Survivor is one of the best reality shows of all time, and has influenced countless competitions series that followed since its 2000 premiere. Two new seasons air each year on CBS and streaming with a Paramount+ subscription, and there are few players more popular than two-time winner Parvati Shallow. And she recently explained the wild reason she decided to play in her first returning season.
Parvati is part of some of the best Survivor seasons, especially Heroes vs. Villains and Micronesia. She won the latter one, thanks to her iconic gameplay and alliance The Black Widow Brigade. In a clip from the Chicks in the Office podcast Instagram, the legendary reality TV personality explained how her win was actually predicted by a psychic before she went back to compete. In her words:
I went and saw a psychic with my friend. This was before the cast has been announced, so nobody knew I had gone and just played Survivor. So she’s like doing her tarot cards and she’s like ‘Oh, you just got back. You were doing some kind of challenge. You did ok but you’re going to go back and you’ll be victorious.’
How crazy is that? Parv should have probably gone back to this psyhic, because her prediction turned out to be totally on point. She won the title of Sole Survivor and the million dollar prize that came with it for Season 16, so that was one accurate tarot card reading. And aside from pulling off the W, she had plenty of truly iconic moments throughout Micronesia.
While at this point Shallow has competed on a whopping five season of Survivor, at the time of getting her psychic reading, returning players were not commonplace. She revealed her initial reaction to hearing she’d go back and win, saying:
And I was like ‘Girl, you’re crazy. I’m not playing Survivor again. Like people, don’t do that more than once.’ So then when they called me to go back and play I was like ‘The prophecy is coming! Oh my God, I have to do this!’
Later in the same podcast interview, the star of The Traitors Season 2 (which is streaming with a Peacock subscription) went on to share how this prediction by a psychic influenced her while competing on Survivor Micronesia. In her words:
So I go out and I’m like ‘I’m gonna win.’ The seed was planted in my mind that I was going to win. So even when things got shaken up and looked really bad for me… like we had the tribe swap, and I was away from Cirie and Amanda my closest allies I was like ‘It’s fine. It’s gonna be fine. Because I’m gonna win.’
How wild is that? It sounds like that tarot card reading put some added confidence behind Parvati, even when she was met with challenges filming Micronesia. While her game could have been ruined during a tribe swap, she forged an alliance with fans Natalie Bolton and Alexis Jones, who would go on to join the Black Widow Brigade alongside Parvati, Amanda Kimmel, and Cirie Fields. This was a winning strategy, one that eventually earned her the million. And even when former allies like Ozzy and James were mad about being blindsided, she still managed to have enough jury votes to win in the end.
Parvati also made to the Final Tribal for Heroes vs. Villains, although she ended up in second place, with Sandra Diaz-Twine winning. After competing on Winners at War, she finally got her second win on Survivor Australia vs. The World.
The beloved competition series will return to our screens when Survivor 50 premieres on February 25th as part of the 2026 TV schedule. As for Parvati, we’ll have to see what reality competition series she pops up in next.
