Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives. This is Jess and I am extremely excited. You

know, in over 20 seasons of the 20 more than 20 seasons of the real world, there really

are two that are truly the most memorable. Aside from New York, the debut season, real world

truthfully, most culturally significant season is certainly San Francisco. And I'm here with

Mohammed Velao, the musician, poet, and voice of reason in the show's most ethnically diverse

groundbreaking third season. Hey, Mohammed. Hey, what's going on? How are you today? How you feeling?

Uh, you know, to be honest, I am, I've been doing a lot. So I'm a little burnt out, but I feel

good right now. So what have you been up to? Tell me. Well, a lot since the real world, but

for the last 20 years, really, I've been doing diversity, I've been in inclusion work,

kind of blending it with my artwork, with poetry, with spoken word, and hip hop. And over the years,

it's landed me at Stanford University, and I oversee an office that does that work. My

office is called the office for inclusion, belonging, and intergroup communication. You're still in

San Francisco? Still in San Francisco doing, spending a lot of time on campus, but yes, still in San

Francisco. And you are originally from San Francisco, right? I was, I was, my family moved to San

Francisco and I was 11 years old. So on that show, I was at San Francisco, for sure. Amazing.

That was cool. I mean, to take, to take everybody back San Francisco aired in 1994. And this is

Gen X, you know, at that time, that was the year friends premiered reality bites was like the

biggest movie ever at that time. It was all about basically people who were slackers and didn't

work. Like that was sort of the reputation of the Gen X generation. What separated you guys

is that you guys really were the opposite. You were actively working to make something of yourself.

You were artists and really trying to make an impact in the world. For sure, I actually think that

the folks who did the casting and I don't remember their names unfortunately, but they were two

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