After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Call Her Daddy CRISIS, Rainn Wilson Blasts Cancel Culture, UFC vs Lefty-palooza, & Pratt’s Next Move, w/ Chris Fenton

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Chris Fenton, producer of the upcoming comedy “Bad Counselors” and a professor at the University of Southern California’s John H. Mitchell Business of Cinematic Arts Program. They begin with a discussion about his new made in America film. Fenton spills the tea on what it’s like to work in Hollywood these days, how the movie industry became overly dependent on China, and why it’s important to reshore jobs. The conversation turns to the UFC event at the White House and the anti-Trump counterprogramming event featuring figures like Bette Midler and Joy Reid. Then the discussion turns to Rainn Wilson saying “The Office” couldn't be made today, why California and Hollywood are really failing, and the truth about Spencer Pratt's political campaign for L.A. mayor. Emily rounds out the show with a look at the Vanity Fair investigation into Alex Cooper's company, and more…   USAFacts: Demand government accountability by signing the open letter for reliable public data at https://USAFacts.org/supportdata   Unplugged: Switching is simple, Visit https://Unplugged.com/EMILY and order your UP phone today!   Beam: Visit https://shopbeam.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY to get our exclusive discount of up to 40% off. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back to After Party, everyone. We have a big, big show tonight. Our guest is Chris Fenton. He's a producer of a new movie called Bad Counselors. It's going to be out soon. Lots to get to with Chris. If you're unfamiliar with his work, I know if you followed me for, you know, five years, you've probably seen Chris pop up because I talk to Chris a lot. He has such interesting perspective, having been in Hollywood for his entire career. So there's a ton to get to. We're going to get Chris's reaction to what happened here in Washington with the big UFC America 250. fight just last night. The counter programming to the America 250 UFC fight, which is, if you haven't seen it yet, or if you haven't heard any of the clips yet, you're going to want to stick around for that. Rain Wilson, Dwight, is out talking about whether or not the office could be made once again. Steve Karell actually made comments like this not too long ago. And Spencer Pratt is not giving up on his campaign or talk a little bit about Alex. I'm sorry, I just said, I almost just said Alex Earl, but of course Alex Cooper. who is in hot water, big, big Vanity Fair investigation into Alex Cooper that I'm going to break down

as well in this episode. Really interesting situation. So first, of course, I'm always so about it doing this, but please do subscribe. If you haven't yet, it's a great way to help the show. The most helpful thing you can do is subscribe on YouTube, like, comment. That's great in the algorithm, and we appreciate it so much. Also, make sure to subscribe on podcast apps. If you aren't subscribed there, we do a Friday episode of the show. That's actually audio only, and it's where I answer your questions that hit my inbox,

Emily at double my caremedia.com, my actual email address where you can ping me. And I respond to just about all of you who do write in, as many of you know, because we email. So like I said, big show tonight. Appreciate you for taking time out of your day to join us. And we are going to be back with Chris Fenton in just one moment. Can I take a quick break first and see you on the other side? This episode is sponsored by USAFax, a nonpartisan organization making government data easier to access and understand. I'm partnering with them on a campaign called The Data We Depend on.

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We're back with After Party and our guest, Chris Fenton, who's producer of the new film, Bad Counselors. It's going to be in theaters July 22nd through 27th. He's professor at University of Southern California's John H. Mitchell's School of Cinematic Arts Program. Chris, that sounds like defense against the dark arts. Sounds like you're a Harry Potter professor. Thanks for being. Go Trojans.

Yes, yes. And Chris also has a great book, by the way you should mention, it's called Feeding the Dragon that came out. What was that, 2021, Chris? Yeah, actually 2020, August of 2020, and you were one of the first that read it and was behind it. I love that about you. And I was so excited to be on the show because we've been talking for a long time about a lot of these topics. Yeah, and if you haven't read the book and you're curious about what's going on inside Hollywood, Again, it came out in 2020.

It was a super, super prescient book. And part of it is just a tour of Chris's kind of experience, his career arc in Hollywood, all the way from what? The Mailroom? You started in the Mailroom, right? You know, I started even below the Mailroom. I started as a temp in the Music Fax Department. So I got promoted to the Mailroom after six months.

Amazing. Well, I'm going to start here with the trailer to Bad Counselors, and then I hope people can get a little bit of your story, because I think it speaks to what you're going to do. you're doing with this film and more broadly in your career right now, Chris. So let's take a look here at a preview of bad counselors. Is everyone excited for camp? Whose idea wasn't to come to this stupid camp?

Attack! Oh, no. I hate kids. I'm not supposed to be on our phone. I keep that girl 10-year-old mouth shut. I'm 12. And let's start acting like it, yeah? I hate camping.

We're not Christian. Our father. Desert in heaven. Hello. Be your name. We're taking no. I'm on here. We've got to come clean.

You say something. We get kicked out. That's great, bud. Is that you and your dad? It's you and me. Who are you, Grayson? I think I'm still trying to figure that out. It's time for a counselor makeover.

Come on. So good. So good. All right, Chris. So comedy. Great castor. You've got Chris Klein. Missy Pyle, some cool stuff. And I just want to start by asking if you could tell us a little bit

about what makes this project different, what drew you to the project and in the context of kind of your experience in Hollywood, your career from working with Marvel stuff all the way to where you are now. Yeah, well, thanks for showing the trailer. I appreciate it. I always getting sort of excited when I hear that Forrest Frank song too. He's a part of the movie along with Cori Azbury and Night Ranger and Lifehouse and we have great musicians involved. So it It was just a really cool process to be involved with, mainly because, as you know, I wrote a book about the U.S.-China exchange in terms of the Hollywood business and how we were catering to Beijing in order to create more relevancy in that market and then also carry out a lot of the

narratives and messaging that Beijing was looking to carry beyond their borders and also inside their borders. And that took two decades of my career. And over that time, we started to realize that was not in the best interest of the United States of America. And in fact, not only was it not a good national security issue in terms of soft power influence and helping Beijing promote theirs and sort of mitigate ours. But then on top of it, we talked on the process and the IP development and how to actually make movies at a world-class level. So eventually they took over the domestic business there in a way that, whereas we might have been 80 cents of every dollar made in that market, say circa 2013, 2014, were now less than 5%. So not only did we mitigate our ability to spread soft power influence around the world through Hollywood content, but on top of it, we lost the market too. So we had a double banger that just did not work in our favor. And what you're doing with bad counselors is just, I saw this.

I don't know if you saw this, Chris. There was a Seth Rogen quote today. Literally, I think it came out today where you saying super bad could not have been made today because for all kinds of reasons and mostly like industry reasons. But it's actually kind of interesting nonetheless. And you know, you'll understand you would be fluent in all of the reasons that Seth Rogen said, you know, basically it was saying the studios are more risk-averse, which is something I first heard from you. And it makes sense. It kind of unlocks your understanding of why some of these movies suck so hard.

