Regina: [music in background] This is Underunderstood.
Adrianne: Hello.
Regina: Hi.
Billy: Hello.
John: Hi, Adrianne.
Regina: Billy is so energetic.
Adrianne: First of all I have to say alert! [music in background]
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: This episode will contain major spoilers for the Netflix reality show The Circle.
Regina: Mmmmmn.
Adrianne: Has everyone finished watching The Circle?
John: I, I finished in so little time, Adrianne.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: I think I had a head start but yes, I finished. We’ve established on this show that I like terrible television.
Regina: I’m only on episode four. I fell asleep watching it one night and I had so many Circle related nightmares. It was terrifying.
Billy: OH, my God. Was Shubham angry at you?
Regina: Oh, Shooby.
Shubham: [music] I don’t like when people like lie or manipulate.
Regina: Shooby.
Billy: [laughs]
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: Okay, so Regina, since you haven’t finished I think you step away.
Regina: Okay. I’m going to take my headphones off now. Slack when I should come back. You have blocked me from the chat. [background signs]
Adrianne: Okay, so of the two remaining players, can someone explain what The Circle is?
Billy: All right, so The Circle is a reality show that we have seen on Netflix but it was based on a UK reality show.
Television: Welcome to a brand new reality show where a group of strangers live in separate apartments for three weeks.
Billy: The idea is that there’s a number of players in an apartment building. Each one of them is in their own apartment. They never meet face to face and the only way they communicate is via a fake social network called The Circle.
Television: Welcome to The Circle.
What’s up Circle.
A new social experiment where players don’t meet to face to face.
What?
They only communicate through The Circle.
Circle, circle, circle. Take me to my profile.
Billy: And the only contact that they have with each other is in text form through The Circle and every some number of days or something they rank their favorite players. The top two players of those rankings wind up being quote unquote influencers and those influencers decide who’s going to get removed from The Circle.
This is kind of a simplification of how the game works but that’s basically it.
John: And the winner, quote unquote winner of this game-
Billy: [laughs]
John: -is the last person left in The Circle, um based on all that voting.
Billy: Yeah, I think we should also mention that The Circle is voice activated.
John: Right.
Billy: Or it’s presented, presented as if it’s voice activated.
Television: Message: Girl, I am living exclamation point. Let’s talk about Bill hashtag [laughs] fake gate. Send message.
John: It’s not good.
Regina: It’s not? [laughs]
John: I just want to be clear. It’s got good.
Billy: It’s actively bad, I think. [laughs]
Adrianne: I don’t know. The words good and bad are not really … They don’t really apply here.
Billy: [laughs] I think the concept is good and I think the casting was good and therefore the performances in it are good. However, the actual like game design-
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: -of the show is terrible in my opinion when you compare it to like long standing reality shows that have stood the test of time like Survivor or whatever which has like some really smart, well executed game design in it.
Jeff Probst: Under the rules one tribe must visit tribal council every three days with a single purpose: vote one of their own members off the island. To win you must survive the island, survive the boat and ultimately survive each other.
John: The Circle’s basically like, you want to be the last person left. Oh, I don’t think Billy mentioned this. Some people are catfishes. So some people aren’t who they’re presenting themselves as. And so everyone’s fixated on hunting out who is the catfish even though that has no bearing on the game.
Billy: And this is kind of what I think is the most confusing thing about the show. It’s like billed as online you can be whoever you want to be. You can catfish people. You can pretend to be somebody else. And like that’s a, like a core principle of the show, but that kind of behavior is [laughs] like neither rewarded nor punished really because it has no bearing on … I think it has no bearing on the outcome of the game.
Adrianne: Right. It seems like the players don’t, don’t understand or have forgotten because of this weird isolation chamber that they’ve been put in that they’re competing with each other. Instead they are acting like, to use a reality TV show cliché, they’re there to make friends.
John: Right.
Billy: Right.
Television: Message: Buddy, I love you with all my heart and I know you’ve always had my back. We’ve made it through this thing together and should you win I would have nothing but pure happiness for you. #friendstilthe end. Send.
Adrianne: They’re ranking people they like high and they’re ranking people they don’t like low.
John: Even though they don’t have to spend any real time with these people.
Adrianne: Right, it’s not like you’re, you’re ranking someone who, who you’re have to go on a cruise with.
John: Right, or like on Big Brother, if someone is like obnoxious and like drunk all the time, like you want to get them out of there because they’re obnoxious. But, in this case they’re just on a screen sending you emojis.
Adrianne: And they also vote off the people they think are catfish, not because it has any advantage in the game but just because they felt deceived, I guess and didn’t like that person.
Billy: I think it’s because they don’t have anything else to make a goal. [laughs] There’s no like, there’s no-
Adrianne: Well, the obvious thing is that you, you want to be competing against the weakest players, right? So you should be voting off the people who are popular.
John: Right.
Adrianne: Although if everyone played the game that way …
Billy: Yes, right, this is the-
Adrianne: It would also break the game dynamics. The game is just broken no matter what.
Billy: [laughs]
John: That’s why I think the players are in search of uh something they feel good about in terms of the strategy of how to play the game. So it’s just like, “Well, let’s just get rid of people who seem phony.”
Television: Message: I too thought Mercedes was fake because of the unnatural filter on her image as well as her introduction was a little bit on the edgy side. And I don’t think that’s her real personality.
Adrianne: Right, so the players pretty much play the whole game literally they’re ranking people they like high. They’re getting rid of people they don’t like, until the second to last episode when they do their final rankings. And there is this moment with Joey who actually ends up being the winner of The Circle, where he … Suddenly it dawns on him that maybe he shouldn’t-
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: -vote his favorite person highly.
Joey: And then’s there Shooby who, yes, has been my boy since day one, but I do have to think about if I rate him higher, that could help his chances possibly winning this thing and that hurts to say. I’ve never thought like this before.
