I Was Put on the Planet For This Show! I don't think the last two winners, CeeCee and Yolanda, were on the show. CeeCee is just a friend of mine from the show. No, actually I do know her, I interviewed her for the show, but we are friends outside of the show. She actually got engaged to someone else from the show. You could call me a newbie, but I've been on the show longer than anyone in the history of Survivor. (I wasn't at the first one and wasn't even at season 22). You know, I don't think I'm as good a Survivor player as they may have thought I was. You know, I don't think that was because of lack of effort. I think it was because I really did want to have a different path for my life, which wasn't a Survivor path. And when I heard about the show, when I found out that there was a show called Survivor, I just figured it would be interesting to go to Fiji, if they'd let me, to get to see some of the natives and get to know them and not really think of myself in the traditional Survivor show. I always said, "I'm a regular guy. I don't think I'm that exotic or interesting." I just had one of those things where I wasn't someone you could play Survivor with, because I wasn't, well... I was pretty shy. You know, it's interesting, because I was the star of Survivor, the biggest personality that any of them had met up until that point in their lives. They never saw anything like that before, ever. And then everyone would try to beat me at volleyball and things like that, and I was always the butt of the joke. I was the one that ended up doing things on my own. I'm very unique, because I never had that social network that they all had in high school or university or college, where everyone was friendly with everyone else. All I had was my family, who are not that social, by the way, and my girlfriend. That's really all I knew. But for a long time, as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be somebody and have people look at me and say, "Well, I heard he did that," or "I read that he won this race or that race." It's something that I think you always wanted, as a child. You want to show the world that you are, or that you can be, somebody. Even when I got into acting, I never thought of myself as a famous person. You know, I was doing these little bit parts in television, little commercials. It was never on my mind to become the next famous person. That actually worked against me for Survivor. Because, I mean, I was the type of guy who everyone wanted to be a part of, but nobody really knew who I was. So nobody wanted to come out of the woodwork to try to be on the show with me, because they didn't know what it was. So it never made any sense, and I was very much an underdog. I never really saw that coming, but I really got to thinking about it a few years later. Like when the show was coming up again. Then they were doing another season in Fiji, and I thought, "Oh, I could go out and play this one and go back to Los Angeles, try to find a job or something." And that was when Jeff told me about this new show that they were doing called The Amazing Race and that it was this kind of twist that was being introduced into the competition. He said, "Oh, I could come back to Fiji," because Jeff's from here. He went to college with some of the other people who have been on the show. He said, "I could compete in it." And I told him, "You know what? You probably could beat me in Fiji. But it would be different for you than it would be for me. You would get off on an adventure with a lot of other people, and you could do that." And then I kind of looked at it and thought, "Well, I'll just wait until the next time Survivor comes back." I just kind of waited and waited and waited, and nothing really happened. And then in May, this show went out on the air, and that was it. It was a big mistake. A big mistake. Because when the show first started, I just thought I would be this little kid who could do things differently. And I was excited about that. I was very much into it. But it just turned out to be something that I never really would have done if I had known I was going to be doing it. So then after Survivor and waiting around for the opportunity, my girlfriend said, "Why don't you just wait for a couple of weeks and watch this show and see if you like it." So I did and I got really interested in it. And she was really excited about it. And then we talked about, "Wouldn't it be cool if you went over to Thailand? You would see a lot of the same people from the show." So that's how I got there. If I go back and talk to my high school friends, they'll say that I used to go over there with them, because I was so scared. I would get all sweaty and scared and go away from my friends, which was very embarrassing. But that's just how I was. That's why I never really talked about it, because people would always say, "Oh, that's just so weird that Jeff has this show. He's probably a millionaire or something." I would go, "Oh, I'm doing well, thank you." See, there were times in my life where I never would have imagined I'd be talking to you guys right now. And I'd always say, "I'll tell you what. We'll sit down and have a coffee or something, and you can go back and write all about this. I'll have a bunch of stories to tell." And every time they said that, I just said, "Not a chance." But now, for whatever reason, the stars seem to have aligned. I just didn't really expect that I would be so involved in this business. It started with me giving my girlfriend that check for $125,000. But then things kind of took off from there and I had some time to spend here in Los Angeles, which I had never done before. It was really fun for me to explore Los Angeles. My mom says I should have gone to college and gotten a degree in something. But I'm really stubborn and I don't want to do that. When I was eighteen years old, I quit school. So that was a lot of money down the drain. I did well in school, but I went my own way, my own way, my own way, my own way. I really loved art and writing and film and music. I wanted to go be an actor. It was so important to me. It was really the first time I saw myself in a reflection, and it was actually at the very last audition I did for The Amazing Race. That audition was in front of all these people and I thought, "I could do this." So that's when I said, "Okay, I want to do this." And then once I said it, I wasn't going to stop until I got into it. And it worked out for the best. I didn't have a degree, but I was really involved with school. I actually didn't do much. I was a member of the student government. I was a little goofy, a little shy, quiet. I was just more of a regular kind of guy. And to think that just a few years later I would be on The Amazing Race. But I never had any expectations of what would happen when I got on that show. All I really thought about was getting myself out of school. The Amazing Race is very different from Survivor, because Survivor is this group of individuals who have to work together to survive as a team. And Amazing Race is more like a group of friends who are working together in competition with one another. The show gets into you, in the sense that it is totally intense and I felt like I had to be on top of my game or I wouldn't get far. It's not really about me as an individual. It's about my team, as it were. You can think of it as if you're a doctor, for example. In other words, I'm not the only one who is trying to cure cancer. I am one of the people that are trying to cure the disease, but if I were the doctor, I wouldn't have the responsibility on my shoulders of the fact that if a child in the third world loses its legs, it could die. And you don't have to go on the race all by yourself. It's a team effort. And that's why I was so upset with my team. Because I thought we were doing really well in the first few legs. We did so well that I thought we would definitely make the top three, maybe the top two, and make it to the end of the race. We never had problems with each other. We got along great and we worked well together. But then we got sick in China. And in China, I