Hey there, it's Kathy. I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to History of the 90s

early and ad-free on Amazon music included with Prime.

Sociology professor Danielle Lindeman has an exercise that she likes to do with her students

at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She asked them to make two lists.

In column A, they're to write down as many current U.S. Supreme Court justices as they can name off the top of their heads.

No looking at their phones or laptops.

In column B, they're to do the same, but with Kardashians, Jenner's can be included too.

And then we sort of take stock and we see how long the two lists are.

And inevitably, for the vast majority of them, the Kardashian-General list is longer than the

Supreme Court Justice list.

Professor Lindemann isn't trying to throw the students under a bus or make them feel stupid.

The purpose of the exercise, it's the silly exercise, right?

But it's just to kind of show that this thing that we might see is kind of frivolous or unimportant

or kind of a cultural side show is not really a cultural side show.

It's on the center stage of our culture.

And whether or not we watch these shows,

we're still impacted by them. But in the early 90s, reality TV as we know it today, wasn't yet

on the center stage. In fact, it didn't even exist yet. I'm Kathy Kinsora, and this is History of the

90s, a podcast about a decade that changed the world.

On this episode, we look at how one cable channel changed everything by putting cameras inside a New York loft with seven strangers.

This is The Real World and the Rise of Reality TV.

MTV's The Real World premiered 30 years ago in 1992, and it set the stage for everything

...