How The Traitors Fooled Survivor Legend Rob Cesternino: "Game Respects Game"

Rob Cesternino: I feel fantastic. I've gotten so much love and support over these last couple of days, and I appreciate it so much. 

Yeah, I was really surprised that Donna, for one, put me on her shortlist, 'cause I felt like that I had a very good relationship with Donna Kelce and that Donna Kelce — who I really, really liked in the castle — who is in her 70s, I thought it was so impressive that she came out there. I was in the first car with Donna Kelce, and I really wanted to be there to help her as much as possible.

I think she was a little bit out of her element in all of the challenges that we were in. I really wanted to make sure that she was doing okay, and I think she was struggling in some of the challenges, which we didn't see as much in the show, but I was there for Donna Kelce, and I had some good conversations, I thought, with her. 

It was a big surprise for me to find out that she put me on the shortlist, and I think at that point her back was against the wall and what she was trying to do, bless her heart, was try to frame Michael Rapaport. I had voted for Michael Rapaport at the round table, so I think she was trying to put out a couple of names of people who wrote down Michael Rapaport's name at the round table.

It was a very late night at the castle, and this is the time of the game in which they tend to do a murder in plain sight, so as it got later and later, I started to think, 'Oh wait, it could be one of those nights,' and I was luckily able to tell Tiffany [Mitchell] about what was going on. I heard the conga line break out, and then I ended up going to the kitchen with Mark and Candiace.

I had been very close with Candiace during my time at the castle. I really have a lot of respect for Candiace, and I think that she was an amazing player, which I thought was a Faithful, but also amazing as a Traitor. I was trying to warn them about the murder in plain sight that had happened. In talking about the conga line, she had brought that up earlier.

She was trying to drum up support for the conga line for a little bit, so I had heard her mention the conga line earlier, so I knew that she was the person who started the conga line. When I brought that up to her, I was really trying to say, 'Oh, but you started the conga line,' and I didn't mean it accusatory. I mean it as like, 'Okay well obviously you're not a Traitor,' but I think that really did spook her.

Then when I was going to bed, I started to think, I wonder if I put my foot in my mouth with Candiace? That that could come back to bite me, but I still felt safe because I thought that it was a murder in plain sight, and I did not participate in the conga line. So, I thought that I was gonna be fine the next day.

You know, Rob Rauch was playing chess a lot. He played chess with Ron [Funches]. I saw him play chess with Tiffany. He would often be at the chessboard talking with different people and trying to play chess. I would have never played at the chessboard because I felt like that would have helped the perception of like, 'Oh see what a strategist he is,' but Rob was able to do that.

I probably went in that room looking for Natalie [Anderson] or Monét, somebody else to warn.

I think Rob R. has been really impressive and game respects game... As a Traitor, I think that he was such a wild card that you didn't know how it was gonna go when he got picked. I think that the show loves to pick people like Carolyn [Wiger], that it could go either way in terms of how it's gonna go, but I think that Rob has been really locked in in a way that I don't think anybody could have predicted... It's been really impressive to watch the three of them.

All three of them on their own right are incredible Traitors, but to then all be pulling in the same direction and be working together so closely, it's really going to be very hard for the Faithful to counterpunch this.

They even caught Donna Kelce. I think that it was Candiace who was the person most responsible in figuring out that Donna Kelce was a Traitor. I mean, that shook me to my core.

I had a couple of loose thoughts. I wanted to keep all of the CBS reality people together cause I kind of felt like, 'Okay, hey, there's five of us, so let's keep those numbers together because then we won't get banished to the roundtable.' That didn't really stick.

Then, also I thought my strategy was if you can't get out a Traitor, get out a bad Faithful. You may not always know who the Traitors are, but you will always know who the bad Faithful are. When you have a person like Michael Rapaport who was very unproductive in helping us figure out who the actual Traitors are, there is addition by subtraction, and to me voting out Michael Rapaport at the roundtable would have been a win-win if he was a next level Traitor that some people were saying he could be, great. but as I thought, he was somebody who was just distracting everybody from figuring things out, so I feel like I take him out of the equation, and I think that the Faithful will have a better chance of finding a Traitor at the round table.

I talked to Boston Rob and I'm fortunate because I've had a 20-year friendship with Boston Rob, where he's just the GOAT in so many of these different shows and franchises, and he's a pro's pro when it comes to doing all this. His advice to me though was [imitates Boston Rob] 'Hey, Cesternino, don't talk to anybody, don't say anything, just be quiet, just talk in the confessionals.'

That is good advice for somebody, but I didn't want to just come there and do nothing, cause you could go home for any reason. I felt like the worst case scenario for me would to have been to gone to have gone to the show and not done anything, and then have been murdered without getting the chance to show the world that I could try to play the game.

I wrote a book, it's called the The Tribe and I Have Spoken and that name is really about the tribe of reality TV fans that I feel like I've helped to cultivate over these last 16 years of getting to do the podcast. So, I wrote this book that really catalogs the history of [Survivor] from my perspective, from where it started in 2000 all the way throughout going into Season 50.

I put the finishing notes of the book as I was on my way to Scotland, and so it does lead up to my life as I was getting ready to leave Survivor behind and ultimately head to The Traitors.

What's the worst that could happen? I feel like I've already had the worse case scenario, and it wasn't that bad, so I would love the chance to return to the castle if the powers that be ever deemed it was a good idea. 

I love what they did with Dorinda [Medley], and I'm so happy to see that she's having such a nice start to the season as opposed to what happened to her last season.