Everything Is Content - MAFS Allegations, Harry Styles' Tour Critique & Elon vs. The Odyssey

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Hello EICorroborators! Happy Friday and welcome back to Everything Is Content- your one stop podcast shop for everything pop culture and beyond.This week- and trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence and abuse- we're discussing BBC Panorama's harrowing new documentary ‘The Dark Side of Married at First Sight' in which former MAFs UK contestant Shona Manderson alleges that her on-screen partner had sex with her without a condom against her wishes. She alleges the team took her to get the morning after pill, but that nothing else was done. The show has pulled all of its episodes from the internet while discussions continue to rage on about how reality TV can't seem to stop failing its subjects. We share our takes as (former) fans of the show.Next up we're talking about Harry Styles' new tour- which has been criticised after some attendees reported having little to no visibility of their fav as he happily scampered around his enormous walkway stage set-up. Has the singer prioritised his Strava over his set design? We investigate.Then we mull over Jacob Elordi's love life after the actor was spotted out and about with model and the inventor of tequila, Kendall Jenner. The internet has separated into two camps in response to the possible pairing- people saying "huh??" and people saying "duh...". Plus: Everything In Conversation with... Kylie?Also (and we're sorry) we chat about Elon Musk's latest MORONIC OUTBURST after the friendless loser suggested that Oscar winning actress and generational beauty Lupita Nyong'o was somehow badly cast as the fictional generational beauty Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. We insult Elon Musk's pathetic existence discuss with consideration for all sides.And finally we revisit the topic of internet fakery and advertising creep after a new piece in Vulture by Lane Brown suggested that just about everything we see online nowadays has been placed there to sell us something. From the piece: "On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce... can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas." In other words... is it time to log off?This week Ruchira was loving Legends on Netflix and Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, Oenone was loving Sister Europe by Nell Zink and Beth was loving SNL UK and London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. Thank you SO much for listening, commenting, agreeing, disagreeing, sharing us on socials or leaving us a review. It means the world and really does help us keep making the show. See you Wednesday! O, R, B x----------BBC iPlayer - The Dark Side of Married at First Sight / PanoramaVanity Fair - Why Can’t Elon Musk Shut Up About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?Forbes - Musk Boosts Misinformation About ‘The Odyssey’ In Days-Long Crusade Against Christopher Nolan MovieVulture - The Feed Is Fake by Lane Brown Waterstones - The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Ruchera. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything is Content, your favourite Popcott podcast that covers film, TV, internet drama and trends. We're wading through countless oysters to find you the iridescent pearls of content.

This week on the podcast, we're discussing new allegations against Married at FirstSight, UK, how everything, literally everything, is secretly an ad, and the backlash to Harry Styles' news stadium tour. Follow us on Instagram, everything is content pod,

and make sure you hit follow on your podcast player app so you never miss an episode. And also, can you leave us a little Apple review? We haven't had enough recently. And I love to read them as I go to sleep. It's so nice to be back. I actually tried to leave an Apple review of our podcast. It turns out I'd already left one when we started it. Just being like, I miss the podcast.

I love it. It's such a good show. I want to ask what you both have been loving. But we actually haven't had a proper chance to catch up. I feel like in such a long time. How are you both doing? You need to give us a recap of your trip. I, yeah, been in Greece for two weeks.

It was meant to be there for less than two weeks, but then my boyfriend got tonsillitis while we were out there. And we decided we couldn't kind of fly on the Thursday and then had to fly on the Monday, which I was very sad that he wasn't well, but I was also just kind of like, oh no, an extra five days in Greece. I took the silver lining. I picked up on Apple War Spitz and I ran with it.

But I had such a nice time. I do think, I was saying to Ruechia earlier, I do think two weeks is the ideal amount of holiday because I was kind of ready to come home. 10 days, I felt like I had not been. away two weeks. I was scrambling to get on that plane. But yeah, it was gorgeous. I see my holidays are always like five days. I haven't gone away for two weeks in I don't know how long. Quickly though, tonsillitis to me is such a throwback of a thing to be experiencing.

