When Joe Anglim and I get on the phone the morning after his exit episode aired, he’s sitting at home, bright and early, watching the sunrise in his home state of Arizona. But his mind is squarely focused on where he was under the Cambodian sun only a few months earlier, holding onto a sixteen-foot pole for dear life, slicked in sweat.

Sounds hot? It’s not. It’s a cold sweat, and it’s one he had felt before.

“I fainted once at my cousin’s wedding,” he tells me. “I was his best man, and I lost my legs. I got this cold sweat faint feeling, and almost passed right out at his wedding.”

Joey Amazing felt the not-so-amazing feeling again during his final day on Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance, five minutes before he actually fell.

“I remember my legs and arms getting numb. I was trying to stretch my neck,” he says. “Luckily, I knew what that feeling was like, and I remember feeling it coming on.”

Joe felt the faint coming on while he was competing against 55-year-old Louisiana firefighter Keith Nale, almost a full hour and a half into the immunity challenge. (“If there was one person I was nervous about, it was my good old boy Keith,” Joe says of his opponent. “He has this old man strength, and this resilience about him. I love him to death for that.”) With his body on the cusp of giving out, the so-called “Joe Brochacho” says he made one last-ditch attempt at winning against the plan-sticking, hard-spitting, better-to-be-the-hammer-than-the Nale.

“I looked at Jeff, and I knew I needed to do something,” he says. “I said: ‘Jeff, can we go down to one hand, or can we add on more lengths?’ And Jeff looked over at Keith and said: ‘Keith, is that okay?’ And Keith was like, ‘Yeah, Jeff, that’s fine.’ Jeff was going over to hand us more lengths of pole to add on, and I just remember this electricity shooting up through my whole head, and then I saw stars, and I knew I was going down.”

Joe thinks that if he had tried to change the challenge up even twenty minutes earlier, he might have won the competition, putting him in the elite class of fellow Second Chancer Terry Deitz and fellow Worlds Apart veteran Mike Holloway, two of the five Survivors to win five immunities in a single season. Instead, Joe fell, not just on challenge beach, but at Tribal Council, his torch snuffed after 32 days in the game.

To his credit, Joe was only vulnerable for six of those days. In every other occurrence, he was immune from the vote, either due to his tribe winning challenges, or his own winning streak initiated immediately at the merge. Indeed, ever since his first challenge back in Season 30, Joe walked around Survivor with a veritable target painted right on his back, one that only grew bigger and brighter by the day.

Before the game began, Joe did not feel he could wash the target off his back — and so rather than trying to hide the thing, he went in the opposite direction.

“You went Full Joe,” I tell him on the phone, and he laughs and admits it: “Yeah, yeah, I did.” He has a strategic reasoning for the decision, too, explaining that he felt that by increasing the threat level, it might actually increase the targets on others.

“That’s why I would say, ‘If I lose immunity, I’m going home,'” he tells me. “It’s almost like saying, ‘I’m the big bad wolf.’ If you say it enough times, then people acknowledge it, but they might eventually forget about it. Like, ‘Yeah, we all know Joe’s a big threat… but who are the real threats in terms of numbers?’ I think that was more the theme this season: Common denominators and these little voting blocs. If I just kept isolating myself, then hopefully people would use me as a number, if they think they’re on the bottom.”

“My strategy was to commit to everything and say yes to everything, and play a pretty simple and honest game, but make sure you’re in the middle of every vote,” he continues. “I wanted one side to always need me.”

Perhaps the strategy worked to some extent, as Joe was involved in the plan that sent Stephen Fishbach packing. It did not work a second time, however, as Joe was sent packing last night, hours after his literal challenge collapse. One look at Joe’s Ponderosa video shows that the man was none too pleased about his fate.

“I was pretty fired up. I was pretty angry,” he admits. “I really did trust some people in this game. At some point, you have to. I put a lot of trust in Jeremy and Tasha at the beginning of the game. I gave my loyalty to them. Even after the merge, me and Spencer formed a close bond. We were getting close. And I had Keith. And me and Kimmi were developing a relationship.”

“You have talks with people that are on a deeper level,” he continues. “You’re hoping that’s going to speak some truth to how they vote. That’s where it gets murky: The relationships versus the strategy. So it hurt a bit.”

But there were feelings beyond pain, too, like the joy he felt over reuniting and going Full Lembo with his father Pat during the family visit.

“It was a family dream,” he says. “It was his dream, and it was my dream. There are no words. It was a million dollar memory.”

(As a quick aside, any and all Joe fans can thank his father for the amazing man-bun. Here’s the secret origin, according to Joe: “Me and my dad had a dollar bet a long time ago. I was growing my hair out. It was three or four years ago. He bet me a dollar and said, ‘I bet you I won’t cut my hair before you cut your hair.’ And I said, ‘Alright! You’re on.’ All the sudden, I have a little man bun and he has some shaggy hair — and then eventually he has a ponytail and I have a big old man bun. It kind of became this dumb joke, but now it’s stuck on him. I think he kinda likes it. It’s funny. We’re two little peas in a pod.”)

Joe says the combination of losing the game and having an intensely personal experience with his loved one culminated in an exhausting emotional reaction in the immediate aftermath of leaving Tribal Council.

“You literally feel every single emotion at one time,” he says. “It’s powerful.”

His memories of the game are still powerful, too. Joe says he not only thinks about what he did right and what he did wrong, but also the simple pleasures about living on a remote Cambodian island for a month of his life:

“I love being outside. Fishing, camping, hunting… I grew up with this stuff. I would go fishing every couple of hours just so I can get away from camp for a little while. Why not go snorkel and visit this Cambodian reef for a couple of hours and enjoy this amazing opportunity? How often do you get to go out and snorkel every day? A lot of people thought I was doing these things for strategic reasons, but in all actuality, I was just kind of bored and looking for stuff to do!”

But Joe’s excellence in the outdoors can become an anchor, if not an Angkor, in the game of Survivor. It’s the brutal reality of this cutthroat competition, and one that Joe fully owns: “Your weaknesses can become your strengths, and your strengths become your weaknesses, especially once you hit the merge.”

And yet, Joe says he wouldn’t have played the game any other way, even if it was at the cost of his shot at the Sole Survivor title.

“For me, I really wanted to give the fans the best,” he says. “If I go out there and I don’t really compete — if I sag back and I don’t really play — I don’t think that’s what the fans want to see. I think it makes for a better season if I go out and compete. And I don’t like to lose in general. I don’t think I can go out there and not compete. It’s against my nature. Even if it didn’t help me strategically… it’s just better this way.”

“I look at it like a battle, and that’s what I love about Survivor,” he adds. “I love the battle.”

PREVIOUSLY: Kelly Wiglesworth Dives Into Her Side Of The Second Chance Story

Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Digital Trends and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.

Visit Parade.com every week for exit interviews with the Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance cast, and click here to read all of our preseason and ongoing coverage.



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