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What does it really cost to survive — on reality TV and in real life?
In this episode of Financial Feminist, I sit down with Parvati Shallow — Survivor legend, and author of “Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power.” We talk about her journey from growing up in a high-control spiritual community (yes, basically a cult) to winning multiple seasons of Survivor and becoming one of the most iconic players in reality TV history, and how the scarcity mindset shaped her money, relationships, and self-worth for decades. Parvati opens up about what it means to rewire survival into abundance, motherhood’s lessons in surrender, queerness, and why playing “villain” on TV mirrors the punishment women face for stepping into their power. If you’ve ever been told you’re “too much” or felt you had to play small to belong, this conversation is for you.
Key takeaways:
Scarcity mindset can drive success — but at a steep cost.
Parvati shares how growing up in a scarcity-driven environment made her ambitious and bold, but it also robbed her of authenticity and peace. Her financial and career choices were fueled by fear of not having enough, which eventually left her burned out and disconnected from herself.
Survivor isn’t just a game — it’s a mirror of real-world power dynamics.
From being infantilized by production to being villainized for using her charm and strategy, Parvati highlights how Survivor reflects societal misogyny. Women were punished for playing smart while men in the same position were celebrated as heroes.
Money doesn’t automatically equal security.
Even after winning Survivor, Parvati described hiding her million-dollar check under the sink and still not being able to afford food. Without financial literacy and a supportive mindset, sudden wealth can feel like “blood money” instead of freedom.
Rest and surrender are forms of power.
Pregnancy and motherhood forced Parvati to soften — to see rest as productive and trust her body instead of constantly pushing. This shift helped her reframe success from constant hustle to alignment and self-care.
Living authentically requires burning down old narratives.
Parvati’s divorce, exploration of queerness, and writing her memoir allowed her to shed patriarchal expectations and survival patterns. Now, she defines power as living authentically and saying no to misaligned opportunities — something money and healing finally made possible.
Reality TV reveals systemic scarcity in America.
Parvati and I discuss how game shows often feel like one of the only “paths to wealth” for many people, reflecting a broken system where healthcare and wages fail to provide basic security — forcing people into extreme survival scenarios for financial relief.
Notable quotes
“I was at JFK flying back from the finale with a million-dollar check in my purse and could not buy a sandwich because my card was getting declined.”
“It was like I married the patriarchy — he imagined his life as CEO and me standing beside him, beautiful and supportive, making him look good.”
“Now I realize rest is productive. When you’re well resourced, your nervous system can actually handle bigger opportunities.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 00:49 – Growing Up in a High-Control Spiritual Community
≫ 01:38 – Survivor as a Reflection of Childhood Survival
≫ 05:27 – Finances Before & After Survivor: Scarcity Mindset
≫ 10:55 – Rewiring Beliefs About Money
≫ 16:31 – Survivor’s Evolution: Sexism, Strategy & Alliances
≫ 20:01 – The Million Dollar Check: Aftermath and Guilt
≫ 22:59 – Game Shows, Scarcity, and the American Dream
≫ 26:09 – Pregnancy, Softness, and Realizing Patriarchy
≫ 32:41 – Postpartum Anxiety & Returning to Survivor
≫ 39:00 – Reality TV: Control, Editing, and Mental Health
≫ 41:00 – Writing the Book & Redefining Power
≫ 50:00 – Queerness, Authenticity, and Burning Down Old Structures
Parvati’s Links:
Website: https://www.parvatishallow.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pshallow/?hl=en
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Meet Parvati
Parvati Shallow is a cultural icon, mother, and one of the most influential figures in reality television. Best known as a five-time competitor on the hit series Survivor and breakout star of The Traitors on Peacock, Parvati is widely recognized for her gameplay, charisma and ability to connect with audiences. What sets her apart is not just her legacy in competition-based television, but her evolution beyond it into a storyteller, healer, and now, author.
Her debut memoir, Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Reclaim My Power, will be published on July 8 by The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In this raw and deeply personal book, Parvati traces her journey from early fame at 25 as the $1 million winner of Survivor: Micronesia – Fans vs.Favorites, through the emotional aftermath of fame, trauma, and grief. She opens up about losing her younger brother, enduring a difficult divorce, and confronting the shadows of her past in order to reclaim her strength and identity. The book also chronicles her unconventional upbringing in a Florida commune, her early career hustle in LA casting rooms, and the intense landscapes of Survivor, where she built, and sometimes battled, her public persona.
Parvati’s television career began on Survivor: Cook Islands in 2006, where she quickly became a standout for her charm and competitive spirit. She solidified her place in reality TV history with her win on Micronesia – Fans vs. Favorites, and continued to earn acclaim in Heroes vs. Villains and Winners at War. Her recent appearance in Season Two of The Traitors US brought her to a new generation of fans, showcasing the same social savvy and strategy that made her a fan favorite.
This year, Parvati is set to take her talents global, joining the cast of Survivor Australia this summer, where fans can expect her signature mix of social savvy and fierce gameplay. She recently placed fourth on NBC’s Deal or No Deal Island, bringing her charm to a new format that merges high-stakes decision-making with tropical intrigue. Fans were also excited to see her return to The Traitors castle for a surprise appearance in the series’ third season.
In addition to her illustrious career in reality television, Parvati holds advanced certifications in yoga, meditation, and breathwork, and is a passionate student of healing and therapeutic practices. Her training spans structural integration, Somatic Experiencing, acupuncture, nutrition, sound healing, hypnotherapy, IRF, and IFS. This commitment to holistic wellness is a central part of her life and voice today.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Imagine winning a million dollars and not being able to even afford a sandwich at the airport. Buckle up because today we’re joined by multi-time Survivor winner, Parvati Shallow, and she’s pulling back the curtain on everything you thought you knew about being a contestant on reality TV. Parvati Shallow is the winner of Survivor: Micronesia, fan favorite on Heroes vs. Villains, and now author of the new memoir, Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power, and she also just won Survivor again this time on Australia V The World.
Parvati Shallow:
I was at JFK flying back from the finale with a million dollar check in my purse and could not buy a sandwich because my card was getting declined.
Tori Dunlap:
And if you don’t watch Survivor, maybe you watch a little show called The Traitors where she has been featured twice. Parvati and I dive into her journey from growing up in a high-control spiritual community. She might not call it a cult because legally she can’t, but I’ll call it a cult, to becoming one of the most iconic reality TV players in history to unpacking the scarcity mindset that drove her for decades.
Parvati Shallow:
I would go to a friend’s birthday party and I would be talking to someone and I would be in the back of my mind while I’m smiling and having a conversation with them thinking, what does this person want from me? Are they trying to get something? Can I trust them? Are they using me for something? It was like this game that I could not break my brain out of.
