Everything Is Content - Literary Dilemmas, Influencer Coaching & Boys vs Girls

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Happy Friday (following the longest week of 2024).First up, artist and poet James Massiah has claimed that bestselling author Coco Mellors (Blue Sisters) brazenly based one of her characters on him. Beth, Ruchira and Oenone dig into the story and ask: just how much can artists borrow from real life, especially when inspiration comes from people around them? Also, would you sign up for an influencer academy? A New York Times feature dives into influencer Valeria Lipovetsky's new and exclusive scheme that promises to help budding influencers break into the industry. Is it a scam or a savvy business idea for everyone involved?And finally, a "global gender divide" is sweeping the world, as experts warn that more and more young men are voting right, as young women vote progressively. A political split is widening between the two everywhere from the UK, to South Korea and Tunisia. Are we f****d as a society? Thank you so much for listening to us. We love every single person who blasts us in their ears - especially those who follow us and gift us a 5* on their podcast app. ----------- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760838/fundamentally-by-nussaibah-younis/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/movies/anora-review.htmlhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b0b7r2k6/mortimer-whitehouse-gone-fishing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/04/london-poet-accuses-author-coco-mellors-of-basing-blue-sisters-character-on-himhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-personhttps://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-it-felt-like-when-cat-person-went-viralhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/style/influencer-creator-method-valeria-lipovetsky.html https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guys, I said my name wrong. Did you notice that? No. What did you say? Inouye. You said Inouye? I think so. How did we not notice you said Inouye? I'm Beth. I'm Richera.

And I'm Inouye. And this is Everything Is Content, the podcast that dives into the week's biggest and best pop culture stories. Whether it's TV, film, famous people, internet trends, we're across it all. We're a firework shooting out golden sparkles across the dark content sky. This week on the podcast, we're talking about the drama surrounding Coco Mella's book, the rise of influencer academies and the new global gender divide. Follow us on Instagram at everything isontentpod

and make sure you hit follow on your podcast player so you never miss an episode. And make sure you listen to our first ever extra Everything in Conversation episode that dropped on Wednesday, a new weekly bonus feature that we started this week. Quite a tricky week, but let's dig deep. What have you both been loving this week? So I watched a film over the weekend and it was called Anora. Have you heard of it? It was sensational. I have heard of it. I've heard really mixed reviews but somehow it's totally

escaped me any context to this so I don't know a thing about it you're gonna have to fill me in so it's about a sex worker in Brooklyn who essentially just gets all of our dream scenarios it feels initially at the beginning like a Cinderella story aka a Russian oligarch son spots her at a strip club essentially decides to girlfriend her and just treats her to the most lavish week I think maybe two weeks at max of her life she gets fur coats she's taken to Las Vegas on a private jet everything's just perfect and then it just starts to unravel in this monstrous, awful way. And he turns out to be just like a terrible guy. He has a family who essentially just like breaks their fairy tale in half and tramples all over her. And it ends up being a lot darker and a lot more sinister than the initial premise.

The main actress, Mikey Madison, is just incredible. She's so charming in it. Where did you watch it so I watched it at Curzon Soho um and yeah also it's by Sean Baker who did the Florida Project and you get that kind of like neon lights kind of gorgeous aesthetic where everything's really bright and beautiful and just kind of nightlifey constantly it looks gorgeous is it slightly an indie film because I have seen people talking about it but I haven't seen like a massive fanfare about it yeah I think so I think his films are quite indie although he is like a huge filmmaker I think the vibe of these films whether they are technically indie or not I think the vibe of them is definitely

indie for sure can I say one Ruchira you go to cinema all the time which is a compliment or you seem to anyway which I really really love for you two is this a kind of pretty woman for the modern age because I re-watched pretty woman and I announced on the internet that I wanted like a cozy movie day what should I watch I said I was watching pretty woman I got loads of people being like so problematic can't believe you enjoy that does it have those sort of parallels or am I am I reaching I guess so I I guess yeah there definitely is parallels between it I mean the fact that you know covers sex work and I guess it's definitely grittier and it's definitely more modern there's loads of references to like technology and I guess just like modern parlance with like dating culture and stuff like that, that modernizes it.

I think the thing that feels very different is just this isn't really a love story. It kind of takes you for a ride and then reminds you that the world just isn't that easy. And also, if something seems too good to be true, it's a thousand percent too good to be true. But yeah, no, thanks for saying I go to the cinema all the time I have been trying to absorb some cinema culture recently so thank you what have you been loving Anoni? I really want to see that film also sounds very timely I think we are living in an era of people looking for ways to shortcut to fame and prestige and money and often it's not as glamorous and glitzy as it can be portrayed. And actually I think later on we might be talking on that subject,

but I have been loving, I got sent a proof of a book called Fundamentally by Nisaba Younis. And I kept getting emails being like from different publishers being like, this is an amazing book. And I was like, oh, I've actually been sent a copy. Anyway, I started reading it and oh my God, I cannot wait to finish recording because I just want to keep reading it so it's about Nadia who is an academic in the UK who gets sent to Iraq to work for the UN to help rehabilitate young women who have been radicalized by members of ISIS but she is like an academic mind not really into the practicalities of it it's kind of she took the job because she had decided to kind of leave behind her religion her mum was a born-again muslim after

her dad died and she decides that she no longer wants to practice and so she takes this massive job opportunity and we meet her she's single she's in her mid-30s and we meet her as she's just arrived in Baghdad and is surrounded by quite a few kind of like bulky buffoonie men immediately I'm completely drawn in and it's set in 2019 when she's there I think this is going to be one of the biggest books that's going to come out it's already so gripping so funny and just a really amazing premise as well it's out in February 2025 that sounds amazing that sounds amazing and my head went that's such a long time away but actually it's November that's three months I'm going to pre-order that because I need great books dropping into my letterbox for the next few months I think that's the only thing that gets me through

