An Interview with Alex
“Their Best Chance Was to Stay With Me” – An Interview with Survivor: Fiji’s Alex by David Bloomberg -- 05/04/2007 David picked Alex to win – why does Alex think it didn’t happen? What did he think about his own game play? Who should have stayed with him for their own benefit? More importantly, how did Survivor change Alex, and what are his plans for the future? Read on to find out all this and more! I picked Alex to win before this season of Survivor began, and for a while it looked like it might happen. But then everything got turned upside down for him. Why does he think his plans didn’t work? Was he expecting too much of people? Alex has a lot of good insight into the way people play – and the way they should play. Read on! RealityNewsOnline: Hello, Alex, and thanks for talking to RealityNewsOnline today. How are you doing? Alex: I’m great. RNO: What did you do to prepare for being on Survivor? Alex: Right before Survivor, I’d trained to climb Mount Whitney, so that came in handy. I took it from there in terms of building up endurance and added core training, cardio, swimming, areas I felt I needed to improve in addition to what I’d done before. RNO: What was your strategy going into the game? Alex: Going into the game, I wanted to sort of lay low at the beginning. I felt I was going to be perceived as a threat if I showed myself too early on. Let others take the limelight and do as much manuevering in the background, waiting until an opportune moment and then maybe play a harder game. RNO: Do you think you succeeded in that? Alex: I do. I think it worked out very well. I feel like I revealed I was playing a hard game when I got Michelle voted off. I would have preferred to wait to use the right moment to exercise that influence, but I didn’t really have much choice. RNO: Before the show, I picked you to win, and for a while it was looking good. So what happened? Alex: It was a series of things, I think. One, I didn’t take into account that people I was dealing with were not playing one step ahead. I always tried to form alliances whose mutual interests were aligned with mine, to get to the end. With Stacy and Dreamz, I saved them, but not even relying on that, their best chance was to stay with me. Stacy was just upset that nobody liked her at the reward challenge, but I didn’t think she would stab me in the back. At that point, any time you stab anybody in the back, you’re not going to get any of those votes and you’re going to be outside an alliance. Not seeing that angle was probably what did me under in the end. RNO: We saw Stacy trying to make nice to you this week. And you kind of reacted like I would have. Alex: Yeah, like alright, sure, whatever. It was a strange situation. I think she felt very alienated by the others. That reward challenge probably screwed it up for me. She was freaking out that nobody liked her. I was like, “So what’s the big deal?” They’re just six random people, but I think that really affected her. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic about it, but it was completely out of the blue. You just expect people to think along certain lines, but that’s not the case. It’s a good life lesson. RNO: It seems that you and Edgardo both thought Dreamz was a potential liability – and you were obviously right. Why did you stick with him rather than replacing him with somebody else in your alliance right at the merge? Alex: Simply because, at that point, it was me, Mookie, and Edgardo. At the merge, it was Stacy and Boo and us. We had been aligned with them before. As you saw before, there were problems with the Liliana vote. Stacy, as soon as she had any power, . With Dreamz we hoped would get Cassandra and with Mookie . But before any of these can be solidified, Mookie tells Dreamz about the idol and it’s sealed in blood. You can’t remove him at that point because he has information that is crucial to your alliance. RNO: Last week, you voted against Mookie and it turned out to be the deciding vote. On last night’s show, you said you went with your gut – did you really have no idea the vote was being split? Alex: I wasn’t sure if it was being split. I didn’t think it was being split for the reason they were splitting it. But I did notice that there was a lot of talking and arguing, and it wasn’t about politics. If it was not unanimous, there is some dissension, there is a chance there is a split vote. The only way my vote would count is if I vote for Mookie. I did not think they were all in unison. If they had been, I wouldn’t notice the tension and stress. You can read expressions and body language . RNO: Why didn’t you try the ninja approach last week instead of stirring things up with the immunity idol and everything? Alex: The immunity idol thing was Mookie’s idea. He went for that approach and ticked a lot of people off. I unfortunately got roped into it. By that point, there was nothing to be done. You can be a ninja by yourself, you can’t be a ninja with Mookie. It was more a question of circumstance. When I was by myself, they had no animosity for me personally. RNO: In the immunity challenge, it looked like you were just inches away from winning. What happened? Alex: I was trying to – I kept trying to scale that pole. My knees were scraping against the sides of that thing so bad that I ended up with a staph infection that left me on crutches after the show. My arms just kind of gave out on me after digging. I had this back injury that I’d been dealing with. I knew Dreamz and Boo were in a better state physically. I knew the only way I could beat them was by scaling it on my own. It just didn’t work at the end, but I definitely gave it my all. RNO: As you left for Tribal Council, did you think you had convinced Dreamz and Cassandra to keep you around, or did you pretty much know you were leaving? Alex: I pretty much knew I was leaving. But if I was going to be convincing, I had to convince myself it might work. There was a part of me that had to believe. The fact that I even caused them to doubt it and think about it after they had such a tight alliance . To the extent that it could have worked, it worked, and I was happy about that. RNO: What do you think when people make comments like Cassandra describing Yau-Man as “playing to win” – as if people should be doing anything else? Alex: I think comments like that – I don’t know if I want to use the word “false.” But it’s either naïve or a false statement, meaning she is herself playing to win and is unhappy Yau-Man is unhappy he is too. Everyone is playing to win. At least he is honest enough to say, “This is my strategy.” There was a lot of that going around, but everybody there was playing to win. Whether they could think their strategy through enough to get there, they were all playing to win. RNO: In your final words, you talked about kids who think their situation is hopeless and said they should never stop dreaming or fighting. Did you mention that because of your own life or for some other reason? Alex: Definitely my own life. I grew up in the east side of L.A., very poor and an immigrant, I didn’t speak a word of English until I was nine. My scenario would have been gangs or drugs. But I never stopped dreaming. I remember seeing a poster saying the justification for higher education and I knew I would get there. Even when faced with negativity and gang bangers and girls getting pregnant at 13, all these outside influences can impact people. These things can doom people. As you can see, I don’t give up, that’s one thing I bring to the table is a perhaps irrational but infallible belief in my ability to get something done. RNO: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your time on Survivor? Alex: I will say that it was one of the hardest experiences I’ve ever had. It brought me to a place where I was between going back to corporate America and it shook me up enough to pursue my own dreams, so I’ve started an academic consulting company that helps high school students and undergrads get into college and law school and business school. The company is Eventus Academic Consultants – Eventus is Latin for accomplishment of a goal. It is definitely a life-changing moment for me, helping people do what saved me, and I think Survivor played a huge role in that. I’ve done all three – college, law school, and I’ve applied to business school . RNO: So are we going to see you on The Apprentice next? Alex: (Laughing) Probably not, I don’t know if I can deal with Trump. RNO: I know what you mean, I couldn’t either. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us here at RealityNewsOnline, and good luck!