Tori Dunlap:
We talk about money, survival, queerness, motherhood, and what it actually takes to stop playing small and start living fully in alignment with yourself.
Parvati Shallow:
Because I was so in the survival mode, it’s like an impressionist painting. If you’re up too close, you can’t see the landscape. That’s how I was living my life. I was just running through my survival modes.
Tori Dunlap:
If you’ve ever been called too much or felt like you had to contort yourself to belong, this episode is an invitation to burn it all down and to build something real. Let’s get into it, but first a word from our sponsors.
You’ve been called the Black Widow of Survivor and a cultural icon, and I have been obsessed with you for years, but in your memoir you say you were really just really good at surviving. What did that kind of survival actually cost you?
Parvati Shallow:
I think it cost me my authenticity. I didn’t know who I was for most of my life or what I wanted, what I needed because I was always putting other people first so that I could be liked, so I could belong, so I could get my needs met, my basic survival needs.
Tori Dunlap:
I think one of the things that made you so good at Survivor and other reality shows was ultimately the things that made life really tough for you too. Can you take me through some of those formative moments in your life before you went on Survivor the first time?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah. I was born into a really high-control spiritual community that was run by a very charismatic, controlling female guru, and she controlled everyone’s lives. She was arranging marriages, she was putting relationships together. When people would have babies, she would sometimes adopt their babies as her own. My parents got me and my sister out of there when I was nine, but we were there for a long time, so the blueprint of my life was established in that environment.
So what I was able to do without even realizing that I was doing it was take all of the map that was laid out for me in childhood and turn it into something that I could monetize and be successful at in my adult life with Survivor, with reality television, with these games that are power games that I was basically living in as a kid without even realizing it. So it’s really interesting. I mean, what I’ve done with my book is really kind of work through that and put the pieces together so that I could see with more consciousness what I have been doing for my whole life. But I’m also really proud of myself looking back that I’ve found a way to sublimate these sort of distorted modes of living and turn it into something that I’ve been really successful at and paved a full on career out of.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you feel like, and I don’t know, do you feel like it was a cult? Can you say the word cult?
Parvati Shallow:
I mean, I don’t want to be in any kind of drama with anyone.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure. I can call it a cult.
Parvati Shallow:
You can. You call it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Great. I mean-
Parvati Shallow:
It has all the hallmarks.
Tori Dunlap:
Absolutely. Charismatic leader, control. Yeah. So I think one of the things we’ve talked a lot actually about cults and these kind of institutions on the show, and one of the things that every guest has talked about is having to shape-shift in order to survive, in order to navigate that and realizing the power dynamics are changing all the time. And you’re exactly right. That’s basically the definition of Survivor. That’s the whole thing.
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, exactly. And I didn’t realize it until much later. I was like, but someone asked me the other night, they were like, “Did you really not have any sense of what you were doing that it stemmed from your childhood?” And I said, “No, actually, because I was so in the survival mode, it’s like an impressionist painting. If you’re up too close, you can’t see the landscape.” That’s how I was living my life. I was just running through my survival modes going fast, trying to keep up, trying to achieve. I’m very ambitious, so I just wanted to succeed and do well by the standards of life that the world sets out for us. And I was just going on autopilot for so long. So it wasn’t until my divorce where I was alone for the first time, where I could actually sit with my own thoughts, with my own energy, and this was just a few years ago. So it really took me a while to figure out how intense that kind of upbringing was.
Tori Dunlap:
Did you have any moments at any of the times playing Survivor where it felt like you were back to being a kid again? Does that make sense? Were there triggering moments?
Parvati Shallow:
Oh, so many. I think that’s what these reality competitions like doing the show will do. It infantilizes us as competitors because all of our autonomy is taken away. The production tells you when you’re going to wake up, what you’re going to do that day, what you’re going to have for breakfast, what you’re going to eat.
Tori Dunlap:
What you’re eating, where you’re shitting. Literally, where you’re shitting.
Parvati Shallow:
Truly. And we have to walk in a single file line in the jungle, and I’m like, “I’m like a 6-year-old.”
Tori Dunlap:
Here’s a cult. It’s a cult. And Jeff Probst is the leader of cults. No, it’s kind of crazy.
Parvati Shallow:
Look, I mean so many parallels in the book to my culty childhood and Survivor. It’s very similar.
Tori Dunlap:
So what were your finances before Survivor, as transparently as you’re willing to be, what did your money situation look like before you went on the show?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, I wrote about this pretty extensively in the book because I think it’s helpful to share information about money, especially as women. You’re doing the Lord’s work out here. I was a waitress and a bartender and a cocktail server, and I did odds and ends and gigs here and there, but I didn’t really enjoy being in an office, so that wasn’t the lifestyle I chose. So my money situation was very sort of up and down, very erratic, sort of influx. I always paid my rent, I always paid for my car.
I could handle my stuff. I was never in debt, but I was always sort of scraping by the seat of my pants because it was motivating for me. Not having enough money and not knowing where I was going to make rent from next month was really motivating. It lit a fire under me to put myself out into the world in a bold way. And so I lived that way for a really long time.
And before I won Survivor, I wrote this story in my book because I had no money in my bank account because I just played in one Survivor, but it was like a year in between playing and then winning, getting the money actually, because the whole show, they had to edit it and then it aired, and then we did the live finale and I got the check. So I didn’t have a job in between playing and winning Survivor and then getting the actual check. I had no money in my bank account. I was at JFK flying back from the finale with a million dollar check in my purse and could not buy a sandwich because my card was getting declined. I had no money at all.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow. That just feels like a weird metaphor for America, the promise of an American dream and maybe having it, but also not being able to afford a sandwich.
Parvati Shallow:
It’s just out of my grasp.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, right. I mean, Parvati, we’ve had 200 plus conversations about money, and I don’t know if I’ve ever heard somebody articulate that feeling. And I know it’s true for people of I’m scared of making money because maybe my driver ambition will go away. If I’m secure, maybe that’s actually a bad thing because then I might get lazy or I might get complicit. I think that’s so smart, and I’ve never heard somebody articulate it like that.
Parvati Shallow:
It would force me out of my comfort zone because I was like, “I need to make money to pay my rent this month.” And the same thing when I got pregnant, because when I got pregnant, I was married and my husband at the time was working for this great company. He had a business, an MBA from Columbia. It seemed fine, and then he lost his job and I was seven months pregnant and I was like, “Oh my God. They gave him no severance.” I was like, “How are we going to pay our rent? I’d quit my consulting job.” And so I just started a life coaching business. I paid all of my savings. I had $9,000 in my savings account, and I just paid it all to this woman to teach me how to build a business.