As soon as you realize that there's so much risk aversion in the game, it's not trusting the artist behind it. And it's putting up all of this bureaucratic kind of barriers to doing a good film. And you're just trying to do a simple comedy here, Chris. What's that like in 2026? Yeah. So you brought it right back to essentially the first question you asked, which was what was so exciting about making bad counselors. So for once, we got to focus on just making it. in a good family comedy, one that parents can bring their eight or nine year old to, one that

teens can go to by themselves or go on a date, something that's really fun, engaging, doesn't have a political bias one way or another or an ideology set in it. It's just plain old entertainment. But then on top of it, unlike what we were doing between the U.S. and China for so long, or what that created a template for, which is the problem that Hollywood sits in right now, where we were offshoring so much of our production, so much of the output and the labor that we were using in order to make these productions. With bad counselors,

we hired 1,200 people to work on this film and to make it into what it is today and to help us get it out into theaters on July 22nd. It's fully American-made. I've never been involved with something like that before, and I really see it as a template moving forward for Hollywood with a lot of different movies. And it's something that we need to replicate over and over,

because as of recently, we have offshoreed over 60% of our production, which means 3 million Americans across the country are in jeopardy of just simply not working or working way under the amount that they used to. Right. And let's put a pin in this part of it, because we're going to come back to this discussion later in the show. It's so important. What Chris is doing is huge.

And it just also is a segue. into what happened last night at the White House with the UFC America 250 fight. I want to start actually just with Zach Brown. We can toss this BuzzFeed headline up on the screen who got so much guff for performing the day before the event and at the event itself. The headline here is, quote, this stupid event is 100% for Trump. Zach Brown just defended his White House UFC performance, but the internet isn't having it, putting him, casting him as somebody who's playing defense for himself here. And he said this was not about politics for him.

His explanation was this is not about politics. He said, this is about the troops. This is about the men and women who serve the country. He said it was an honor. He loves USC. He is friends with Dana White very clearly. He sang the national anthem at the event. And it was really good, by the way.

And as I was watching all of this play out, Chris, I just want to get your take on this. I thought the production value was shockingly good for this strange event that you're putting and the broadcast itself had to have been enormously difficult. on the south lawn of the White House, unprecedented with a level of production at that scale. And it was kind of went off without a hitch, to be honest. It looked good.

It was high energy. UFC's not really my thing. But, you know, I think everybody in UFC world, the millions of UFC fans in this country were pretty stoked about it. It seemed like it was a pretty significant entertainment achievement. Yeah. Well, it definitely was. It was a very big event to pull off. Quite frankly, I can't even imagine the kind of security protocols they had.

in order to do that. But then on top of it, as anybody would know in production, doing anything outdoors is a real pain in the butt. So the fact that they were able to work around bad weather that was, I guess, going in and out of the area, thunderstorms, et cetera, and pull that off. It was a major feat. And then you talk about Zach Brown, which, by the way, shout out to Zach. I went and saw him at the sphere in January. He was fantastic. you know, him going there supporting the President of the United States, whether it's Donald Trump or whether it's Barack Obama or Joe Biden or whatever, that's a real sort of honor to be involved with, especially on the 250th anniversary of the founding of this country and the birthday that it's so

important this year. So I just don't understand the flak that he was getting, honestly. If I were invited to go, I would have done it. And if I was invited to go, I would have done it. And if I was invited to go to Joe Biden, you know, having the same thing in 250th birthday party celebration. I would have done the same thing. It's, it's sort of a shame that we've gotten so bifurcated and so divided as Americans because it just seems like a very non-political thing to do in order to go sing the national anthem at a big event like that. They're right at the White House. And in the meantime, like the split screen here, I was so excited to get your take on this because I'm looking at the this and it's really, I'm seeing all of these big brands behind the, well, actually on the octagon,

physically on the octagon, it was like blanketed with brands. And it's Bud Light, Budweiser, crypto.com. Obviously there was like World Liberty Financial and I think Trump Coins was the sponsors. Or you had that stuff in there, which felt a bit grifty, but huge name brands on this octagon sponsoring that RAM. And I'm thinking back to like the first Trump administration, that That would have been unthinkable and untouchable. And what's felt like a dip in the cultural momentum for the right, it was put into kind of stark relief by looking at the counter programming from Hollywood celebrities like Jane Fonda and Bet Midler, who actually did have a counter event.

I think it was called like the People's Town Hall. Let me see what it was actually technically called here. Rise Up, Sing Out, a concert for the First Amendment in New York City. So let's play a bit of it and I want to get your reaction, Chris. You fascist bound to lose. You're bound to lose, you fascist bound to lose. Let me put you straight when you come for the rest of us. We'll fight you at the gate and you will lose, you fascist bound to lose.

No one is getting left behind this time. No one is getting left behind. Not this time. No one is getting left behind. How do we get there? Together or never get there. And we also had some pretty political speeches, of course, from the likes of the various celebrities, including Julia Roberts, and somebody who's not really a celebrity, but gave

a very political speech here at the rise up concert. Joy Reid. Let's play this. Scott Pelly fired from CBS by the clack of far-right ideologues, who bought it and handed it over to a zealot named Barry Weiss, Jim Acosta, out at CNN, Karen Attea, fired from the Washington Post, and me, more than a year ago. All of us shone the door for just doing our jobs, standing up to the administration, and in my case, also for speaking out against a genocide. And it's not just journalists. Jimmy Kimmel suspended until the people rose up to put him back on the air. The late show with Stephen Colbert fired after more than 30 years, that show was on.

on the air because a certain orange asshole whose name is no longer on the Kennedy Center. Chris, what this looks like to me, like the split screen of this is incredible because I don't think you might, you'll have different opinion on this maybe, but I don't think that the administration has been completely above board when it comes to some of this like pressure on the big media companies and the like. But if you're just looking at this side by side with the UFC fight, which was condemned as like a degradation of the White House and was going to be so real, low rent and the celebrities were had like these very elitist takes on what was happening. They just kind of walked into this trap Trump set.

Then you look on this split screen at these, like just the production was tired for that rise up sing out thing. It was much lower budget, obviously, but even just taking, I mean, they have Julia Roberts, like huge names and it looks tired. It looks so lame. And meanwhile, on the other side, you have Trump with all these huge brands, Joe Rogan, Dana White, Zach Brown, and you had like big influencers there. The juxtaposition is crazier than I can remember in my lifetime in terms of the right

having an edge on the left in pop culture. And I wonder what your assessment is of this ongoing vibe shift or the battle for the vibes between the left and the right, because that was pretty clear last night. Well, A, it's just disappointing because honestly, we should be coming together as a country around this 250th birthday party and celebration of this country. I remember back as a kid going, and this is aging me, but I remember the 200th going to a train that passed through town, and that was a huge thing.

And I don't think my parents really cared who was president at the time. We just went and celebrated the birthday of America, a big milestone. The counter program, and I thought you were talking about last night, was a great hockey game, which the line ended winning. So I was flipping back and forth to that. I had no idea that was going on. It's a shame that people couldn't get behind

and just celebrate the fact that there was a really sort of unique event going on at the White House or at least just tune out and watch hockey or watch the Golden Murals or whatever else. It's, yeah, it's just, it's hard to imagine we've gotten to a place like this in this country. And I'd like to think that somehow we're going to maybe get some resemblance of a together, put together nation at some point here. But it's hard to stay hopeful.

