After the remaining castaways had tried to get him out for weeks, during the November 29 episode of Survivor 45, the one and only Bruce Perreault was finally ousted from the beloved competition series, despite winning back-to-back Individual Immunity Challenges after the merge.

After losing his first Individual Immunity Challenge to Austin Li Coon, the Rhode Island native knew he was on the chopping block, given the fact that he had been ruffling feathers (or rustling feathers, as Survivor and Big Brother alum Hayden Moss would say) around camp, especially with his Belo-turned-Lulu tribemate, Katurah Topps.

To make the situation even worse for the 47-year-old, he was coerced into not playing his Hidden Immunity Idol, resulting in him being voted out with said Hidden Immunity Idol in his pocket — poor guy!

Despite playing a physical game that was truly unmatched, Bruce lacked in the social and strategic departments throughout his journey on Survivor 45 (which ultimately led to his untimely exit), with his tribemates accusing him of being both overbearing and controlling on numerous occasions.

In a tearful confessional a few episodes prior to his elimination, viewers saw these accusations take a toll on Bruce’s mental health (especially after they came from his closest ally, Kellie Nalbandian), causing him to question his own personality, as well as the way he treats his daughter back home. Because of this, Dalton Ross at Entertainment Weekly asked him about the situation in an exclusive exit interview.

“You had a very introspective moment after [Kellie] left and talked about how you were going to ask your daughter if that’s how you talked to her, so did you have that conversation with your family, and if so, how did that go?”

Naturally, Bruce Perreault sang like a bird…

Admitting that the chat was had with neither his daughter nor his family, Bruce prefaced that he had a slightly different conversation with his loved ones…

“I actively made sure that I was listening more than I wanted to talk. I say it all the time, ‘Two ears. One mouth. Which one wins? The two ears,’ and I actively kind of put that into play as much as I could. You can’t change a tiger’s stripes, it just kind of is what it is, but you can adjust as necessary, and I think that I did do that because my daughter and I have never been closer.”

To follow this statement, Bruce gushed about his better-than-ever relationship with his daughter, explaining that she calls him every single day, despite being away at college — how sweet is that?

He then proceeded to explain that instead of having a conversation with his daughter and asking if he is overbearing and controlling, he made the necessary adjustments to both his personality and his parenting style without even asking her, long before Survivor 45 even aired.

“I knew that all that I really needed to do was kind of check myself and not bring that up, because I know my daughter’s going to ask me a ton of questions in regards to why I’m asking all this. Instead, I just needed to change myself in the way that I look at how I converse with my daughter, with my wife, and with friends in general. It was funny to come back and see my friends, and the amount of active listening that I was doing with my daughter, with my friends, and everybody else around me was kind of eye-opening. People should do it more often.”

While Bruce Perreault and his antics are already greatly missed on our television screens, to see how the rest of Survivor 45 unfolds, catch 90-minute episodes of the beloved competition series every Wednesday at 8pm ET/PT on CBS.

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