Jeff Probst has been hosting the reality TV show, Survivor for so long that he already has a plan to defeat his wife if they were to ever compete with each other. The Emmy award winning host talked to People magazine on 2014 and when he was asked if he would vote his wife (who he has been married to for 4 years) off, if they played Survivor together, he replied:
"Absolutely. Lisa and I would have a simple code. Whenever we'd see each other, we'd hold up our fingers. One finger would mean, 'I love this. Everything's going great.' Five fingers would mean 'I'm in trouble and I'm ready to go.' If she held up one, I'd do what I could to keep her in the game. If she gave me four or five, I'd gut her – and then I'd use that move to my advantage. Of course, I say that now, but if I saw someone messing with my wife, I'd go crazy."
Aww. Isn't that adorable? If they did play together, Probst's annual salary and net worth would skyrocket from an already high shelf (rumors say it's $40 million). He would be a participant, a host and an executive producer! But we would definitely like him to play because at 53 years of age and 15 years of being a host, he has never once played the game himself.
He has, however had to deal with an array of participants, some of whom weren’t great people. Probst recently talked to EW about sexism on the show.
“One of the key elements in the premise of Survivor is that the game is to be played with people from various walks of life. In a perfect world, it’s a tapestry of people from different parts of the country, raised with different religious and political beliefs, with a range of IQ’s and physical abilities. You then put them in extreme conflict, in this case, being abandoned on an island, deprive them of everything else and force them to work together while voting each other out. It’s a tremendously stressful situation and typically, the tougher it gets, the more a person’s façade is stripped away and the more truth is revealed.”
This was, of course in regards to Dan Foley, Rodney Lavoie, Jr. and Will Sims II. Apart from talking about it to the press, Probst also decided to take matters in his own hands when he called out Dan in the reunion episode.
Dan, who is from Maine, had been terrible towards women throughout the course of the season; this includes calling Rodney’s mother some derogatory words. He had then went to the press just after he was eliminated, suggesting that he had been a victim of bad editing. He did not apologize for his actions in the reunion show, instead decided to stick with his original story.
Probst just could not let him off the hook. Him and the rest of the producers decided that they had had enough of Dan's behavior and being blamed for naught. So, they showed the raw footage of the incident, which proved that Dan was not a victim of bad editing and the show did not make Dan look bad. It was Dan that made Dan look bad.
Probst also called out Will for his terrible behavior towards Shirin Oskooi. Both Dan and Will had been terrible towards her but they apologized with, “I never would’ve said those horrible, nasty sexist things to her if I’d known she was abused as a child” as an excuse.
They definitely were not excused.