[Jeff Probst]

With only 15 people left in the game, are you beginning to worry about numbers?

Do you feel like you would rather play with Veterans, Newbies or does that label not affect your decision one way or another?

With there being so many swaps and shake ups, do the original tribes mean less and less as different combinations of people begin to meet? Or is there still a sense of loyalty to your original tribe?

[Ryan]

Numbers are everything I either want to go into the merge with a majority, or I want to go in with very little obvious allies. That way I'll either be in a good long-term spot, or I'll have the potential to skate by for being a non threat. Right now it seems like the latter is going to happen. Brooke leaving kinda stinks cause we had some sort of relationship I could have built off of. On our tribe, Gary is 100% voting with Chrissy, Lydia, and Jim so I have the decision of trying to break them up somehow or to get rid of loyal soldiers in Taino. Man those Tainos aren't really good at the game. Why aren't they talking with other people? Like you're gonna push people like Gary away if you don't talk to them.

I think I'd rather play with Vets in general, cause they are more likely to be active and are generally just more comfortable and know how this freaking game works. Now as for the vets we have right now , no I don't want to play with them. That's probably just hindsight though, knowing non of them are truthful with me. The label itself doesn't really matter to me, like if these newbies on Taino were playing good games then it wouldn't freaking matter. Instead they came in with the mentality of "we have each other, we don't need anyone else". I'm the only person that they've tried with Like come on!

The original tribes are definitely starting to mean less and less for me, but I think a lot of people in this game aren't thinking that way, or at least not acting on it yet. I hoping they act on it very soon, so I will live to see the end game. With that being said, obviously there are smaller groups of people that I think are pretty loyal to each other. The Trino, Danni with Brian Lydia, Joaq with Dale and Caryn, Me with Gary and Drew. Obviously there's some flexibility and overlap in there, but that's roughly the way I see it.

I'm assuming we have a giant ass merge tonight and time over the weekend to recoup and get to know one another. If we have another one of those back-to-back tribals before the merge where we all vote together, but we can't strategize together, then I'm kinda worried lol. I don't know what type of crap is being talked about me on the other side.