But that's what's interesting from your vantage point in Hollywood is that the big tent pole blockbusters, some of which that you've worked on in your career, there's still something about those that manage often to bring the country together. It's like the NFL. There are a couple of cultural artifacts every year that feel more like monoculture. But by and large, because these channels have been democratized or these mediums have been so democratized by the internet, meaning you could be watching a million things on Netflix, a million things on Hulu, a million things on Paramount, wherever at any given moment, you don't have to sit down at 11.30 p.m. and watch a late night show on one of the three channels that has a late night show because it's not, you know, 1972. And so they have less incentive to do unifying content. Like, that's why Joy Reid's invocation of Kimmel and Colbert. was so interesting because with Colbert, they canceled the whole late show. They didn't just cancel Colbert. They canceled the entire franchise because with that level of overhead 200 employees, it just wasn't worth it anymore. And I wonder if, Chris, you're seeing this incentive structure

shift the way. People like you on the production side, writers, think about studios, think about doing these projects. Are there more and more of them kind of going to niches? Or are we moving back towards more and more big tent pole type things? Like what's happening right now in terms of how this content could be for a bigger audience versus a micro audience? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Believe it or not, I used to represent Jim B. Kimmel back in the day, he and Adam Carolla were clients of a senior agent.

I worked on him as a young 24-year-old agent William Morris. And they were just good comedians. And Adam, as you know, has sort of been more. sort of seen as somebody on the right side of the aisle, Jimmy obviously much more on the left. Colbert was an absolutely fantastic genius at comedy, especially when he was sort of doing a parody version of essentially what he does now in real life.

It's just, it's sort of a shame that, you know, we've gone to a place where the comedy just can't simply be about, you know, poking fun at both sides, you know, being somebody that can call balls and strikes, also have good guests on and just talk about entertainment and allow people to have an escape as when they're sitting in their lazy boy late at night and starting to dread the fact that they got to get up six hours and go back to work. You know, we, Lome Entertainment is the independent studio that I've been working with that made bad counselors.

and we have admitted that media is not neutral and it doesn't create itself. It's created by people and they have particular worldviews. So one of the things that we're very particular about is to try to make sure that our worldview is something that can include all people, you know, and everybody can enjoy something. So even with something like bad counselors, which is not a serious movie or something that is going to be up for Oscars, but it's a fantastic sort of nostalgia look at summer camp that parents will enjoy. And then kids who are going through it over the next two months are going to, you know, sort of be excited to see it because, oh, my God, I just lived through that. And then on top of it, even more importantly, is that it is a Nashville-based, Tennessee-based company.

And, yeah, we're surrounded by a lot of people of faith. So one of the things that we wanted to do was create this interesting sort of fish-out-water dynamic, where these two fraternity brothers get in trouble and they have to serve community service at a church camp, except they're secular by nature and they're surrounded by people that are believers. And on top of it, you know, they don't know that they're secular and they're sort of faking it out. And what we try to do is create the nuance so that the funny didn't poke fun at either sides, but it actually allowed both sides to sort of laugh with it and embrace the nature of the different

characters that were from different sides of sort of the spectrum and enjoy it because it was just good, clean, fun. And that's something that we need to do more, particularly in the comedy space, is just, you know, enough of the political correctness. Like, go out there. If you're a comedian that's really edgy and R-rated, you know, go after everyone. I mean, look at these roasts that Netflix does. They're fantastic. Or a Tim Dillon who just goes after everyone. Or even a Joe Rogan who calls balls and strikes. I mean, he doesn't like a lot of what happens on the right and people affiliate him with the right. And sometimes he doesn't like what happens on the left, even though he was a Democrat at one point. So like just entertain. You know, entertain us. I think even

Kurt Cobain said entertain us, you know, that's what we're supposed to be doing here in Hollywood. And it's important because we were really good at it and we can be really good at it. We are best in the world. So I'd just like to see us get back to that and just help people escape their everyday sort of troubles and challenges and all that kind of stuff. Yes, you had a mandate from Kurt Cobain that was utterly just botched. But let's keep going on this trend because Rain Wilson did an interview with Fox for some reason. I don't know why Rain Wilson was speaking to Fox. I still haven't figured it out. But he was and he made comments. I go in what Steve Correll said not long ago about whether or not the office could be made today in 2026, of course, I think when Steve Coral said it,

it was around 2019, 2020. But a similar argument here. Let's watch Rain Wilson. I do feel like you couldn't make the office today. I think that would be too hard to be as politically incorrect as the show was. I think there has been a bias in the media towards more what we call liberal policies. They're willing to overlook the platinum Nazi tattoo, but if it was someone from the other side that had a tattoo that was questionable, they would be all over MSNBC about it. So it's the hypocrisy that gets me the most. It's the hypocrisy of like both sides need to have kind of equal standards of behavior.

A little bit of media criticism there too, but the point about political correctness in the office, it's not as though he's saying the office couldn't be made. made because it was bad. He's saying the office was good and it couldn't be made now because our standards have gotten whack, which is interesting in light of you literally having a new comedy film out. But that makes me really sad, Chris, because the office was satirizing bigotry and ignorance. And that's where the office would get into trouble with these standards, actually literally

behind me on the shelf. I called myself a cultural prepper in 2020. It's like I wasn't stockpiling like powder mac and cheese. I was stockpiling DVDs because there's already stuff that you can't watch unless you had the DVDs before some of these episodes, whether it's the office or 30 Rock or it's always sunny or Reno 911. Actually, I don't know if Reno 911 purged anything. That would be awful. But the rest of those shows have gotten rid of certain episodes and plot lines or moments in those episodes, including the office. And it's like all of it was meant to satirize ignorance and bigotry.

And it's crazy that even now in 2026, after we've had this cultural reckoning, there's like randomly a UFC fight on the south lawn of the White House. People know that there's a problem in Hollywood. Even now, I think he's right. And I'm curious what you take, what you make of it, that we couldn't do this again. Well, I think he is 100% right. I mean, it is very difficult. Even if you look at Saturday Night Live skits from, say, 10 years ago, we probably couldn't do most of them. It's pretty amazing to think of how quickly this sort of political.

correctness phenomenon took hold. And the fact that it is abating the amount of comedy that used to be out there that people would laugh, you know, enjoy laughing at, knowing that it was making some sort of cultural commentary, yet it was also very accepted. And I go back to those Netflix roasts, like the Tom Brady roast, you get to see sort of the potential of what comedy can be. and it's nice how it's unrestrained and allowed to go that direction. One thing you said at the beginning of that is, you know, I'm surprised Rain Wilson even did a Fox interview. Now, honestly, I don't know if he's left or right.

I sort of saw that when your producer sent it over earlier today, and I was like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder if he does lean right. But I would also love the fact if he leaned left and he was doing a Fox interview because you brought up the year 2020. I didn't realize how bifurcated everything I'd gotten until my book came out. And I realized like, oh, Simon Schuster wants me to go do Tucker Carlson. So, okay, great.