Like it's very much a year nine affliction, I feel. Yeah, that's so true. He'd never had it before. He didn't realize even, it only occurred to me to be like, can I look in your mouth? Could you have a look in your mouth and see he was like, oh, right. And then immediately I was like, Non-sexual. Yeah. Can I non-sexual? Look into your mouth. And he realized at that point, he had it.

And I was like, oh, to me, I mean, I've had tonsilitis twice. One of the times it was one of the worst things that ever happened, I was hallucinating for about a week's straight. Horrible. He was quite, he was quite brave about it. But I would have been so dramatic. But yeah, such, it does feel like a childhood. Because like getting your tonsils out, that was the thing I really wanted.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why did that feel so cool when in hindsight, like, what does that even achieve? It's the ice cream. isn't it? Wasn't there some cartoon? Was it in like fairy godparents where someone got their tonsils removed and then kept them in a jar? There was a shoe that I used to watch like a cartoon.

I really remember that being a thing. I could imagine and only you doing that asking to keep them. I don't know why. Something a bit ghoulish. I asked to see my appendix after I had it removed and they didn't let me. I actually asked, I was 11 and I asked, now I'm so squeamish I can't watch anything to do with blood. But when I was younger, I was really convinced I was going to be a doctor and so I obsessed it. And I asked if I could have my appendicitis under local anaesthetics so I could watch it.

Oh my goodness, you are so mental. I was such a freak. Yeah, but my niece is like, she's four and she's like, I just watched her biopsy. Emily's like, sorry, she made me show it to her on YouTube. What do you mean she made you show it to her? She loves medical stuff. She's like, obsessed. She's holding a gun to her mum's head being like, you have to show me this biopsy.

Oh my God, I love kids. They're actually just weird as hell. That's so funny. Wait, Beth, quickly, because you didn't go to Hedra this year, and I'm still desperate to go on a holiday and copy that. Where were you this time? So we're in Athens for a couple of days because I've been to Athens a few times. I've never actually done any of the history stuff.

My boyfriend was a, I'm about say a history major. Who do I think I am? He studied history at university. So he made me got up the Acropolis and we saw some old crumbly things. Now it was very fun. And then we got the four hour coach to Paros, which is a kind of cycledic island about, yeah, four hours from Athens. And then we went back to Athens, couldn't get on the, didn't get on the flight.

And so we went to an island called Poros. Paris and then Poros, which is about hour away and stayed in a nice hotel there. So we did two islands. But yeah, didn't go to Hydra this year, which I'm gosh, fuck, because it's my favorite place. But I really enjoyed the islands we went to. I feel like I'm just ticking off. I'm collecting islands now. So if any listeners have like a favourite island, you know I'm going to move back to Greece. Yeah, you are such a Hydra girlie to me. Like, I feel like that is your, that's your place. I think of you as the summer Hydra Island Queen. Me too. I keep trying to get my partner to go and he's like, you're just copying bath.

Why can't you come up with your own holiday? And I was like, oh! Ouchy. I know. He actually got quiet. He was like, I don't want to go. You just want to go because bath always goes. And I was like, okay, well, it looks really nice. A slightly sour tone there.

I was going to say the three of us can go. It's such a funny thing. He was like, let's go to Croatia. I was like, okay. Tell him I've been there too. No, I haven't. I'm actually very happy to be back. I did feel really left out of the podcast for two weeks.

I have to say. I was sort of listening was like, I would have chimed in here. Or I would have been like, yes, yes, yes. So anyway, thank you for, thank you for having me back. and I'm also happy to be able to ask you my favorite question. I think, Routira, first today. Richarda, what have you been loving this week? Okay, so I've got two for you.

The first one is a Netflix drama called Legends, which stars Steve Coogan, have either of you seen this? Started watching it, but only got like five minutes in before I was like, I have to go to bed. Tell us more because I'm desperate to watch. Okay, so I don't know why. My partner was watching this and just kept recommending it to me. And I had this weird aversion to it,

And I think it's because Netflix dramas to me have this weird. I just feel like they're going to be quite overdramatic, quite silly, not very serious. That's not what this is at all. It almost feels like a proper sky, HBO-esque style thing. It's basically a real situation in the UK in the 80s where Thatcher was reigning her war on drugs. And in Liverpool, there was a new kind of trend, this new movement of loads of heroin getting brought in through Liverpool and ravaging that particular area. And a lot of the people, there were so many people getting addicted, so many people buying.

