"Hey Faco,
I just went to a Survivor open casting call here in Pittsburgh, March 1st. It was at a local mall and pretty pathetic to say the least. It was from 1-5PM, I got there kinda late and I was only the 40th person to audition. To top it off, I'm 20, not 21, and they still let me have my 3 minutes. I think fans are hopeless - we know that these open calls are pointless because they are going to hand pick 16 people off the streets of LA who have never seen the show. No one goes to these calls anymore and cbs is making a mistake and losing fans by casting actors and models who only passively play this amazing game."

"I appreciate your input, but if you look at the profiles of the casts from each season, a large majority of them are from LA and are "models" or bartenders. Look at this excerpt from wikipedia:

"The program angered its fan base when Jeff Probst revealed that Survivor: Fiji ignored the thousands of viewer applicants and instead used their own recruited players. It was revealed that Gary Stritesky was the only actual applicant chosen, while the rest used on the show were recruits. [55] While Probst defended the process by claiming they wanted to find more “diverse” players, 10 of the recruits were from California (13 the previous season) and many were young unemployed actors and found in places like bars and MySpace.com. [56] Many fans felt that going away from the original selection process of using people of all ages from around the country produced inferior and uninteresting players. One example was Melissa McNulty, a Fiji recruit, who was unable to even make it to the island, quitting because of a panic attack merely five hours before departing. [57]

So, with all respect, they DID reveal how they are picking the constestants, so it just makes me wonder why they hold these open casting calls anymore."

"I've applied for Survivor 17 and hope to get on. I'm 51 and have watched more tv than ran marathons. Since my open audition in Syracuse I started to get serious about getting on the show. I'm on the treadmill about an hour a day. A fitness coach at work has given me the Ultimate Survivor workout to get in shape for the show. I'm also going to hit the pool soon. Used to be able to swim a mile and that skill would always help on the show.
I was on TV once before on Who wants to be a millionaire. Met Regis, and both of my brothers were also contestants on the show, but alas the fastest finger was to fast for us.
Thinking about what skills would be good to practice for the show? Starting fire from scratch, Building a shelter? Any other ideas?
I led an expedition in the NY Adirondack Mountains to find a lost WWII Army Airplane lost in 1944 and eventually located it. I also discovered a shipwreck in Lake Ontario that a piece of it's in the Smithsonian. Hopefully I'd be interesting enough to be on..."

" I got an email from the Survivor Media Group ."