Andy DehnartBear Naked Granola founder Brendan Synnott, the entrepreneur/dragon who was voted out of Survivor Tocantins last night, has a new business venture coming, and he’s tied its early marketing to his slayer on the show, Benjamin “Coach” Wade.
His new company Evol Burritos is giving away 50,000 free burritos–you get a coupon for a free “all natural and organic, made from scratch” frozen burrito if you sign up on its web site. But the offer is only good until “Survivor 18 concludes, or when ‘Coach’ gets kicked off…whichever happens first,” as the site says.
As I told Brendan when we talked a few minutes ago and he mentioned his new venture, if I could eat 50,000 burritos to guarantee that Coach would be voted out, I would. Clearly, Brendan is a smart guy, capitalizing on the Coach-hate to bring attention to his new company.
Coach told me before the game that he would have Brendan “by the balls” because he knew about Brendan’s success and status as a multi-millionaire, but Brendan told me that while that may have affected how people voted at the end, it didn’t impact the game day to day. Brendan said “everybody knew from it being leaked” but “the impact your prior life has on the game isn’t as severe as I thought it would be.”
Regarding Coach, perhaps surprisingly, Brendan said, “I still like the guy” and called him “totally amusing” and “totally harmless.” Brendan said Coach is “a really smart guy” who “talks this big warrior game” but “what he said and his actions never really correlated.” Brendan also said, “I think he reads a lot of books, I think he reads a lot of fantasy,” and “they all tend to blur together.” That affects Coach’s “ability to differentiate himself from that and reality.”
And Brendan said that “the edit he’s getting, he completely deserves. He talks about himself incessantly, but he’s totally harmless, he’s not malicious.”
Regarding his game play, Brendan joked, “I’ve let down everybody” for not getting Coach out. Brendan said he was ultimately voted out because Timbira thought he had the immunity idol, and thus wanted him gone. And Jalapao’s diminished numbers meant they “were naturally inclined to do whatever” Timbira wanted.
The Exile alliance that got so much attention fell apart quickly because of that, and because, as we saw on TV, he and Taj decided to “keep this on the DL,” and so Brendan said he “removed myself and didn’t proactively spend” time with them after the merge. When he did finally start talking strategy with Taj and Stephen, it was “obviously too late,” he said.
Interestingly, Brendan told me that he and Taj created a system of hand signals to communicate at challenges, and were able to tell one another whether or not their alliance mates (Sierra and Stephen) were on board, and whether or not they’d found the idol back at their camps.
Sounds like the secret one-finger system I use to communicate with Coach while watching TV.