It was like this new frontier of the UK dealing with an epidemic of heroin. And I can't believe this is real. But basically, because the government wanted to crack down on it, they elicited these completely out-of-use border control officers to basically become spies and act like MI5 agents, but they had no official training whatsoever. They were just border force. they were infiltrating gangs. They were living double lives.

They were, you know, entering, observing, surveilling the gangs. And were a big reason why they managed to crack down on one of the biggest gangsters who was behind this heroin epidemic. It is so crazy. Every time I'm watching it, I just, my mind is baffled. But also it's such good TV. Yeah, I've read other people saying that it feels more like a BBC I play a drama because it's so like quintessentially British.

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard great things. So I must watch it. I think you would love it so much. And even to think there's so many facets of UK history, recent UK history, we have no idea about and they are way better than fictionalised TV. That in and of itself is so wild.

The other thing I have for you is a book called Lost Lambs by Madeleine Cash. And this on the front of the cover is a Megan Nolan quote and Alina Dunham quote, basically saying it's brilliant and she's got an amazing voice. So obviously I saw the cover and I was like, yoink, going to take that home. And it's such a fun story, like a modern kind of, it almost feels like where's Anderson-y in tone. It's quite, it's quite like fun and whimsical tone. But a lot of the stuff is poking at how many different kinds of conspiracy doors there are and how many different ways people of every generation can get sucked into the nonsense of the internet and cabal of child eating satanics. But in amongst all of them, there's a bit of truth and all that kind of stuff.

I won't say too much, but it's, it was quite a. fun one to read, even though a lot of the themes were quite dark. I tried to download this one on my Kindle on holiday, but encountered a problem with technology, but I'm just looking now and also got a sample approval from our close personal friend, Kerry Claire Burke, who said extremely smart and possibly funny and just plain fun to read. Right at the beginning of the year, Richard, around March, you sent a link into our group chat that we never went into that was a New York Peace mag about this book. How should a white woman writer be in Madeline Cash and Honolive's novels, Progressive Ideals are the Ultimate

Bogieman. Do you remember that? And now actually having read the book, reading the book, do you agree with it? Maybe it's something we need to get into. We need to all read the book together and then discuss that because I suddenly a ping went off my mind and I was like, I know we've spoken about this book somewhere and it was on WhatsApp. No, you're so right. And I was thinking about that after I read it and I need to revisit it because now I have all the context. And I can't remember the thrust of that piece. So what we should do is we should all read the book and then revisit it and do a proper segment because I do remember that initial piece and it had quite a lot of like controversial, provocative points about who gets to be the voice of a generation and which young

white women in our generation, well, maybe not our generation, Gen Z more like, are getting thrust forward and who gets discounted. And I really, really, really want to do that justice. Oh, I just remember reading the piece now because I'm reading the synopsis of this. And I was like, oh, yes, Louise maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. I remember reading a bit of obscuring on that, which I will try and file away now in my brain because I do like to go into things blind and I think this actually sounds like something I would really enjoy but in the back of my mind I'm going to be going, have I already seen this critique? Have I already? I know. I almost shouldn't have said it because you do read things with the framing. It's so bad. Just wipe it from your memory,

men in black style and then come back to it. That's what I do every time. I can never do that on purpose but by accident I do just wipe things from my memory that are probably quite important. Oh, same. But it means we can re-watch and re-read stuff. That's true. Okay, what have you been loving? Anoni. I really wanted to recommend rivals, Cesar. season two, but I started watching it and I was thinking, this is interesting. I wonder where this is going and I was watching season one, episode one. So I can't. Oh my God, they've gone back in time. It's quite a long time ago since I watched it. So I was like, oh, interesting. I was like, I'm sure they've met before. Anyway, I can't recommend that. Did go to bed. But what I can

