Austin Carty was the eighth Survivor to be extinguished from Exile Island on Tuesday night when the Casaya alliance stayed true to it's annihilation of La Mina.
While it looked like Terry was going to bring his hidden Immunity into play by giving it to Danielle, he didn't and Austin's self-predicted doom from last week came true.
The bonus for him versus his imaginary friend
Nick is that Austin managed to cash in on being the first member of the jury, which brings cool benefits beyond the million buck deciding power - as you'll discover when you hear what he has to say.
I caught up with him on Thursday for a chat:
Tashi: Hey hey Mr Grisham.
Austin: Hello, how are you?
Tashi: Fine thanks, summer's in full swing so I'm feeling very spinkly spankly.
Austin: For me it's very cold where I am.
Tashi: Where are you?
Austin: I'm in North Carolina.
Tashi: At the moment of you being voted out, you said it was very difficult for you to negotiate the line between integrity and playing the game of Survivor. What did you mean?
Austin: The game of Survivor is built around putting yourself first and lying, deceiving and cheating to get yourself to the end. It doesn't fit very well with saying you want to be honest. I try to dictate my everyday life through the lens of my Christian faith and I wanted to do that with Survivor too but I knew that was gonna handicap me.
You have to have a lot of luck to win Survivor no matter what, but you have to have a
lot of luck to win the game and not have to use people and deceive them in the process.
While I was out there I was amazed at how quickly that whole black and white situation of the truth versus lies became grey. You've got a million dollars at the end of the road and it's very easy to tell yourself: "Well, it's just a game, I'll tell a couple of little lies here." That's what I meant.
Tashi: I think that's the crisis for everyone isn't it? Facing questions like: How honest can you be? How much do you distance yourself from who you truly are to win? If you were to do it again - would you face the same dilemma or would it be different?
Austin: I think I'd have the same crisis. The way that I look at it now - I think Survivor's just a microcosm of life. You can lie and cheat and win and get the million dollars but at the end of the day if you've wronged people, people don't really respect you. I think it's the same thing in life. I would prefer the respect. That might make me an idiot but so be it.
Tashi: The crowd with you in La Mina - you all seemed to be genuinely good friends.
Austin: Yeah, we were. Also, with the Casaya people for the most part. I just went into it wanting to have a good time and make good friends so I never had any hard feelings about anything that was going on out there. The La Mina people, we got along super. I'm still shocked at how well we got on.
Tashi: Do you still see each other now?
Austin: I don't really see them, simply because where I live is so far removed from everybody. I saw several of them in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago but I still talk to a lot of people.
Tashi: Telling everyone that you'd thrown the Immunity Challenge was
such a dumb idea. Why did you do it?
Austin: Because I'm an idiot. It's hard to go through life as an idiot. I was convinced I was going home. Aras had given me every indication that I was going home and I had no reason not to believe it.
He and I had been really close at the beginning when we were in the Younger Guys tribe together and there were two things going through my head.
It was the first thing I'd done that could be perceived as being duplicitous and I didn't want them to see it later on on the show and have a bad opinion of me.
That was the thought going through my head and then in the same breathe there was a part of me that wanted to say: "Hey, I could have hung on longer." A stupid male ego thing which was so ridiculous to have 'cos I followed that up by saying that I still wasn't gonna be able to beat Nick and Terry. I don't know if they aired that but that's what I said.
Nick, Terry and I hung out there for about 20 minutes and we were talking all the time. When I was talking my voice was quivering whereas the way Nick and Terry were talking it was clear that they were fine.
Tashi: So basically you wanted to get sneaky and then felt bad about it.
Austin: That's precisely the case.
Tashi: You had a very stormy time on Exile Island. Talk about that for a bit.
Austin: It was the most miserable thing I've ever been through. It never stopped raining when we over there. It rained every day out there but the difference between every other day and the days Danielle and I were on the island is that the sun never came out. It usually rained, then the sun would come out but we were on the island for 72 hours and the sun didn't come out once.
Tashi: Did it change you?
Austin: I think it did. I've never had to go through anything nearly as hard as that and luckily I've never had to go through anything remotely as tough since but I whenever I'm going through anything that's miserable I'm able to draw from it.
Tashi: Did you and Danielle talk about anything besides strategy?
Austin: We hardly talked about strategy at all. We were so miserable we wound up talking about everything under the sun in terms of our lives.
I worked Danielle on stratgey for around thirty minutes to an hour solid when we first got there and I could tell that all I was doing was turning her off. I got to the point where I decided that if I was gonna stick around it would have to be based on them just liking me as a person and not because of a sales pitch.
We had no pitch to give.
Tashi: As the first member of the jury, what did you get up to in between Tribal Councils?
Austin: We just hung out, it was awesome. The person who got voted out after me - I can't tell you who obviously - but we watched the first season of Lost on DVD and ate like pigs. It was a blast.
Tashi: Did you talk about what you thought could be happening in the game?
Austin: Yes we did but you never really knew. Once you're out there's no real telling.
Tashi: When you're sitting in on Tribal Councils - how much does it impact on your decisions? How much can you actually work out?
Austin: It impacts quite a bit because you get to listen to everything that gets said so you try to glean from that what's going on but at the same time there's a lot of stuff that you don't see. The information I garnered at Tribal is what helped me in my decision at the end. After watching the show my decision would have been the same.
Tashi: What are your novels about?
Austin: They're dramatic fiction. They're bitter-sweet type stories. I'd compare them to Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook type thing. Mine include a faith element, though I try to keep it very under-exposed. They're basically glorified love stories. I've just changed to a new agent and she and I have done a major revision of my novels so we'll be sending it out to publishers very soon.
Tashi: Have you had books published already?
Austin: I had one come out in 2003 which I published myself and it did pretty well for a self published book so that helped me get an agent.
Tashi: Who's your fave Survivor of all time?
Austin: It would probably have to be Elizabeth Filarski 'cos she was so cute. I haven't crushed on anybody like I crushed on her. I liked Boston Rob too.
Tashi: He was great and he managed to do the whole thing of what you were saying at the beginning. He just lied and backstabbed all the way but didn't come across as being a bad person.
Austin: Yeah it's because everybody knew he wasn't trying to petend to be a super-good guy. I've met him and I really liked him.
Tashi: What are you doing next, directly after this?
Austin: I'm about to go gym and then I'm going down to Charlotte, North Carolina tonight - they're having a book signing.
Ends