And I think it’s because I had nothing, and I had this pressure of I’m going to have this baby to take care of, and I have to have a house for her to live in, and I have to have money. And so it just forced me into this place of, okay, well, I’m willing to do something I’ve never done before that I could fall flat on my face because I need the money. So it was like this very sort of fiery drive. And I had to heal that, undo that, and completely transform that driver so that I could be motivated to create from something that wasn’t scarcity.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ve always wanted to bring somebody onto financial feminists who had won a reality TV show, especially Survivor, because it’s my favorite because of that story she just told about winning millions, but then not being able to afford a sandwich. And don’t worry, we’re talking plenty about money after this word from our sponsors. So when we come back, Parvati opens up about how fear and scarcity fueled her drive for years and how she learned to rebuild her money mindset from the ground up. Stay tuned.
Without spending too much time on that, what was that process like for you? Was there a transition moment? Was there a practice that helped you? Was it therapy? What was that?
Parvati Shallow:
It was mostly through coaching. I had a couple of coaches that worked with me around my money mindset and just first of all, seeing that I was motivated by scarcity was helpful because I didn’t know that. I didn’t have a consciousness around it until I started working with these coaches. And then we did all of this kind of deprogramming around my money mindset because I was born into a cult-like environment where all of the money that everyone made was given to the guru and being poor was associated with being spiritually closer to God. So I had to undo that too, where it was like, “Oh, having money doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Having money is spiritually okay and supportive even. God wants you to have money. Abundance is associated with spirituality and success, and that’s good.” So I just had to completely rewire my brain. I read a lot of books too. Overcoming Underearning was a good one. I don’t know if you’ve read that one.
Tori Dunlap:
I haven’t.
Parvati Shallow:
Or other people have read it. That one was really helpful because really tactical and weaves in your community and all these sort of other areas of life that are related to money because it affects everything. If you don’t have any money, you can’t go out to dinner with your friends and you can’t go buy a new outfit to if I had a press interview or something. So it’s just, it’s connected to every area of life. So I had to upgrade every aspect of myself and allow for myself to give myself permission to flourish rather than be caught in swirling chaos and scarcity. It was a process.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you feel like playing Survivor, especially the amount of times you played it helped or hurt that scarcity mindset?
Parvati Shallow:
Well, Survivor is an arena of scarcity, but at the end of it, somebody can win a million dollars. So it’s like you’re living with nothing, but at the end you could have everything or this life-changing amount of money. So it’s kind of a mindfuck like that.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Parvati Shallow:
But yeah, I don’t think it helped.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I don’t think it helps a lot of things. Well, okay, so I don’t know if I told you this when we finally got to meet, but I was asked in an interview in 2020, it was like this fun little, it was part about my business and then part some rapid fire, and one of the questions is like, “What is the best game ever invented?” And I said, “Survivor.” And my friend looked at me, I showed her this interview, I was proud of it, and she’s like the best game ever invented, and she had never seen it. And I was like, “What do you mean? It was of course the best game ever invented,” and she could not understand. And so I went through the whole thing of like, okay, it’s a sociology experiment. You put strangers on an island and they not only have to literally survive, figure out, especially in the early seasons, it was like, “How are we going to build this shelter and how are we going to survive basically a tsunami?”
And then as it’s evolved, it’s like what is allowed versus not allowed? What is okay in the construct of the game versus what is not? And 20 years ago, you couldn’t say, I swear in my grandmother’s life, you can say whatever the fuck you want now. And so I think it’s just is such an interesting, I mean obviously only as a viewer such an interesting thing to look at as who humans are, what happens when you put humans together who would never have otherwise met, but also what they’re made of or what is going to break them in that way. I think that especially with the logistics, obviously they’re crazy. So you have to take off work, you have to isolate for a week just for casting, and then you disappear for weeks during filming, and I’m giving all this background in case somebody hasn’t seen Survivor in a very long time. How did you financially plan for all of those logistics or not plan for those disruptions? How did that work for you?
Parvati Shallow:
My God, every time I played Survivor, I moved out of my house. I just moved out. I was like, “I’m not going to pay my rent.” And that’s actually a crazy thing to do because I was only gone for a month, but in my brain I’m like…
Tori Dunlap:
Who knows how long I’ll be out here?
Parvati Shallow:
I know.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s Exile Island this season. It goes on for three months after.
Parvati Shallow:
Completely insane. But I do think that this is a product of my upbringing because I really thrive in chaos, so I would create just a little extra insanity before I left so that I couldn’t be too afraid of what I couldn’t control because Survivor is an arena you can’t control. Any aspect of it, everything is controlled for you down to the minute you’re taken on the boat and thrown on the island. So I was like, okay, well, I don’t know because I’m not home. I’m not going to be able to work, so let me just move out of my place. I’ll throw my stuff in storage or just get rid of all of it. I was basically very Bohemian about that lifestyle and I was just flying by the seat of my pants.
I was in my 20s when I played Survivor back to back to back, and I didn’t have, when I came back, I had never set myself up with any kind of real career paths. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was so good at Survivor, they kept asking me to come back. So I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll just do this or maybe I’ll be a TV host or something.” And I just tried a bunch of stuff, but I certainly didn’t think, oh, how do I financially prepare? I was just like, how do I go win this game?
Tori Dunlap:
When I think about-
Parvati Shallow:
I didn’t want to have any responsibilities at home. I think that was it.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, you didn’t want to have to worry about two things. You’re like, “Let me just go all in and worry about this very hard thing that I have to do for the next 39 days.”
Parvati Shallow:
Totally. I would just cut off my world at home. And then so my real life and real world was the bubble of Survivor, which was pretty problematic.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, totally. Well, you’re literally escaped from reality and you’re in this new reality.
Parvati Shallow:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
What I was saying before of the reason I love the show so much is that again, catalogs almost just America generally or what we will or won’t accept as a society. So you’ve played, or is it five times now?