the cold dark winter Beth what have you been loving so what i have been loving and this is not so much of a recommendation as i would say this is a demand to command a directive is a little fishing show called mortimer and white house gone fishing i have been watching this probably for the last eight weeks there are seven series so there are plenty to watch and it is bob mortimer e.g the world's best man and paul whitehouse another gorgeous man both in their 60s going fishing all over the uk and ireland it is for anyone out there and i think this will be a lot of our listeners who are tired of doom scrolling, who haven't smiled since mid-September, who are really sad this week. It is the perfect antidote. It is so funny. It's really silly. It's really visually soothing because they're just

fishing in the countryside, having gorgeous conversations. There's often a dog there. They cook, they eat. They also have these really moving conversations about grief and about life and about fishing and about nature. And they're so funny, of course. They're both like award-winning, brilliant comedians. It is brilliant. It has had, I think, the same medicinal effect as 20 milligrams of Prozac, but without the side effects. It is so comforting. It has brought me back to the brink of many panic attacks i like i say i'm not asking you to watch this i am telling you to watch this i love bob mortimer so much that i can't believe that i haven't watched this me neither

and also just as a another balm again this is going to be like such an obvious recommendation but i started watching gilmore girls from the beginning and just eating a lot of pasta with cheese and watching Gilmore Girls and it's really helping. Oh, those together. Have you watched it, Ruchira? No, I've not seen the show. I have seen Gilmore Girls and I am overdue a rewatch. But no, I think those sound like the solution for winter.

I'm ready to get on board. I'm ready to watch them. Yes. The problem is watching Gilmore Girls at this age I want to be Lorelai and I want a teenage daughter it's so funny because the first time I did watch it I think I was probably Rory's age and now you're she must be what 32 now I think she's 32 in the first season that is quite and so I'm like I I desperate I really want a teenage it just is no way I can't you could adopt I can't really afford to look after myself so you could adopt me oh yeah okay I'll adopt you and cut you in half so that you're 16 perfect you got twins

I was just saying the other day to a friend I was saying how wouldn't it be great if you could adopt just like a teenager because then you would have a bestie and also you could have really good chats with them and it would be like my ideal version of having a child and then they just turned around and said that's just friendship you could literally have a friend but not a teenage friend who looks up to you because that's creepy no and my sister does not look up to me so i think it has to be a child so some literary news to start off with a london-based artist james messiah who is a

poet producer rapper dj and radio, has accused best-selling author Coco Mellers of basing one of the characters, Charlie, on him in her latest novel, Blue Sisters. Speaking to The Guardian on Monday, he said that multiple people had sent him snippets from the book to ask whether he had been the inspiration. The character of Charlie in the novel is a black poet, someone living in London with his parents who are religious who talks openly about drug use and sexuality and faith all things which are true of James James says that the use of the term amoral egoism in the book in relation to his character is also telling as this is a philosophical concept he formulated after leaving the seventh

day Adventist Church in 2008, and that in his searches he has turned up very little else online. He said that this experience was harmful and led him to having, in his words, a mini-identity crisis. He also took to Instagram to provide textual evidence of all the similarities to demonstrate that it's more than just coincidence. James and Coco do know one another and have some time, and he says that although they're not always in touch, they did talk shortly before the novel was released. At the time of recording this, Coco Menace hasn't publicly acknowledged this or responded, and perhaps she won't, but it feels like a story worth talking

about, an experience that I would dread as a writer to be on either side of frankly. We've seen similar stories to this in the past which I'm sure we'll get into in this segment cat person bad art friend to name but a few so I guess what we're asking is what are the rules around borrowing from real life when writing fiction and non-fiction can these things happen purely by accident and what should happen in cases like this one so us three have all read the novel and actually we did talk about on this podcast if you want to go all the way back to the beginning of june to listen you should and we've also now seen james's post and read the guardian piece so i'm just really curious what you both have made of this story. I was so fascinated by this,

not getting into the weeds of it, just objectively, this is such a mad situation, but is something that must happen all the time. I think just in this case, it just so happens that James is, you know, a massive person in his own right. So when he knows and sees that he's been written about and can see the parallels he has the audience to share the fact that that's happened even with you know Taylor Swift's breakup songs I always wonder what would it be like the morning that one of her exes wakes up and sees that text message or somebody messages whether it's his PR or whoever and he finds out and then listens to that song what is that feeling it must be mad to have something so high profile and to feel yourself written through somebody else's eyes and to have no control over that

image of you it is baffling fascinating insane I have to say I completely believe him I think the parallels really speak to me I really believe him I think the parallels really speak to me I really see it I I think she did just base this character on him and didn't rub enough out and change enough details I completely agree and it's made me think of and I don't know I'm sure you guys remember this but in Fleabag Phoebe Waller-Bridge took inspiration for one of the scenes from her friend Elizabeth Day and when Elizabeth Day had Phoebe Waller-Bridge took inspiration from one of the scenes from her friend Elizabeth Day. And when Elizabeth Day had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on her podcast, it's the scene when they're in the restaurant and the sister starts miscarrying and then she goes to the loo and just comes back.

