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00:00I want to start with where things end here, because, at least from my perspective, two kind of different moods from you, you know, on the other side of that final commercial break, where you just get blindsided, assumingly so, maybe you'll tell me otherwise, the votes are coming in, you're saying, all right, bring it in, everybody, you know, you got rid of the biggest player, good for you.
00:21On the other side, it almost seemed like sort of the gravity of the moment had finally hit you, that this was all coming to an end, and perhaps in a way that you didn't expect. So talk me through that. Is that true? What was sort of the emotional cocktail you were sipping over those moments?
00:36I mean, okay, two things. One, for the group, for the five people remaining, they're incredible players. They're making it to the end of the game, they beat me, and I think I'm an incredible player, and I also want them to feel no sense of bitterness coming from me, that everybody can go get my vote, and they better go play a hard game, right?
00:59So leaving, I want to make sure that the rest of this game is going to be awesome, and they also know that I understand that it's a game, and I have respect for big moves, I have respect for moves that need to be made.
01:11I did view myself as the best player in the game, I thought that I had the best shot to win of the people that were remaining, and when you take out the person that is the best in the game, that's the thing you're supposed to do on Survivor, right?
01:21That's how the game is supposed to go. And then when you walk down the path, and you realize you don't get to go back the other way, right?
01:32There's only one way down that path, the one-way path. Your game is over, and the reality hits you, that your family is going to see that you got this close, but you didn't get all the way.
01:43Your friends, my speech and debate team, like, my, you know, my Probstie group chat that is immortalized on television forever, which is so cool, but they're also going to see it, and I also thought, like, man, they're really going to think that I might win this thing.
02:05Like, I played a winning game in my mind, and then you realize, okay, but you didn't win.
02:13And now you have to deal with all of those feelings as well. But, you know, Survivor is that dichotomy, that you only get to have these incredible, powerful, awesome, you know, dive off the platform after winning a challenge, finally, moments, if they are juxtaposed with having to walk down that path by yourself, knowing that you came up just short.
02:41That dichotomy is why we love watching Survivor.
02:46Well, yeah, let's talk about what had you walking down that one-way road in the first place.
02:52Because, listen, I imagine you were picking up some odd vibes, to say the least, when, you know, Joe ends up sitting you down.
02:59But how much were you picking up on stuff that may have been happening?
03:04Did you have any sense at all in the moment as to any, you know, even just a glimpse of what Kyle and Camilla were doing behind the scenes, throwing you under the bus?
03:15You know, it was kind of a perfect storm, because Joe had come back emotional from, obviously, like an incredible thing that he was waiting to do for years.
03:29I take him on the reward, so he gets the letter that gives him the permission and the confidence and the moment and the mental clarity to go and have that moment with his sister.
03:39He has the moment with his sister, comes back, and in that vulnerability, Kyle and Camilla have a ruse that they perfectly implement with perfect timing and perfect structure.
03:49And then I come back, and I am expecting to have a strategic conversation with my strategic partner that I've been talking to about strategy every single day.
04:00And that's maybe something that we don't really see that much of in the edit, is how close Joe and I really were.
04:06We were on the same, you know, island every single day.
04:10There were five hours where we were separated, and that was it.
04:13And that was when they went to tribal council after the split tribal.
04:16So you don't really see as much of the relationship that Joe and I had, but he was, you know, the rock, and I was Kevin Hart.
04:23Like, we were tied together and making jokes and having a blast the entire time, and we had strategic conversations every single day.
04:31And so I went to go have our strategic conversation, and Joe is in his head about his sister.
04:36He's in his head about the letters he got from home.
04:38He's in his head about this ruse that Kyle and Camilla have spilled.
04:42And so he is coming at me with an energy that I'm not expecting.
04:45And after 23 days, I'm, like, so close to him that when you get that closeness, like it's a brother, like it's someone that close to you, and you're surprised by them, by the reaction.
04:57I didn't have the gentle touch to be like, yo, wait a second, what's going on?
05:02And instead, I hit him with the, like, did someone piss in your Cheerios?
05:08And that was enough for Joe to be like, nope, he's coming for me.
05:12And okay, cool, well played, perfect storm, amazing move, genius lie, and a really well pulled off blindside.