Parvati Shallow:
Mh-hmm.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh dude, that’s so many times. Okay, so what in the first season or two would’ve been “allowed” that wasn’t allowed later? One of the examples I think I can give is there were a lot of very inappropriate jokes about gay people in the first couple seasons, and that would not be allowed, I think, or would not be okay now when folks are playing. So is there anything either in the tactics for the game or the just kind of mindset or environment that can almost track where we’ve moved either as a country or as a society?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, I think in the early days of Survivor, there was more outright bullying and cruelty. And it wasn’t jokey or light-hearted. It was just mean spirited. And that was sort of encouraged at the time. I think it was because of the format of reality television. It was new and people were looking at it as we need to have a clear villain and a clear underdog or a hero, or they were archetypes of people. And now that just won’t fly. What’s shifted is there’s snarkiness, there’s making fun of people, but it’s more humorous or it’s more kind of intelligent the way that people will put people down. So it’s funny and highbrow villainary I guess is happening these days. And I think also what has is the attitudes around women and women in power and women using all of the aspects of our power that we have, including our sensuality or flirtatiousness or ability to charm someone. It’s more accepted and then lifted up when women do that, it’s more celebrated than it was in the past when I played. It was very like shame, shame, the Scarlet Letter.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I had to ask you about that because again, early seasons of Survivor with you playing, there’s a reason they called you the Black Widow is I think very intentionally, and you can tell me maybe it wasn’t intentional. It was like, “I’m going to flirt and I’m going to get what I want, and then as soon as you don’t see me coming, I’m going to stab you in the back.” And it’s brilliant gameplay. But of course there’s immediate sexism in that which is like, “Oh, she’s just putting her tits out and whatever.” Talk to me about that transition now where, yeah, it’s more socially acceptable, but also we got to do what we got to do as women to do. It’s a game. We got to do what we got to do to win.
Parvati Shallow:
It’s a game. We got to do what we got to do. And there’s this such an entitlement with the men where they’re like, “Oh, wait, she shouldn’t be.” Especially because it’s Survivor, it’s already so inherently masculine, the container. So the men are like, “This is my arena and I am going to take care of you, pretty little lady.” And then if the woman comes back around in viper snaps him and kills him when he least expects it, he’s like, “Wait a minute, I was providing for you. How could you do this to me?”
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, she was so pretty, and it turns out she’s smart too. Crazy.
Parvati Shallow:
Oh no, you can’t be both.
Tori Dunlap:
You can’t be hot and intelligent.
Parvati Shallow:
You can’t be pretty and smart. But of course, I know the tropes. I use that to my advantage in the game. I know the guys think I’m a dumb dumb. So I definitely played that up and man, were they upset about it like really very hurt egos from my seasons. And we still see this.
Tori Dunlap:
We do. We do see it a lot. No, we see it a lot. I think they’re more likely to maybe disparage women quietly or in a confessional. They’re less likely to do it with other people around. And I think, yeah, misogyny has gotten well in some ways quieter. It’s less obvious, I think. And in that way it almost makes it worse because I can’t see it in the same way.
Parvati Shallow:
Well, they’re hiding it more so it’s sort of lurking in the shadows, but you can feel it.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, absolutely.
Parvati Shallow:
Oh, I can feel it. I’m out there. I’m like, “Oh, it’s the same shit. It’s just glossier.”
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. Well, when I met you for the first time, finally in person, I had a friend who is English who hasn’t seen American Survivor, and I was literally just talking you up and I was your hype woman. I was like, “She’s one of the best to ever do it. She was super hot and sexy and all these things, and then she’d stab you in the back later and it was so good.” And I think that a lot, especially for a really long time, we just thought of good Survivor players as the ones that we could “root for.” And of course, the second time they brought you back, you were in the villain camp. And that is just kind of misogynistic on its own of like, “We’re going to make this woman who is very good at this game, okay, we’ll acknowledge she’s good, but we’re going to label her as a villain in order for it to be socially okay.” If a man would’ve done it, it would’ve been applauded as the best strategy in the entire world.
Parvati Shallow:
Exactly. And I mean, I looked at that. I saw the way that they split up the tribes for Heroes vs. Villains, and the men winners were on the Heroes tribe and the women winners were on the Villains tribe. There were two women winners, me and Sandra, and we were both cast on the Villains tribe while my friends who were in the Black Widow Brigade with me on season 16 were put on the Heroes tribe. So I was like, this doesn’t compute. And when I said something about it at the start of the game, Jeff really doubled down and he was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.” He justified why I was cast on the Villains tribe. And then he asked James Clement, who was one of the guys that we’d blindsided if I was a hero or a villain. So he gets back up from one of the guys who we took out. I’m like, “Ask Courtney Yates. Ask Jerri Manthey if I’m a villain or a hero.”
Tori Dunlap:
Was that the Erik idol season, right? That was that Erik-
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh God, so good. We could cut this. I’m just so proud. I see clips of it on TikTok now, dude, and every time I sit and watch it every time. Okay, Kristen, I have to tell you because you haven’t seen the show. They convince a guy to give him their idol or his idol away and then they vote his ass out. It’s so good every time I watch. It’s so good.
Parvati Shallow:
I mean, especially because that final challenge, the puzzle said guaranteed final four, and he won it. So he was guaranteed a spot in the final four, but then he gave up his necklace and never made it.
Tori Dunlap:
I literally am a little teary. It’s so good. It’s just all of these women who have convinced him utterly, and even you can see in Sherri’s face especially is shocked. She’s like, “Did we actually pull this off?”
Parvati Shallow:
Well, and Tori, it completely changed the landscape for reality television from that move, especially with Survivor, because people are so terrified of a women’s alliance taking them out like everyone-
Tori Dunlap:
Really, that’s the only time it’s ever happened, at least that I can remember. You’ve had voting blocks or you’ve had… But the amount of times I think it gets every single season, women go, “Okay, we’re going to do all girls,” and it never happens. And I think that’s the only time that at least I can remember in Survivor history that it actually worked out and happened.
Parvati Shallow:
It was such a magical group of women and the stars aligned and I was just like, “Oh, fuck yeah, this is working.”
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, it’s so good. No, it was so good. And again, the look on his face, I was like, “Oh, sweetie pie. That’s okay. Go ahead. Go get your torch snuffed.”
Parvati Shallow:
But then every man is now-
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, so scared, so scared, so scared.
Parvati Shallow:
Terrified.
Tori Dunlap:
And as they should be, quite frankly. Oh, the way I’ve been dying to talk about the Black Widow Brigade, when you know, you know. When we return, Parvati and I dig more into the financial and other compensation from the game, and some of it is truly shocking and what it means to be powerful, why women are punished for playing the game well and how those lessons of survivor mirror the real world. Thank you for listening to our sponsors. They allow us to do this show for free for you. We’ll see you back here in a second.
Okay, so you get a million dollars after all of the scarcity mindset stuff. In addition to the million dollars, is there any other financial support that is offered to contestants? I think we’ve all heard the rumor that you get a little bit of money depending on how you place. I believe that’s true. Is there anything else that you’re getting outside of that million directly from CBS or from Survivor?