And Elizabeth Day says to Phoebe, the reason I felt particularly personally connected to it, day begins, is because I had a phone call from you a few months before the screening saying, I'm really sorry if I've done this, but I think I've taken a story of your miscarriage and put it in fleabag and the story of my miscarriage is that I started miscarrying at three months in a restaurant toilet although it was over brunch and not dinner and I was actually incredibly honored and so happy that you're taking that and using it and giving it a platform that was necessary which I think highlights so many things that we're going to get into but first of all that perhaps there is space for people to

memorize things that have happened in their real lives or conversations they've had or people they've met translate that into art and then not realize until later down the line that actually that is taken from facts but also how interesting and actually very generous of Elizabeth to be like I'm really honored and I guess the difference there is they are really good friends. I think where it gets quite sticky with James Masaya and Coco Mellis is also the intersections of the fact that he is a black man, that she's a white woman, that she hadn't run this past him. As we've seen with Elizabeth Day's reaction, I guess, because that's about an issue like miscarriage, which is quite political and also important to be shared. Whereas James Messiah it's taking something that belongs to him

his intellectual property and his art but I do think the question of is it possible that Cocomela's didn't realize I guess this maybe gives leeway for the fact that maybe she didn't realize but I think the fact she hasn't spoken about it is also a choice I would imagine that there will be an acknowledgement of this because it does happen. The only one I can think of off the top of my head, which I learned about at university, was I think Helen Keller plagiarized a fable or something. She said this is intellectual. Okay, I don't know the verbiage around this, but claimed that this was an accidental plagiarism, which has been one of my greatest nightmares for as long as I've wanted to be a

writer. I remember I used to make films with my cousins and my siblings, and I was always the director and the writer, obviously incredibly bossy. And looking back at them years after, I would just rip whole scenes from, or moments and bits of script from Friends, whatever I was watching at the time. I think this can happen in adulthood. I think in moments, if it had been just the one case of it, so the amoral egotism, things like that, that does happen because it slips into your consciousness. In this case, it's such a building of character. Multiple of his friends noticed this to send it to him. Either they're all having a shared delusion or there was a more willful thing and then you just

get into how much are we allowed to borrow from the people in our lives how much are we allowed to as artists and as writers have a bit of this have a bit of that without disguising it I think it's such an interesting discussion it's also a very scary one from both sides I would be horrified to do that but I would also be horrified to have that done to me yeah I think the primary issue with this is the optics and the intersectionality completely if this was a different case if James was not a black man I think this would be awkward but it wouldn't be as big of an issue as it currently is optically it looks horrendous and I think that this would be a very different discussion if she had ripped the personality maybe some characteristics of another person

public facing who was white I think we would still be talking about this but it wouldn't feel as problematic or as much of a talking point in the way that we need to talk about the fact that she has like taken all of this away from somebody in the way we are now also I think my line on basing art on real life and the people around your life has always been that everyone has the right to do that we are inspired by our experiences and we don't live in echo chambers we don't live in caves we experience the world through people so in every piece of art there will be litterings of people of places of other people's art that's the crucial thing as well like every piece of art is in

communication with every other piece of art before it potentially so you could you can never create anything truly original that is a fallacy a complete fallacy but I do think when it's so obviously connected back to somebody that is an issue because I think it's very well possible and I think it is probable in fact that she didn't realize until he pointed it out but I also think he has a right to be pissed off because if it's so identifiable that multiple people can identify him this wasn't done properly in the way it should have done which is enough creative license being taken enough change enough fiction added to it so it's not so stark two things came to mind to me then when you were speaking one of them being how interesting the parallels are between this and Rebecca F. Kuang's yellow face which is the plot of the story is that a white woman takes the

manuscript of an Asian woman and passes it off as her own. And I guess the parallel here and where the kind of icky feeling comes from is that a white woman is indirectly or directly profiting from the ideas of a black man. That's just an interesting parallel because it's something that culturally that book was massive. And I do believe again, like you said, Richa, I don't believe that she's going to have done this actively. Perhaps her memory is blurred of how much she's actually drawing from reality. Because I agree with you that it's impossible I think to imagine a character out of nothing it's like you know how your brain can't assemble a new face if you dream of someone it's always like a face you've seen but do you remember we spoke in this Sally Rooney episode about the Sally Rooney interview in the daily and she's asked does she draw on characters in her

life and she says no nothing I write is ever drawn from anything in my real life and I love that interview with her but I was like I actually spoke to another friend of mine who was an author and I was like what do you think what do you make of this and she was like she has to be lying like no one can write really truthfully genuinely completely from zero you have to draw from real. Maybe she just is a genius and has a creative mind like no other, but I truly believe that everyone starts from a foundation of knowledge of an idea or a person or something someone said. It comes from a little seedling. And then as your characters grow and you begin to understand them, they can take a life of their own.

But I really think, I'm sure it's impossible to just come up with an entire being that has not got some semblance of someone you know or some famous person or someone you've read. Well should we talk about some other similar recent cases so I mentioned both Bad Art Friend and Cat Person. Bad Art Friend was about two writers in Boston who were in similar circles. And one of them donated a kidney and talked about it quite openly in a Facebook group they were both part of. The other woman then went on to write a story about a woman who donated a kidney. And one of them got in touch with the other and said, hey, is this about me? And she said, well, sort of based on this, but it's my own retelling of it. And there was a huge, I'm going to say the

word, furore about it. We'll post a proper summary of this in the show notes, but it was such a thing. Loads of other writers and artists weighed in on whether the woman was right to draw from directly from this woman's experience of donating a kidney she did it in a really uh kind of generous act it was a real act it was to a total stranger it was kind of very personal to her and had been sort of poached by this woman and people came out really strongly on both sides about whether this was morally okay to be in this sort of closed group with someone, see them talking about personal experience and write a story about it. It made me think of, I'm not the world's biggest oversharer, but I do overshare. I mean, I've got hundreds and thousands of tweets and posts to show that I overshare. I wonder how I would feel to have

perhaps the most significant moment of my life be then reimagined into someone else's work and how I'd feel if that work was super, super successful. As we've seen, Coco Mellis is a bestselling author. This was one of the biggest books of the year. To find myself a small part in that or a big part, I think it would be a very strained, empty, and like you said, a sort of identity crisis moment. Yeah. One of my first thoughts was Caroline Calloway, the famous, infamous, I should say, influencer who just attracts infamy wherever she goes. But the best friend essay from Natalie Beach in the cut, essentially her former best friend, who was her personal assistant through the many years of Caroline Calloway gaining fame,

