Before we get started, I should let you know this episode discusses suicide and drug abuse. So please take consideration before listening.

I think it played out exactly the way that it needed to play out. I think that reality TV came into our reality for a global purpose.

That is Eric Nies. If you You watched the first season of The Real World, and the data shows pretty clearly that you did, you know he's one of the seven strangers picked to live in a loft. And one of the first seven people with a completely new job title, Reality TV Star. Since its premiere in 1992, we have seen 33 more seasons of The Real World, plus spinoffs and challenges and spinoffs of The Challenges. And beyond The Real World, we've seen documentary-style reality shows, sitcom-style reality shows, competition-style reality shows, shows where you try to be a pop idol or a top model or Brody Jenner's best friend, shows where you try to bake a cake real good, shows where you try to bake a cake and it turns out real bad, and a show where they put something in front of you and you have to tell them whether or not it is a cake. Eric Nies and the first few cast members of the first few seasons of the real world were pioneers. They experienced an unprecedented and massive fame, and then they to figure it out on their own. And that didn't always go so well.

In this episode, how do you come back down to Earth when the reality TV ride is over? And what do you do with the rest of your life when you're famous for an edited version of who you were at 22? I'm Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star. Before we dive into the individual stories of some real-world cast members, let's talk about how the show came together in the first place. By the late '80s, MTV executive Doug Herzog was in the middle of a pretty impressive winning streak. Remote control was huge. Club MTV was huge. His news department was becoming a respectable outfit. So it was time to take some big swings. And if MTV's production budget had been just a little bit higher, this story might have gone in a completely different direction.

The real world, which was a grand experiment at the time, there was no such thing as... Nobody called it reality television. That wasn't a term that had been coined yet nor unscripted. I think we referred to it, and the producers referred to it as a docu-soap, and that's how we positioned it. It sprung out of our desire to have a teenage soap opera, which we realized after spending a lot of money developing one that we could not afford to make every day. And so Mary Ellis's Buhem, who had been working with us on the soap opera, came back a couple of months later and said, I think I have your soap opera problem figured out.

Like the business model of early MTV itself, the solution was so simple, you can't imagine how nobody thought of it sooner. Writers and actors and sets are expensive. Mary Ellis's Buhem and her partner Jonathan Murray said, Why not ditch the writers and the actors in the sets. Why not find some real young people, like regular everyday young people, but hot, and follow those hot, young, regular people around with cameras and see what happens? So they made a pilot.

I was in the pilot. It was a fluke. It was weird. I was in the Creative Services Group and just filing papers and not very challenged and feeling like maybe MTV isn't where I belong.

That's eventual Video Music Awards head writer, Tracy Grandstaff. At the time, she working at MTV like she had dreamed of, but she was in a menial position like nobody dreams of. Then, like Ace of Base would do just a few years later, she saw the sign.

Hilariously, when the producers of shows like this were trying to cast something or needed an audience, they just in the pantries, post information with an extension number that you could call. This one happened to say, Looking for people between, I think, 19 and 21 willing to go on camera and just be themselves and live together for a weekend. And a friend told me to try it. She's like, Yeah, go see what it's all about. So for whatever reason, I got picked. So they moved this first pilot group of folks into this killer loft down on Broadway and Prince Street.

The pilot was a proof of concept. A long weekend in Soho for Everybody Now, seven strangers picked to live in a loft.

It was a really eclectic group of people There was a bass player. I think his name was Izzy. Izzy was like a cool beasty boy type vibe. Adam was a rock and roller. Amy was the youngest. She was 18. She was very comfortable in her own skin, and a little bit of a wild child. She was very cool, very fun. Janel, who was a last minute addition, who was a Club MTV dancer, dropped dead gorgeous. There was a guy named Peter, who was a bartender down at the Rock Toon Lodge.

The pilot had the mix of personalities that make a show like this work. But Buhnam and Murray seem to understand the secret to reality television success, an element that is crucial to the genre to this very day: psychological warfare.

All of us were having breakdowns because you weren't sleeping, you're drinking, you're out on the streets, they're following you everywhere. Every two minutes, they're pulling you out to change the batteries in your audio pack. You didn't know if anything was planned.