Billy: [laughs]
Television: Since day one-
Billy: [laughs] Strategically my brain has never worked like this before.
Adrianne: I’ve never thought like this before.
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: And then he goes …
Joey: I think for fourth I gotta place Shooby. I think I have to.
Adrianne: So he’s debating between placing Shubham, number two or number four.
Joey: But I know Shooby’s been himself since the beginning. It’s been a great friendship. I really feel he’s my second place. Circle, I’d like to submit my final ratings. [music]
Adrianne: So Joey ended up ranking Shubham second, presumably because he was just a good friend. And Joey also ended up winning The Circle in the end anyway, but that was basically unrelated. Strategically he should have ranked Shooby lower if he wanted a better shot at winning.
This leads me to my questions. Okay, should we have Regina come back.
Regina: Sorry, that was me.
Adrianne: Hi. Okay. So, I have two questions about The Circle. First, why did the contestants on The Circle play like this? Why were they acting like friends even though they were competing?
My second question is, what is the correct way to play this game? If you actually wanted to win, what would you do?
Billy: I’m going to say a minor spoiler, Regina. I, it’s, this doesn’t affect the-
Regina: Aaaaaaaa!
Billy: No, it doesn’t affect the game. At some point in the show uh Shubham starts drying a diagram [laughs] of-
Regina: Oh, yeah.
Billy: -how the game is going and what the possible outcomes are. I’d also like to know if he was onto anything with whatever he sprawled on that piece of paper.
Adrianne: [laughs] I absolutely wanted to see that completed diagram.
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: From Shubham. [background music] So I’m going to talk to some sociologists and economists.
Billy: And game theorists?
Adrianne: And maybe a game theorist and maybe a contestant from The Circle.
Billy: Oh, my God. I hope it’s not Bill.
Adrianne: I don’t, I don’t think I know who Bill is.
Billy: Well, sorry.
John: Coming up, Adrian creates some unscripted drama.
Billy: Message: Adrian, Adrian-
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: Did you learn the answers. Send message.
Adrianne: Okay, well first, Regina did you finish watching The Circle?
Regina: I did.
Adrianne: Perfect. So it turns out that there is actually a small but passionate body of academic research around reality TV game shows and game theory. One of these papers was called, Friend or Foe, Cooperation and learning in high stakes games. It was written by researchers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and it’s about the show Friend or Foe, which aired for a glorious two seasons on the Game Show Network in 2002 and 2003.
Billy: Oh, yeah.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: [laughs] Sorry, I was like-
John: [laughs]
Billy: -very into the Game Show Network during this period of time.
Regina: Sure.
Billy: It’s like all I watched.
Adrianne: Uh-huh [affirmative], of course you were.
Billy: Yes, I remember the show.
Adrianne: You remember the show. Do you remember how the show works?
Billy: Uh …
Adrianne: Don’t worry about it. It’s not so memorable.
Billy: [laughs]
Kennedy: Hey there, I’m Kennedy, and welcome to Friend or Foe. Today I’ll be your game show fry cook and I’m about to slap some questions on the grill. Right now.
Adrianne: The way the show works, is you have six players. They pair off into teams of two. They answer trivia questions. The more questions they get right the more money they get in this sort of pot.
Billy: Oh, yeah.
Adrianne: And then they move to the final round where it’s like, “All right, you have this pot of money that you earned by answering trivia questions and now you have to decide if you’re going to share the money or if you’re going to try to keep it all for yourself.”
Billy: Yes.
Adrianne: And the way they do that is they have to simultaneously vote and they have to pick friend or foe.
Kennedy: Welcome back to Friend or Foe. Our two remaining players have arrived at the final trust box where five thousand dollars is on the line now.
Adrianne: If they both pick friend, then they get to split the money. If they both pick foe then they both get nothing, but if one of them picks friend and the other picks foe, the person who picked foe gets to walk away with the whole amount.
Regina: I love this.
Kennedy: Please, each of you slip a hand inside the trust box. It’s time to choose friend or foe. [music]
John: It’s great music.
Adrianne: Essential, dramatic music.
Kennedy: Well, $5,000.00 is up for grabs. Let’s see who’s a friend and who’s a foe. [music].
Kevin, you went foe. Bad, Kevin bad.
Well, let’s see if Ben can save the day here. What’d you do, Ben? You also went foe. You’re not a bro.
Ben: I’m not a bro.
Kennedy: You both should be ashamed of yourselves. All right, each of you place a hand right here floating in the air. Right here, right there. Bad and bad.
Billy: Incredible that this only lasted for two seasons.
Adrianne: What the researchers found was that people actually played more collaboratively. Almost half of the people who played the show voted friend even though all the YouTube videos I found were people voting foe.
But one of their conclusions was really interesting to me. So, based on the players behavior the act of playing fair was actually worth something to people in itself. The way it played out they found that the value of playing fair was worth about as much to people as the money.
Here’s what they wrote.
“We document that non-monetary payoffs, the value of playing fairly must be remarkably large and roughly proportional to the monetary stakes. It is one thing to forego $5.00 in order to be fair, as players typically do in laboratory games. The players on Friend or Foe commonly forego over $1350.00. Preferences for fair divisions are apparently strong. The researchers said that meant that people were behaving, because the, the act of playing fair was worth something to them in itself.”
John: By, by worth something you mean they’ve come on to this game show to win money, but they’re like-
Adrianne: [laughs]
John: Their nature is making it worth, worth as much to, to just be nice to another human?
Adrianne: Sure, like I guess in the form of like cognitive dissonance.
John: Yeah.
Adrianne: Or, you know, reputation, because you’re on this TV show in front of this big national audience, something like that.