wrote this kind of tell-all of what it's like to actually know her. And that essay went astronomically viral, but nothing really came of it. And apart from that essay, she hasn't really done much since. Whereas Caroline Calloway continues to just be this crazy, mad internet baity person, regardless of what she does. And I was just thinking about how your experiences in this world, in this kind of attention economy, are kind of like IP. So when somebody tells your story for you, or includes you in their story, I hate that this is how I feel. But it kind of feels like your IP aka your life experiences has been snatched and you know if I wanted to do a memoir but somebody got there first and told a bit of my story it makes me feel

like my idea suddenly has less value in this creative world which is really bleak and depressing but I think that also is a part of this whole thing too. I totally agree actually weirdly sometimes I'll have journalist friends ask me for quotes on things and I'll sometimes really consider if I actually want to give a long-winded answer to a thing because I'm like what if I want to write about that for my own thing and I've already said it in someone else's publication and that's a new feeling that I didn't used to have which is quite interesting because it does feel like we're always reaching and searching for that story and competing as we've spoken about you know in the mini-sode that we just did for that top spot and that every single idea every single concept could be that ticket to getting to that point I think what's coming up for me as we're talking about this is perhaps it's the proximity to the

person whose story you're telling because I think so often writers will say I was on a train and I overheard a conversation and that became a dialogue that started this whole book and because the writer in that instance doesn't know the backstory of the person they don't have to treat with care this sort of little idea that's become the seedling I think when they know the person as in with the case with Coco Mellers and with Bad Art Friend that's when it hurts a lot because you feel I guess there's a sense of betrayal where it's like I thought I was telling you this on a level as a friend and actually are you just looking at me and thinking I can use you I can use this I think that art has always been this way I do think there's a convergence of what you just said Ruchira because of the changing

landscape and because everyone is kind of creating and we're all content creators in our own rights maybe people are becoming more protective I don't mean this about James Messiah because I do think that that is quite a singular situation because of the specificity of it and the recognizability of him that is already kind of crossing boundaries and thresholds of what publishers and even the legal side of publishing will advise you to do when you're writing characters but I think borrowing things from other artists or other creators will have existed over time I wonder if we're closing the doors and becoming more secretive and if the boundaries maybe is purely down to how close you are to that person how much you trust someone and how much you start to feel like you're being used for their own gain maybe that's where

the issue comes from I think there's also a concern, like I said, on both sides. And as a writer, so Anoni, you've written nonfiction where you included really personal stories from your life. I did my most recent book, Romanticize Your Life. I was writing about breakups and I was writing about bad dates and I was writing about sketchy, difficult experiences and including real people. And it's so important to do that. We have

to tell real stories, but there's so many legal loopholes that you have to jump through, quite rightly so, so that they can never recognise themselves. And we've talked about this a few times. It's interesting how in fiction, they exist, but I don't think we think about them. In a non-fiction book, you have to make sure you change enough of age, location, when it happened, sometimes race, to make sure that even if they suspect, they can never go, plausibly, other people will know this is me. And Cocomelos, you would assume that every writer would know this and then apply it to their fiction. But maybe we don't. Maybe we think that if something is fiction, there is enough of a leeway to say,

well, it's made up. I think the legality, especially in the UK, was so libelous. You have to be so careful about saying negative things. But I think in the case of writing, because Charlie in the novel is not a bad character. He's actually quite an interesting character, but he's sort of a bit par. In a case where no one is quote unquote getting hurt or getting defamed, I think you still have to behave with a level of decorum when you are taking words from someone's mouth. And it's not a conversation that publishers, I mean, I've not written a novel, but publishers have ever had with me. And I do wonder whether these things go on in closed doors, whether they say, is this based on anyone? Can you make sure? It just feels

really fascinating to me. There is a thought that crosses your mind when you see the situation with James and Coco Mellors, which is how come it's only his character that this has happened to? Is it that she cannot imagine a black character without drawing on a literal person? And that discomfort is hard to shake. And I'm sure it's not as horrible as that, but it just makes you feel that when you see the situation, because I've not seen anyone else step out about any of her other characters in either of her books. So I would hate to be her in this situation. I would hate to be him. It's just a hard thing, essentially. And I think, as we've pointed out, not necessarily with this situation, but I'm sure it would be so easy to write a book and to not realize that something is so plainly

put and a situation or a person is so plainly described and you just haven't spotted it because you're so far through a process of creative writing that you're not personally fact-checking every single thing. Please let us know what you thought of this story do you think that authors should have free reign to borrow as much or as little as they want for real life or do we need to reconsider what is content and what is off limits let us know on instagram at everything is content pod so would you guys pay someone to teach you how to be an influencer the new york times is asking just that the piece by kiera delahoyo looks into valeria lipovetsky's creator method an online

content creation academy where she charges people to learn how to become influencers lipovetsky has reportedly earned 1313.5 million over the span of her influencer career. And now for $3,000, you can pay her to learn tricks of the trade and students gain access to pre-recorded video sessions, weekly Zoom calls, and private group chats. I have written about accidentally becoming an influencer in my memoir, Bad Influence, which came out last year. And in that, I wrote about the rise in young people aspiring to become influencers. But since then, I've even noticed that the number of content creators on these platforms has risen exponentially. And to quote from the piece, the creative economy is currently worth 250 billion,

and it's predicted to be worth around $480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs Research. And as their industry booms, a morning consult survey last year found that more than half of Gen Zers aspire to be influencers and see it as a viable career path. I am personally quite fascinated by this, not only because so much of this information is already readily available freely online, but also because it feels slightly like the industry is eating itself. So many times when I'm scrolling on reels, I just stumble across million followers strong accounts with tips and tricks and guides

on how to gain virality and followers, but kind of to what end, I don't really know. Algorithm hacking seems to be like a massive trend, but from the conversations that I'm having behind the scenes, brands are in the future going to be looking towards more long-term partnerships with people who aren't just digital creators. In the piece Chiara says that Lipovetsky's goal is to enroll 100,000 people which would amount to a cash flow of 300 million dollars. What do you guys think about people investing quite large