Even in pilot for the real world, the story lines had to be manipulated.

Then the big twist was, I guess in casting, there was a guy who was a little bit older that they wanted to include. They asked if I'd be willing to go on a blind date with this guy during the taping, which I did. He was a very sweet British guy. But little did I know that they were trying to play up like Peter and I had a thing going on and that this guy and I had a thing going on. The producer asked us to kiss at the end of the blind date, and then they'd play into Peter being jealous during one of the interviews. I'm telling you, with that four-day weekend, you just realize the manipulation that can go on with these story lines.

By now, the pilot gets picked up. Buna Murray and MTV start from scratch with seven brand new strangers. This is the true story.True story.

Seven strangers.

Picked to live in a loft.

And have their lives tape. To find out what happens.

When people stop being polite.

And start getting real.

The real world. Eric, the Model, Julie, the dancer. Heather B, the rapper, Kevin, the poet, Andre, the grunge guy, Norman, the artist, Becky, the singer-songwriter. Their adventures over three months of living together are cut into 13 episodes, punctuated by the hit songs of 1992 to preserve the music connection. And the Real World is a huge hit right out of the gate. Here's Rob Tannenbaum.

Once MTV MTV saw that they could have success with the real world, which, again, free labor. You're getting camera-ready kids. I mean, these days, every kid is camera-ready. But you're getting young, uninhibited people, which are the lifeblood of MTV, to appear on your network for free just because they can live in a cool loft. That doesn't cost much.

Even as someone who's watched season one countless times, I can't say any specific story lines jump out at me. Now, there are moments, Heather teaching Julie some hip hop slang and Julie misusing Skeezer, Kevin being gone a lot, and the other six roommates pulling personalities out of a bowl to surprise him with when he got back. I remember the girls getting a trip to Aca,, all of these play in my head like vignettes, like memories from college, like real life memories in that they don't neatly tell stories. For the viewers, the people on the screen in the real world felt like us, which meant we could be them. Here again is Professor Karen Tongson. In episode 2, I said she was a professor at UCLA. She is not. She's a professor at USC. I'm sorry, but MTV destroyed my attention span.

I think that we were all intrigued. Also being narcissistic college kids at the time, I think we all felt like, Oh, maybe we could all be on this show, too. I think it opened up the possibility for us of imagining ourselves and our lives being interesting enough to document in a series.

Doug Herzog saw something important in the show's success.

We realized as much as our audience loves big stars and music stars and the glitz of music video, they really like watching themselves even more. I think you can draw a straight line from, say, the real world to social media, to even Instagram, specifically. Look at me.

Once the real world blew up, a second season was a foregone conclusion, and the real question became, How do you do it again? Buna Murray and MTV were very close to filming again with the original cast, but ultimately, they decided to wipe the slate clean and start with seven all-new strangers. Doug Herzog was skeptical.

I'm the idiot who thought it would only work once because I thought, Well, the next time you do this, these kids are going to come in with all these expectations, and they're going to be acting out, and they're going to be over the top, and they're going to be absolutely insufferable trying to get camera time, and no one's going to want to watch. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong because they acted out, they were over the top, they were insufferable, they were trying to get camera time, and everybody wanted to watch for 25 years.

So Doug was wrong. The formula kept working, but Doug was also 100% right. In that subsequent real-world cast members were more savvy. They were, in many cases, insufferable. Puck, obviously, comes to mind. But let's not sleep on Flora or Bethes or Sean. I'm getting off topic, and I know that. But the point is, Even as it got a little less real, the real world still gave a platform to young people, including, and this, too, was revolutionary, people who weren't white and/or heterosexual. Here again is Professor Karen Thompson.

Once they had the season in Los Angeles, and I was still in college, and I remember getting into it, and there was Beth, the lesbian. It was also like a place where as a new queer person, the real world was one of those soft landing spots for me of seeing queer people on TV and on screen and being, quote, unquote, real. And that was important to me and to my group of LGBT friends.

