Road Rules

When I just said being in New York, it brought me back to a very, very vivid memory I have.

I think I was still in college at the time, and I was obsessed with The Real World and Road Rules, and I walked into an audition room, sat in the chair, then got up and left.

[laughs]

Okay.

in either format, but that leads me to my next question.

Yes.

How does Road Rules enter your life? Were you already a Real World fan and knew the potential in that, or was it something that kind of happened out of the blue?

So I started on The Real World actually.

imagine? The levels of exploitation that happened.

Like if you look at reality television as a form, like there's an arc of like how it became a big segment of the television business, right? It's like- There was like the PBS Up documentaries and then there was The Real World and then Road Rules.

And then like you kind of had these Survivor and things that splintered off from there.

But it was really like the aughts.

And now, isn't this interesting, right? You know, this is why you need to hire experts, not just your random reality TV stars.

You're, you know, you were on Road Rules, you were on The Apprentice, all of...

You're Dr. Oz.

Or, or it's like you need experts that really know what happens when, A, you go into wars you shouldn't go into, the geopolitical, uh, uh, uh, wrecking ball coming back in your direction.

He's always been one of my favorites since...

I, I watched his, like, Road Rules, and I really liked-

Yeah

... him on that, and I've loved his career, and he was nice to me at Challenge Mania [laughs] so that's why I picked Derrick.

That's when I came of age.

And so I watched him on Road Rules, like those reality competition shows that sort of preceded like The Amazing Race and Love Island.

MTV at the time was kind of the only place to find shows where a bunch of attractive people between 18 and 25 were thrown into a situation together and asked to complete challenges.

And I remember watching him on that and thinking he was extremely stupid.

I think that sucks.

But I also think that it's reasonable to expect that as you get older, you gain wisdom, you gain experience, and you change based on that wisdom and experience.

And so to have someone who's 46 years old acting like he's 21 and competing on road rules alongside Sean Duffy or whatever, there's something like stunted about it.

that feels inappropriate and not necessarily aspirational.