Parvati Shallow:
No, we’re cut loose. The show’s over. We’ve given what we promised to give. They give what they promised to give, which is the million dollar check or whatever little prize money you get if you don’t win. And we have a contract to go to the finale and that’s it. That’s where we see everyone and then it’s over. If a contestant needs psychological support, it’s on them to reach out to ask for it, and they’ll give you a fact sheet and then I think there’s maybe a call, like a one site call to see are you good or whatever.
But it’s definitely not enough for what we go through. It’s such a pressure cooker of paranoia and survival, starvation. Our bodies are in complete fight, flight, freeze, survival mode for 39 days, and that’s enough time to rewire the body and the brain to a mode of you’re in a trauma response now.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Parvati Shallow:
To not have a way of even contextualizing that. For myself, when I came back, I was like, I’m whacked. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I would go to a friend’s birthday party and I would be talking to someone and I would be in the back of my mind while I’m smiling and having a conversation with them thinking, what does this person want from me? Are they trying to get something?
Tori Dunlap:
Are they lying to me?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, can I trust them? Are they using me for something? It was like this game that I could not break my brain out of, and I didn’t understand. I was split into two different parts because of that situation. And so when I got the money, I didn’t know what to do with it, and it felt like blood money because Ozzy was so mad at me. He was like, “You’re greedy.” And I was ashamed and I was told I was a mean girl and I’d done all these horrible things and I’d chosen greed and selfishness over friendship and lied, and I was a bad person and I was like, “Fuck, oh my God, I don’t even want this money.” I was like, “I earned this by being a bad person.” So I just didn’t even acknowledge it. I shoved it under my bathroom sink. I had a gig. I had gotten this bit part in a movie, and so I’d flown straight from New York to LA and I only had one day turnaround before I flew to Hawaii for this movie. So I shoved the million dollar check under my bathroom sink.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh my God.
Parvati Shallow:
And flew off. And I still had no money because I didn’t deposit anything. I couldn’t even buy a sandwich. So when I got to Hawaii, they gave me an envelope of cash for a per diem, and I was like, “Well, I got 60 bucks, I’m good.” But I had a million dollars under my bathroom sink.
Tori Dunlap:
I think if you’ve never seen Survivor, I think that is one of the hallmark differences as you continue to play and as the game evolved is again, the earlier seasons, typically the person who was winning was the person who deserved it more or betrayed people the least. And I think now there’s more of a respect if you play the game really strategically, even if you fuck people over, would you say that’s accurate?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, I think now the way that the show is being cast is the people that are getting cast on the show are super fans of the show. So they’ve watched every season and they know how it is to have a bad winner at the end, like a winner that was just kind of nice but didn’t do anything. So people feel like a sense of responsibility now, I think, to choose the right winner, the person who played the most strategic game, whether they have hurt feelings by that person or not.
Tori Dunlap:
As I’m thinking about any game show, reality show where there’s money involved, one of the things that honestly makes me really emotional is the amount of people who go on these shows, who put themselves through, and the way you’re describing Survivor, I mean, that’s torture. You’re not eating, you’re not sleeping. There’s natural disasters. You have challenges, physical challenges you have to do. You don’t know who you can trust. There’s nobody around you who you know or love until the loved ones visit for four minutes. It’s like literal torture.
But the way the American healthcare system works and the way minimum wages have stagnated, a lot of people I think feel like game shows are the only way to financially provide for their families. It’s like winning the lottery. It’s like, okay, I’m going to put myself, it’s like a squid game. It’s like the only reason I’m doing this is because I need the money. And that’s always felt deeply unsettling to me that we live in a society that can’t just provide its citizens with its basic needs, and you have to go do this crazy thing in order to just get enough money to buy and pay for your mother’s cancer treatment. Is that something that’s always sat weird with you two?
Parvati Shallow:
Well, I think it’s sort of the American dream. It’s the like we can strike it rich. And God, David on Deal or No Deal Island that I just played won 5.8 million in a month playing a game show. It’s insane. And the thing is, it’s way better odds than playing the lottery because on Survivor, you have a one out of 20 shot of winning this game. Yeah, you have to sacrifice your mind, body, spirit for it. But also it’s not all good or bad. I think that’s why I wrote my book the way I wrote it is I wanted to break down the survival modes because it’s not bad that we have these modes of operating and we live in fights like free sometimes. It’s actually a very helpful thing that our bodies do to keep us safe when we’re under duress or under threat that we have these modes.
So it’s like, okay, I’m going to put myself out into the world and try some, especially Survivor. I think it’s one of the more compelling reality shows to do because it’s such a grand adventure and it does test a person on every single level. So I think that’s something for me when I’m saying yes to go play, it’s never only just about the money. The money’s amazing, but I just played Australian Survivor and that money’s not even real. So I’m like, “Okay, if I win this game, I’m winning $30.”
Tori Dunlap:
With the exchange rate, it’s $30.
Parvati Shallow:
But I’m going to play because I love testing myself on that level. And I think that’s one thing. When I think back to how I used to create money from a place of scarcity, there is something to it that’s like if we’re reaching for no, I don’t think that we should be in a society where we can’t take care of our kids. I think the system is so, especially with mothers, single mothers, parents with kids. We need childcare, we need healthcare, we need support because it’s this single family unit is just not working in the way that we’ve set it up. And it keeps people stuck in scarcity, which is really, it’s really hard to get out of it.
It’s like a hamster wheel that you’re just trying to make ends meet from one day to the next is not an easy place to make a big quantum leap to abundance and thriving. But if someone can go play Survivor and win a million dollars, maybe they can. Kenzie who won Survivor more recently, she’s now a mother. She credits the show with giving her that chance because she was a hairdresser before and now she is like, “I’m in a place of security and I can take care of my baby, and I feel really complete with my Survivor journey.” She’s not trying to keep going and going and going, but she’s really very vocal about how helpful playing the game and winning it was for her. And I think she was also just a beloved character. So it helps a lot if you’re not destroyed in social media [inaudible 00:37:02]. But look, we all have our path in life.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it’s also the edit, and I will move on because I have other questions for you beyond Survivor, but I think that that is the thing that terrifies me most about reality TV and why, I don’t know if I want to say it on mic so it’s set in stone, I don’t think I’ll ever be on reality TV because I think one of the biggest scary thing is you’re not in control of your own narrative. They can cut and splice things that you’re saying or position it in a certain way, or they can make you out to be the villain and you don’t have any control over that. It’s just the edit.
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, that’s a challenge. You just have to completely release control and surrender, and you have to know why you’re saying yes to go play the game knowing that it is going to be a TV show. I was talking to my friend Ethan about it, who won Survivor: Africa, and I love the process. I love the game going out and playing the game regardless of what the game is, if it’s Traitor or Deal or No Deal, Survivor something else, I just really enjoy that aspect of it.