Go back and watch some of those early seasons of the real world. You'll notice that you're seeing some of the first honest, three-dimensional queer human beings in television history. Norman in Season 1, Beth in Season 2, Pedro in Season 3, also being the first honest three-dimensional human being with AIDS a lot of people ever encountered. You'll notice that what a lot of Kevin says in Season 1 about the experience for people who are black and male in 1992, much of which his non-black and non-male housemates reject, is about 30 years ahead of the mainstream national conversation on that subject. And in Season 1, you are watching the last seven young people in the history of the world to not quite know how to be on camera. The world, the real, real world, used to be a lot like this. Here again is Rob Tannenbaum.

I posted a couple of pictures on Facebook from a summer camp that I went to, and people wanted to know why no one in the picture was smiling. Again, how do you explain this to kids? I mean, maybe I was just at an unhappy summer camp, but I think the answer is People weren't performing for cameras. If you stood in front of a camera, it was something that didn't happen that often, so you should look serious, right? You're not going to be a goof ball. Now, I've got probably 5,000 photos of my 11-year-old son, and in every single one of them, he's performing. He can't turn it off. He doesn't even think about it. I've seen home movies that my parents took. Everyone is stiff and wooden and uncomfortable. You can't find a 15-year-old now who's uncomfortable on camera.

As the real world blew up, MTV did what MTV does, which is show it over and over and over. Reruns at night, marathons on the weekends, wall to wall, seven strangers picked to live in a loft. It may have taken a year or two for the original five VJs to become celebrities, but the cast of the real world were white, hot, famous in a flash.

Those first seven kids that came in, they didn't know what to expect, nor did we. We had no idea what was going to happen. And they turned into stars. Well, maybe stars are wrong. They turned into Andy Warhol, 15 Minute Celebrities.

But I think Doug was right the first time. They may have been on TV for 15 minutes, but the Fame and its effects on them lasted for decades. We'll talk some of the people who lived in after this.

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I was 18 years old, and school wasn't working out, and didn't want to go to college. I was looking for something to do.

At the start of the 1990s, Eric Nies was living in his native New Jersey, coasting. And I don't think he'd mind me saying this, but you've seen the guy. Eric Nies is simply too hot to Coast.

Been a good friend of ours, our family became one of the top male models in the world, and he had endless connections in that world and introduced me to a woman who was a talent scout, model scout for Bruce Webber. And he said, Get in shape, get shredded, and let's take some photos, and I'll bring them to the agency, and I think that you could make some money.

Bruce Webber is a photographer. He did that first big Calvin Klein underwear ad in the early 1980s, with the guy leaning against a wall in just his briefs. He did a lot of those early Abercrombian Fitch catalogs and shopping bags. Eric was featured in Bruce Webber's Bear Pond, a book of tasteful male nudes, after which MTV called him in for an audition, an audition to replace downtown Julie Brown as the host of Club MTV. And he got that job. Before he could start, MTV canceled Club MTV, but they liked him. And after that proof of concept in the Soho Loft worked out, and they were looking for seven new strangers, they called him back in.

They just talk to you and ask you questions about your life, what you were interested in, what you were passionate about. They were looking for a model, somebody who was interested in getting into acting, getting into the entertainment industry. And I that character.

So Eric moves into the loft, 565 Broadway. He's the first one there, and his experience is real.

It was the epitome of authentic television because we had no reference. There was nothing that we were accustomed to on television that was like that. And we weren't in our minds thinking, Oh, what should I say here? Or what should I do here? How is this going to come off on television? So you really got authentically who we really were as people. And because it was new for the production crew as well, we were like their kids. We were like their babies. And they saw that we were getting emotional and triggered about a lot of the things that were happening.

And sometimes the things that were happening in the loft were nothing. There was no rule that said the cast had to hang out and film in that first season. So sometimes they just didn't.

There were time periods where there was nobody in the loft, and they had to actually call us back in and say, Hey, we're filming a TV show here. We need you here in the loft. And so it forced us to interact with each other. But there was a magic in that. There was really a beauty in that because it forced us, especially for me. I can only speak for myself because it was challenging for me at 21 years old to be that vulnerable and that open and share my story. There was nothing that happened with me personally, where they manipulated what I was giving them as far as myself, emotionally, mentally, my judgments, my fears, my insecurities, my addictions. I gave it all to them. I mean, I let them come into my world, so I couldn't avoid it.

