TVLINE | Was your elimination a surprise or were you pretty clear on where people were voting? Dude, as much as I wish I could tell you that it was very clear to me, clearly this shows how little of a grasp I have on the social game of “Survivor.” I was a little blindsided. Something that you actually don’t see in the episode, Savannah is working me all day, saying like, “Oh yeah, we should make sure that we have a Hina connection and an Uli connection, and when we meet up at the merge, we can do X, Y or Z. Jason, you’re so important. You’re such a special little boy. We just need to make sure that you vote with us so [we] know your loyalty.” And I’m all like, cool, great, no one’s telling me anything. I’m so down. Savannah’s so nice and she’s ready to talk.
This should be a “Survivor” advantage, for me to be able to watch other people’s confessionals, because if I saw any of what she was saying behind my back, like, dude, I am playing my Shot. Maybe it’s the starvation, but I’m like, “She’s pretty convincing!” I was convinced that she was on my side, that she was scared and in a position where she was making a risky play and I was facilitating that. So I think that had she not put in the work, the writing was on the wall, but she kind of gave me that rope to be like, “Jason, I can save you,” and I just hung myself with it, bro.
TVLINE | Besides the Savannah of it all, any other reasons why didn’t you play your Shot in the Dark?
In “Survivor,” you don’t have very much information to go off of, especially when you’re somebody on the outs where no one can vouch for me. I’m the only [original Hina] guy left. What’s the only way I can convince these people that I’m not a dirty rat or whatever the heck they think that we are. Your vote is your power, you know what I mean? And I think that I wanted to signal to them that, “Hey, I’m somebody who’s willing to vote for you.” And that’s going back to the Matt vote, right? What you don’t see is the second half of the conversation where I turn around and I say, “Hey, I understand that you all don’t need my vote tonight, but I will vote with you anyways,” just as a show of vulnerability to say and signal like, “I’m actually down to vote with you guys in this game. I never voted with Hina. I’m voting with you. Let’s move through this game together.” So I think that it’s not necessarily like, “My vote was needed for X, Y or Z.” It totally wasn’t, but when you play your Shot in the Dark, you lose that opportunity to show loyalty, and in a game where I’m already kind of very untrusted by everyone, I felt like that was something that I wanted to show them. Clearly, I was drinking a lot of my own Kool-Aid because it’s all like, “Hey dude, let’s roll, let’s get to the merge,” and then [it was] like “Screw you, see you later.” But I picked my lane and it was my own downfall.