But then watching of the show part of it is, oh, I have so much anxiety about that because I have no control. I don’t know how they’re going to edit the story. I don’t know how people are going to respond to it. And the intensity of the physicality of playing is over, and now it’s just very cerebral and mental. So that is the hardest part for me. And that was the hardest part of writing my book. Writing my book was an incredible, very therapeutic, very cathartic process that took three years for me to do from start to finish. And then publishing the book, I was like, “Dah.” Going out of my book tour, I’m like, “Fuck.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, because it’s no longer yours. It’s like you can’t do anything different and people are going to say or do what they’re going to say or do, and yeah, it’s no longer yours. You have to give up that ego to say, “Okay, this is everybody else’s now.”
Parvati Shallow:
And so I make peace with the process as I’m doing something. If the process is fulfilling and feels good, and right, and aligned, I will say yes and do it. If I’m inside of a process of something and I’m like, “This feels really bad,” I will stop. And I think that’s the gift of sufficiency. Having enough money gives me the privilege of being able to say no to projects that are not aligned.
Tori Dunlap:
Speaking my language, girl, that’s what we say all the time is money gives you options and you get to say no when you want to say no and yes, when you want to say yes. And it’s just so true. You wrote about a moment in your book when you found out you were pregnant and how something shifted pretty much instantly. You said you had spent decades being “hard and rough with yourself, always pushing your body, surviving.” But now you physically literally had to soften your survival depended on surrender, and I think that line is just so powerful. Do you remember what it felt like in your body to make that shift from force to softness? And what did it teach you about safety and trust and love?
Parvati Shallow:
It was a really massive transformation in every way because I remember if I would sit down on the couch, I felt lazy. I felt like someone who was going to catch me. I always felt like that I need to be doing something, I need to be productive. And it was this constant busyness inside of me that sort of felt like there was some overlord that was going to reprimand me if I stopped and rested or took a nap or something. And when I got pregnant, I was fucking zonked. I was so tired I could not go to a spin class. And I was like, “Oh my God, what?”
I went to Flywheel. I remember I was living in New York at the time and there was a studio called Flywheel, like Peloton. And I went in and I sat on the bike and I was like, “I can’t even push this.”
Tori Dunlap:
This is not happening today. This is…
Parvati Shallow:
Which my body, I’ve always been able to command my body to do, perform, move for me. I’ve always been very, I can push myself, but when I got pregnant, it was like I got run over by a truck, so I just had to go home and sit on the couch. And it was because I physically could not do more than that. And I was so nauseous. So I was like, “Well, I’m not in charge.” And it was like a switch flipped, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m just going to give myself permission. I’m just going to let this happen. I’m just going to let my body be in charge of me.”
And I talked to some people who were mentors at the time. I’ve always been really into therapists, coaches, teachers, people who’ve gone before who have a little more wisdom who’ve been down the path a little further than me. And they’re like, “Girl, you are doing…” And friends of mine who have a different kind of mindset because I’m just so intense. I’m so intense. I’m like, “Just chill. Okay, I can’t.”
And my friends who’ve been down this path who had babies were like, “Yeah, you are doing the most productive thing that any person can do, but it’s just not treated like that by society.” If a man was pregnant, having a baby-
Tori Dunlap:
The entire world would shut down.
Parvati Shallow:
Do you know how the world would stop? Yes. And it would be like, “Oh, you’re doing the thing. This is the most important thing you could be doing. Like rest, let me rub your feet.” But because it’s women’s work and women are expected to do literally everything, we’re not allowed to stop. And even if we’re pregnant, it’s like, “Oh, she’s still working nine months pregnant.” My friend, I can’t say who this person is because of whatever, but she’s a PR person and she works for a successful TV person and she was nine months pregnant.
We were at Magic Mike, the movie. So this is a while ago, and the music comes on and they’re doing the dance and her belly starts moving. She goes into labor at Magic Mike. We go home-
Tori Dunlap:
Really totally in that movie.
Parvati Shallow:
Oh my God, that baby was like (singing).
Tori Dunlap:
Literally. It’s like Pony. The baby’s like Ginuwine.
Parvati Shallow:
But she drives herself home. She won’t even let us drive her. And then she gets there, she’s bouncing on a ball fielding calls from her boss, and I said, “Girl, tell him you’re in labor.”
Tori Dunlap:
Your water just broke.
Parvati Shallow:
She’s like, “I can’t do that. He’ll be so upset. I have to help him.” I was like [inaudible 00:44:11]. Yeah. So for me, I was just like, it was a complete shift and it was like, “Oh, it changed my whole life.” Now I realize napping is so productive, rest is so helpful.
I had a whole day where I did absolutely nothing yesterday because I’ve been on this tour, so I’m exhausted and I let myself, draw the shades, stay in the house all day long I never would’ve allowed. I thought in my brain multiple times, I was like, “I need to take a walk around the neighborhood.” And then I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to lie down and take a nap.” It’s a complete shift. And now I realize the nervous system is so much more capable of handling a bigger life when you’re well rested, when you’re well resourced, when you’re really taking care of yourself in kind of an exorbitant way, a very extravagant over the top way of taking care of yourself, then your nervous system loves that, and then it can handle big, massive upgrades in your life. But if you’re stretched too thin and you’re too exhausted, you’re not going to be able to succeed I think at the bigger opportunities that will come your way, that would actually be a life changing thing.
Tori Dunlap:
You described this moment, and my jaw dropped when I read this, where your ex-husband casually said he imagined your life as him being a CEO and you standing beside him, you’re beautiful and supportive and basically making him look good, and it hit you a ton of bricks that you “married the patriarchy.” Can you talk about what it felt like to realize that and were there any red flags? Was there anything that you missed going into that?
Parvati Shallow:
I think I’d always known in the back of my mind that that was what was happening in our relationship, and that was sort of his vision, but he’d never explicitly said it like that. And when he did, it was this watershed moment where I was, “God damn it.” I walked into this trap and I write about it in earlier parts of the book where I met his family and his family is very gender norm, conforming, very traditional. The mom is sort of the caretaker of the family, cooks the dinners, the dad was the “businessman,” whatever, and she was like the social butterfly. And it kind of was appealing to me only because I had no sense of what I was doing with my life at the time. I had no career path for myself. I had no sense of consistency in how I was going to take care of myself or make money-
Tori Dunlap:
Direction was helpful even if it was the wrong direction. It was like, “Okay, cool, I know what to do now. I know how to play this game.”
Parvati Shallow:
It was like someone else would take care of me. And I think it’s a trap that women are sold is like, “I’m just going to find a man to take care of me.” And I thought of myself as this very empowered woman, very feminist, very strong, very girl power. But I walked right into that trap because I wanted a baby and because I had no direction for my own career or life at the time, so I just wanted to be taken care of, and this man looked the part, he looked the perfect part.
