Celebrity Drive: Jeff Probst, Host of CBS' "Survivor"

Quick Stats:Jeff Probst Host CBS' "Survivor"

Daily Driver: 2009 Toyota Prius (Jeff's rating: 8 on a scale of 1 to 10)

Favorite road trip:Los Angeles to Arizona

Car he learned to drive in:1966 Volkswagen Beetle

First car bought:1980s Mazda RX-7

Despite becoming a household name from "Survivor," host Jeff Probst still considers himself just a guy from Wichita. While he is a car enthusiast, his current tastes reflect his down-to-earth, introspective persona.

If you're one of the millions of viewers of the original reality juggernaut, you know Probst as the guy with the unenviable task of saying, "The tribe has spoken..." before announcing who gets voted off and their torch snuffed out.

While he is the balanced personality that helped debut the show that spawned what has become an entire genre of television, his own life became chaotic as the show catapulted him to another level of celebrity.

When Probst moved to Los Angeles to work on "Access Hollywood" and VH1's "Rock & Roll Jeopardy," he bought the Isuzu Rodeo. Then came a little reality show called "Survivor" in 2000, which became ratings gold. Unprepared to deal with the accompanying fame, the trusty old Rodeo became a life raft of sorts.

"I kept that car for the first four years of 'Survivor' and I kept it because everything else around my life was a little crazy and chaotic," he says. "I'm smarter now. But at the time I was this guy from Wichita, I didn't know anything, I didn't know anybody famous, I didn't have any idea of what I was supposed to be doing. As a result my life was chaotic. There were times when the National Enquirer was parked outside of my house, looking through my trash."

Probst didn't know how to react to his own sudden stardom. "That Rodeo was the worst car I ever had and it always grounded me in terms of, 'You're just still the same guy. Just keep driving this car.' The windows didn't work, it didn't ride very well, it had rust everywhere, the paint was terrible."

At a point in his career when most celebs buy some snazzy dream car to declare they've made it, Probst's Rodeo was its own metaphor for his life. "Instead of becoming what I thought would be the cliche -- to go out and buy a car because I'm in Hollywood and I'm supposed to have a really cool ride, I kept driving that. I would pull up to red carpets in that car and that oddly felt good I wasn't in the expected ride."

Even after a few years of hosting "Survivor," Probst still didn't upgrade. "For the first several years, I was not making a lot of money," he admits. "It was a weird perception because the show was so popular and my friends assumed I was must be making millions, but I was making less than I'd made in any other job."

When he finally bought a new car, he bought a rugged GMC Denali. "I really enjoyed it and I road tripped everywhere in that car and I slept in it. I just loved it."

But a year ago, Probst had an environmental epiphany and the Toyota Prius was the result of that paradigm shift. "It was one of those days when things crystallized and I realized I can't drive this anymore. I just can't," he recalls. "I hated giving it up and I got the Prius. Now, I honestly can't imagine being back in that truck. It's strange. But I really enjoy driving the Prius."

But Probst didn't choose the Prius because it is Hollywood's car du jour. He was looking at hybrid SUVs, such as the Toyota Highlander or Denali and Probst didn't think they were very green.

His brother test drove every hybrid available and the last one he tried was the Prius. He loved it and had Probst look at it. But the Prius had to meet his outdoorsmen criteria.

"The test for me was I had my truck stocked, so I could road trip at anytime," Probst says, from his Prius, while running errands. "I could go to the beach at anytime, play volleyball, rollerblade, hit softballs. All that stuff I had in my Denali is in the trunk of my Prius. So that for me was the real test of the Prius -- can I still be road tripping at a moment's notice? And I can. So I'm all good."

The only thing Probst added to the Prius was tinting the windows. "Of course, to give it a little bit of attitude," he chuckles. "I could fit my Prius in the back of the Denali, so I went from the biggest car you could get to a really small one. I feel better as a citizen of the planet driving it."

He rates his Prius a perfect 10 for economy, but an 8 as his daily driver. "You certainly give up some luxuries, if you need a lot of really nice things or seat warmers. But in terms of value, for 30 grand for a daily drive that gives incredible gas mileage and is fun to drive -- I'd give it an 8. It shows your fuel consumption, like right now I'm averaging 41 mpg from this drive."