The show airs, and immediately Eric becomes an unprecedented mix of super famous and instantly approachable.

Oh, my God. It was crazy. Just wild and crazy. Overnight, you become famous for who you really are. And so people are coming up to you as if they know you, and they're asking you questions about personal things.

Eric is arguably the breakout star of what is suddenly MTV's biggest show. And like almost nobody who came after, he was able to parlay his fame into some big opportunities. Mtv decides that maybe there's some life in Club MTV after all. Eric gets that job, and the show becomes a harder, sexier reboot of the format called The Grind.

The real world was one thing, but The Grind took it to a whole another level. Because now you're talking about music. You're talking about the biggest musicians in the world performing on the show. You got 30 kids. Everybody's half naked. It's It's sexual. All the camera angles, the upright camera angles, and girls on the beach in their bikinis. So now I went from, I don't know what the viewer audience was for the real world, but the grind. After about a year, we were in 90 million homes around the world because MTV at that time was the first network that went around the world through satellites. So I was doing shows, shouting out to Asia. It was wild, man.

Eric's gotten famous for being himself, and then even more famous for doing what he would naturally be doing, which is just being charismatic. But there are no lines to learn like an actor would have. No practices or games to show up for like an athlete. He's back to coasting, except this time he's got a lot more money and attention.

I was so self-destructive at that point. I mean, I was wild. I was drinking, I was partying, I was burning the candle at both ends. When you keep adding to that fire, eventually something's going to burn down.

Eric is famous the way the original MTV VJs got famous. But where they had each other, he's pretty much alone. He's working more than his cast mates, which creates a little bit of tension. He's projecting a happy image, but inside, he's falling apart.

It was so divinement orchestrated and set up in the perfect way for me to really see see myself like, Oh, this is who you are. Look at you. Look at how you're acting in these situations with these people. And I didn't like what I saw.

As a person who was a '90s famous reality person, you were on your own in figuring out what these things mean for your existence.

That's Melissa Beck. She was one of the seven strangers on Season 9, The Real World New Orleans, in 2000. And even though eight years and eight cast full of potential role models had gone before her, she still came out of the experience feeling lost.

Kids these days got it made. I can explain to a YouTuber what's going to happen when you fall off. I can explain that to you. I could tell you exactly and what you need to do to get healthy and get okay. If you're going to make these choices that are going to affect your day-to-day life, at least have a plan with how you are going to make your life comfortable financially so that you can zip in and out of this persona that you've created when you have to go back into your, quote, real world. That was not an option. I went on there as my real-ass personhood and then came out and thought that I could do something different.

We are paid to just be ourselves. And it's not just being yourself, but it's also being interviewed about your opinions and feelings on everyone else around you. And let me tell you, that does not exist in the actual real world.

That is Sarah Rice. She was in the cast of Season 21, The Real World, Brooklyn, in 2009.

Nobody cares if your coworker is sleeping in real late. And definitely, nobody cares about your opinion on anybody else or what anybody else is doing. So I see a lot of people leave reality TV with a feeling like that opinion and them caring about whatever is going to be able to be monetized and turned into another career. And then when they are met with the reality that, guess what? Nobody really cares about what you have to say. It's shocking. It's very different.

There was no language for the mental health support a reality TV star would need. Not after Melissa's season ended in 2000, not after Sarah's ended in 2009. There was no real career path to follow, no awareness of the ways that reality fame can warp your self-perception. The whole thing can fuck you up.

This manager came in in my world who really prayed upon me, had no idea what I was doing. I didn't understand the world that I was in. And this guy took advantage of me in many ways, stole $350,000 from me, destroyed my relationship with MTV. I had a deal with Universal Studios to create my own talk show called Eric's Place. And this was going. It was literally happening. And And this manager came into my life and I lost everything. Everything. He brainwashed me. I went down the rabbit hole of the Illuminati and the New World's Order and all this dark stuff that's out there. It got a hold of me and it took me down to the point of suicide, taking my life. I didn't feel like I had a way out. But in that moment where I was ready to take my life, I was literally standing on the Hudson River in Weehawking, looking at the Viacom building in the middle of the night with my grandfather's knife on my wrist, feeling like I had no way out. And this small little cloud came down the river. And I looked up at the cloud and I heard this voice in my head that said, Just go home.