05:22So to that point about you, you know, elaborating on your relationship with Joe, what was your feeling when some of that dust settled, you know, as you continued on that one-way road to Ponderosa?
05:34Because, again, obviously you did not have, especially in that moment, a lot of the context as to what was happening.
05:41Did you feel burned by this guy that you considered a non-island brother?
05:45Yeah, it's hard to not feel burned, especially when you get voted out.
05:51The burn feeling is there, for sure, especially when you, you know, you've been on the same island, you've been talking every single day, waking up at one o'clock.
06:00You don't see any of our one o'clock in the morning conversations.
06:02We've had a lot of one o'clock in the morning conversations, middle of the night, figuring out strategy conversations.
06:08And you would expect that he would come to you and ask you that stuff, and when instead it's just your name on parchment.
06:14And how poorly he spelled my name on parchment.
06:19Bro, it's on the tribe flag.
06:20We wrote it on the tribe flag.
06:21You could go look at it.
06:22What are you doing?
06:23Well, listen, you were talking about playing chicken this entire time.
06:26Maybe it was just a shout-out to that with the Shah hen.
06:28It might have been.
06:29Jesus, yeah.
06:30That was the most upsetting.
06:34Overall, like, the burn goes away, and you just kind of enjoyed the fact that it took that much effort to get me out.
06:40So you don't spend that much effort getting out someone who didn't matter to the game or wasn't a threat to win the game.
06:46Well, you talked for a while about the fact that had everything gone to plan, Joe would have been someone that you wanted to sit alongside.
06:54And you didn't need the full Mitch of a, I know what you're all thinking at home, but you did explain the fact that you felt that you could be the one to take down this giant in a final tribal council setting.
07:06I would love to hear your logic about this.
07:09To be clear, the rest of that confessional is me going through the fact that I could beat every single person that was remaining in the final tribal council.
07:16So it wasn't just Joe that I thought I could beat.
07:21I thought that I had really great relationships with every single person that was on the jury.
07:27Cedric and I had a really good relationship.
07:29We didn't get to spend too much time together, but I thought that he would respect the game that I ended up playing.
07:33So if we're going through jury members, Cedric and Joe didn't have a relationship really at all.
07:39Then we get to Chrissy and I thought Chrissy was, you know, you watch her exit and it's like her and Joe didn't really get along.
07:46She didn't really play the honor and integrity thing with Joe and the big strong guy thing.
07:50And I'm neither of those things.
07:52I never said honor and integrity.
07:54You do not have a clip of me saying that on the show at all.
07:57Well, David, you know, Mr. Salute himself is like not gonna, you know, he already called Joe out for being dishonest or for not keeping his word.
08:08And so I thought maybe that would be a tough place for him.
08:12But also for Kyle, you know what I mean?
08:14Also for Camilla, that those people were supposed to be working with David and he kind of threw them under the bus.
08:20Whereas I was pretty honest with David the most of the time.
08:22And I think that he would respect my game star, I thought was a pocket vote for me.
08:27I thought that she would for sure vote for me because she was coming for me for so long and thought that I was a big threat.
08:31And I knew that she thought I was a big threat.
08:34And then I thought Mary would just kind of listen to the arguments.
08:38And with star saying, you know, Shaheen is the brain.
08:43I think that that was the perception out there.
08:46I think the perception was I was the brain that Joe was, you know, this great challenge threat.
08:52And obviously the firefighter and the daddy pulls on the heartstrings.
08:56But I thought the actual relationships out there, I thought that I had stronger relationships.
09:00And I thought that they viewed me perception, like the perception of me was that I was smart, strategic, and that I was running the moves.
09:07In actuality, I did do a lot of moves.
09:10I obviously planned the David move.
09:11I was a huge part of it switching back from Camilla to Chrissy.
09:15You see me shift the grounds from star or, excuse me, from Mary to star with Joe.
09:24And then you also see me kind of talk Joe off a ledge when Joe is going to throw a hinky and tell the person he's going to throw a hinky on.
09:31And I talk him off that ledge.
09:33And that's all my gameplay.
09:35My gameplay surrounded building consensus so that my alliance would continue to go through.
09:44Building consensus with people on the bottom requires a pretty deft touch.
09:49It requires a connection with them that they would feel real.
09:55And you see Mitch say that in this last episode.