With its low ground clearance, Probst's hybrid does hit the pavement at times. "They are low and going into my driveway from the street, my driveway's pretty steep, I scrape the bottom."

Probst likes the easy-to-use navigation system, with a caveat. "The only thing I don't like about it is you can't use your navigation while driving. I've yet to figure out how to bypass that," he laughs. "When your car's going more than two miles an hour, you can't do that."

Recently, Probst decided to go to an old-school drive-in in Pomona. "I didn't even know there was still a drive-in existed. Took the Prius, rolled the windows down, had the feet up. It was a great drive in car."

Car he learned to drive in

Born and raised in Wichita, Probst learned to drive in a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle that his dad bought for $50. "We put an engine into it and the engine cost $200 and my dad rebuilt it and I watched him," he says.

They also took the Beetle to Earl Scheib. "It's one of these painting places where they will paint your car for $100. When you're a kid that's only making $3 an hour, I had a black VW bug that I thought was the greatest car ever."

Growing up in car culture, Probst got his learner's permit as soon as allowed. "I had my learner's permit at 14 and a half, imagine that," he says, looking back.

As Probst describes it, he learned to drive by riding the clutch, burning the clutch out pretty quickly. "I didn't want to give up the car to have a new clutch put in, so I would grind those gears. I would just push the clutch in and even though it wasn't doing anything, I'd grind it into second, then grind it into third," he laughs. "The whole car was $250, but God, I babied that car."

Probst enjoyed his share of "car wars" with friends. He tells of one particular car war when they coated his car with mud. "Man, they didn't mean to cause me this much trouble -- they were just trying to get my car dirty because I always kept it really clean," he describes. "They scraped all this mud on my car, but it had little, tiny pebbles in it. When I washed it off, the whole hood of my car was all scratched up."

His dad Jerry used it as a teaching moment for his young son. "I remember my dad saying, 'That's what happens. You mess with somebody, you think it's funny and then guess what? They come back and mess with you and it's not so funny.' That was my punishment - you're pretty little car now isn't as pretty is it? He thought it was ridiculous, the things we were doing. But we were screw ups, we were little punks playing around."

Probst only got to drive around Wichita in his Beetle for a year before the family uprooted and moved to Seattle. It felt like he was moving to another country.

To help cushion the blow, his dad gave the 15-year-old keys to his own 1966 Corvette for one last date in Wichita. "The greatest date I had was before I left, my girlfriend Susan Christian was the most beautiful girl on the block and my dad let me take that '66 427/435 with 40,000 miles on it," he says, reflecting on that moment. "That was the greatest night of my life. I was in a machine, I had my best shirt on, I was picking up the prettiest girl on the block."

Probst drove to nearby L.W. Clapp Golf Course. "We parked in the parking lot and we made out like bandits in that car," he laughs. "We were going to go out and sit in the grass somewhere and make out, but instead we ended up staying in that was car because that was like being a man. I was a little boy in a man's car. It was cool, it had a teak steering wheel."

1966FordMustang

Probst was so upset he had to move, his parents bought him a 1966 Ford Mustang for $950. "The bribe from my folks, because I was in love with my first girlfriend and I didn't want to move, was a new car. My dad rebuilt it, while I held the flashlight and watched. I'm the oldest, so that was my first car and we had a series of older Mustangs that we would rebuild."

The old Mustang had a little rust from the Seattle rain, which they fixed and got repainted candy apple red at the local shop. But on its inaugural drive, the newly painted Mustang got christened.

"The day the car was finished, I drove it and hit a guy two hours later," Probst admits. "Just a fender bender, the rear quarter, I totally smashed in. I had to go home and tell my dad."

His dad leveled him with the look of parental disappointment. "He worked so hard on this car and it took his reckless son about 30 minutes to destroy it," Probst says.