recommend to you is a book that I've been reading. I'm about 50 pages in. It's called Sister Sister Europe by Nell Zink. The Sunday Times said that zinc is a talent that is as rare and strange as a on Oxford Street. And I actually picked it up because one of the things, I literally saw that Jonathan Franz on the cover had said a writer of extraordinary talent and rage, didn't read what the book was about, just bought it because I am a Franz and Stan. Basically, where I'm at in the book is it's set over one evening in 2023 in Berlin and I've met a cast of different characters who are all headed to the same high society literary event. It's like an asurbic social satire and I am enjoying it so much. I'm just about to get to the point where all of the characters meet at the

event. They're all really eccentric and privileged and self-conscious. And it's really current. There's lots of interesting themes within it. All of the characters are like fascinating. And it's a, it's a short novel. So it shouldn't take me long to finish. But I hadn't heard of Nelsink before. They're a really fresh voice, I think. But one thing I will say is there's loads of bits where randomly stuff is just in French and it's not translated. They'll just say things to each other in French. And I'm thinking, am I supposed to be able to speak French? Is that just someone that's really like just randomly, they'll just be a sides and I'll think, okay, well, I don't know what you. you said but that's nice. Imagine if they've said the wildest stuff which is like it changes the

entire perception of those characters. It's so funny. I don't think I've had that before. It's just like I can kind of work it out. It's only like little sentences but I do look at it and I think that makes me feel thick. I respect it. It's kind of like Rosalia just being like if you bitches want to know what I'm saying you can Google translate it. Yeah, got into the lingo. Anyway so that's mostly what I've been loving and obviously I'm still watching The Hamid's Tale. Is that so that you can watch the Testaments, or did you finish the Testaments? I got up to date with the Testaments, and then my partner hadn't watched Handmaid's Tale, so we started it again, and I forgot, it's been so long since I've watched it.

I forgot how good it is. Yeah. So we're just making our way through it. But it's, yeah, I just wrote a Substack on this, but it's maybe not the right time to be doing it. Oh, no, because I literally heard you saying that you were rewatching it. It saw your essay and it really made, it worked to influence me to watch The Handmaid's Tale. What, even though I think the beginning of the line of my substack is, I'm rewatching

the Handma's Tale, big mistake, don't do it. Yeah, I don't know why. I was just like, oh wait, the gravitas of that. Maybe I should watch it. Yeah. No, I am having nightmares. I think it's all. Every time I try and watch The Handmaid's Tale

because I've started and stopped and got further and further, just because I just want to watch, really I should just watch the last series, but I have a kind of purest idea of I should watch something from beginning to end. And I watch it so frequently. I binge it, really, that I get most the way through and I've got to have a... I always have this with the, what's the zombie one? Not the last first, the one that you really liked, Anoni. What was that called?

Walking Dead. I started to watch it. I think this is fantastic. I'm really enjoying this. And then I start having nightmares and I just, I ditch it immediately. So I'll never see the end. I haven't had a zombie fix in ages.

If anyone's got a new zombie series that they can give to me, then I would love that. What have you been loving bear? Oh, yes. So I first, I kind of first wanted, I've come prepared. I first sort of wanted to shout out S&L UK

because it just wrapped its first season and is now confirmed for the second. And obviously we did discuss right at the weekend. we said really happy it exists. We enjoyed a lot of it but weren't laughing out loud. I had to say, after watching all eight episodes, I was so won over by the end and I really was laughing at loud. I think it genuinely found its, it's perfect groove with, with humour and its position and its audience. And I'm just, I'm sort of obsessed with it now. Did you both continue to watch it? I've been sporadically watching episodes and I completely agree with you. I think I was one of the people who

was like, I found it enjoyable. I'm really glad it exists. Didn't really have any belly laughs. hope that changes. I can definitely say that has absolutely changed. And yeah, they've just, they found it. They found what they needed to do with the humor. The Jamie Dornan sketch where he's kidnapped one of the cast members. And then they just started gabbing. Like they're like, oh my God, what did he text? Because basically he's trying to ransom note her situation ship and the situation ship doesn't reply. And it becomes really awkward. And then he's just like, don't worry about it, girl. I'm sure he's just busy. It's so funny. I was cracking up. So I did say that I laughed out loud. I was going in all guns and blazing and then I fall in victim to not watching it live.

