Joe Hunter is still coping with losing “Survivor 48.”
The 45-year-old fire captain exclusively spoke to The Post about his third-place finish — and named the jurors who he thought were going to vote for him to win that didn’t.
“So it sounds silly now. People will probably laugh at me for this because when you watch it all back, I understand more,” Hunter stated. “But here was my mindset going into it. You see these comments of like you get blamed for people being there. ‘Oh, I think he sent me there. He sent me there.’ But then you get one vote. So it’s like, how did we get here?”
“I don’t feel that with my responses I scuffed it or blew it,” he added of his final tribal council performance. “I feel that some of those marks, like for example, Chrissy [Sarnowsky]. I felt Chrissy, just the fire relation as crazy as that might sound, that’s a deep bond. And so I thought maybe that would default to me.”
“David [Kinne], regardless of how it plays out now, but in the moment, I thought, his big mission was the people that win challenges — he calls them the challenge beasts, not me — I thought maybe that will loop into a vote,” he said.
“Mitch [Geurra] believe it or not, we had such a deep bond off camera that we talked about. Maybe that would be a vote,” Hunter continued. “So there’s a few that I thought. You never know. I’m like, as long as I don’t mess this up, I might be in an okay situation. And then Shauhin [Davari]. I thought it would be a mutual like, ‘Yeah it happened,’ but we were so close out there. I’m like, ‘This might swing my way.’ That’s what I thought.”
When asked why he thinks he ultimately only got one vote to win, Hunter replied, “I’ll say this. The jury looks like a very tough position to be in. And it’s emotion and it’s perception. And they’re all there together and your perception of what happened, I think, unequivocally factors in.”
“So not necessarily how good Kyle [Fraser] was or wasn’t. I’m aware of the fact I did or didn’t do something wrong. Obviously that’s a fact,” he said. “So it’s a hundred percent on me. … [But] I do think that there’s elements to the jury that make it complicated. That could be bias, could be emotion. And do I think that factors in? Absolutely.”
Hunter revealed it was “extremely difficult” to film the aftershow right after losing the game to Fraser, 31.
“I still am in that place with it,” he admitted. “You want to celebrate. It’s nothing against the person. You are feeling it. But I’ve noticed with this exit press. It’s so difficult — this concept of just blame. ‘This person did this and this person did this.’ And there’s not a lot of, ‘I messed this up.’ So it was also me just reflecting like… I didn’t think it would go that way, but I’m grateful to be there.”
“And then I just was kind of picking myself apart,” Hunter added. “Like, man, I must have messed a lot of things up. I must’ve done a lot of things wrong because that’s what one vote represents. So that was what was going on — was just the reflection. I turned internally and said, ‘How many things [did you mess] up?’ So I was trying to process that and also show my kids: how do you handle a loss? And I’m grateful for that, because they make me a better person.”