The Mustang became Probst's sweet high school ride, which provided endless entertainment. "There were three of us - Neil Bates and Mark Tyhurst and me, we all had Mustangs," Probst starts to laugh, as he tells the story. "Back in the day, you could pop somebody's hood open because to open the hood, it was on the outside of the car. Then we'd pull off one of their spark plug wires and their car wouldn't start."

Probst and his friends played the same joke on each other for months. "Then we wised up and realized, 'This is the cheapest security system ever.' You simply park your car, take off one of your spark plug wires and nobody can steal your car because it won't run," he adds.

1966 Corvette at Barrett-Jackson

The Probst family enjoyed their musclecars. They had a Shelby Cobra, which his dad bought after they moved to Seattle. "Truly a race car, that we drove together back to Seattle," Probst says. "We drove back to our hometown of Wichita and bought it from a guy and my dad and I drove this Shelby Cobra back from Wichita to Seattle. That was like being in some sort of off road race," he laughs. "Literally, this car had a stick shift, a steering wheel and a big engine and that was it."

Probst also drove his old Volkswagen Rabbit back to Wichita. But the prized family car was the 1966 Corvette. Probst bought the Sting Ray from his dad, when his dad wanted to sell it. "Part of that for me was I wanted to own my dad's greatest car, I wanted it in the family." A couple years later, his dad convinced him it was the right time to sell.

Probst sold it at Barrett-Jackson in 2004 for $75,000. "That was fun," he says of the auction. "We had the car for 30 years in our family, all original. We took it to Barrett-Jackson, with both my brothers, my cousins and friends. That was the craziest experience to see your car on the block."

Probst later saw it on Speed Channel. "The guys from Speed Channel thought this car would go for 63 and it ended up selling for 75," he says. "I remember you the guy going, 'Boy, you've got to believe this fellow Jeff Probst's 15 minutes are way over. He's getting every penny he can get out of this car!' It was so funny to hear him dogging me. It was the most beautiful car we ever had. I mean it was a race car. That thing was loud!"

First car bought

Coming from a family that prided itself on being enthusiasts, the first car Probst bought on his own was a used 1980s Mazda RX-7 at 18. "We knew how to buy a good clean car, we knew what to look for, we knew to buy from a single owner who didn't smoke, and it didn't have rust," he says.

The RX-7 met his criteria. "I liked the style of it and I could afford it," he says. "I was at a time where I wanted a nicer car, but didn't have a ton of money. A used RX-7 was affordable, it had the sunroof and it was copper, which I didn't really like. But it was the cleanest one I could find."

Probst bought the RX-7 while he was in college at Seattle Pacific University. He was going to school during the day and working the second shift at Boeing, in their motion picture department, making training and marketing tapes.

"Boeing is really big in Wichita and Seattle and nobody believes Boeing at that time had a huge motion picture department," he says, of his first TV gig. "Somebody had to give you your first job and you're not ready when they give you that job, you're in over your head. But they believe in you and Don Ciminelli believed in me and I was a total idiot. And he just said, 'Just shut up and watch and you'll learn. '"

After the TV experience in Seattle, Probst moved to New York in 1994 to host live shows at FX, a little known cable network back then. Ironically, he worked alongside other names who would later follow in his reality show hosting footsteps, such as Phil Keoghan, who now hosts CBS' "Amazing Race" and Tom Bergeron, of "Dancing with the Stars." He also worked with Orlando Jones, who is now a well-known actor.

"At the time, it was a live television network," he says. "We were based at an apartment at 26th and Fifth Avenue. We housed all these shows out of there."

Probst didn't have a car in New York. Although he was on TV, that didn't translate to wealth. "I had no money. New York is so expensive, when I moved to L.A. I was broke. It's misleading. I was working on FX and making $100,000 and that's a lot of money, except in Manhattan. In Manhattan, it ain't a lot of money. I was struggling to pay rent which was $2,800 a month."

Favorite road trip

Probst has taken many great drives, like a recent trip to Santa Barbara. He is philosophical about what a road trip means. "It doesn't have to be across the country. The idea of a road trip for me is -- throw some snacks in your car and just start driving. And just go."