It sells a lot of books. I'd love to talk to Tucker Carlson's audience about issues between the U.S. and China. And I did it multiple times. Well, after the first time, 50% of my friends were no longer my friends. So I was like, wait a minute, are we in that divided of a nation where you can't even talk to the other side without people suddenly wanting to throw you out of their life, that's a problem. And I hope Rayne Wilson, if he does lean left,

gets respect from his friends on the left saying, hey, I'm glad you talked about something important on Fox. That's important for that audience to digest. But I have a feeling the reaction was probably different than that. And this is what was so frustrating about the earlier clips we were looking at from the rise-up sing-out rally in New York that was counter-programming the UFC fight, which is that you've got Jane Fonda saying, now the House on American Affairs Committee,

so famously the anti-communist committee, the McCarthy Committee, was going after, she's saying now it's coming from the White House. And I just have to think for a guy like you, Chris, who faced serious career repercussions, for asking questions that the rest of the country was asking about the far left and about how it had kind of infiltrated the industry. And let alone the people who were suppressed,

during COVID for asking questions that are now considered to be settled in the mainstream, saying things that are now considered to be totally mainstream about Wuhan Lab and masking and those sorts of things. To hear Jane Fonda and Julia Roberts coming out and just saying this is coming from the White House in 26, which, by the way, I agree. There's some problematic things coming out of the White House when it comes to art and entertainment, but say nothing, Nothing about all the suppression that happened over the last 10 years from the left, some of which was literally coming from the Biden White House, the Obama White House. This was serious.

And real free speech advocates saw that it was serious. But the creatives of all the people in the world, in your industry, Chris, they were giving you guff for daring to even talk to people who disagreed with them. And so it just feels like such selective outrage. And I wonder if you sense that there's a thaw maybe coming or if it's getting worse. What's ahead? Well, it's a very interesting question. I do think, you know, look, after you lose half of your friends because you did a Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or whatever it is, you sort of get thick skin. So now it's like, well, might as well do everything because it's important to talk to all audiences about important subjects. And quite frankly, when I talk about subjects, I talk about in a

constructive manner, but then on top of it, I try to provide solutions. And even in some of the analysis of what I talk about that sort of went the wrong direction and was misguided between the U.S. and China, I'm out here making a fully American-made movie and convincing investors to do the same thing because it's a smart thing to do. So I'm praying that come July 22nd, people actually go see this film like they would go buy a Harley-David-Sern or a pair of Levi's because it's American-made and it's fun. But I think, you know, it's interesting because Tatiana Siegel, who writes for California Post, she does the page six for them, the page six Hollywood, she called me the Maga Whisperer because I'm out there talking about the importance of reshoring, manufacturing in our,

in our entertainment space, our TV and film production. And I take that as, you know, one of great respect, because I think Tatiana realizes that I'm somebody that can talk to both the left and the right. I understand the sensitivities about talking to essentially what was my party for most of my life, the Democratic side. I understand what really bothers them and what's important to them. But on top of it, I'm also totally at ease speaking to the Republican side of the aisle. In fact, one that I voted for in the last election. And I'm also totally good about calling balls and strikes, which, by the way, Emily, you're one of the best at doing that now.

There's not a lot of people that are doing it on either side. I totally respect the fact that you do it, you know, whether you're on breaking points, you're talking to Megan Kelly, you're doing it on your show. Like, you have no problem saying, hey, these are issues that I have or this is something that's not going the right way. And that's the way America's supposed to be. We're supposed to be outspoken about who. we're electing in office and what they're doing. And we're supposed to be outspoken of wanting them kick them out if they're doing the wrong thing. And somewhere along the way, we have lost that ability and everybody's got to be tribal and fight to the end over whoever it is they voted for,

even if they're sitting there going, God, I don't know if I really agree with what they just did. So anyway, kudos to you. And yeah, to answer your question along with the way, yes, Hollywood has been difficult on that subject. I don't know if it's actually. abating at all, but at least they see me as a potential conduit that can help the cause and maybe get President Trump invested in some sort of federal production incentive program. Oh, that's so interesting.

Because yeah, he talked about a 100% tariff and all of that. So much to discuss. Thank you for the kind of words, Chris. I'll say one thing that makes it a lot easier is when you realize that, you know, not everybody likes the balls and strikes approach, but there's so many people who do and just want to trust that someone is doing their best to challenge themselves. And so when you realize that, I mean, it's easier to tune out the noise.

But we're going to take a quick break and be back with more of Chris Fenton on the other side. Stick around. We talk about this on the show all of the time. But for years, legacy media, government, and big data companies coaxed us into just surrendering our digital freedom. They would give lip service to privacy while also leaving digital backdoors wide open for their own purposes. Sometimes they're blatant in conveying the idea that encryption is only for criminals or that if you want more privacy, you must have something to hide. We hear it all the time. But how did we get here? From cherishing our Fourth Amendment rights to giving them up so

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tested so you can be confident in knowing your upphone is the most private smartphone that you can by check out up from Unplugged at Unplugged.com slash Emily. That's unplugged.com slash Emily. We're back now with more afterparty joined by Chris Fenton. He's the producer of bad counselors. That's going to be out on July 22nd. He's professor at the University of Southern California's John H. Mitchell, Business of Cinematic Arts Program, the author of a great book also called Feeding the Dragon. Chris, thanks for sticking around. Yeah. And by the way, you know what? My wife and I have a podcast called Platen Ponder Empty Nesting. So we're trying it out as a hobby and it's sort of fun because I get to talk about China stuff

around less serious subjects and I don't know. It's sort of it's an interesting sort of hobby to do and it makes me realize how hard it is in terms of what you do on a daily basis. No, people should definitely check that out. And there's going to be so much China stuff coming up in the near term, as you know better than anybody. So Chris is a great person to follow in general. Now, we've been discussing cultural shifts, what's happening in Hollywood, and I kind of want to start connecting the local politics in, you know, this area you've been for many years, Chris, with the cultural question

of what's happened in Hollywood. Just before we get into this, I want to toss a headline up. This is from Variety. Leverne Cox saying 90% of income gone. 90% of income gone. 90% of Laverne Cox's income, according to Laverne Cox, is gone because of Trump's quote regime for attacking gender ideology and DEI. And this is just an interesting headline in the context of the discussion we've been having because Laverne Cox was one of the hottest celebrities in the world about 10 years ago and for really the last 10 years. Like people were putting Laverne Cox in absolutely everything. Obviously, transgender and was often a way to kind of give the middle finger the first Trump administration and the, you know, the people who were questioning trans

ideology and the like. So I think that's just a kind of interesting note as well. That story just dropped today. And some of that is coming from colleges not hosting Levern Cox anymore and DEI programs at corporations paying speaking fees or schools paying speaking fees. But also kind of interesting that a sign perhaps at some of the big studios and streamers are realizing maybe people don't want the politics that comes with. The reason that they were putting Liver and Cox in so many things for so long was political. There were some people that obviously really like Liverard Gox, but a lot of it was also political. And now, Chris, tagging on to this, Farid Zakaria, who's kind of been heterodox for like the mainstream media bubble,

quote-unquote mainstream media bubble when it comes to criticizing Blue Cities is going in on what's happened in L.A. and with Hollywood. So let's take a, we're going to play two-pocket. clips here because this is a fascinating monologue from Farid Zakaria at CNN. Let's take a listen to the first one here. California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet. It has Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world-class universities, extraordinary agriculture, ports, talent, and natural beauty. But it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need. The state is using public spending to paper over private sector stagnation.