sums of money into becoming influencers and what does this say about the current state of the job market and people's attitudes towards how they're actually going to make it I think this is such a scam it's got scam written all over it to me I think workshops and tutorials and all that kind of stuff most of them are scams everyone on TikTok is a coach of something I can't remember where I heard this phrase but I think about it all the time if somebody is a coach of something why are they not doing it themselves this person is a really successful influencer she either is noticing in my opinion the trend of influencing moving towards a direction of the market becoming more saturated, brand deals

becoming harder to access. And I feel like she's future-proofing herself by creating another revenue stream. That's my take on this. And you just don't need to pay somebody to learn this shit. You just don't. I think it's a scam. So I was on the fence about this. Alarm bells did immediately start ringing when I read this piece because I don't object to people selling courses on things that they're very knowledgeable about and it's a very legitimate industry it's an expanding industry essentially every business on earth is trying to use influence marketing e.g. opening up new opportunities for young creators I just have my doubts when one it is this recurring billing cycle you paying, I think it was $299 a month, or maybe you get a discount if it's the $3,000 across the year,

but you can only sign up for the repeated billing cycle. So they say we're invite only, but you have to apply to them, be invited. 93% of applicants are being accepted. It doesn't scream exclusivity. It doesn't scream somebody behind the scenes filtering the applicants of people that perhaps really don't have a background that will make this work or just something. Safeguarding doesn't seem to be on the table. And the husband of the founder, who I think is also a partner in the business said, you need to believe you have

talent. You don't actually have to have talent, which I think they're using it as a kind of marketing lead, but did fill me with a little bit of dread. So speaking as someone that's like worked in this industry, it is changing and evolving very rapidly. And across all industries now, people kind of want you to have a following. So it's become really desirable. But what this is, I think, feels just kind of like a pyramid scheme. It's teaching people how to have followers for the sake of having followers. And I agree with you about coaching as well. Someone once said to me years ago, they were kind of like a lifestyle coach and they're very clever, intuitive, interesting person that had really good ideas on overcoming imposter syndrome and all of these kind of issues that we face. And they charged people £10,000 for the year and I said that is an

extortionate amount of money and they said but when you pay someone £10,000 to elevate your career you automatically work harder, work smarter and become better at your job. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So sometimes I think coaching can be a scam but it's a bit like when you invest so much money into something by virtue of the fact you spent so much you then actually do become great at wherever it is so that's just a really interesting kind of like psychological thing on how a lot of coaching works it's also sort of the same as when I used to personal train a lot of the reason that personal training works is one yes you're learning the tools and you're being held accountable but you're actually if you've got to the point where you're

investing money in learning how to get better at your physical health that's half the the thing you're you're already doing it the problem I think that's happening is nowadays if you're a model if you're a writer if you're an actor you need to have a following and that is going to help you if you're just a general person like you said Beth some of these people that are signing up to these programs just have like 126 followers they're going to build a following that that's not going to do anything, you're not going to make money just by virtue of having a following. It's now because of the way that people have learned to hack the algorithms, the volume of people with huge volumes of followers is getting more and more and more. And so actually, that is going to stop being the metric that brands are looking to,

it is going to be about having longevity in other areas, having creative endeavors outside of the platforms, because you can just go viral for loads of random reels. But that isn't going to be enough to bring you in money, which is where I think this does feel quite like a scam, because you're selling people a dream that really isn't actually going to amount to much. Maybe it might make you a bit of money for a bit, but there's going to be no longevity. And probably the cost of that year might be more than you're going to make back in the long run. And it is a lot of younger women who see this and it is, it can be so profitable, but it's like any, starting any business, starting out as a freelancer, you are taking huge risks. You're investing a huge amount of time, money, and emotional energy. For a lot of cases, this is their dream for something that has absolutely no guarantee of return. And I consider myself as someone who has a very digital career and I'm not an influencer, but everything I've done has been off the back of medium social media success in my early twenties. That was as unlikely

as it was likely. It was complete lottery. It paid off. And when people come to me and they ask for advice, one, I say the landscape has changed massively because it's a saturated market. Two, I say you have to be very cautious. It's not me trying to put anyone down saying, oh, you'll never make it because actually it's such a random thing. You never know who will fall on the right side of the algorithm, who will be the internet's hero, who will capture the attention of the masses. But because it is a lottery, because it is so changeable, because there are no real safeguards in place in this industry, I do advise people caution. And when someone says, hand over some money, throw your all into this, I am sceptical because I know the people that are going for this. It will be mothers who want more income. It will

be young women. It will be people who have dreamed of this and I think it's always wise to be a little bit skeptical and a little bit protective of these creators. I think what's so difficult about it is let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she genuinely believes that she's going to be able to assist all of these people in being able to create a profitable career from Instagram or from social media. The truth is that a lot of these people that are applying to this perhaps are in positions of desperation. It's a bit like playing the lottery. It's that level of gambling. It's like, if I invest this money, there's a chance that I could win big. The risk reward in this career

is massive. And I've seen that myself where I've had amazing years and that can sometimes lull you into false sense of security and then it can all be pulled back and there is nothing holding you there if it goes wrong there's nothing really supporting you three thousand dollars for years a lot of money which I can't imagine that most people have spare to invest and so I think that's where I get a bit stressed is at what position are people looking to this as being a means to get out of whatever financial insecurity they're in I I mean, I'm sure some people maybe aren't financially insecure. Maybe they think it's just going to benefit them in other ways. But I think it feels like it's preying on people's insecurities and offering

them a dream, which again, could possibly happen. But I think what's also so icky is all of this information, as they say in the article, as we know, is all available online. But then obviously marry that with the thing I said earlier about the coaching and the investment perhaps this will help people to drive I think my next question to you guys is what do you think about the fact that people so many people aspire to be influencers I know it's something that I do as part of my sort of like multi-hyphenate very millennial career but that leaves me feeling a bit disquieted that that is such an aspirational thing for so many people I think it makes total sense it is a growing industry it's an industry

