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Connecting four western US states with a straight line isn’t hard to do on a map: many of them are already in a square grid, letting an easy vertical be drawn from Kansas to the Dakotas or a horizontal from Kansas to Nevada, for example. But completing that same challenge on the ground, using rental cars, last-minute flights, and a $5,000 budget is a lot harder—and that’s not even considering that your opponents might steal a state from under you. Welcome to [*Jet Lag: The what might be the world’s largest Connect Four game ever constructed.

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Developed by Wendover Productions, the first season of this state-hopping game show aired last month on YouTube and Nebula, with a second season of international proportions dropping June 29th on Nebula. The show starts as a race in Colorado and doesn’t cease in its energy throughout the next three days of travel, as two teams of two travel to state capitals to complete challenges to claim a state as theirs before rushing on to the next. To keep this interview spoiler-free, we won’t dive into the twists and escapades pulled throughout the series (or in the second season), but they’re hilarious and often use logistical or geographical skills I’ve never seen in game shows.

Wendover Productions founder Sam Denby has been working for months with *Jet Lag* cocreators Ben Doyle and Adam Chase on creating a game show for streaming. Denby sat down with WIRED to discuss developing a travel series with carbon offsetts, shooting an entire show with iPhone 13 Pros, and flipping the *Amazing Race* techniques on their head. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.



[#video: What were some of your inspirations or cultural touchstones for** _**Jet Lag**_**?**

**Denby**: The biggest cultural touchstone is basically the obvious one, *The Amazing Race.* I've always loved that show, but I always thought it could be better. It's kind of a traditional broadcast game show shoved into the context of travel. The travel is just like the background to the competition. I thought that you could flip that and turn the travel into the competition. You can absolutely be better at traveling than someone else, especially once you throw in all these uncertainties and real-world circumstances. Also, we realized that you can't just show up at a random place with a broadcast film crew, but you can with a YouTube or vloggy-type setup. Because of our low-budget nature, we can embrace the spontaneity of real-world travel in a better way than the bigger-budget broadcast equivalent.



[#image: you explain to readers your filming setup and how it varies from other reality/game show film crews?**

Having done three seasons, our camera setup is now the simplest it's ever been. The first season we filmed on iPhones, GoPros, and a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema that was terrible to lug around the entire country, especially in Vegas in 110-degree heat. We even brought a mini drone that never saw the light of day. We learned that we needed to streamline production to not let the production get in the way of the content. So we simplified to iPhone 13 Pros, Rode lav mics, and some 360 cameras. We are always moving, so we needed cameras that are just super reliable, easy to use, charge, and data-transfer. Right now, we're an all-iPhone 13 Pro production. They’re so easy to find, so if we break a device halfway through, the ability to just get a direct replacement within an hour or two is huge.

**What changes in season 2?**

In season 2, the game format is completely different, and it's a completely different location. Basically, it's a race to circumnavigate the world. We started in Denver, and the first team to get back to Denver after crossing every line of longitude and covering a distance greater than the Tropic of Cancer (about 22,500 miles) wins. There is a record for circumnavigating the world on commercial flights; that's something people regularly do. Usually the people who are doing it have a little bit of help, or it’s high-profile enough that the airlines will try to make it [Sign Up
##### [Sign up for our Games and never miss our latest [gaming tips, reviews, and didn't want to do any of that. We wanted to do the real version, having to deal with check-in lines and security lines—and what actually made us more excited to do it now was the added complexity that Covid introduces, like having to think about border openings, Covid tests, entry forms, massive security lines, and understaffed airports.

**How did you stay safe while filming a state-hopping game show during a global pandemic, especially given states' differing levels of safety and Covid management?**

This format is somewhat dictated by it being pretty good in the context of Covid, because it developed during Covid. In a lot of the other productions we do, we have to do like months of prep work to arrange interviews, site visits, and go on location. We'd have to start locking dates months in advance, which is really tough when you never know when the next Covid wave is. Here, all we do in advance is just design the game; we don't spend any production money. We could decide two hours before that we're not doing this now, because Covid rates are too high, or because this person on the cast tested positive, and not lose cost. We've only ever filmed when rates are relatively low and in the post-vaccine era, and then we go into the normal safety precautions of vaccines, testing prior to departure and on arrival, and masking.

**Could you tell me more about how you offset the flights' carbon emissions by** [**funding replacements of Burmese What was your main takeaway about carbon offsets after releasing a video during** _**Jet Lag**_**’s airing titled** [**“The Carbon Offset big conclusion from that video was that the carbon offset market is essentially a scam, because it incentivizes scam offsets, through incentivizing the cheapest offsets. What makes that even worse is that carbon offsets can actually be effective\! It's not an impossible proposition. It's just that the system doesn't work towards it. So we identified a certifier \[[the Gold that genuinely accounts for all of the various aspects that make for an effective carbon offset, and it does the best job of creating a system that assures that they actually fulfill those different guidelines. The worst cases we saw were among big certifiers that were overstating their offsets by three or four times, so we offset 10 times more carbon than we were estimated to output, because then we were pretty sure that even if this program ends up being a big scam, there's still some benefit.

We don't want to inspire others to go and do something like this with their friends. A lot of people have asked us to sell a packaged game to play with friends in a similar manner, or to sell the *Jet Lag* season 1 cards. We will never sell a piece of merchandise that encourages others to travel on planes. I think it is very likely in the future that we will, for example, create city-based versions of this that we can sell as merchandise, ones that are still fun and travel-oriented but do not meaningfully add to carbon output.



[#image: episode of** ***Jet Lag*** **airs on Nebula a week early, which is sort of like an expansion pack for YouTube, full of educational or STEM video creators. What role did Nebula and that community play in starting the** ***Jet Lag*** **channel?**

This channel was built after Nebula, as a streaming site, became a success. It's designed from the ground floor to be a channel optimized for the Nebula ecosystem. Full transparency, that’s because this is a really expensive channel to produce on a per-video basis. We're spending an amount that requires this to be a certain level of successful to just break even. But Nebula has continuously been a force multiplier for creators. We're only at a quarter-million views, and this has already broken even financially with just that many views and Nebula sponsorships. Without Nebula, and the fact that Nebula allowed us to pilot this, it would have to be way larger and way more successful, and it would be a risk that we probably could not take. They gave us a check to turn this crazy format into a Nebula original, and we learned that the format was good.

**Without spoiling the series, what’s the most emotional moment you’ve had as a contestant?**

Without spoilers? Maybe not the *most*, but I think it’s easy to miss as an audience member just how exhausting this is. It is a brutally exhausting show to film. Imagine a bad travel day where you end up waiting between flights on connections and going in and out of airports all day. Yeah, this is that for 14 hours a day on back-to-back days. Of course, we go run around outside, but anytime outside we're on the clock, and then we go back into the sterile environments of the airports. It feels really good to put a ton of work into something in a small amount of time, fun but grueling work, and then be done with it and be able to go home and nap for a little bit.

Source: Wired

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