Nowhere is this more vivid than Los Angeles, where Hollywood, the city's defining industry, is in slow motion collapse. The effects are being felt not by celebrity actors and influencers, but the carpenters, costumers, sound engineers, camera operators, editors, drivers, caterers, dry cleaners, prop houses and small businesses that once formed, one of the world's great industrial clusters. The numbers are stark. One report found LA shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,6994 in 2025. Another report estimates, film, television, and sound jobs fell by nearly 30%.

Motion picture employment in LA County fell from about 142,000 at the end of 2022, to roughly 100,000 two years later. Chris, if people are listening to this, they missed you nodding vigorously as for Reid Zakara was explaining exactly what's happened in the state, but he has been sort of heterodox on Blue City

type issues, blue state type issues, but I see there kind of a connection between the cultural disconnect between Hollywood, California and the rest of the country and also this economic malaise, which is very interesting too, like when Hollywood was kind of more in touch with and had its thumb really on the pulse, the state was really humming. And you see the kind of how the inverse has played out in the last, I don't

10, 20 years. So are those jobs going to Georgia and Nashville? Are they happening overseas in China, as you've documented and have personal experience with? Tell us, just give me your response to what you just heard because I saw you nodding. And I think that's an interesting sign. Yeah, well, there's a, I mean, there's a lot to tackle there. I mean, he was also talking. talking about the decay overall of Los Angeles, which is definitely something that I've witnessed since I moved here in 1994, and it's something that we definitely need to turn around somehow. But when you look at just the Hollywood ecosystem, right, that's film and television production for the most part. We're down, say, 50% since 2015. Just in television alone, we're down 58% from 2022.

too. CBS Radford, one of the most iconic soundstages, backglots in town, or Survivor's finale or Seinfeld was shot, that just went bankrupt. You would think, okay, well, maybe that has to do with a lot of stuff moving to say Georgia, a lot of people hear about, oh, Georgia's got a lot of production going on down there. Well, believe it or not, yes, that was the case, say, circa 2007 to 2017. But since COVID, it's really seen a down-tick. In fact, Georgia's spending in 2022 on just simply production, the actual production of movies was at $4.4 billion. It's now down to $2.3 billion, almost a 50% drop. You have sound stages and various other facilities that are about 75% of them are either underutilized or completely empty.

Some of the most state of the art complexes down there, like Trillis Studios, which was started by Chick-fil-A chairman, Dan Kathy, they have 31 soundstages on 1,000 acres. It is not humming like it used to be. And a lot of that is because everything's moved offshore. You know, Marvel, in fact, recently moved out of the Atlanta area to go shoot their movies in the United Kingdom. So you're seeing that, Rinsden repeated over and over, and it's a real problem. And when you talk about the people affected, I get it. L.A., California, very toxic to talk about in terms of most of the country, right? The stars, the people we see on the Golden Globes, a lot of people don't want to hear about their headaches. But like Farid said, it's a lot of the middle class jobs, the upper middle class jobs, the tradesmen, the craftsmen, the cameraman, the gaffers, the electricians, you name it, the 122,000 small businesses that are involved across the countrymen, the craftsmen, the cameramen, the gaffors, the electricians, you name it, the hundred and twenty-two thousand small businesses that are involved across the

country and roughly three million jobs that are those type of jobs that are affected when the economy around this ecosystem is not healthy. So it affects a lot of people. And for Donald Trump, who can really push through a federal incentive that would go on top of the state incentives, which would be a cash credit, which would be a tax credit, he needs to know that a lot of these states are the states that supported him. You're talking about Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas. These are not blue states, like most people think. These are hardworking people that need jobs. They're used to work in four times a year on four different projects. Now maybe they're one a year. It's a real problem and people are

having a hard time dealing with it. And the president has also been kind of peddled to the metal on AI is very close with a lot of those big companies. And Chris, this is the talk of Hollywood. It was a big plotline in the recent comeback season, which was hilarious. But how much of this when we're looking at job loss is coming from AI? Are you hopeful about studios learning to use AI in a good way that doesn't completely wipe out the class of the artists? Like the takes that bottom rung of the ladder out

from the artists or kicks the ladder out from under them as they're trying to make their way up? Just a big question. But since Farid Zakharovached all this job loss, what's happening right now? What do you think is happening? Well, I think there's two things to keep in mind in terms of AI, right?

One is the output, right? So we talked about how media is not neutral. It's fashioned by people with a particular worldview. Like with bad counselors, the entity I'm working with in Tennessee, Lome Entertainment, we're also working on a platform that's an AI platform that actually is deriving answers from scripture, right? So it's this idea of, okay, we have these different worldviews that are

coming into play, but why not go back to the book that's been read for a long time and take scripture out and actually use that to convey the trust and the guidance and the judgment-free space that a lot of people have gotten accustomed to? And that's something that we're going to be launching in September, actually on September 22, exactly two months after bad counselors. So that's one thing. It's the content side. The actual practical uses is something that I'm battling with literally as I'm putting my curriculum together for University of Southern California. What are these kids going to be doing 30, 40 years from now or three or four years from now? It's very hard to know. But I will say that the practical use of labor, the practical use of workers on films has not been affected yet. But we're starting to see this ability to use AI. to really enhance visuals, to do things that are sort of a pain in the butt, right? To correct color, to bring in more brightness when, for instance, you're shooting something on a gray or cloudy day that's supposed to be blue sky because it was yesterday and it's not today on the same scene.

The ability to bring in extras and have background actors that are AI generated in terms of being able to keep that consistency. because when you're, say, doing a summer camp movie, you've got to have, you know, hundreds of 12-year-old showing up every day. And quite frankly, eventually they start to get a little bored. And you're going, wait, where was the guy with the blue shirt that we had in the scene yesterday? So you do have those issues. And that's where AI is going to definitely help. But for the long run, it is going to be an issue, just like it is everywhere else in all other industries. It's going to be seen across the board.

So it's a whole other reason why we do need, at least in this short term, to re-shore these jobs as quickly as possible so these people can get on a solid footing before the real disruption starts. Yeah, I bet you weren't surprised by any of those viral videos, especially because you teach at USC in the film studies of cinematic arts, especially because you teach in that. You probably weren't surprised by all the videos going viral of kids booing the AI guys. are you, Chris? No, that was actually really interesting to see. In fact, I saw there was a walkout at Stanford yesterday, too, but I haven't really seen what the reason was. I think one of the Google founders was speaking. But yeah, it's hard to go through as long a process as it is, as expensive it is, to get through four-year universities or colleges now, and to hear this essentially proliferation of AI technology, where it does seem, for the most part,

it's going to be threatening most jobs. So I can see why the booze are happening and why there is a tone deafness from people and older generations that are just sort of going, ah, you know what, it's not going to affect me or I'll be retiring soon or whatever it is. So let me talk about it in a commencement speech. I think it's a little know-your-a-know-your-audience kind of situation. Well, speaking of somebody who knows the audience, Spencer Pratt. We have to talk about Spencer Pratt before you read, Chris,

because this has been fascinating to watch from here in D.C. He says he's not going anywhere. Obviously, it looks like Nithia Raman did end up making the runoff. The Trump administration, I think the DOJ actually, is investigating the election. We'll see if anything comes out of that. But it looks like Nithia Raman has the votes. And Spencer Pratt is saying, nope, not going anywhere. He's also saying that he had something he was saving for the general election that will take out one of the candidates that might have them resigning in disgrace. So let's say, take a look here at what Spencer Pratt says is in his immediate future. If you think we uncovered a lot of fraud and evil in the campaign, just wait.