So being like, I'll watch it after, then just watching clips. And I keep saying I need to, I'm just going to sit down and watch it all as if it's like one long film. Yeah. Because I feel really bad that I haven't been. There's something about it. There's something feels like you're meant to watch it live. So then when I don't, I'm like, right, okay, well, I'll do it. And then I see a clip and anyway, I'm sorry, SNL UK, but I still stand.

I've never watched it live. It's a tough slot, isn't it? Like, I'm either in bed 8.30 reading my book on a weekend or I'm out till like 3am. There's no in between. And I wanted to give that a little shout out to kind of close the loop on that. The thing I've actually been loving this week is the book, London Falling by Patrick Raddenkief, which is a non-fiction book. So it started as a long-form investigative piece in the New Yorker in early 2024,

which actually I think I mentioned on the podcast the week it came out, which was about a 19-year-old from London, who is a young white man called Zach Bratler, who died after jumping from a fifth floor balcony of an apartment building, a luxury apartment building along the Thames and drowned. And on the way down, he had struck his hip on a wall. And so it was sort of possibly unconscious. But the circumstances of his death were confusing, concerning.

There were a lot of questions. It was suspicious in the, there were no real answers. His parents were not buying that he would have jumped for any other reason that he was very, very afraid. But no one had pushed him. And he was in the, you know, the people that he was sharing the apartment with. I mean, I'm so low to give too much away because actually the book is written in this really wonderful. It's not written like true crime in the way that it feels sensationalist,

but it's written. It gives away enough in each part to furnish you with sort of your expectations and then he dismantles them. And both the piece in the book kind of explore the circumstance of his death and the month's leading up to it. So he's from this. He was from like a really normal, really stable, but quite affluent family had gone to private school. His dad worked in finance. His mom wrote for the Financial Times. His grandfather was a really well-respected. Rabbi and Jewish cast for the BBC, a Holocaust survivor. And so the fact that he ended up in this like shady criminal underworld with these really violent cast of characters was so unlikely and such a strained blend. And it feels like a kind of case that the MEP police should have leapt to solve.

But it didn't turn out that way. And it shows, I mean, it's about the many failings of the MEP police in investigating this. But it's also about London as this haven for billionaires, It's this kind of this city where foreign money just like pours, dirty money just pours like a sieve via like these, all of these unscrupulous global sources. It's like this financial playground for anyone that has enough money, these oligarchs, these Russian billionaires, these wealthy heirs. And there's no real, it is, it's like a playground. And the Met Police, the feelings, the Met Police are kind of a knock on effect of how

London has become structurally weakened by our tolerance for this sort of really suspicious accounting. So it's just such a fantastic book. It kind of goes to this private personal tragedy of this family, but also zooms out into just Britain as this nation that has been warped by its allegiance. And it's kind of like countowing to the 0.0.0.0.1%. So good. If there was like an EIC golden buzzer that said like all of our recommendations, amazing.

But like this one is their tits. I would be hitting that golden titty buzzer right now. So good. It's really high in my TVR pile. And last night I went to dinner with a friend of the podcast, Livy Petter, Livy Petter. And she was like, I'm so tired, I'm so tired. Need to go sleep, need to go to sleep. Got back, sent me a picture. She's in bed reading London and is falling and being like, oh, I can't sleep. This book is so good. So yes, it's really high up. What an amazing synopsis, Beth.

I was really marvelling at your intelligence when you were retelling that. I was in the middle of being like, God, I hope I've actually explained the book. I feel like I've been talking about 45 years, but it is, I just want to get that bit right. And just, I think it's a bit of a hard sell if you haven't read the long read, which immediately made me fascinated with this case. But it is so worth reading. I really would implore everyone to, because it's also Patrick Raddenkeith, who I'm sure we've talked about a few times. We've covered Say Nothing. We've talked about, um, uh, is it Empire of Pain, which I'm yet to read, which is the book you wrote on the America's opioid crisis. Like, he kind of is the guy.