So this reminded me of The Circle where most of the players talk a lot about being honest, playing true to themselves. Even the ones who are playing as catfish say that even though they’re using someone else’s photo they’re actually speaking as themselves.

We started the episode. We all kind of had the same reaction, “Why are these people so bad at playing this game?” My first theory is maybe the reason we’re thinking the players played the game badly is that we failed to consider that playing fair and appearing honest on national TV, national Netflix, is also inherently worth a lot to some people. It might be worth more for you to put some uh, some reputation in the bank to withdraw later.
John: Right.
Adrianne: Instead of getting uh the prize money which was-
Billy: Oh my God.
Adrianne: $100,000.00 for the winner and then $10,000.00 for the fan favorite. So I decided to talk to one of the contestants on The Circle.
Regina: God, which one did you talk to? Was it Shooby?
Adrianne: I talked to Shooby, aka Shubham Goel.
Billy: Oh, wow.
Regina: Oooh, it was Shooby.
Shubham: Yeah [laughs], it’s, you know what’s funny is I didn’t actually realize, like the whole Circle was calling me Shooby ’til close to the end.
Billy: [laughs]
Regina: Oh my God, Shooby.
Billy: Wow, where did you find him?
Adrianne: Oh the internet, man.
Billy: Wow. [laughs]
John: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
Adrianne: I actually e-mailed him through his like Shubham Goel for Governor website from when he ran for governor-
Regina: Oh.
Adrianne: -when he was 18 or whatever.
John: [laughs]
Billy: Uh, have you guys seen the video of him running?
Regina: No.
Billy: Oh, it’s so good.
Adrianne: Should we play a little bit of it?
Shubham: My name is Shubham Goel and I’m the youngest candidate at 22. When I tell people, I know people are like, “Oh, what? This is like a leprechaun. This happen, you know.” Uh, if you have energy and if you have ideas and if you have conviction it is your civil liberty to the State to run or do something about it. To return to an age of prosperity, and a prosperity that is so prosperous. [laughter]
Adrianne: Just to uh refresh everyone’s memory, Shubham Goel was the player who said he hates social media. He thinks it’s all fake.
Shubham: My name’s Shubham and I’m 23 years old and I’m from California. I am a virtual reality designer. [music]
My presence on social media, it’s very minimal. Honestly, I think social media is our modern day bubonic plague. It’s actually the devil in all its forms.
Adrianne: And he wants to play The Circle as truthfully as possible.
Shubham: Although I despise social media, by me going into The Circle, being myself 100% authentically, it can show you don’t have to be fake. You can be yourself and that is good enough.
[music] I had this theory that like if I just tried to stay myself and stay true to who I was … You know, if I can get two or three people who are my right or dies, people who really are my true friends then that will ride to the end of the game.
Adrianne: So, as we know, Shooby, with the nice guy strategy and no cat fishing, did not win the circle.
Regina: He came very close though.
Adrianne: He did come very close. It’s true. But the game got down to the final five, which was Joey, Shooby, Sammy, Rebecca the Catfish aka Seaburn and Chris. Then the players do their final rankings and it was at this moment that Shooby could have changed his strategy and thrown his Circle friends under the bus, ranked Sammy and Joey who were the most popular fourth or fifth and tried to pull ahead.
Shubham: So the end of the game, right? I knew what I have to do to win the game: tank Sammy, tank Joey, I win the game.
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: But it was like the emotional bonds, I connected with them. I just, I, I couldn’t do it.
Adrianne: He made a judgment call and it seems like the $100,000.00 didn’t really … It didn’t really seem like much of a factor.
Shubham: So at the end, you know, if I tank Joey to fourth or fifth I would have won the game, you know?
Adrianne: Right.
Shubham: But my emotions just stopped it. Like, I knew 100% if I tank this kid I’m winning the game.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Shubham: I got the glory, I got the 100K. I’m popping, you know! I just do it. And of course if you’re like a strategist, you’re like, “Shubham, you idiot! What were you thinking man. Secure the bag,” you know, but I couldn’t do it because I just formed these emotional bonds and I knew they were so real and I couldn’t do it to these people. I love Joey. I love ’em all to death. I just couldn’t do it.
Adrianne: Billy.
Billy: Yeah.
Adrianne: You remember you asked about Shubham’s diagrams, like he, in one scene they show him drawing this like mad conspiracy theory kind of diagram of all the players and how they might vote?
Billy: Yes. Yes.
Adrianne: So I asked him about that.
What were you writing on that diagram?
Shubham: Yeah, so this is interesting. It was actually cut, but the whole game I created this graph. I game up with a graph that basically you draw all eight people, right, in a circle.
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: You put their names. And what you do is assuming each of those people becomes an influencer, you draw a red arrow to every single person they would eliminate, assuming they could get rid of-
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: -as many people as they want. So theoretically the person with the most red arrows to their name is the person leaving. And then if you go from most red arrows to least red arrows, theoretically that should be the rankings.
Regina: That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not that the one person that they would eliminate. It’s like a ranking system.
Adrianne: Right, well he actually said you would draw a red arrow to every person that person would eliminate if they could eliminate as many people as they want, which is like, why wouldn’t they eliminate everyone but themselves, Shubham?
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: Anyway, bless his heart.
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: So, after I talked to Shooby, I then decided to talk to someone who would never let a reality TV friendship get in the way of winning.
Richard: Guten morgan.
Adrianne: Hello.
Richard: Hi, how are you?
Adrianne: I’m good, how are you?
Richard: Just peachy.
Adrianne: Does anyone recognize that voice?\\\Is this the guy from Survivor season one?
Which guy?
John: The guy who won?
Adrianne: Maybe. Do you remember his name.
John: I don’t, no. I just, it-
Billy: I remember his name. His, his name is Richard Hatch.
Adrianne: That’s right.