of I mean you said the figure earlier like hundreds of billions of dollars with room to expand it it's not silly I think often people are really sneering one because it's women doing it one because it's women who pioneered it one because people are very stupid and they don't realise the work that goes into it. And it was actually probably for me, I've done like ad deals before off the back of my writing, but I found them fucking exhausting. The money wasn't great and it was always a complete faff. I could never have done it for more than a day. I think it makes sense that people want to do this because they see the return on it. The idea that you can have in this job market, in this economy, sort of your own fate in your hand, in your iPhone, of course that's appealing. It's appealing to me. And it was reading your book and only bad

influence, laying out actually the labour behind it, that it's not just look good on the internet. Here's a nice photo. It is pitching pitching it is coming up with a copy it is submitting it is shooting it's resubmitting it's having at the last minute the campaign's been pulled i don't think that young people or people in general are going into this with their eyes closed i think they're well aware of it but i think they're just one dispirited and discouraged by the world around them they would quite like a shot of something greater and something more. And I think they just see this is the direction we're going and we're so heavily online. I think it's a smart move, but I also think it's so unknown. There are, like I said, there are no safeguards in this industry, not really. The mental health aspect

of it is potentially terrible. The benefits are non-existent people treat you poorly yeah I want to just be sympathetic but at the same time I am nervous I think just careers online and specifically being influencers or big tiktokers or big twitch streamers or whatever the platform is they almost feel like our generation's American dream making it big and being successful even to me and being a millennial not even being gen z I still equate it apart from maybe having a book deal and these creative pursuits it still would be to have a big audience and to create something online and have a bit of an empire a media empire which now especially as magazines are dwindling careers in journalism are dwindling that means having some kind of online

space that I have created and some kind of influence it just like seeps into everything and it comes back to that same thing where every career whether it is being a fucking letting agent or whether it's being a writer, now expects you to have an inbuilt audience. So of course that has become the marker of success and being a successful person in society. It just, it all feeds into the same thing. I write about this and about influence and people are often at pains to say this, but so often people with any, any person in any career with followers at the top of their page is labeled as an influencer whereas more often than not the people that are actually doing really well

on these platforms are people that already do something else have an expertise in a certain area and then have a following from that expertise and then capitalize on that that that is kind of where the money especially I think is going to go away from sort of like just traditional solely digital content creators because what I find I think I guess really hard about it as a concept as well if we're talking about true influencers that are people that solely make their income from marketing and advertising products to an audience is all we are doing is just selling stuff constantly and in a planet that's burning and we're over consuming and life is so difficult

and everything is so expensive we're going through a cost of living crisis it just feels like we're all again sort of like everything's eating itself everything is a pyramid scheme we're just buying and selling we're just moving money around in a really kind of inconsequential way just shifting it and pushing it into these corners and areas so I think when I say I feel disquieted it's not because I don't agree with everything you guys have said and that yes it can be a ticket into finding greater success and especially if you're in a creative industry I just feel fearful of what we're going to lose if that is where all the money is going which is what we've seen and we've spoken about

it already so many times even in the mini-sode about the way that the music industry works I wonder if because of the saturation and I'm feeling it as a creator and every single person that I know in any creative industry is really feeling the pinch in terms of these platforms being so saturated they project year on year but I do wonder at some point if it is just going to kind of combust because you can't have that many people doing that much stuff and spread the money out that thinly I do wonder if it can keep actually going at an exponential rate that they keep projecting because I'm already starting to feel that something is shifting I don't know which direction it's going to go in but something is moving the needle is moving I think would you

pay someone to teach you how to be an influencer? DM us on at everything is content pod. So I know we've all been consumed by the news this week that Donald Trump has won the US election. And don't worry, this is not going to be a postmatch analysis of what went wrong for Kamala Harris. It's not gonna be any of that. But I think there is one strand from this shocking news event that is definitely worth diving into, which is the voting divide across gender. So according to NBC News' national exit polls, while 54% of men in the US voted Republican, the exact same figure, 54% of women voted Democrat. And on the whole, women across all age groups were shown to lean just about to Democrat, and the exact same can be seen across for men except for the Republican Party. So this isn't a particularly new phenomenon. The Center for American Women and Politics says in 2020, a majority of women favored Democratic victor Joe Biden, while a majority of men voted for Donald Trump

at the time. The thing that is different is the fact that this isn't an isolated incident in the US. We're seeing a similar pattern across the UK and Germany, South Korea, Tunisia, multiple countries across the world, where women, especially younger women, are voting more progressively, but young men, in contrast, are going to the opposite way. All year, there've been some really compelling articles on this. And what experts are calling this is a growing global gender divide. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries and found that two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18 to 29 on a self-reported scale but their analysis has found that by 2020 the gap was

growing bigger. The key thing as well is the assumption that I think many of us have which is Gen Z is a monolith and all of Gen Z seem to want you know progressive values and want society to move forward but what's becoming clear is that that is actually just a fallacy that is far from the case. As the Economist piece Why Young Men and Women are Drifting Apart said, data shows that notably young men are more anti-feminist than older men contradicting the popular notion that each generation is more liberal than the previous one and although a high share of young men think it's harder to be a woman than a man they're actually likelier than old british men to say it's harder to be a man than a woman

even in south korea men in their 20s say that men are discriminated against when barely 30 percent of men over 60 agree making their views indistinguishable from those of women in their 20s or 60s. So why do we think this is happening? Experts seem to say that education is key in this, women are essentially overtaking men in their numbers going to university and also there's seemingly a difference in how both genders are perceiving the experience of the fact that society is less sexist than it once was and of course our favorite social media has a part to play the fact that echo chambers essentially driving either side forward in their views that a either society is terribly