09:58He says, I thought that at six we would make a move.
10:03I thought that at six we would make a move.
10:04Well, that's my gameplay.
10:06I made him feel like if you wait, we'll make a move together if you wait.
10:10But I made a lot of people feel like that.
10:12And explaining that to them, that they got to feel like they were part of the alliance, even though I was always going to stay true to Joe and Eva, I think is a pretty good pitch, if not a winning pitch at Final Tribal Council, especially considering the other people that I wanted to sit next to.
10:29So personally in my brain where my heart was at the time, that's kind of how I felt.
10:33Well, you mentioned the people you wanted to sit next to.
10:36I'm curious, you know, we found ourselves a bit in Kyle's head when you talked to him on Reward.
10:42And listen, this is part of your like bread and butter, right?
10:45He's talking through the pros and the cons of all of these options.
10:48So how much was Kyle's claim true here?
10:52Were you legitimately thinking about turning on Joe and Eva at a certain point?
10:57Or as he was claiming, was this you trying to fish for a little bit to see if he would bite on some bait?
11:02Okay, so I tried to run through all of the options with Kyle, and I even ran through the option of Kyle voting me out on that reward.
11:24To Kyle's face?
11:25To Kyle's face, yes.
11:26Because listen, it's not like he's not going to think about it, and I'd rather control the narrative there.
11:33And the narrative that I planted with Kyle and why he shouldn't vote me out is that if he's viewed as responsible for voting me out, then he goes next at five unless he wins immunity.
11:44Or he gets put into fire at four unless he wins the immunity.
11:47And so I wanted him to hear that from me, and then I ran through the same scenario with him.
11:53If I vote him out right now, same thing happens.
11:56I'm gone at five because you raise your threat profile.
12:00And so I thought that that was a way for me to try and convince him.
12:03And of all the Icarus moments, that might have been the biggest Icarus moment that I had out there.
12:09You know, I ran through Joe, I ran through Eva, I ran through Camilla, and we ran through Mitch as well.
12:14And I was trying to do that so that I could lower the idea of doing Eva, Camilla, Joe, me, him, and elevate the idea of doing Mitch.
12:27Because I want to explain why those things are bad.
12:31But obviously, a great player like Kyle is going to take something like that and go, okay, cool.
12:36How can I just use this against him?
12:39And he did, and he obviously did it very effectively.
12:42I'm curious because now you were sort of present in your first and last tribal council to these ruses conducted by Kyle and Camilla.
12:50You spent a lot of time with them.
12:52You had David sort of chirping your ear about like, oh, the two of them might be working together.
12:57How much of a sense did you get as to the things that they were doing behind the scenes?
13:03I was working with Kyle and Camilla.
13:05So them working behind the scenes was with me a lot of the time.
13:09And so the secret alliance wasn't so secret, at least to me.
13:15I knew that they were working together.
13:16It wasn't a surprise to me that they were working.
13:19It was a surprise to me that they found it to be a secret alliance.
13:21I probably didn't talk about it that much because one of the other things that you don't see is Camilla and I kind of had the same thing going.
13:29Camilla and I also had, you know, in passing conversations.
13:33And you see David getting paranoid about it.
13:35You see like other people being worried about my and Camilla's relationship.
13:39And even Joe, I think, was worried about my and Camilla's relationship.
13:43And so that was certainly part of Camilla's strategy.
13:47It seems very clear that she wanted to do secret alliances.
13:50In the back of my mind, I was always worried about the flip side of the secret alliance.
13:55That if it does get found out, it becomes such a big problem for you.
14:00And so I had some obvious alliances and I also had some secret alliances.
14:05But, you know, I knew that they were working together when we were on Vula.
14:09It was just a matter of how much are they working together and do they have any opportunity to do anything.
14:15I didn't think they did because I checked their bag.
14:22You brought props to the props.
14:26And so I thought like we were good, but, you know, we weren't.
14:33And they used the idol and Thomas went home.
14:38It's just been so wild to be able to track your journey over the past, I guess, two years at this point.
14:45Because obviously, 46, you make a huge impression.
14:49You know, you tell me a bit the next year that's a bit purposely so.
14:51But you expressed so many times on the island, like how much even your expectations, which I would say are even more magnified given the fact that you were out to Fiji once before, immediately changed once your feet hit the beach.