John: Oh, wow.
Adrianne: It’s Richard Hatch.
Billy: You got the Hatch!
John: Yeah, Richard Hatch, the famous villainist first winner of Survivor.
Billy: Wow.
Adrianne: All right, so Rich stood out on the first season of Survivor because the show was super new. Reality television was pretty immature and nobody knew how to play the game. It was actually the runner up, Kelly Wiglesworth, who said the famous quote, “I’m not here to make friends.”
But Rich embodied this maybe the most. In fact, he doesn’t believe in the concept of reality TV friendships at all.
Richard: You know, crying and hugging and-
Adrianne: [laughs]
Richard: “Oh, you’re my friend.” What? I met you two days ago. I mean, it’s bizarre, but it says a lot about who we are as humans.
Adrianne: Are you saying you think that these friendships are fake?
Richard: I’m saying they’re nonexistent. I’m saying they’re imaginary. I’m saying they aren’t friendships. [music]
Adrianne: One thing Rich emphasized to me was that the show is not just about playing with the other people who are the players that you see on the screen but also thinking about what the producers are doing and how much attention the cameras are paying to you. And he’s actually on the outs with producers now. He was not invited to come back for season 40 which was previous winners, um probably in part because of an incident with another player in one of the previous seasons where he had been invited back.
They were doing a challenge. Rich was not wearing any clothes because that was one of his trademark things was that he would walk around naked. And he made another contestant so uncomfortable that she quit the show.
Regina: Uck.
Adrianne: Yeah, not a great guy. And then Survivor was dealing with some other MeToo issues where there was a guy in season 39 who kept being accused of non-consensual touching, is how they put it and it took Survivor forever to get rid of this guy. Finally they kicked him off the show. And then all of the players who had been assaulted by him said, you know, “Why wasn’t …” [laughs] “Why wasn’t it enough when I said it the first time?” And they got a lot of blow back for that.
Billy: This keeps happening on reality shows. Like something very similar happened on the set of the Bachelor a couple seasons ago.
Adrianne: It’s not surprising.
Billy: And if I’m remembering correctly about the incident on Survivor with Richard, uh the producers and uh the host Jeff Probst kind of didn’t handle it particularly well in the moment that it happened, uh which I think also contributed to the, the contestants leaving the show, uh because of the incident.
Adrianne: Right, and that brings me to my next point which is something I think we overlooked when we first started talking about this is that we can’t take this game at face value. The producers are shaping the world that we see on reality competitions and as a result they’re shaping the behavior of the players.
I read a bunch of articles and a bunch of interviews with the contestants and the level of control that the producers had over every moment of their day was bananas.
John: Yeah, I’ve been wondering about this because like it seems, at least watching the show, that there’s like all kinds of contrived stuff happening, right?
Adrianne: Joey said they had lights on in his apartment all day and he didn’t have a clock. They didn’t have their phones. He didn’t know what time it was so-
Regina: Oh my God.
Adrianne: -that’s why he’s wearing sunglasses indoors sometimes. He just had no idea what time it was. It just seemed like it was noon all day.
Regina: That’s terr- I would hate this so much.
John: Even as a viewer it’s hard to keep track of how much time there is.
Adrianne: Right. It was very trippy.
Regina: It’s true. I was so confused, yeah.
John: Like while I was watching this I was convinced that the whole thing had happened over like six days and it turned out to be three weeks.
Regina: Yeah, exactly.
Adrianne: Three weeks, yeah.
Regina: And it also made their, like relationships with each other feel so, like I had such a hard time imagining caring at all about these people.
Adrianne: Right.
Regina: Because I felt like they had spent two days together.
Adrianne: Well, they also, in the cut, they made the conversations, the one on one conversations seem like they were three minutes long. In reality they were about 20 minutes long but the producers didn’t seem to, based on what Shubham told me, the producers didn’t seem to let people go longer than that.
Regina: Interesting.
Adrianne: If you wanted to start a private conversation you had to make a request to a producer and the producer would set it up and then they would tell you when it was done.
Regina: That’s crazy. The producer had to okay you having a private conversation.
Adrianne: Exactly.
Regina: And then the producer told you when it was over.
Adrianne: Yep. [music]
So I still wanted to know if there was some way to calculate the best way to play according to science. Luckily I found Mark B. Salter, who is a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa and a lover of reality TV.
Mark: I’m a fan of reality television. I know that that’s not a smart thing to say but I find it totally fascinating that people can know that they’re in a game and know that these situations are constructed and yet still be totally emotionally committed to the path that they’re on.
Adrianne: Yeah, so uh, Mark, very cool professor. He had his students analyze two seasons of Survivor in order to teach them concepts of game theory.
Mark: Game theory a subset of economics or psychology that attempts to pare down decision making into it’s kind of purist form by giving particular scenarios and then analyzing payoff matrices. And that helps you prioritize what the best strategies are in the abstract.
Adrianne: Has this concept ever been useful for you, like in your personal life? Has this every helped you get ahead?
Mark: That’s a really interesting question. Has it ever been useful in my personal life? I don’t think that I’m any more rational or strategic than anybody else.
Adrianne: So Mark’s students in this assignment tried to figure out which qualities were the most important to winning Survivor, based on what the players said about each other when they voted.
Mark: I had went into that exercise thinking that the students would say, “Oh, well, there’s a good, clear rational way to do it.” But when we assessed what people said about each other in terms of physical strength or mental strategy or the social game, you know, about how nice they were, how popular they were, how thoughtful they were, how honest they were, it was the social game that really dominated as much as the kind of mental strategic turn.
Adrianne: So Mark’s students found that people who were judged to have poor social qualities, like being lazy or irritating or annoying, that was the worst one, were voted out early. And people who were considered to have positive social qualities, like being being funny or contributing to camp, they were kept around longer.