discriminatory against white men or on the other side the society has so much further to go in terms of equaling the genders in terms of their experience of the world what do you guys think of this whole issue do you think that you agree have you noticed this kind of gender divide what do you think so in a piece from the financial times titled A New Global Gender Divide is Emerging, I highlighted a thing that said, and I quote, the hashtag MeToo movement was the key trigger giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long running injustices. And for a while, I have felt since MeToo that there has been this pendulum swinging where

the more women felt emboldened empowered and able to speak up about the ways that they are marginalized and oppressed some men took this as a direct insult or as a personal attack and this started to skew their views more towards the right the difficulty in that is and as so many women said, is we feel compassionate towards men and we want men to be brought into the conversation. But it's very frustrating when you're trying to defend your own rights to also feel like you have to tone police yourself in order to not offend your oppressor and push your oppressor further towards being your opposition. And I think so often in the conversations around feminism, we were told and told each other to not pander to this. It's not all men rhetoric to stay strong and believe that men would be able to understand that if they didn't identify with the men we were talking about, that they wouldn't take offense. But I think what we're seeing is that actually that isn't working, that there does have to be a level of responsibility on behalf of women which is

really frustrating to make men feel included this is something that katlin moran wrote about recently in a book that came out i think a couple of years ago where she was kind of talking about the responsibility we have towards young men even that i find complicated but i basically think that's where it's all started it's it's it's come from the place of unfortunately the language men haven't been taught to be able to emancipate themselves from a conversation more broadly about like the concept of men and they're getting caught in the crossfire and in such kind of defending themselves and I think that young boys are growing up in a world where they seem to see it as though men are actually the ones that are disadvantaged purely by virtue of the fact that men are finally being sort of like pulled up for their actions. I would really agree with that. And I think when

we talk about men, and then when we talk about young men, and then when we talk about boys, we do have to delineate. We do have to be careful because where an adult man is saying it with his chest, he knows what he's saying. And he is pursuing misogyny to its natural end, which is, you know, dominion over women violence you know we know where it ends we're watching it happen in global politics young men and boys are a vulnerable group and i don't believe that any boy any man any person is born with the contempt in their heart or the need to subjugate women it is taught and it's taught so young. And when their role models are men, when they are the MAGA supporting buffoons like Logan Paul, the podcasters, the Twitch streamers,

the favourite football player, the Andrew Tate of the world, the well of their mind is poisoned so early that by the time they become young adults, they have already entered hating women. They've entered hating dating. They've never dated. They've entered this space of bitterness before the world has even had a chance to welcome them and have them. And I think there's a crisis for young men. And feminists are talking about this, and they do care about this. But where a lot of older men get confused is women talk about women's issues under the umbrella of feminism. We are allowing them, giving them space to talk about the issues for men.

They don't do that. They instead dispense their energy getting annoyed at us for not talking about men's issues. It's cyclical. It's very draining. And it just leaves the youth out of the conversation in a point of real vulnerability. And in the age of smart tech, smartphones, YouTubers, children with unlimited access to social media, I feel absolutely terrified. I don't know that many young men myself because

I don't have children. My friends don't have children. None of my family's children are quite of that age where they're political or they're really on social media so I perhaps have been naive to this and now I'm being exposed to that via election statistics via pieces like this and I'm horrified it is really concerning and when we talk about the manosphere and when we talk about you know the men getting radicalized and becoming incels or red pilled it's so easy to feel that the scale of it is huge and actually I think it is quite impossible to understand the scale of it and I think you know entering that with some kind of ability to maybe not take the you know the multiple think pieces and all the kind of news reports on it to mean that it's every single young boy is important. But I also think there is enough out there suggesting, and with, you know,

the data from this polling, that there is a trend. So even if it's not, you know, the most extreme kind of progression into black pill ideology, it's clear that young women are moving towards a direction of wanting to further empowerment, to kind of move towards a society that works in favour of our values and our ability to live in the world without oppression, essentially. But rather than having allies in men, it seems that young men are just feeling further subjugated by the system rather than working with us. I don't even know what you do with that because how do we even have a conversation with a whole gender to sit everyone at the table and ensure that they understand that that is just

simply not the case? It feels too exploited by politicians who build on that rhetoric and make young men feel like they're empowered and right to feel as if the world is against them and somebody like Donald Trump can help them. It feels too far gone with the media figures gaining prominence online who are exploiting that. We're working against an entire system with multiple pillars propping this up at this point. God, there's so many elements to this i wanted to go but i agree with everything both of you said and what you said beth about the thing that like nobody is born with a prejudice it's entirely true and i think what we're seeing is young men

are growing up in a world where we're so much more individualistic they are spending a lot of time online whether that's consuming content from the people that you've mentioned like andrew tate and logan paul or watching porn and when they're sat in their rooms on their own they're digesting information that's very anti-women and perhaps if if the statistics are right about how young girls are so much more politically engaged and so much more liberal than their peers when they are having these in real life interactions with women it's reaffirming all of the things that they're finding out online from these characters. It's making me think of Ivan, even Ivan in Intimazzo, Sally Rooney's character that we spoke about in the Sally Rooney episode, where so much the problem of this is so much of this is the humanity of everything

is completely stripped out and everything is put into binary, into boxes, into oppositions, into arguments, into soundbites. And in that book, if you haven't listened to that episode, Ivan's a young man who holds quite contemptuous views towards women and has been online a bit too much, but then he falls in love with an older woman. And that's complete, just that one relationship with a real person actually kind of melts away all of this information that he's taken in. I think because of the way that the world is set up, the difficulty is that these relationships that people are forming are mostly happening online. Whenever I speak to anyone who has like a teenager, they're like, they don't want to go and hang out with their friends in a shopping mall. They want to go and like talk to them on YouTube. So it's just the way that they're getting to each other is almost

always through these channels. Everything that you can do as a parent to keep your child safe still almost feels futile because it's just like those streams of these adult men beamed into your baby children's brains and eyes via the frustrating power of the internet. I saw a tweet by the author Emma Shevchak, who wrote a book about gender violence. And she was responding to a man who said, the men of Gen Z are being radicalised because it's a generation that does not feel that they have a stake in the future. And she was talking about her own children. And she said, a few weeks ago, my kids five and six started randomly dropping phrases like bro and top G into conversation. At first, I found it funny. But after after some searching questions traced it back to a couple of boys at school

