early show 12 episode 6

Dan Barry's Early Show Interview

Video:

Transcript by James Barber for SurvivorFever.net  3.09.06 

HARRY: On Survivor: Exile Island, astronaut Dan Barry didn´t have the right stuff. So his tribemates blasted his million dollard dreams to the orbit.

<video clips>

HARRY:  And Dan Barry with us this morning. Was it tough when that fire went out and you had to walk away from that game?

DAN:  It was. It was really hard. I was having a great time out there, and I did not want to go home.

HARRY:  Do you feel betrayed a little bit by Terry?

DAN:  Well I was disappointed in Terry, that's for sure. In Survivor, you can't always count on your buddies staying your buddies, but I thought he was strategically smarter than he turned out to be.

HARRY:  Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So interesting. I wanna go back to the puzzle last night. Is it from watching "The Right Stuff" or reading all those books, but aren't you guy supposed to be able to solve puzzles, upside-down, blindfolded, in a vat full of Jello, something like that? I thought if anybody's gonna be able to do this puzzle, it's gotta be you. What was going on? What happened to you?

DAN: Hey, I'm great at solving puzzles, but I couldn't do it last night. (laughs) Sometimes you just have a day like that. You put together 12 or 15 days of no food, hardly any water, not a whole lot of sleep, and bang, some of those skills suddenly go out the window. So yeah, it was tough.

HARRY: That was one of the things about the show, because I thought yeah, you guys were ahead going into the challenge, getting the puzzle pieces - I thought, 'Yeah, they got an astronaut there. This is a piece of cake.' I'm gonna show a secret scene because how much weight did you lose?

DAN: 32 pounds.

HARRY: 32 pounds in how many days?

DAN: In about 15 days.

HARRY:  Unbelievable. Let's take a look at the secret scene.

[DAN: Just walking back and forth from there, and I'm out of breath.

DAN (solo): The last couple of days I find that the smallest task kind of leaves me out of breath.

AUSTIN: You guys, we got to get some food in Dan. He's laid out up there.

TERRY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DAN (resting in shelter): It's amazing, just walking around just saps your energy. I felt a little out of breath there, and I decided to sit down for a minute.

DAN (solo): It has been tough for me. Starvation is no pleasant thing, and that's exactly what we're undergoing now.

]

HARRY: Man. You're an astronaut, you're a marathon runner, everything else...were you prepared for what happened to you physically?

DAN: Well, I think I was prepared for those sort of sensations, and we can see that sort of scene, and then half an hour later we're diving underwater, holding our breath for 5 minutes, untying knots. There was a big time up and down in these situations, and yeah, you are hungry, you are tired, but at the same time, there's a lot of energy there when you...

HARRY: Did you guys make a mistake to start this all-boy alliance?

DAN: I don't think that was a mistake. I think that was a pretty good move, actually, because there were four boys and there were three girls, and it could've easily gone the four young ones against the three old ones, so I think it was actually the right move at the time.

HARRY:  Good strategic move, yeah. One of the things I appreciated about you, watching the show - and there was a great clip last night - it seemed to me that you really appreciated the environment you were in.

DAN:  I loved that place. It was so beautiful. Every morning - and it became a saying around camp - I would get up and say, 'Another beautiful day in paradise.' I saw two new species of bird every day. The iguanas could come up to the fire and you could just pet them.

HARRY:  Seriously?

DAN:  They hadn't seen people. It was completely back to nature. It was like rolling around in the mud because there's no parents there to tell you to take a bath.

HARRY:  In your own mind, looking back, woulda, coulda, shoulda, what should you have done differently to have stayed in the game?

DAN:  I think if I had been thinking a little better when I saw Terry vote against Ruth Marie - which was strategically a terrible move because Ruth Marie was friends with people on the other tribe, Cirie, we would have really had a powerful group together - I should have realized then he wasn't the strategic person I thought he was, and started building a better relationship with Austin and Nick.

HARRY: Interesting. And why in the world is a guy...how many spacewalks did you do?

DAN: Four spacewalks.

HARRY:  Four spacewalks, and zillions of hours in space, why would a guy with your kind of experience want to do Survivor?

DAN:  Hey, there's two reasons I went out there. One was when you're an astronaut, when you do spacewalks, you have a thousand people supporting you. They help you every step of the way. They ensure your success. I wanted to see how it would be when you don't have that kind of backup. What was it gonna be like? The other thing is I think Survivor is a really interesting model for how you pick space flight crews to go places like Mars.

HARRY: I'll tell you the other thing I was very impressed with, the way you handled the whole thing when they said you were out. You said, 'My bad,' you took your responsibility, and you took your lumps. Nice to meet you sir.

(shakes hands with Dan)

DAN: Hey, a real pleasure, thanks.

HARRY:  You bet. Really good.