The Cestus says
While wearing a cestus, you are considered armed and your unarmed attacks deal normal damage. If you are proficient with a cestus, your unarmed strikes may deal bludgeoning or piercing damage. Monks are proficient with the cestus.
I am interested in how the bit in bold, interacts with Monk damage
A Level 12 does 2D6 Unarmed Damage. If they are wearing a Cestus do they still do 2D6? And their strikes can be Bludgeoning or Piercing
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There're probably dozens of threads on the topic, because the cestus and other, similar weapons (brass knuckles, dan bong, emei piercer, gauntlet, rope gauntlet) have long been a source of confusion. Sean K Reynolds even said (back when he was the head guy of mechanics) that "Cestus shouldn't refer to "unarmed" attacks at all." The issue is that these weapons talk about your unarmed strikes and how they modify them, but then they present full weapon statistics, which means you should attack with them as weapons using the given staticstics, and it's left in the air how things that modify unarmed strikes interact with them. You obviously can't attack with both a weapon and an unarmed strike at the same time, so you would have to choose, but they still affect your unarmed strikes even if you don't attack with them as weapons, e.g. by dealing lethal damage.
I'd say the only sensible way is to do exactly what the text says, nary a smidge more. "your unarmed attacks deal lethal damage" and "you can have your unarmed strikes deal bludgeoning or piercing damage". That's it. The increased crit range, magic weapon enchantments, Weapon Focus (Cestus), and similar things are not stated to transfer to unarmed strikes, and thus don't. If you want to use them, you have to attack with the cestus as a weapon, which isn't an unarmed strike, and thus not subject to the increased damage etc.
There is an easy solution, however: Handwraps do just about the same, only without all the uncertainty (well, most of it)*. The handwraps sidestep that entire bog of unclearness by not having any weapon staticstics, which means you can't possibly attack with them as weapons. They tell you exactly how they affect your unarmed strikes (materials and weapon enchantments), indeed they literally state that they don't alter the damage you deal with unarmed strikes.
*) It's unclear whether they count as a weapon "in your hand", for instance, but cestus et al. have that problem, too. It's also not clear how the metal inlays work, and counting as armed and being able to make AoOs is at least unintuitive ('yes' on the first, 'no' on the second) but for a Monk, that's not that important.
Edit: I'm going by the AoN version, which is the wording from Ultimate Equipment. d20 uses a weird version patched together from that one, and from the first printing (!) of Adventurer's Armory.
I agree with darklords first sentence, just the title of this threads screams 'I didnt do a pre post search'
nevermind this is a common sense question too
And if you do a google search you will find a lot of the questions were asked at least 5 years ago. In the last 5 years prior to 2E they released FAQs so asking this question again, is entirely valid.
For example, I had not seen or heard that Sean K Reynolds had said anything about it