We have some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame. I was saving it for the general election. Go ahead and pick your demon, certify your choice, and then you get to see it. So Karen Nithia, ask yourself, is it possible that one of your employees may have a recording of you doing or saying something that would force you to resign and disgrace? Hope you sleep well at night over the next five months because you know who hasn't slept well at all for the last 17 months? My mom, all my neighbors in the palisades,

all the moms who worry about their kids walking past drug addicts in front of their schools, all the business owners getting crushed in the L.A. economy, worried that they can't stay in business and feed their kids. What do you think, Chris, even though he didn't make the runoff, is there a political future for Spencer Pratt in L.A. in California? Well, I mean, there's a couple of things that are really interesting about Spencer Pratt, honestly. Number one is the January. of his particular reason he ran, I think really resonated with people, regardless of whether you're red or blue. I mean, I think he said at one time, you know, you're a Democrat until your

house burns down and it could have been, you know, protected by the government that was in power. The fact is he got into the race because he lost his house. He got into the race because his parents lost his house. He got in the race because quite frankly, I think out of the 7,000 houses that have been destroyed in the palisades, only 250 permits have still been issued or 250 houses are actually under some sort of construction. I can tell you if you drive the PCH where 700 houses all went down in that fire, there's only 25 houses actually being built right now. It's a really unbelievably sad story that has affected a lot of people that aren't overla. wealthy. You know, it's one of the things that people sort of think about when they think about

the palisades, but there's a lot of families that have been in their multi-generations, and they have not been properly insured to be able to build back. And then, of course, you've got the Altadena situation, too. The other thing that he talks about that's really genuine is the fact that, yes, we do have a homeless issue here. We have a real problem in terms of how it's proliferated around the city and how it does interact with, say, kids or, or, you know, nearby schools. One of the things that I think would be really interesting for you to dig up and do an episode on is a thing that I have to go through every once in a while because I have to get off the freeway out here because the 110 freeway is always packed. And if I'm driving to USC,

you get off on an exit and you drive a road called Figueroa. And a mile south of USC, it starts and it goes for another four miles beyond that. And it's an area called the blade. And the blade is the biggest sex trafficking area in the country. And it's girls that are walking the streets that are 11 or 12 years old. And it has gotten completely out of control over the last 10 years with no end in sight. And it's those kind of things where you're realizing, man, when your protection is hurt, when you're seeing things like that that are just so out in the open and there's nothing that's getting done about it, you can see why there was a great passion behind a lot of supporters for Spencer Pratt. Now, whether he does have a political future, I don't know. It seems like

the machine or whatever anybody wants to say didn't get behind him and it costs some votes or, you know, if you want to listen to the All In podcast, they'll say it was a one in a trillion type of chance where, you know, these comebacks occurred and he got knocked out of the runoff. But I do think he's not going anywhere. I do think he found his voice. I do think he's probably found a voice that now has allowed him to come back into, you know, the mainstream and probably create more content and build a career back again, too. And maybe have one that has purpose and a mission just to keep whoever is running in this city on their toes and possibly trying to do the right thing to fix things. You know, it's funny to look at California from the outside. And what makes

me sad about how Farid Zakari was describing California is that we've all kind of watched the evolution and it's crazy to just see so much doubling down in places like California, even after there were recalls post-2020 when some of these awful local AG races went really far left and they kind of ran a lab experiment in places like San Francisco and it failed. And even people on the left rejected it. Centrists, people on the right and the rest of the country, maybe even some people center left are looking at LA and California and thinking, when is it ever, when does the doubling down stop. When does the vicious cycle end? If it's not, you know, Spencer Pratt, who is so outrageous, ridiculous, but has this deep personal story that can maybe catch enough attention to at least

make a runoff, who could, or Rick Caruso, Steve Hilton in the governor's race, who could ever possibly do it? When does this stop? When does this change? And Nithia Rahman is certainly a double-down candidate. Karen Bass is certainly a double-down candidate. It's just, it seems so crazy from the outside. And I guess I wanted to try something out on you, Chris. Is it possible? Well, by the way, I'm just going to add really quick. Yeah, yeah, please. Now is it crazy from the outside, but there's a lot of common sense stuff that is said where people just completely gaslight it. And even the freed, the freed monologue that he had the other day, I tweeted out because I thought, you know, it was really common sense. He's from the left. So like,

how can anybody from the left be upset about it? And it was a lot of the stuff that the right had been saying. And he's just, flat out making a statement that I think is hard to disagree with. Well, I noticed after I tweeted that out, I had a lot of journalists on the left, particularly a lot of Los Angeles Times writers complaining about his monologue and how incorrect it was and inaccurate it was. And I was just going, wait, why? Like, why even fight that? Because it is, it's accurate. It just is. Like, you don't have to say, oh, it's all Karen Bass's fault, but you could say, hey, maybe we can fix this or maybe make it a little better.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I mean, that's such a good point. And Mamdani, unlike Nithia Raman, wasn't in charge of the city. I mean, he was a state senator. But Nithya Raman has held like really significant posts in the city overseeing some of the problems that have gotten worse, obviously under Raman and Bass. So that's kind of an interesting element of this election cycle. And is it possible? I mean, here in D.C., like every conservative I knew that used to live in the city left during COVID. They're like absolutely not not doing this anymore. And I wonder if any of the like normie centrist center right types don't even live in LA County anymore, Chris, like is there any part of that? Like it's it's just being kind of left to its own devices because nobody wants to live

there who can't stand the fact that the vicious cycle seems to never end. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm I'm sort of one of them. I live in Manhattan Beach, which is um, about a 50-50 makeup. You know, it's pretty centrist, but it's, you know, 50% on both sides. The west side of L.A. was definitely very, very left, although the Palisades has definitely swung more to the center or to the right, given what it just happened there. So, yeah, I do think a lot of the centrists have left. I think there's a lot of Republican people who literally feel like they can't live here because people don't want them here, which is definitely a problem. You have Orange County, which I obviously is more right leaning, which a lot of people have moved down to.

But on top of it, seeing a lot of people moving to Franklin, Tennessee or Nashville or down to Texas or, you know, Shapiro's down in Florida. You have Jeremy Boring who moved to Tennessee. You have Joe Rogan down in Texas. You have a lot of these people who have left the city or left the state for a variety of different reasons. Man, it's so sad because that's just the vicious cycle. It's hard to get off that ride once everyone starts leaving and it's left.

Only the true believers are left. Chris Fenton, the movie Bad Counselors, that is out on July 22nd. He's got a podcast. He's still got Feeding the Dragon. He's a professor at USC. Thank you so much for taking the time tonight. Emily, I absolutely loved it. And, you know, just keep doing the great work that you're doing.