And I heard it three times. And in that moment, it was like I went into a trance. And I went back to my apartment where my friends and the manager were, and I just started packing up all my stuff. And I couldn't hear what anybody in the house was saying. And I packed up all my stuff and I went home. And that was the beginning of my spiritual life. From that moment forward, became almost an addiction to understanding how to liberate myself from suffering.

Eric made some pretty big changes.

About 16 10 years ago, I went into the desert to do a very long fast. I set out to do a 40-day water fast, just like Jesus and Buddha did. And a friend of mine had a ranch in the desert. I got to day 16 of just drinking water, but I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't do it correctly, so my body was breaking down, and I would get up to go to the bathroom and faint and hit my head against the wall and stuff like that. I had a mentor at that time who was in my life, and he suggested that I read this book when I finished my cleanse. And it was called The Medicine Way, written by an anthropologist named Kenneth Meadows. And the book facilitates you, it guides you through the Native American Medicine Wheel. And it's basically an empowering journey through your relationship with the universe outside of you and the universe inside of you. And while I was in that journey, it came to me through spirit that this was the work that I was going to be doing. So I created a program called The Beauty Way, which is based off a poem by the Navajo, What does it mean to walk in beauty wherever you go?

And so I created this program, and 90 % of the people I worked with over the years were drug addicts. I would bring them into the desert, and I would cleanse their bodies. I took them through breathwork, grounding, meditation, exercise, connecting with nature, facilitating them through the Native American Medicine Wheel, identifying what traumas they had in their life, and it reconnects the person with their soul's connection to the universe and to the Earth.

Now, what he's talking about doesn't just mean mushrooms and ayahuasca and toad venom and all that stuff, but it does partially mean that. Eric seems happy, fulfilled, healthy. When we get back, we'll talk to Melissa from the Real World, New Orleans, and Sarah from the Real World, Brooklyn, about the evolution of that new species, the modern American reality star.

I watched every season of that show until I was on that motherfucker.

Melissa Beck was a fan of the Real World before she was a person on the Real World. With fans of her own.

I always feel like, corny saying it out loud as a person that participated on it, but that shit was special and important and genuinely cool in a way that I don't know that people think that it is that now. There's been like a tainted vibe to it. But if you were there in the '90s, it was groundbreaking and it was really cool and special.

I was hooked on it in the '90s, too. And I can tell you, once Once the formula for the real world was set, as a fan, you waited for a new cast announcement like you were watching the chimney in Vatican City. When MTV announced a new real-world cast, it was like Chevrolet announcing a new fleet of cars. It was like MTV was saying, These are our young people for 1995. It was a big deal.

So we were less individual and more a representation of whatever year 2000 was. So Mine was year 2000. That's why I bring that up. Of course, you can then extrapolate each person and be like, Okay, that's the black guy. That's the frat guy. That's the non-white girl. We don't know yet what we're going to do with her. But we weren't individuals in the sense that we could then go out into the world and become celebrities. We could, and some of us have, but we were cast. We moved together in this box of, Yeah, that's the 2000 version of that thing. We were there as our raw selves. Knowing what I know now and knowing the things that I have access to now, would I have appeared that raw on national television with no eyebrows and wearing God knows what? I wouldn't have done that. But back then, I would say that that was an authentic version of young people who were not… They didn't go in there with a plan. I know a lot of times people are like, Oh, you knew what you were getting into. You got on the real world because you wanted to be famous.

I thought it might be fun to be famous, but I also really wanted to be on the real world and hang out and meet new people. That was my dead-ass true real idea. And that doesn't exist anymore.

We weren't a big hookup drama relationship, wild drinking night cast.

Sarah Rice was a cast member on Season 21. The Real World Brooklyn was a return to New York City and a return to form. The house was full of young artsy types as that Season 1 Soho Loft had been.