Mark: In The Circle, the players who did well were those who identified themselves as always being honest and true to themselves and saying what they felt and having each other’s back, all things that were about the social game, about their personal relationships, not so much about strategy.
Adrianne: There’s another interesting aspect to this that Mark talked about which is that it’s not necessarily you’re, you’re talking about social norms but you’re talking about the social norms that are established within the game. And he said this was true both for Survivor and for The Circle. So, if you have some behavior that you can say you’re playing the game and maybe this behavior, like making an alliance would be considered asocial in the real world but within the game, it’s, it’s an accepted social norm.
These norms are established through successive seasons of the game which is why the players on the first season of The Circle, US version and the first season of Survivor are like a little bit wobbly and their strategies are a little amorphous, is because it’s not really clear what’s acceptable. In the first season of Survivor people are really hesitant to join alliances. Since that first season an alliance is an essential part of the game, is my understanding.
Billy: This is one aspect of that season that I really love, uh I remember there people literally saying, like refusing to join an alliance because it was like amoral.
Adrianne: Yeah.
Billy: Or like bad sportsmanship to do that uh which is so interesting ’cause like not it’s like the first thing anybody talks about when they arrive on that island, is like, “Who’m I doing an alliance with?” It’s like the way to win.
Adrianne: So would you say there is a best strategy for playing the circle?
Mark: I think like so many things we can only figure out the best strategy once you see who else is playing because the social game is really dominant. It really depends on the complex social rules that get agreed on by everybody in that group. And so there’s a best strategy but we can only know it looking backwards, not looking forwards.
Adrianne: The first thing, if you remember, that I wanted to know, was why the players on The Circle played the game so emotionally, so, to us, badly?
I kind of think we were a little bit naïve talking about this show. I think we made the mistake of judging it on it’s face as if it’s a real game.
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: And after I talked to Shooby and Mark I remembered, “Oh yeah, it’s not really a game. It’s the producers’ game and we can’t even begin to judge how the players played the game without knowing how they interacted with producers.
John: And then there’s the strategy question, is there a best way to play The Circle?
Adrianne: No one I spoke to was able to give me a real answer on that.
John: Yeah, I think what Mark is saying is basically that there, there basically is no correct way to play the game, right?
Adrianne: I think it’s also too early in the life of this show for there to be enough norms and strategies established for people to be able to play correctly. Like, people need to come up with some strategies, like an alliance strategy or a sob story that uh convinces other people that they deserve the money more.
John: I still have a strategy.
Adrianne: What’s your strategy?
John: Okay, so on The Circle you get to have private conversations with people, right? You could slowly confess things in a sort of narrative way. You could like slowly open up to someone where you’re revealing more and more and things about yourself that seem like they’re leading some really interesting end point.
Regina: Wait, is this like the Arabian Nights strategy?
John: What is that? I don’t know what that is.
Regina: Yeah, John wants, like to have like a novel in advance and you’re slowly revealing it chapter by chapter.
Adrianne: Chapter, yeah, exactly.
Regina: So like they can’t-
Billy: This is good.
Adrianne: Wait, I just want to really quickly explain [laughs] uh the Arabian Nights thing-
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: -because it’s, that’s exactly what this is. It’s like the … It’s a book of stories and it’s basically in the beginning this princess or someone, she has to marry someone she doesn’t want to marry. And he’s like, “All right, I’m going to kill you on our wedding night for whatever reasons.”
“And she’s like, “Oh, but let me just tell you a story.” And she tells a story but the end of the story turns into a new story and then ends on a cliff hanger. And she’s like, “I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.” And then she just spins that out until he forgets about killing her.
John: Yes, exactly! You just need to become a really goo story teller. Like, people are going to want to keep you around. You could literally just steal a story.
[laughs]
Adrianne: Catfish with a story.
John: Right, yeah, and it’s literally like Moby Dick, or whatever. I don’ know.
Adrianne: [laughs]
John: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
Billy: It’d be, “Wow, that really happened to you?”
John: Yeah! I feel like this is a show that kind of lends itself to having some player at some point come in and completely like blow up the game.
Adrianne: Yeah, definitely.
John: You come in and you actually catfish as a celebrity, right?
Adrianne: [laughs]
John: Oh, or, I’m a celebrity. Figure out which one I am.
Regina: Oh, but you don’t know which one. Yeah. Mm-hmm [affirmative]. That’s really good. You can … Yeah, and then you get to name drop all the time and you get to make people jealous. That’s, that’s a good strat.
Billy: Hey, if the four of us were playing The Circle, who do you guys think would win? For me I think it, I think John would, would get it.
John: Oh, Billy, thank you.
Regina: I don’t know. You think it’s John? I think Adrianne might win because I feel like Adrian’s really good at, at the one on one conversations. Like, you would ask people really good questions. You would have really conversations and I think, I think if people were all playing the way people played in season one, Adrian would win.
Adrianne: I’d have to learn to use more emojis.
Billy: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]Billy
John: I, I actually think if she were able to play by herself we would all lose to Tammy.
Billy: [laughs] Tammy was my favorite player.
Regina: Tammy, she’s using all the emojis.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: I wish they’d mixed in more of Tammy, it’s just it’s like the whole cast is like these like young people who probably go out for auditions all the time. Like the kind of people that would be cast on a real world-
Regina: They’re all actors.
Billy: Type show.
Regina: Yeah.
Billy: But then like someone who’s like-
John: [laughs]
Billy: -someone from like the undetermined voter panel on CNN, you know.hs
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
Billy: Just like. I want Tammy to um just be inserted into other shows.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: Like, I want her to just walk onto the set of Big Brother or something, like just she’s there sometimes, like just a perirenal cameo, a Tameo.