15:04Whether it was the people you were playing with, whether it was the alliances, whether it was just the fact that you were actually playing a survivor now.
15:11And I think it speaks to those elements of adaptation that, you know, considering what you and I talked about not once but twice before the season, you were able to kind of, to your earlier point about being an overcorrective driver, like stop the car, shift it into another gear and be able to make it as far as it did to the point where, as you're claiming, like you had made it to those final three.
15:33Hey, listen, we know you know how to make a good argument and it sounds like you had some good supportive evidence.
15:37So, I mean, it's been such a pleasure to get to follow you through your journey here and to see how it ends up coming to a close right now.
15:47I know it obviously is not the most ideal thing, but from what you were able to experience over the course of, again, a really long time coming, it's been an outright, you know, honor for me to get to experience it from my own perspective.
15:58Thank you. And for me, same thing, man, I've wanted to play this game for, you know, a couple of years now and the opportunity came up and to be the first Persian man to ever play survivor is a crazy responsibility.
16:12And I'm, I, I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of how I represented myself, my family, my culture, my community, you know, my speech and debate team, speech and debate people in general.
16:23And being at the end of the season, the end of the journey, knowing that I got to do it for two years and it came up at such a really like insane, important time in my family's life.
16:39You know, my mom just is still recovering from a back surgery that she had six weeks ago in the middle of the season.
16:46She has the Eiffel Tower in the middle of her back right now. It is crazy. She has all these pins.
16:51She's, it's very hard for her to move around right now, but you know what she gets to do is sit on the couch and rewatch episodes where her son's on television and, and his hair looks fantastic.
17:01And that makes, that's very important to my mom who was a hairstylist for 40 years and, and like through all that, it's like, yeah, I go home, I get sixth, but most people go home.
17:12So, you know, 17 people are not going to win this game and one person is, and you can only ask for so much.
17:19And I've, I've been really delighted to see my gameplay out there. I've been delighted to see all my antics out there. Ridiculous though they may be.
17:28Um, but, uh, but yeah, man, it's been an awesome, awesome ride, especially even being an alternate was an awesome ride too.
17:35I got to go out there with all those psychopaths from 46 and getting to have that experience, seeing behind the scenes.
17:42If that was all I got, that would have been enough. I would have been excited enough to have been like, cool.
17:47I get to see them on television and fine. I think some people frame this experience in a really negative way and it's unnecessary.
17:55You don't have to do that. You get to control your mental. You get to control what goes in here.
18:00You get to control that if you want to. And I understand that this experience can be so traumatic for people.
18:07It's, and it's hard out there to deal with someone looking you in the face and telling you the truth for 20 days and then stabbing you in the back, becoming your best friend, telling them things you've never told anybody.
18:17And then using that against you, using your vulnerability to destroy you.
18:22But if you know that you signed up for that and you know that you were willing to do that to other people, holding it in here is unnecessary.
18:28And instead you get to choose to hold in here all the amazing experiences, the gladiator style setting that they built for you to go run all the amazing, like the incredible things that you got to see yourself pull off.
18:44I didn't eat for 12 days, 12 days. I'd survived on one croissant and a half a coconut.
18:50If you would have asked me to do that five years ago, I'd have told you you were nuts.
18:55And yet I did that. And I can hold that with me every single time I get hangry.
18:59It's like, no, man, you're not hangry anymore. You're fine. Just go and enjoy.
19:04And the life lessons that Survivor will teach you, there's nothing else that will teach you what you're capable of.
19:11And even like the application process will teach you a ton because you have to take your dynamic and complicated and wild life and bring it all down to three minutes and submit an audition tape.
19:23And how do you even do that without doing a level of introspection that will benefit you in your life?
19:29So apply now to be on Survivor.
19:32There we go. Well, I'm so happy that you're experienced with both savory and sweet.
19:36And it was what you wanted to eat.
19:38Well done.
19:39Thank you. Thank you for eating this interview in a manner of speaking.
19:42Always great getting the chance to talk with you, man.
19:44I wish your mom nothing but the best as well, especially in her recovery.
19:48And amazing talking with you as always, sir.
19:51You have a great day.
19:53Oh, I see. I know. I know.