your team, and the show you're making.
Filming 'Survivor' can be all-consuming, so I make sure to talk to the crew about things outside work
One thing we do on "Survivor," and this is not a formal rule, it's just our community, is if we show up for a challenge rehearsal or something, we'll spend 10 minutes talking about the latest episode of "Game of Thrones" or whatever show we're watching.
I used to wonder, is this an efficient use of time? Because we seem to be bonding, but we're not working on the project at hand. And then my wife and I met Laszlo Bock, who formed the people culture at Google and wrote a book about it called "Work Rules."
One of the things he talks about in his book is that time spent talking about your favorite TV episode or going bowling with your coworkers on a Tuesday night is fundamental to the harmony and cohesion that you're going to then take into battle, take into the workplace.
So I'm always aware now that that is something in our nature, to bond a little bit. It's not just work. It's a community living together, working together, but with the emphasis that we are also living together and we're friends.
Before Tribal Council, I have to center myself and get into 'the zone'
You would think I would have a ritual for being on camera by now, but I really don't. But my coworkers have said they can tell when I'm getting into what they call "the zone." That's when I stop listening, and I'm just thinking. All I'm really thinking about is just reminding myself, "These 13 people are still in the game. They voted out seven people; they're tired, they're hungry."
It's just basic repetition of reminding myself that even though I have a life outside this game, and I might be looking at a cut from last episode, and I might be looking at an idea for next season, these players are in this season, and they demand and deserve my entire focus.
I actively choose to be in the moment: I see that you're sad. I could tell when you walked in, your body language, you're hunched over.
The question is, am I going to bring it up? Are you going to bring it up? Is somebody else going to bring it up? Are we going to talk about it or not? I don't know. Let's find out!
I wind down with a good crime drama, a real-life police interrogation video, or listening to philosophical books
The single hardest part of "Survivor" for me is being away from home. That has never changed.
My wife and I will attempt to have date nights where we agree to watch an episode of whatever show we're watching from across the world. I'll put it on my iPad, she'll put it on her iPad, and then we'll say 3, 2, 1, and hit play. So that's kind of a fun way for us to bond.
We like a good crime drama — a little bit of love and lust and blood and guts and "Who did it?" and "Oh, I can't believe it was him!" We just finished "The Beast Within," and now we're going back to watch "The Night Manager."
If I have 15 minutes to myself, my go-to is almost always watching a police interrogation on YouTube. They're fascinating if you like that kind of thing. You are watching a human walk into a room, wondering, "How much do these detectives know?" In most cases, the detective knows a lot more than you think, but they want to see what you're willing to share.
Then you watch a great detective or a team of detectives slowly build this box, and the box gets smaller and smaller, and the guilty person starts to realize, "I'm never going home. They know what I did." I love those subtle shifts in power dynamics, watching how people respond and what tells they have.
When it comes to reading books, I tend to listen to them more right now. My wife just turned me on to a book by Ram Dass, which is really interesting. It could be Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts — I love that philosophical side of listening to philosophers talk about being human.
I'm also really into longevity, and the role technology is playing in where our lives might be heading. I'm really interested in Ray Kurzweil, who predicted the singularity 30 years ago, and he was right on the money. That kind of stuff fascinates me because obviously I'm too dumb to talk about it. But it's a paradigm shift in our culture, and it's happening in real time.
So if I really have free time, I'm distracting myself with something not related to "Survivor. " And then I'll fall asleep pretty early and get back up with the sun.
"Survivor 50" airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET, starting February 25 on CBS and Paramount+.