So I walked into the trap, there were a hundred million red flags, and I was talked out of them by friends or by therapists or by myself. I justified everything at every corner because I wanted a baby and I wanted to be taken care of. And then I got the baby, and then I was like, “Ah, I’m in a really bad situation where not only am I not being taken care of, I’m being actively sabotaged consistently all the time by this person who he didn’t have direction for himself or he lost it.” So it was really a recipe for disaster.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and you got pregnant, gave birth to your daughter and then had to go back on survivor partially due to money. You had learned all of this softness and this rest and had been forced basically to do this. And then, oh, we got to thrust ourselves back into the most chaotic environment possible. So what was that switch like having to then go back to scarcity? Marrying the patriarchy, enough said. When we come back, she’s sharing how her pregnancy, divorce and discovering her queerness all push Parvati toward living authentically, and why power now means something totally different than it did on the island.
Parvati Shallow:
It was so intense, but it was like the softness and the rest only existed in pregnancy. Once I had the baby, it was full on out of control-
Tori Dunlap:
You were back.
Parvati Shallow:
-postpartum anxiety. Insane anxiety, sleeplessness, my body was crazy hormones. I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t know that I had postpartum anxiety until much later because I didn’t have the language for it. I’d only heard of postpartum depression, but I was not okay. When my baby was born, I was a wreck, and so the softness went up in flames as soon as my baby gone was born. It was gone. And then, yeah, we needed the money and I was like, “Well, this is the fastest track to get a little bit of cushion so I can get out of survival mode and just feel safe with this baby for six months.” I just needed to know my rent was paid for a few months because my husband at the time had lost his job.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s something crazy ironic by the way of being like, “I’m going to go out of survival mode by going on Survivor.” There’s something crazy to that.
Parvati Shallow:
No, it’s really, the whole thing is full of paradox in it, and that’s where I got to in the book where it’s the way that I think about life now, is it’s all shades of gray. Nothing is good or bad. I learned so much through my relationship and through my marriage and through my divorce that I am a different person from having had that experience. I’m grateful for it because it really matured me and grew me up in a way that way. I don’t know how else I would’ve become so fully realized. So there’s good. That came out of it too, and this is how I live life too. I’m always kind of mining shitty experiences for the gems because I have to do that to survive. But you’re right, playing Survivor was my mode of my means to getting out of survival mode.
Tori Dunlap:
Which is crazy, crazy of a sentence.
Parvati Shallow:
Because it really did. It took everything out of me. There was a challenge where we had to… I had already been voted out the game. I was on Edge of Extinction, and they just did random torture experiments with us, and they hit a bunch of very heavy coconuts across the ravine, and we had to run across this slippery rocks and through soft sand, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m 10 months postpartum and I’m running a marathon and carrying it heavy coconuts.” It was like a three-hour endurance race.
Tori Dunlap:
This is the winner’s season, right? This is the-
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Oh, I remember that challenge. It was hard to watch. Yet alone, I can’t imagine what it was like to actually do it. And again, it’s like these challenges. This game is hard enough if you’re well slept, well-fed, you’re around people you trust, it’s just insane. It’s insane.
Parvati Shallow:
I came in and I won the challenge with, it was like the top three, won the challenge. So Tyson and I came in together and Tyson is an endurance athlete. He is like a former pro cyclist. So I was like, “Oh my God, I’m 10 months postpartum, just had a baby and I’m coming in with this guy.” So there is this sense of like, “Whoa, I’m so strong and so capable,” and it gave me a lot of my confidence back going out and playing Survivor, knowing that my body could still do those kinds of things that I could do before I got pregnant because I hadn’t been working out. I was on the StairMaster trying to train to go play Survivor, and I was like… The StairMaster is the worst. It’s so hard.
Tori Dunlap:
I am not pregnant and I also agree. It’s the worst. It’s the absolute worst. Okay, so I also loved watching you on Traitors. I haven’t seen the new Deal Island, but I’ve seen Traitors. Are reality stars smarter at playing reality games because they’ve done it before? Was Traitors harder?
Parvati Shallow:
Traitors was harder because of the format, because Traitors is 20 something people all together and Survivor is 20 people, but you’re split into two tribes of 10, so you only have to negotiate relationships with half the people. And then Survivor, you’re not given a lie that you have to cover up and pretend like you don’t have the lie. Everyone’s on the same even playing field of lying and making alliances and stuff, but Traitors is like, it comes with so much suspicion right off the bat and paranoia, and it’s in it really confined space that really stresses me out.
Tori Dunlap:
But you look fabulous, so that’s got to mean something.
Parvati Shallow:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
You get to look hot the entire time and you get to… I heard you don’t stay in the castle. Is that true that they bust you out of the castle and you stay somewhere else?
Parvati Shallow:
I could never reveal that production secret.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. That means yes. Okay, but how is it harder? Because I think, yeah, everybody’s immediately suspicious. There’s no trust being built, and I didn’t even think you’re so right of you’re battling against 20 people all at once as opposed to even now, typically with Survivor, we have three tribes, so it’s even less people. Is there any other things that are crazy that the average person wouldn’t think, oh, this is way harder?
Parvati Shallow:
Well, I think also gamers have an understanding that the game is the game, and we’ll play the game. Regardless if we don’t like someone, we’ll still work with that person because you’ll do whatever you have to do to get farther in the game. Housewives don’t care. They’re not going to work with someone they don’t like. They’re going to kill that person or banish them just because.
Tori Dunlap:
Drives me crazy. I screamed at my TV during your season, honestly, during every season the housewives on, I’m like, “Play the fucking game. You can’t just not like this person.” Oh, it drove me crazy. I was like, “It’s a game. Voting blocks. You can’t just vote for who you don’t like. It’s a voting block.” Drives me crazy.
Parvati Shallow:
But that’s why I think that’s what makes Traitors so fun to watch because the game is still played like that. No one has gotten it together to create a voting block to figure it the out. But I think also the thing with Traitors that makes it so fun is the cash prize at the end isn’t that big. It’s like people are not really going to sell their newborn baby down the river to win 40 grand probably, but they do want to make good TV. So there is kind of that sense of performance and campiness and high drama. And you’re in a castle with Alan Cumming and nothing beats Alan Cumming. I love him so much.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s so good. Okay.
Parvati Shallow:
He’s so good.
Tori Dunlap:
My last question about the shows you’ve been on now, you’ve been Australia’s Survivor. I know it’s harder, I know it’s more intense, but from a sociological perspective, what’s different about Australia’s Survivor versus US survivor? How are the people or the way they go about it different?