We were all advocates of some kind. We had people who were there working for LGBTQ rights. We had people there who were being outspoken politically, somebody who had just come back from the war in Iraq. I was on there and shared my story of being a survivor of child sexual assault. We were all fighting for something and had a lot to say.

But the action, even if it was a low drama house, was being captured and edited and broadcast to the world. And viewers who had never met Sarah were making up their minds about Sarah. And by 2009, there's such a thing as social media.

We are who we are, love us or hate us. And there are going to be people who watch us on the show and people who identify with us and are on our side. And then there are going to be people who watch us and don't like us. And when I hear, oh, my gosh, Sarah from the real world, she's the worst. That's me. I think people don't realize that the person that you see on television has a real life and real feelings and is just trying to do their best. And I did the math on this one time that we are in the real world house. I was filmed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for four and a half months, I believe it was. There are eight cast members on my season. I think it was 10 episodes. That's barely 45 minutes for each person with all of the things that they went through in that whole four and a half months. You can pick the best or the worst. 45 minutes from any of us. So what you see is only like 1% of who this person actually is. Yet we want to be real quick to judge and label.

And that's half the fun of watching reality TV.

And that's hard to explain to the outside person who's listening to you ramble on about it. There's a feeling that you get where they're like, It's really not that serious. And you're like, But you didn't live it.

Reality Fame does affect your life like any fame. But it's unlike any fame in that, at least in the 1990s and the '80s, it didn't come with the money that can make the harder parts of Fame easier to deal with.

It's just the Fame. And to have just the fame, but a dwindling fame coming off of an extreme high. You felt great. People were in the streets like, I love you. I loved it when you did that, or I hated when you did that. Why did you throw that chair? That was immature. And I'm like, Bro, that shit was nine years ago. I don't even You know?

So you have a choice. Do you keep trying to hold on to this level of Fame? And if you do try and it doesn't pan out, does that mean you failed?

Say I got off the show when I'm 21, 22, when I'm 25 If things aren't going my way after I've gone on a whole host of auditions, yeah, I'm in a space where I'm like, Dang, I didn't really play that right. But then you get 30 and you have kids and you have a mortgage and you have a husband and you like your Long Island suburban life, and then you feel bad that you like your new reality because random person comes up to you and is like, Why didn't you do da da da? Why didn't you go on the such and such show? I'm just like, Wasn't in the cards. But wasn't in the cards doesn't mean that I had a personal failing. It really just I wasn't in the cards. And now I'm doing this thing over here. There is this need for you to stay the thing you were in your 20s, which is horrible. Why would I want to stay the thing I was in my 20s? I didn't have my shit together.

After the real-world New Orleans and a couple of years in Los Angeles, Melissa met a guy named Justin Beck. Justin's the lead singer for the straight-edge hardcore band Glassjawn. Melissa and Justin got married. They had a couple daughters. Melissa works with Justin's merchandise company, MerchDirect. And a few years ago, selling some of that merch, Melissa found herself among the reality stars who came in her wake at BravoCon.

My husband did the merch for Bravo. So I was there in a working capacity. I'm slinging shirts. But it also is very fascinating because I'm an outsider looking in, but I'm also like, Wow, I am part of this genre that was created, but here is where is now. And that could not have existed the way that it does now unless we did what we did back then. But the celebrity now versus the celebrity then is the same except on steroids and the individual persona can now monetize. Where before, it truly was just a gift to be on MTV, and you were happy to be on MTV with little to no pay. I was happy. I was. I'm only able to move in these spaces without bitterness because it was that special.

I should say, while we were recording this episode, Melissa's season of The Real World went up on Netflix. You can stream the whole thing there. She and her cast mates get no money from it. Sarah did some speaking engagements about her experience as a survivor of sexual abuse. She trained members of the military on how to respond to assault within the ranks. She did the Real World Road Rules Challenge a couple of times, a show that's on its own 39th season right now, a thing that's become a reliable revenue stream for some of those real-world alumni. Johnny Bananas alone has done the show nearly two dozen times. But Sarah walked away from all that. She got her degree in Clinical Psychology, and now she's a therapist, the therapist that wasn't available for her or Melissa or Eric.