Regina: [laughs] Okay. [music]
Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is Adrianne Jeffries, John Disney, Billy Lagomarsino and me, Regina Dellea. Thank you to the amazing Phil Robibero for our show art. And if you liked this episode or any episodes, if you even think we’re kind of okay … Actually, no, only if you like us, uh [laughs] please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
John: This is the last episode of season two and that means we are taking a break to work on more episodes and figure out what the next season will look like. So if you have ideas, questions, things that you’ve been wondering about, uh you can e-mail those us at Hello@underunderstood.com.
Billy: The four of us that you hear talking every week on this show, we fund and produce every aspect of it ourselves independently and we really want to make sure that we can keep this thing going. We’ve built an incredible audience and so we’re going to start to explore some extra things we could do every week or people who would be maybe willing to chip in a few bucks on monthly basis or something like that.
So, if there are certain things you would like to hear more of or if you just want to let us know you would be willing to support the show, we’re going to be working on that stuff during this break. So, reach out. We always love to hear from you.
Regina: In the mean time, check out our website, Underunderstood.com or follow us on social media. We’ll update all that stuff and we’ll drop an episode in the feed once we know what’s coming next.
John: Thank you so much for listening this season. We’ll talk to you soon.

[music]

I had this theory that like if I just tried to stay myself and stay true to who I was … You know, if I can get two or three people who are my right or dies, people who really are my true friends then that will ride to the end of the game.
Adrianne: So, as we know, Shooby, with the nice guy strategy and no cat fishing, did not win the circle.
Regina: He came very close though.
Adrianne: He did come very close. It’s true. But the game got down to the final five, which was Joey, Shooby, Sammy, Rebecca the Catfish aka Seaburn and Chris. Then the players do their final rankings and it was at this moment that Shooby could have changed his strategy and thrown his Circle friends under the bus, ranked Sammy and Joey who were the most popular fourth or fifth and tried to pull ahead.
Shubham: So the end of the game, right? I knew what I have to do to win the game: tank Sammy, tank Joey, I win the game.
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: But it was like the emotional bonds, I connected with them. I just, I, I couldn’t do it.
Adrianne: He made a judgment call and it seems like the $100,000.00 didn’t really … It didn’t really seem like much of a factor.
Shubham: So at the end, you know, if I tank Joey to fourth or fifth I would have won the game, you know?
Adrianne: Right.
Shubham: But my emotions just stopped it. Like, I knew 100% if I tank this kid I’m winning the game.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Shubham: I got the glory, I got the 100K. I’m popping, you know! I just do it. And of course if you’re like a strategist, you’re like, “Shubham, you idiot! What were you thinking man. Secure the bag,” you know, but I couldn’t do it because I just formed these emotional bonds and I knew they were so real and I couldn’t do it to these people. I love Joey. I love ’em all to death. I just couldn’t do it.
Adrianne: John.
John: Yeah.
Adrianne: You remember you asked about Shubham’s diagrams, like he, in one scene they show him drawing this like mad conspiracy theory kind of diagram of all the players and how they might vote?
John: Yes. Yes.
Adrianne: So I asked him about that.
What were you writing on that diagram?
Shubham: Yeah, so this is interesting. It was actually cut, but the whole game I created this graph. I game up with a graph that basically you draw all eight people, right, in a circle.
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: You put their names. And what you do is assuming each of those people becomes an influencer, you draw a red arrow to every single person they would eliminate, assuming they could get rid of-
Adrianne: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Shubham: -as many people as they want. So theoretically the person with the most red arrows to their name is the person leaving. And then if you go from most red arrows to least red arrows, theoretically that should be the rankings.
Regina: That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not that the one person that they would eliminate. It’s like a ranking system.
Adrianne: Right, well he actually said you would draw a red arrow to every person that person would eliminate if they could eliminate as many people as they want, which is like, why wouldn’t they eliminate everyone but themselves, Shubham?
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: Anyway, bless his heart.
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: So, after I talked to Shooby, I then decided to talk to someone who would never let a reality TV friendship get in the way of winning.
Richard: Guten morgan.
Adrianne: Hello.
Richard: Hi, how are you?
Adrianne: I’m good, how are you?
Richard: Just peachy.
Adrianne: Does anyone recognize that voice?\\Is this the guy from Survivor season one?
Which guy?
Billy: The guy who won?
Adrianne: Maybe. Do you remember his name.
Billy: I don’t, no. I just, it-
John: I remember his name. His, his name is Richard Hatch.
Adrianne: That’s right.
Billy: Oh, wow.
Adrianne: It’s Richard Hatch.
John: You got the Hatch!
Billy: Yeah, Richard Hatch, the famous villainist first winner of Survivor.
John: Wow.
Adrianne: All right, so Rich stood out on the first season of Survivor because the show was super new. Reality television was pretty immature and nobody knew how to play the game. It was actually the runner up, Kelly Wiglesworth, who said the famous quote, “I’m not here to make friends.”
But Rich embodied this maybe the most. In fact, he doesn’t believe in the concept of reality TV friendships at all.
Richard: You know, crying and hugging and-
Adrianne: [laughs]
Richard: “Oh, you’re my friend.” What? I met you two days ago. I mean, it’s bizarre, but it says a lot about who we are as humans.
Adrianne: Are you saying you think that these friendships are fake?
Richard: I’m saying they’re nonexistent. I’m saying they’re imaginary. I’m saying they aren’t friendships. [music]
Adrianne: One thing Rich emphasized to me was that the show is not just about playing with the other people who are the players that you see on the screen but also thinking about what the producers are doing and how much attention the cameras are paying to you. And he’s actually on the outs with producers now. He was not invited to come back for season 40 which was previous winners, um probably in part because of an incident with another player in one of the previous seasons where he had been invited back.