Parvati Shallow:
Australian Survivor is more like old school survivor where the contestants are game players, we’re characters. We’re playing a game as a character. We ham it up for the cameras, and it’s more like there’s the arc of the character inside of the game that has nothing to do with our lives outside of the game. So I think now with what’s happening with these new era Survivor US is they’re showing the B roll of what this person’s going through outside of the game. You’re hearing about their childhood and stuff. You’re not going to hear about any of that on Australian Survivor. Australian Survivor is we are here to play this game. We’re here to win this game. I will do the hijinks and shenanigans and whatever it takes to win and make a really fun show that’s super kind of Marvel action movie style Survivor.
Tori Dunlap:
Did you watch seasons? Did you study before you went out there?
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, they sent me the links because you can’t watch it here.
Tori Dunlap:
No. You have to go to like a pirated third party-
Parvati Shallow:
Get it on Paramount Plus.
Tori Dunlap:
You need to go to a third party sketchy website to watch it.
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah. It’s weirdly controlled. I wish it was available in the US. I think fans will love this season. It’s me, Suri, and Tony from the US playing, and it’s so fun. But yeah, I watched links the producers sent me a few seasons, so that’s how I knew who David was from Australia Survivor when we played Deal or No Deal, because I’d watched some of his season to prep for playing the game.
Tori Dunlap:
Speaking of Alan Cumming and fabulousness and gay in general, you discovered, I think, a part of your journey in the last few years has been discovering your own sexuality and your own queerness. When did that come about for you? Was that during a lot of this emotional unpacking, and what did you learn about yourself, especially related to maybe how you grew up or that trauma of the cult not cult? How did that take shape for you?
Parvati Shallow:
Everything happened for me inside of the process of grieving the death of my brother and through my divorce and writing my book. I did all of that at the same time. It was sort of melded into each other. So I’m writing my way into a whole new story as I’m grieving, as I’m doing all the stuff you have to do to get through a high conflict divorce. And it was so gnarly and so intense. And then I was like, “I want to have some fun.”
And so I started dating and I was going out with some guys, and I was only finding that I could either a physical connection with a man with no emotional connection. The chemistry was good physically, or I could have an emotional connection but the physical connection was torture. So I was like, “I did not just battle my way out of this marriage and divorce to now settle for a mediocre man.” So I opened my app up to date women. I was like, “Well, I’ve never done this before. I’ve always kind of been curious. I’ve never really explored it.” Because I always had so much success with men. So I feel like I’ve always-
Tori Dunlap:
If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, the formula worked for me until it was like, “Oh.”
Tori Dunlap:
It’s no longer working.
Parvati Shallow:
This is lacking. Yeah, I don’t want some mediocre stitch. So I opened my app up. It was wild how it all happened because my divorce finalized in March and then a week later or something, I met Mae and started dating Mae and Mae Martin, the comedian who I write about in the book and who was non-binary, and it was like the clouds parted and the gates of heaven opened up and I was like, “This is so cool and fun.” And it really fit and worked for me because it was just like the emotional connection was there. The intellectual compatibility, the physical connection. It was like everything worked and yeah, I was like, “All right, I’m fully head first.”
Tori Dunlap:
When you think about this journey from being likable, from using charm to survive, to being slut-shamed publicly to then reclaiming your sexuality, what does powerful look like and mean to you now?
Parvati Shallow:
Being powerful is aligning with authenticity. It’s knowing who I am and what I want that is truly coming from inside me. And that’s not looking for external validation to be okay. I think that’s really the message of the book that I wanted to drive home. That’s like I burned it all down to claim my, it’s like I burned down all the structures. I mean, I’m still work in progress. I’m still burning stuff down, but burning consistently, continuously burning down structures that I didn’t build that someone else built maybe thousands of years ago in the Roman Catholic Empire that I’m like, “Oh, this does not fit my life. I don’t want to play that game that these old men created thousands of years ago. I want to play my game. What does that look like?”
And then that’s really hard to decipher what we want, I think, individually and authentically because it requires introspection on so many levels and a curiosity to explore some of these very difficult feelings and some of the pain that we may have experienced in the past. So for me, it’s like power comes from not being afraid of the past, not being afraid of pain, not being afraid of difficult conversations, being curious about life and moving towards creating life on my own terms.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and the deconstruction of all of it too. I think that is unfortunately the biggest job we as women have. The biggest task of our lives is deconstructing everything we’ve been told. It is to be a good girl or a nice girl or the prized daughter or wife, and determine what we actually really want.
Parvati Shallow:
It feels good getting praised.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Parvati Shallow:
It feels good. It’s like I want to be told I’m a good girl.
Tori Dunlap:
But it also feels safe. Well, safer. It feels safe to not rock the boat because if you draw attention to yourself, you might literally get murdered. You might literally not be safe anymore. So no wonder all of us are in survival mode. No wonder all of us are just trying to not piss anybody off so that we can maintain some semblance of safety and control.
Parvati Shallow:
Yeah, I’m really getting into these kind of forgotten scriptures like Mary Magdalene, and there’s this book called The Girl Who Baptized Herself. It’s about Thecla. Meggan Watterson writes about these women whose voices have been erased, but really their gospels, what they were talking about was having how to have a direct experience of God ourselves, which is just essentially the way that I think about God is this sort of generative organizing force that we can create our life. If we can attune to that force inside of us, we can create a life that is our highest potential to live.
And it’s like you’ve got to remember the way that this world is set up, it was set up by a bunch of men who were in power, who wanted to stay in power. So there’s a lot of perspectives, especially women’s that were erased or not included. So that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book that I wrote that included a lot of more of the darker, kind of shameful aspects of being a human woman on this earth, like an emotional affair, having a queer relationship, going through a divorce like rage, I wrote about all that stuff. Money, because I want women to hear that, those stories, I think we heal when we hear stories that are real.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m blown away by you. I’m so thankful you’re here. Plug away my friend. Where can people find the book? Follow You? Plug away.
Parvati Shallow:
You can buy the book anywhere. It’s called Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power. And you can find me on Instagram, @pshallow, and I usually give updates there. I do book tours and drag shows around the country, so you can find me somewhere.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Thanks for coming on.
Parvati Shallow:
Thanks, Tori.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to my friend, Parvati, for joining us. You can grab a copy of her brand new book, Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power, wherever books are sold. And if you loved this episode, you want to share it with a fellow Survivor or Traitors fan, we really appreciate it. It allows us to continue bringing on great guests to supporting feminist media, which is really hard to do right now. So we really appreciate it. Thank you as always for being here, Financial Feminist, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist a Her First $100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