You know, Therapists didn't have a lot of answers for that, nor experience watching reality television, which I think is a big problem. And what I'm very passionate about now is getting that mental health support to people who are on reality television shows, because that is one thing that I do think that they were really missing when I was on the show. And I see a few changes being made, but not enough.

They're going to need to come up with a certain therapy or a person who is experienced and understand understands this thing so that when they have clients who are going to be coming out of this reality bubble, they'll have words and terms for these feelings, which aren't bad. They're just feelings that exist.

Things are changing, but they're changing slowly. And probably for the rest of their lives, Melissa and Sarah and Eric will have someone come up to them and remind them of something they did when they were 22. Treat them like a character on a show, someone who's frozen in time, regardless of how much they've evolved since then. And maybe it won't happen every day like it used to, but it'll happen every week for sure. And then maybe every other week. But it won't stop. That's the nature of this thing. So I have to ask, if you had your life to live over, would you do it again?

100 %. 100 %. And I say all this from a healthy place. It was an opportunity that brought me so much life experience and so much exposure to shit I would have never seen before. So So much perspective I would not have had I not done it. All the people at MTV, they changed my life in such a way where I could be in a cute little townhouse in Tampa, going to my happy hour and punching in, decorating my cubicle. And that would have been a happy and good life for me. That was actually the path. But I took that chance, and I've seen the world, and I met really cool people, and married a really cool person. None of that was happening unless I did that shit.

Let's get back to Eric. His psychedelic journeys and healing work have given him serenity and forgiveness and purpose. And believe me when I tell you this, absolutely glowing skin. But they've also given him a vision of the future, a hopeful glimpse into what a young Eric or Melissa or Sarah might be able to expect.

The spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits that I work with were actually communicating or talking to me about my life, my path, my mission, and what I came here to do. And they started talking about the real world, and they started talking about reality TV. And they said, You know how you were a part of that show that changed the face of television 30 years ago? And they were like, well, guess what? It's going to happen again, but in a different way. And what you're going to see, and I'll make a prediction right now, this will be the first time that I'm making this prediction publicly, but I can almost guarantee with every bone in my body that you are going to see a wave over the next 5 to 10 years of transformational television. It's going to go from the train wreck to, Oh, I don't want this train to wreck. And you're going to see this year and next year a ton of transformational television that's really going to make an impact on the world in a very, very positive way.

Time will tell whether reality television will actually become a catalyst for positive societal change. I hope so. My heart can't take another scandival. But in the meantime, Doug Herzog was right. You can draw a line from the real world to social media. Everyone is playing to the cameras now, and not just people who are signing up to be on television. I mean, you wouldn't dream of showing up to the Bachelor mansion without thinking about your social media strategy and how it might help grow your life coaching business. But increasingly, you wouldn't show up to your first high school dance without all that sorted out either. Everyone has a potential audience and a degree of pressure to grow and monetize and hold on to that audience. And there's a psychological cost associated with that. Some of the people who we watched in the '90s and the '80s, people who had the first and biggest audiences are trying to address that fact in an honest way. They're having the important conversations. They're doing the work. They're reaching out to support one another and the ones who came after them. That is a real good thing. In our next episode, we'll pick up the story of MTV in the '90s, the decade when the network gave you a show for the middle-aged music aficionado, and a show that would send teenage viewers sprinting through Times Square.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I got to figure out a way to get to Hawaii and do mushrooms with Eric Mies. Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes. Executive Produced by Jenna Weis-Burman, Dave Holmes, Jim Webber, and Chris Callen. Our Story Editor is Maddie Sprung-Kaiser. Produced by Lloyd Lockeridge, Ian Mott, and Terence Malingone. Edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Baisel. Production support by Javier Cruises. Special thanks to JD Crowley, Maura Curren, Leah Reece Dennis, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey, and Hilary Shuff. Who Killed the video star, the story of MTV, is an Odyssey original. I'm Bobby Finger. And I'm Lindsay Webber. And I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to love.

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