They were doing a challenge. Rich was not wearing any clothes because that was one of his trademark things was that he would walk around naked. And he made another contestant so uncomfortable that she quit the show.
Regina: Uck.
Adrianne: Yeah, not a great guy. And then Survivor was dealing with some other MeToo issues where there was a guy in season 39 who kept being accused of non-consensual touching, is how they put it and it took Survivor forever to get rid of this guy. Finally they kicked him off the show. And then all of the players who had been assaulted by him said, you know, “Why wasn’t …” [laughs] “Why wasn’t it enough when I said it the first time?” And they got a lot of blow back for that.
John: This keeps happening on reality shows. Like something very similar happened on the set of the Bachelor a couple seasons ago.
Adrianne: It’s not surprising.
John: And if I’m remembering correctly about the incident on Survivor with Richard, uh the producers and uh the host Jeff Probst kind of didn’t handle it particularly well in the moment that it happened, uh which I think also contributed to the, the contestants leaving the show, uh because of the incident.
Adrianne: Right, and that brings me to my next point which is something I think we overlooked when we first started talking about this is that we can’t take this game at face value. The producers are shaping the world that we see on reality competitions and as a result they’re shaping the behavior of the players.
I read a bunch of articles and a bunch of interviews with the contestants and the level of control that the producers had over every moment of their day was bananas.
Billy: Yeah, I’ve been wondering about this because like it seems, at least watching the show, that there’s like all kinds of contrived stuff happening, right?
Adrianne: Joey said they had lights on in his apartment all day and he didn’t have a clock. They didn’t have their phones. He didn’t know what time it was so-
Regina: Oh my God.
Adrianne: -that’s why he’s wearing sunglasses indoors sometimes. He just had no idea what time it was. It just seemed like it was noon all day.
Regina: That’s terr- I would hate this so much.
Billy: Even as a viewer it’s hard to keep track of how much time there is.
Adrianne: Right. It was very trippy.
Regina: It’s true. I was so confused, yeah.
Billy: Like while I was watching this I was convinced that the whole thing had happened over like six days and it turned out to be three weeks.
Regina: Yeah, exactly.
Adrianne: Three weeks, yeah.
Regina: And it also made their, like relationships with each other feel so, like I had such a hard time imagining caring at all about these people.
Adrianne: Right.
Regina: Because I felt like they had spent two days together.
Adrianne: Well, they also, in the cut, they made the conversations, the one on one conversations seem like they were three minutes long. In reality they were about 20 minutes long but the producers didn’t seem to, based on what Shubham told me, the producers didn’t seem to let people go longer than that.
Regina: Interesting.
Adrianne: If you wanted to start a private conversation you had to make a request to a producer and the producer would set it up and then they would tell you when it was done.
Regina: That’s crazy. The producer had to okay you having a private conversation.
Adrianne: Exactly.
Regina: And then the producer told you when it was over.
Adrianne: Yep. [music]
So I still wanted to know if there was some way to calculate the best way to play according to science. Luckily I found Mark B. Salter, who is a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa and a lover of reality TV.
Mark: I’m a fan of reality television. I know that that’s not a smart thing to say but I find it totally fascinating that people can know that they’re in a game and know that these situations are constructed and yet still be totally emotionally committed to the path that they’re on.
Adrianne: Yeah, so uh, Mark, very cool professor. He had his students analyze two seasons of Survivor in order to teach them concepts of game theory.
Mark: Game theory a subset of economics or psychology that attempts to pare down decision making into it’s kind of purist form by giving particular scenarios and then analyzing payoff matrices. And that helps you prioritize what the best strategies are in the abstract.
Adrianne: Has this concept ever been useful for you, like in your personal life? Has this every helped you get ahead?
Mark: That’s a really interesting question. Has it ever been useful in my personal life? I don’t think that I’m any more rational or strategic than anybody else.
Adrianne: So Mark’s students in this assignment tried to figure out which qualities were the most important to winning Survivor, based on what the players said about each other when they voted.
Mark: I had went into that exercise thinking that the students would say, “Oh, well, there’s a good, clear rational way to do it.” But when we assessed what people said about each other in terms of physical strength or mental strategy or the social game, you know, about how nice they were, how popular they were, how thoughtful they were, how honest they were, it was the social game that really dominated as much as the kind of mental strategic turn.
Adrianne: So Mark’s students found that people who were judged to have poor social qualities, like being lazy or irritating or annoying, that was the worst one, were voted out early. And people who were considered to have positive social qualities, like being being funny or contributing to camp, they were kept around longer.
Mark: In The Circle, the players who did well were those who identified themselves as always being honest and true to themselves and saying what they felt and having each other’s back, all things that were about the social game, about their personal relationships, not so much about strategy.
Adrianne: There’s another interesting aspect to this that Mark talked about which is that it’s not necessarily you’re, you’re talking about social norms but you’re talking about the social norms that are established within the game. And he said this was true both for Survivor and for The Circle. So, if you have some behavior that you can say you’re playing the game and maybe this behavior, like making an alliance would be considered asocial in the real world but within the game, it’s, it’s an accepted social norm.
These norms are established through successive seasons of the game which is why the players on the first season of The Circle, US version and the first season of Survivor are like a little bit wobbly and their strategies are a little amorphous, is because it’s not really clear what’s acceptable. In the first season of Survivor people are really hesitant to join alliances. Since that first season an alliance is an essential part of the game, is my understanding.
John: This is one aspect of that season that I really love, uh I remember there people literally saying, like refusing to join an alliance because it was like amoral.
Adrianne: Yeah.
John: Or like bad sportsmanship to do that uh which is so interesting ’cause like not it’s like the first thing anybody talks about when they arrive on that island, is like, “Who’m I doing an alliance with?” It’s like the way to win.
Adrianne: So would you say there is a best strategy for playing the circle?