with completely unsupervised youtube access it took me googling top g once to learn that this is an andrew tate reference and that's the thing when you have those pervasive forces i just don't know where you go yeah i went to a really good talk by uh matta and Jamie Tarson who wrote a book from their years-long investigation into Andrew Tate. It's called Clown World, Four Years Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere. They put it in a really good way that's kind of shifted how I think about it and essentially they pointed out that being a young boy, a young teenager and feeling like there's something wrong with the world is an entirely normal expected experience the difference is there is this nice tidy explanation for why you feel like that and it's that the world is against you and to battle against that you have

to do this laundry list of things aka mirror these alpha influencers invest into crypto do all this like bullshit but when I think about when I was a teenager I fell into an eating disorder that time is just so rocky and it has been rocky for years and millennia before us I think the difference is the internet is just like feeding us these like insane ideologies and narratives constantly. And this is not the same, but I remember getting really stuck into the, you know, men are trash kind of ideology and feeling like that was really empowering to be able to just say that constantly. And then coming out of it and just thinking, well, that's not the answer either. That wasn't really particularly helping me feel good about my bad experiences of dating when I was single or I guess healing me from those

experiences is what I'm trying to say I think the conversations are so extreme don't get me wrong I don't think they're extreme on the female side in the same way they are on the male side but I just mean that those ideas can be so aggressive and there is something I can relate to in that aspect there just needs to be a big hurdle stopping people at that point before they enter into it and I think that although I hate to put the pressure on education it has to be it has to be teachers it has to be figures in young people's lives, parents, just people stopping that process and accessing those young people who are feeling really disillusioned, disenfranchised, lonely, depressed, anxious, all of those things and just sorting it at the root,

it has to be. So whenever I do a Let's Talk About, about about various subjects this has come up quite a few times just on different subject matters but from teachers writing and saying I have students that will disrespect me be like you're a woman miss Donald Trump says you grab me by the pussy that will like literally touch them so I don't want to listen to you that have such disdain for women I think teachers already take on such great pastoral care, especially in this country, for very little money with like completely oversubscribed classes. That yes, it has to be an education, but I think it has to come from legislation. I think it has to come from telephone use. And I mean, the thing is the world is becoming so much more digital that it's so normal now that your child kind of maybe has to be on an iPad for school or has to use computers.

Like the world is going so digital, we have to be able to have access access to that but that safeguarding in terms of what people are able to access needs to be changed well we've all been saying the world's been now with this election with everything we talk about between men and women the extremes as you said are so extreme that i think we are getting to the point where we are going to have to find out a way to use a language that even though it feels like it's going against the cause, that is inviting, that is inclusive, that is saying, I want you to come in and come here and look at this and that you aren't my enemy. And I'm talking across the board. I'm talking about if we're talking to someone that has extremely opposing political views from us, there has to be a way to bridge that gap and not just see each other as like enemies across a different trench because that's kind of where the problem's coming from with radicalization specifically and with the various gateways into radicalization I get myself to a point of just thinking I do wish the internet didn't exist and I say that as somebody who literally in the segment previous said that I

would love to build an audience and you know that feel that would be really exciting but I think it's going in a direction that worse things will come and having reported on radicalization previously the way the governments essentially intervene is only when it's proven to show real world harm so with the far right quite recently that has been shown to produce real world harm because of protests and killings and violence and all that kind of stuff so there have been interventions in de-escalation and de-radicalization with this apart from incel violence there hasn't been any clear violence from if say you're just a red-pilled man who says that women are xyz but you're just a hateful person because of that this is allowed to kind of exist because it's just

seen as a political view rather than something that is expressly violent in its nature so there is no kind of future intervention in a really obvious way. It's down to, you know, charities and male influencers who go into schools and do that off the back of their own work. Hopefully things are changing. But that was the case when I would report on this stuff two years ago. So I really hope that's been updated since then. With the election that we've just seen, I think one of the things that's so gutting and so painful is that in our march towards what we thought we would see as progress, what we have been met with

is actually complete defense and offense from, I guess, the inverted commas opposition. And I agree with you about the internet, Ruchira, as well. Sometimes I'm like, I wish we could take it back, but we can't. And it's like that thing of like there's no ethical consumption under capitalism maybe there's sort of like no ethical way of existing on the internet in the perfect way but I think with this current election it's so difficult to swallow and so hard because I believe this to be true of your feminism as well but my feminism is fundamentally intersectional and definitely includes men

and does care about men and their issues. And I, in my own life, feel that men are completely impacted by the patriarchy, the way that they see their emotions, the way that they handle their relationships, the way that they are able to deal with certain things in their lives. In a fight for progress,

feels so hurt because all along, we want everyone to come out on top and it feels so painful that actually you have these people who are so quick to use a language which is very engaging and makes people feel safe so we have to find a language that is inclusionary we have to find a way to bring people in and we have to also not let what feels like such a heady cocktail of just fascism and narcissism and cruelty win and I think we've been trying to fight fire with fire we've been trying to push back and maybe that isn't the way forward maybe it's like we have to to find a different route I don't know what that is yet I would just say look out for the young men in your life the ones that you have direct access to radicalization does not happen just to people

you don't know it happens under your roof it happens to people who have everything going for them it happens to people that have loving mothers sisters people that are in the world in every way and I think it is all of our job to just keep an eye out and do what we can thank you so so much for listening this week just a fun little reminder we've expanded the everything is content universe with our brand new everything in conversation episode please please please give it a lesson and let us know your thoughts we want to hear it all make sure you are following the podcast because then it will just drop straight into a little podcast box every single time there's an app which is now twice a week and if you've enjoyed this

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