What's up Tyler? How's it going? This is Derek Kaczynski. Welcome to ChallengeMania. ChallengeManiaPodcast.com.

Appreciate you being here today. I start these interviews off every time in the same way.

Whenever there's a brand new survivor or a big brother that we haven't interviewed before,

by saying, this isn't SurvivorMania, this isn't Big BrotherMania, this is ChallengeMania.

So we're going to have to start off by getting a little bit of backstory from you.

I know that I watched some of your season and I was very excited to see your face,

one of the CBS faces that I've been wanting to see on the challenge.

I know that you ended up losing to Kaczy on Big Brother and being the runner-up,

can you just kind of walk us through how that ended and rumor has you been saying

no to the challenge for a while and I'm curious to know if that's the truth or if that's just a rumor?

Yeah, man, I mean, I feel like Big Brother 20 definitely is probably the reason

that I even got asked for the challenge in the first place.

And Kaczy is an absolute beast and is one of my best friends all the time

and she's just amazing at everything that she does.

So it was just an honor to even be a part of Big Brother.

I was a huge fan of the show going into it and that is true.

I had been asked for the challenge before and I said no.

I just felt like I wasn't mentally in the right place.

Like a lot of people told me that coming off of Big Brother,

it takes like a good year, year and a half to even feel normal again

and I definitely wasn't feeling normal.

So I feel like this time around, I was looking for something new going through some personal stuff,

...