Mark: I think like so many things we can only figure out the best strategy once you see who else is playing because the social game is really dominant. It really depends on the complex social rules that get agreed on by everybody in that group. And so there’s a best strategy but we can only know it looking backwards, not looking forwards.
Adrianne: The first thing, if you remember, that I wanted to know, was why the players on The Circle played the game so emotionally, so, to us, badly?
I kind of think we were a little bit naïve talking about this show. I think we made the mistake of judging it on it’s face as if it’s a real game.
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: And after I talked to Shooby and Mark I remembered, “Oh yeah, it’s not really a game. It’s the producers’ game and we can’t even begin to judge how the players played the game without knowing how they interacted with producers.
Billy: And then there’s the strategy question, is there a best way to play The Circle?
Adrianne: No one I spoke to was able to give me a real answer on that.
Billy: Yeah, I think what Mark is saying is basically that there, there basically is no correct way to play the game, right?
Adrianne: I think it’s also too early in the life of this show for there to be enough norms and strategies established for people to be able to play correctly. Like, people need to come up with some strategies, like an alliance strategy or a sob story that uh convinces other people that they deserve the money more.
Billy: I still have a strategy.
Adrianne: What’s your strategy?
Billy: Okay, so on The Circle you get to have private conversations with people, right? You could slowly confess things in a sort of narrative way. You could like slowly open up to someone where you’re revealing more and more and things about yourself that seem like they’re leading some really interesting end point.
Regina: Wait, is this like the Arabian Nights strategy?
Billy: What is that? I don’t know what that is.
Regina: Yeah, Billy wants, like to have like a novel in advance and you’re slowly revealing it chapter by chapter.
Adrianne: Chapter, yeah, exactly.
Regina: So like they can’t-
John: This is good.
Adrianne: Wait, I just want to really quickly explain [laughs] uh the Arabian Nights thing-
John: [laughs]
Adrianne: -because it’s, that’s exactly what this is. It’s like the … It’s a book of stories and it’s basically in the beginning this princess or someone, she has to marry someone she doesn’t want to marry. And he’s like, “All right, I’m going to kill you on our wedding night for whatever reasons.”
“And she’s like, “Oh, but let me just tell you a story.” And she tells a story but the end of the story turns into a new story and then ends on a cliff hanger. And she’s like, “I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.” And then she just spins that out until he forgets about killing her.
Billy: Yes, exactly! You just need to become a really goo story teller. Like, people are going to want to keep you around. You could literally just steal a story.

[laughs]

Adrianne: Catfish with a story.
Billy: Right, yeah, and it’s literally like Moby Dick, or whatever. I don’ know.
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
John: It’d be, “Wow, that really happened to you?”
Billy: Yeah! I feel like this is a show that kind of lends itself to having some player at some point come in and completely like blow up the game.
Adrianne: Yeah, definitely.
Billy: You come in and you actually catfish as a celebrity, right?
Adrianne: [laughs]
Billy: Oh, or, I’m a celebrity. Figure out which one I am.
Regina: Oh, but you don’t know which one. Yeah. Mm-hmm [affirmative]. That’s really good. You can … Yeah, and then you get to name drop all the time and you get to make people jealous. That’s, that’s a good strat.
John: Hey, if the four of us were playing The Circle, who do you guys think would win? For me I think it, I think Billy would, would get it.
Billy: Oh, John, thank you.
Regina: I don’t know. You think it’s Billy? I think Adrianne might win because I feel like Adrian’s really good at, at the one on one conversations. Like, you would ask people really good questions. You would have really conversations and I think, I think if people were all playing the way people played in season one, Adrian would win.
Adrianne: I’d have to learn to use more emojis.
John: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
Billy: I, I actually think if she were able to play by herself we would all lose to Tammy.
John: [laughs] Tammy was my favorite player.
Regina: Tammy, she’s using all the emojis.
Adrianne: [laughs]
John: I wish they’d mixed in more of Tammy, it’s just it’s like the whole cast is like these like young people who probably go out for auditions all the time. Like the kind of people that would be cast on a real world-
Regina: They’re all actors.
John: Type show.
Regina: Yeah.
John: But then like someone who’s like-
Billy: [laughs]
John: -someone from like the undetermined voter panel on CNN, you know.hs
Billy: [laughs]
Adrianne: [laughs]
Regina: [laughs]
John: Just like. I want Tammy to um just be inserted into other shows.
Adrianne: [laughs]
John: Like, I want her to just walk onto the set of Big Brother or something, like just she’s there sometimes, like just a perirenal cameo, a Tameo.
Regina: [laughs] Okay. [music]
Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is Adrianne Jeffries, Billy Disney, John Lagomarsino and me, Regina Dellea. Thank you to the amazing Phil Robibero for our show art. And if you liked this episode or any episodes, if you even think we’re kind of okay … Actually, no, only if you like us, uh [laughs] please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Billy: This is the last episode of season two and that means we are taking a break to work on more episodes and figure out what the next season will look like. So if you have ideas, questions, things that you’ve been wondering about, uh you can e-mail those us at Hello@underunderstood.com.
John: The four of us that you hear talking every week on this show, we fund and produce every aspect of it ourselves independently and we really want to make sure that we can keep this thing going. We’ve built an incredible audience and so we’re going to start to explore some extra things we could do every week or people who would be maybe willing to chip in a few bucks on monthly basis or something like that.
So, if there are certain things you would like to hear more of or if you just want to let us know you would be willing to support the show, we’re going to be working on that stuff during this break. So, reach out. We always love to hear from you.
Regina: In the mean time, check out our website, Underunderstood.com or follow us on social media. We’ll update all that stuff and we’ll drop an episode in the feed once we know what’s coming next.
Billy: Thank you so much for listening this season. We’ll talk to you soon.