For someone who logs more miles than most, Probst's favorite road trip is very close to home. He enjoys driving to Arizona because he has family there and there's a lot to explore, whether it's the Grand Canyon, Sedona or Tucson.

"If I had to pick a last minute road trip, I would say, 'let's just head east' and swing through Vegas on your way if you want. I prefer to drive anywhere I can. It's also less hassle. You can throw on Howard Stern and listen," says Probst, who is a Howard Stern celebrity super fan, and hosts some shows for the Howard channels on Sirius-XM.

"I went to the Grand Canyon a year and a half ago and I was reminded there are amazing journeys right in your own backyard," he says. "I make a living travelling the world. I get to go to all these really fun and exotic places, but I had as much fun hiking down the Grand Canyon as I had in the Cook Islands."

For Probst, it was about listening to music, talking to whoever is in the car, meeting interesting and odd people at local dives. "You really get back in touch with the world, the people you live with. Because Hollywood is definitely not representative," he says, adding he does get recognized on his road trips.

"Survivor" on CBS

"Survivor" created the genre that now seems to dominate the television landscape. "It's an understatement to say 'Survivor' changed my life, I have a completely different life than I would have without Survivor," he says. "It's given me a career and it's opened a lot of doors that would never have been opened. I wouldn't be talking to 'Motor Trend' if I wasn't hosting 'Survivor. '"

The show has also changed Probst's perspective on the world and himself. He's perhaps the envy of cultural anthropologists, because it's allowed him to have a front row seat at studying human behavior for the last nine years.

"I can't say I've learned anything ground breaking, but I have come to the conclusion that you cannot change who you are. Although you may be able to mask it for a while, when you introduce extreme conflict like we do on 'Survivor,' your truth comes out," he points out. "If you're an asshole, we're going to know it. If you're a leader, you're going to lead, if you're a follower, you're going to follow."

He says there's no way to hide or change one's intrinsic traits. "That's why every season fans of 'Survivor' say, 'How come people don't figure out this show and know what to do?' They do know what to do," Probst says emphatically. "They just can't help themselves, they just can't. It's in their nature. It's like that little story about the scorpion and the frog and the scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the lake."

The new season "Survivor: Samoa" premieres September 17.

The Serpentine Project

Being a TV star wasn't enough to feed his soul, so Probst added another project to his busy schedule. His passion to help others led him to create the Serpentine Project, a mentorship program that helps foster kids achieve their life's dreams.

"I was dating somebody who was a product of the foster care world and she and her sister had very different experiences," Probst says. "One was adopted, raised by a family and went on to get her master's degree and her sister was never adopted, spent her entire time in foster care and ended up running away at 15. I saw that disparity and thought, 'Man, it's so unfair that a kid can be born and do nothing wrong except being born into the wrong situation and they never get a chance, they simply never get a shot."

Probst thought of all the people in his life who gave him a chance and helped him out, so he created the foundation to give other kids opportunities at a better life

"Our deal with them is -- as long as you continue to work toward achieving your dream, we will be there to support you, whether it's college tuition or help with your apartment, getting a car, advice, mentoring, or how to open a checking account," he explains.

The foundation has the role of a surrogate parent with a strong message. "You do have a net underneath you, so go out there and try and explore and dream, really dream," he underscores.

"It's amazing when we ask these kids what they're dreams are, they start off by saying, 'I'd love to have a consistent job and an apartment.' We have to work with them and say, 'What's the wildest dream?' Then suddenly they say, 'Well, I'd love to be a doctor, because I'm really into science.' Now we're talking!"

Probst started the program two years ago in Los Angeles. The teens are at least 18, out of the foster care system and entering college. Once they achieve their goals and graduate from college, Probst hopes these foster kids will help others.

"It's expensive, but that's what it takes to give somebody a chance who have nobody. They have nobody," he enunciates slowly. "Nobody. It's not like they have lousy parents. They don't have them. They're not around. They don't want them or they couldn't handle them. They don't often have brothers and sisters. The statistics of how many kids end up on the streets or incarcerated, is so sad, that it just breaks your heart."

To become a mentor or for more information, go to www.theserpentineproject.com.