If you're a fan of “The Real World,” you probably remember Wes Bergmann.

210: Do you remember your own casting call?
WB: I do. My casting call, there was about 1,000 kids that showed up at a bar outside of Arizona State. And I showed up with a girl that I was trying to, you know, put the moves on, and next thing I know, she was home, and I was there filling out paperwork for a couple of hours.

210: Were you excited?
WB: I was more drunk than excited. (Laughs.) And it's comments like that that got me on the show.

210: Was the show what you thought it would be like?
WB: It was pretty similar to what I thought it was going to be like. I was more pleasantly surprised than unpleasantly surprised. The good stuff was the money. I had no idea that afterward I was going to be getting paid $500 an hour just to show my face in public every day, so that was a very big plus. The connections, the travel. I didn't know that I was going to leave the show with the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.

210: Do people recognize you on the street?
WB: Every day. I'm on the highway right now. If I look over and make eye contact with whoever's to my right, I'm sure that they would gasp and hit the car in front of them. It is ridiculously bad sometimes. It goes in and out. When you're on TV, it's a lot worse. And certain weeks are bad, too. If you had a week on television where you did something absolutely gnarly stupid and you're getting the center of attention for a week's worth of reruns on MTV, I mean, you're going to get noticed a lot more easily, I've noticed.

210: Are you really the way you appeared on the show?
WB: It depends on what your idea of how I appeared on the show was. There were certain things that were totally exaggerated, and by exaggerated I mean, it's not like they edited it to make me look worse than I was, it's just that they only show a certain dimension of my character, which is not how I am in real life. If they wanted to paint me, let's say, on the show as the bad guy, they're not ever going to show any clip of me being nice to someone, you know? They'll completely edit that out. Whereas in the real world, no pun intended, yeah, I might make a couple of mean di** comments every once in a while but that's also in contextual arrangement with a bunch of nice things I said and did. There were certain episodes there where I could have saved a baby from a burning building, and it wouldn't have made the show.

210: MTV called you “the kind of guy you love to hate.”
WB: Yeah. You know what, I kind of like the personification of the guy you love to hate. I don't know. It's kind of hard to describe in a way that doesn't make me sound even more hateful. The people that know me well love me. Anyone that ever meets me is like, “Oh man, you're so much cooler in real life,” stuff like that, and I'm like, “You know what, I understand. Whatever.”

210: People said nasty things about you. Did that bother you?
WB: Very, very few people actually say anything rude to my face because they're afraid of getting their butt kicked. I know for a fact people say all sorts of stupid stuff behind my back, and if I hear anything of the sort, then I pretty much just go up and call it out. 'CauseÖ I can't take advantage of groupies and hook up with girls anymore, so the only form of entertainment I have is being an absolute di** to people that say the wrong thing. And that's a true statement. I literally just prey on people that ask stupid questions and stuff. And I'm real quick with my words, like I say some of the creepiest, meanest things sometimes, and everyone just doesn't even know what to think with themselfÖ until they just are so confused and awestruck that they just turn around and leave me alone, which is what I wanted in the first place, so it's cool.

210: Do you have any advice for people who want to get on the show?
WB: I would say be yourself but don't even consider trying out if you don't tell good stories. If you're the kind of person that's going to get there and be asked a question and you're going to have one- or two-sentence answers, then just don't even bother showing up. I mean, you can be an average-looking person and still get on the show, I'm an average-looking person and I got on the show, but if you're even remotely ugly or fat, don't try. I've been to a couple of casting calls since, and I just look at the people down in line and I'm like, “Man, do you guys have mirrors? What are you doing to yourselves?” In my casting they sat us all around a pool table, and the casting director was at one end of the pool table, and he just went around and asked everyone a question, and I remember that people just froze up. And if you're going to freeze up at a bar amongst your peers, how are you going to do anything close to entertaining on TV? And the casting director knows that. So if you're shy, and you think

210: Did you act like yourself at the casting call?
WB: Arizona State is kind of famous for being a party school. So I had a feeling that they were going to Arizona State to look for a party dude. And so I went out there, and I knew they were kind of looking for that, so I just told as many stories as I possibly could about my fraternity and the parties I went to and the girls I hooked up with, the beer I drank literally, there were no questions that strayed from that genre. So I knew what they were looking for. You don't have to lie, you just concentrate on one area or one aspect of your life because that's all they're going to show on TV anyway.

210: Are you watching the current show?
WB: Not to groupie status, but enough to be able answer questions about it.

210: What do you think of it?
WB: I think it's good. Alex (Smith) is a good friend of mine, and TyrieÖ (Ballard) is a good friend, also. So both of those two dudes are really cool and really entertaining. Tyrie right now is getting an absolutely horrible rap because of how he's coming off. He's the most soft-spoken little baby I've ever met in my life. In a good way, in a good way. Tyrie is cool, Alex is cool, but I never met any of the other guys.  Alex is another Arizona State dude. And so he came over a couple of weeks after he finished (taping), and Johanna and I sat him down and we literally just like lectured him for like an hour. We were like, these are good agents to get in contact with, these are good strategies. ..... to make the most money, to network in this way and that way, because I'm in a prestigious business school, I know what to do to take advantage of the minute ..... celebrity fame or whatever the hell you want to call it. I know how to take advantage of that to make it profitable. I was just trying to help Alex out, and then Alex made sure to convey a lot of that information on to the Denver cast. And he has since come back to us and thanked us and talks really nicely about us, and that's all we wanted, I just wanted to help out a little bit.

210: So you're living in Arizona?
WB: Johanna and I bought a house in Arizona. ..... We're very seriously dating. Basically what happened was, I won all that money on the show, and I was going to take it back and spend it on buying a big rock and everything, but we started this business. So most of it is kind of tied up in that right now. ..... We've never had any problems with cheating; we hang out with each other almost 24 hours a day. It's the best relationship I've ever been in, and I'm the happiest guy ever. We're just not in a hurry to get the actual question popped, because I'm still finishing up school and making some dinero here and there.

210: Do you plan to continue on in the reality-show world?
WB: Absolutely not. I've taken as much as “The Real World” could possibly give me. I got the girl, I got the dough, I got the traveling experience. Now I'm back in school, I'm kicking butt and taking names in other ways. This project that we're putting together, it's going to be a boxing match with kids from “The Real World,” and it's going to be called “The Reality Rumble.” It's going to be a live event in Phoenix sometime in the fall. There's going to be television and pay-per-view Web broadcasts and stuff like that, so everyone in Texas will have plenty of opportunity to check it out.

210: Cool. Good luck.
WB: Thank you, Jessica, and if I were single, I'd be flying down to San Antonio, because you sound hot.