And it's so refreshing. Shane, and you have so many fans out there. And hopefully one day, maybe you run for office and help us get us out of these jams. I think it's safe to say, Chris, that's something that I would never do. But I think maybe you should. I would get behind a Fenton campaign for Manhattan Beach mayor. Yeah. Well, you know what?

I've lost 50% of my friends. So hopefully the 50% left would actually vote for me. So maybe you're on to something there. I don't know. That would be good. The surfing mayor. that's appropriate for Manhattan Beach. All right, Chris, I'll let you go, but thank you so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, everyone, we're going to be back in just one moment with more on Alex Cooper. I think I might throw in a little Emily Radikowski to stick around. Remember those days in your early 20s where you could just survive on four hours of sleep and caffeine alone? It just doesn't work anymore. Now, if I don't get quality rest, I'm dragging for days, maybe even the whole week. And I don't want a sleep aide that leaves me feeling knocked out or grotto.

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So seriously, think about it. How much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? With my discount afterparty, go to shopbeam.com slash afterparty today. All right, everyone, rounding out the show tonight with Alex Cooper. Absolute big investigation. I was going to describe it inappropriately, but then there are all these different poems that come up when you talk about Alex Cooper. Okay, so let's get into it. Vanity Fair did a deep dive into what's happening at Alex Cooper's company run with her husband. And it's not good. You look under the hood. Apparently, people are very dissatisfied with the way Alex Cooper's company is run.

So let me just read a little bit more from, or let me read a little bit from this Vanity Fair story. And before we dive in, I just want to say, Alex Cooper, remember, her career is built on the back of coursing her culture and encouraging young women to have meaningless sex. I think Alex Cooper is 31 years old, now married and pregnant. She said things like, Cheater be cheated on and you're just a whole. But she's really been treated as a serious champion for young women by people in elite media. And that would include, by the way, Kamala Harris, who sat for an interview famously with Alex Cooper ahead of the 2024 election. She's seen as this kind of pretty and normal representation of sex positivity or embodiment of sex positivity who encourages, I think the quote when the original call her daddy launched was, quote, female locker room talk to help women kind of be heard alongside male locker room talk, right? But obviously not all sexual equality is healthy because equality doesn't mean interchangeability.

Right. So this idea that for women to be equal to men, they have to have their own version of locker room talk. Again, seen as sex positivity championed by elite media. Well, it's not going so well at Alex Cooper's company. It turns out these standards are actually really confusing within the Cooper Kaplan workplace. And that's not really a surprise for somebody who champions this like everything goes sexual ethics. So let's get into the Vanity Fair story. Quote, Vanity Fair has spoken to more than 40 sources, at least 30 of whom are current or former Unwell employees, most of the women in their 20s, about their experiences with Cooper and Kaplan, her husband, the company's co-founder and co-CEO. From the outside, Unwell has positioned itself as the guiding light of young feminist media, a company by and for a new generation of women, from podcasting to television to, as of this week, when Unwell announced a substack titled Unsaid, written media. Now, Vanity Fair goes on to say, several women who have worked at Unwell. well, say that Kaplan, Cooper's husband, referred to employees as, quote, stupid or retarded and threatened to ruin careers. Several alleged that he made employees uncomfortable with comments about physical appearances and questions about people's sex lives. Many described the feeling that lines were crossed, though they weren't always sure where those lines were supposed to be drawn. Such an interesting line in this Vanity Fair story. A confusion compounded, several noted, according to Vanity Fair, by how knew they were to the work first. One source says that

Kaplan thinks of his young female employees as little sisters and suggests that feelings of discomfort may be to misplaced. Finally, most, even those with more experience or who no longer work at Unwell, were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retribution, but taken together their accounts paint a picture of a workplace marked by fear, anxiety, and paranoia. Okay. So, what's happening behind the scenes at Unwell is not surprising at all. They are not claiming that Vanity Fair left out the accounts of employees who said they were satisfied and enjoying the workforce. But clearly, whenever you have so many people leaking, there's a lot of drama and turmoil inside the company. Like that, you can pretty much be sure.

If you don't totally know what's the big picture, but you can be sure, like, you don't necessarily know the contours, but you can be sure that this is a dramatic workplace where there's tension and people are stressed and anxious. That is true just about any time a major story like this hits Vanity Fair where they're saying they have 40 sources, 40 sources, at least 30 of whom are current or former unwell employees. And I just want to say, I mean, the recent advice that Alex Cooper was giving people is kiss them on the first date, fuck them, sleep with them the first night. Like, I don't care. You have to go based on what feels good to your body and what feels right to you. That is a very representative slice of the advice that Alex Cooper has offered since call her. her daddy started back when they were with bar stool.

And as I was saying earlier, it's a physical representation in the form of one empowered, quote unquote empowered woman of sex positivity, which has still not fully fallen out a fashion, at least in terms of a narrative in these elite media spaces where toxic millennials, which I can say as a toxic millennial, are clinging to this ideology that was pretty preached to us as like the foundation for female empowerment, truly, and I mean it. And that's why I don't think we were talking with Chris Fenton about Hollywood this entire episode, the culture of Hollywood. And he was saying he doesn't know that there's really a cultural thaw coming for Hollywood. And I've also sensed that for a long time because people who are

in middle management and like older grew up with this being the foundation of their worldview that actually what makes you happy, I mean, Christopher Lash wrote about this and culture of narcissism in like the 1970s. This isn't entirely novel, but what we saw with millennials was it kind of taken to its most extreme form, and we now see Gen Z really rejecting it, but follow what makes you happy, put yourself over anything else, anything, put your, put what your body and your mind tells you is important over everything else. And what happens is you, create obviously a culture of instant gratification. At the expense of your future, of course,

even though everybody is telling you in some of these elite spaces, it'll be fine, it'll be fine. There's plenty of research that shows satisfaction in a marriage goes down with sexual partners before marriage. And so if you're rich, like Alex Cooper, maybe you can afford all of the therapy in the world to get over that and you can afford nannies that make all of this easier.

You can afford, you know, the access to the best of everything to augment your lifestyle and to deal with some of the pain and trauma induced by all of that. But think about this. Like she has encouraged dishonesty. Like, cheat or be cheated on? That's encouraging dishonesty. She's encouraged immediate material pleasure, instant gratification, both of those over long-term health, right? That if it makes it feel good in the moment, she wouldn't say it'll hurt you in the long term. a lot of times we know that it hurts you in the long term. That's basically gluttony. It's myopia,

right? It's seeing sexual pleasure as almost an idol, again, at the expense of other things in your life. And it's poor self-regulation, period. It is poor self-regulation dressed up as empowerment. This is what Lash was writing about in the 1970s. It is what millennials were raised on, that discipline, disciplining your mind and your body away from material pursuits, material pleasures, You don't actually need to do that because what you're doing is suppressing this sort of natural inclination of your body and your mind. Therefore, if you just follow it without all of these strictures, Rousseau said, of course, man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, right? These ideas that the chains are socially imposed strictures, which by the way sometimes is true, and they should be thrown off of us. But when we start to question the existence of certain biological structures that obviously do exist for men and for women who have different reactions hormonally to sex, for example, that if you're questioning this norm that has constricted female sexual behavior for a really long time, and just in the interest of saying women deserve equality, of course, that's true, saying that that means living exactly like men with no.

nobody asking questions. Well, that's different. So again, what does that have to do with her workforce? Well, I'm just saying it's not surprising at all when you idolize self-empowerment and instant gratification that you would end up with a workforce where, I mean, listen, should a CEO or co-CEO be referring to people as stupid? I don't know. Probably not. But I can also see how that's getting regurgitated and vanity fair in a way that doesn't reflect perhaps a joke or casual conversation. or somebody saying an idea is stupid. I don't know the truth of that. Some of this feels like maybe a little bit of fragility

in the young Gen Z workforce that makes up unwell. But I think some of it also is people coming into contact with their own confusing standards. Like this is, again, the line from Vanity Fair. Many describe the feeling that lines were cross in reference to Kaplan talking about physical appearances and questions about their sex lives. Like he was asking them allegedly who they slept with.

over the weekend. Vanity Fair says, many weren't always sure where those lines were supposed to be drawn, a confusion compounded, several noted, by how new they were to the workforce. So that gives me the impression that people are genuinely very confused, and they should be confused, because if it is empowering and if this company's entire purpose is to make money off of the sexual confessions and, quote, empowerment of the main host of the personality at the front of the brand, Yes, you can see how some people would be confused as to why then it's inappropriate to have these empowering conversations behind closed doors or in the workplace or they would be confused when that feels wrong, right? Maybe they're just confused by why that feels inappropriate and why that feels wrong to them, to themselves. And this is ending up in the media.

I actually kind of feel like we're being invited into the thought process of some of these young women who work for a company built on empowerment. via sex positivity. And they're really, really uncomfortable with what that looks like in practice. That's what I see in this story. It's very interesting. I mean, think about this. Let me put this Emily Radikowski essay for the cut up on the screen. This came out a couple of days ago as well.

I'm going to show the artwork for it. Unfortunately, if you're listening to this, fortunately for you, you don't have to see it. But this was the photo that went with the article in the cut. It's Em Rada, boobs out, base. maybe breastfeeding in a bare bones apartment. And then we'll go down to this part that I wanted to highlight, where Radikowski writes this essay about sleeping with someone she refers to as elder millennial as a single mom.

She writes, elder millennial had his own mantras and not just the ones he repeated, well, inside of me. Animal brain was the term he'd coined and repeated, usually after doubting a few of his tropical cocktails. He was half explaining himself, half philosophizing. It was pretty simple, really. He'd often behaved during sex. in a way that didn't align with who he was,

a well-meaning campaign for Obama twice type of guy. With animal brain, you could be violent, cruel, whatever you wanted. But by that logic I offered, after one of his many late-night rationalizations, you could use it to excuse anything. I told him that as a kid, I once destroyed an ant farm in my parents' dirt driveway. It was so satisfying to do, but of course, I felt guilty watching the colony descend into mayhem. And Radikowski is among the most pretentious, self-appointed,

feminist champions in our DNAs. She might not even embrace that label anymore because it's kind of become a little uncool. But I remember when she was writing for Lena Dunham's Lenny letter, it was always so contrived. The prose was so contrived. She was trying to write like a great writer and clearly couldn't.

And this essay is very, very similar. It's people who think they have edgy ideas, therefore, that will be packaged in this edgy style naturally because they're an edgy person. And it's really just not. This is like if this came across my desk as an editor, and I, listen, I don't even work in the rarefied air of the cut newsroom. But yeah, I would tear this up.

So anyway, all that is to say, what we're seeing is women come into contact with some of these standards that were set throughout the sexual empowerment, sexual positivity era, and try and then to figure out what it means to establish correct boundaries in a world where you were told boundaries were themselves disempowering, that having standards as a culture was disempowering. It should be what you're comfortable with. Maybe you're comfortable as an asexual, they would say. But it should be what you're comfortable with, not what society says is right or wrong. We don't have to have really societal standards for what's right or wrong when it comes to

to sexual ethics. And now, as people have lived out this experiment, they're really confused by these standards and they're often uncomfortable with them and confused by being uncomfortable with them. I'll just say there's a much easier way to go about this. Like, it really is for women, which would be to do this in a wildly different way inside of monogamous, loving relationships with somebody that you plan to spend the rest of your life with. It's so much easier and simpler. But all that is to say, it reminds me of a BuzzFeed article that I think published in 2019,

And the headline was something like Gen Z women are turning on sex positivity. And the article quoted a young woman who was a self-identified victim of rape. And it quoted many other young women. It was talking about how this idea that seemed to peak in the Lena Dunham era of the 2010s, early to mid-2010s, where all the feminists were all the celebrities are running over themselves, tripping over themselves to come out as feminist, Radigowski included. And they were all pushing the same idea of what empowerment looked like. It was coming from the academy.

It was coming from the newsrooms. And it was coming from the writer's rooms of Hollywood. And then it was coming all over social media to the masses. This is what empowerment looks like. And this young woman quoted in the article said, quote, HBO really did a number on me. And she cited sex in the city and girls and talked about how after being told it would be empowering to pursue this path of sex positivity,

meaning going out at night and having meaningless sex with people you'll never meet again, hookup culture. She talked about how after living that life, she realized that it was disempowering and it was painful and it wasn't natural for her as a woman. And there is a lot of wreckage from what people primarily at the tippy top of the cultural and socioeconomic ladder pushed on the rest of the country. And it's heartbreaking to see people come into contact with the reality,

because that's trauma that they'll live with for a really long time. It's hard to listen to stories of the young women who work it unwell, and it's easy from the outside to be like, well, yeah, no kidding, they were asking you about your sex life, and they're your boss. Your boss's job is to push people talking about their sex lives. You work for this company. But it does feel wrong, and they're right for it to feel wrong to them. So what we don't want to have to happen is people then, you know, going too far in one direction or the other.

But it's just sad. It's sad to see it. And I think, I hope at some point now that Alex Cooper is pregnant, is going to be a mother. She is a wife. She looks back on some of this as being as discharges. as it was, as being as wrong as it was. I don't know if that'll be the case. I think we will start to hear more and more of that from women going forward. And yeah, I mean, I don't know where it's going to go, but I expect we probably will see some of that.

But like saying, cheater being cheated on, you're just a whole. What's this other line? F-sleep-effing sleep with them on the first night. Like, I don't care. That's recent. You have to go based on what feels good to your body and what feels right to you. That's instant gratification. That's saying if your body wants ice cream and that feels right to you at 11 p.m., do it. Empower yourself, do it. And that's how we ended up with now so many people who were in the fat positivity movement, regretting their involvement in it. Because it's this postmodern idolatry of the self.

And it is not ultimately satisfying. It gives you a literal stomach ache and a literal hangover. And hopefully you can prevent it from being a hangover for the rest of your life with trauma and pain and suffering that comes with that. So I'll leave it there for this evening. But thanks so much for tuning into tonight's edition of After Party, Culture Heavy edition of After Party. Appreciate it. We're going to be back on Wednesday with a very special, special, special guest. That's my tease.

You'll have to tune in on Wednesday to see who it is. A huge guest. I'm very, very excited. So we'll see you all then. I hope you all subscribe and have a one. I don't believe it.