And so this is characteristically very, very good. You are the third person to recommend this book to me in person. So it really is. I feel like everyone is reading it and everyone needs to read it. I'm implored. So before we dive into this one, I just want to give a trigger warning. We will be touching on topics of sexual abuse and sexual violence. This week, BBC Panorama released a harrowing doc called The Dark Side of Married at First Site, which has blown up a huge amount of discourse around the hugely popular reality series, where strangers marry a stranger and have a turbocharged relationship on screen, and they even move in together. Shona Manderson is one of the former contestants interviewed. She was paired with Bradley Skelly, but in the documentary, she alleges

that he had sex with her without a condom, despite her telling him not to. She alleges that the team took her to get the morning after pill, but that nothing else was done. CPL, the production company behind the hit series, alleged that at the time she claimed she was fine with what happened, Bradley also alleges she had shared consent and that he hasn't done anything wrong.

But the production company later removed the pair from the show, alleging they did it to protect their welfare. Channel 4 maintains all sexual experiences were consensual. During the series, the documentary points out that experts picked up on how Bradley used controlling language during their relationship on the show. And they even include clips where the experts called it out on several occasions. Another anonymous contestant alleged that she was raped and she had already shared concerns to the production company that her husband had been violent to her. She also claims he threatened to throw acid on her if she spoke out. After her alleged rape, the welfare team allegedly saw her bruises and took photos off them.

CPL have since claimed they were told it was consensual sex and the acid threat was reported as a passing comment. They said her on-screen husband passed their betting process. And a third anonymous contestant alleges her on-screen husband had sex with her without her consent. The documentary also has a legal expert who says this case was quote, televised abuse. So I've never watched any of maths. So this was genuinely like my first introduction to all of the people that appear on the show. I thought it was extremely shocking and damning, but at the same time, as you guys know, I do have a bit of resistance towards reality TV. And I think we have seen so many contestants, participants of these shows come out with harrowing stories. It wasn't that long ago that we

spoke about the America's Next Top Model documentary and there are mirrors in what happened to one of the contestants on that show with what these contestants are talking about. So it seems like such a massive failure of care in a current climate where I kind of thought, thought maybe naively that that was something that production teams and companies were really putting at the forefront of their minds in terms of making sure of the safety of people that appear in these shows. And one of the things that really shocked me that I wanted to ask you about if you knew this was the case was when they said that there's no other option for sleeping arrangements that when you're put in with the person that you're partnered with, you basically

just have to sleep in the same bed with them. That for me, even as a first hurdle, feels like such an obvious mistake on behalf of the production team. So I'll let Beth answer first. because she needs her time. But the only thing about the shared beds thing, I only have experience of maths Australia. And with that, there will be times where contestants move out of their shared apartment and have a separate room. But I think the point is they don't make it clear you have access to that unless you ask for it and you're in duress. So you'll say something like, I can't live with this person. That's what they seem to show the people in their cutaways who move out and it's a massive deal. Rather than starting the experiment with that being the baseline and

then you make a choice. It's like the default is you live with that person and then there has to be some kind of big, big explosion or some big example of why then they're asked to then leave, if that makes sense. Yeah, which actually is just such a big flaw. One, because you know it's going to be quote unquote drama for the show and then you might get a villain edit or you might. And also if you are in, as a lot of these women, I do believe, are trying to make these relationships work. There are real feelings involved and they are because they are thrown together, I think it engenders these feelings of attachment way too early. But in the case of being, having feelings for someone, even if things are going wrong behind the scenes off camera requesting a separate bed,

knowing that's going to be then talked about in the, when they sit down and talk to the experts, knowing it's going to be a storyline, you're going to be really reluctant to put your relationship under that scrutiny and also maybe embarrass the person that is sort of coercing you. So I think when you lay it out like that, you're like, oh, it's such a flaw. Like they meet, they go, they spend the wedding night together. They often wake up in the same bed before they go on honeymoon. Actually, you know, they've had a few drinks. Actually, that's kind of a nightmare.

And I think having watched this show, I didn't watch, I watched a few episodes of the, the UK series that this, the UK series that this was from, but mostly I watched the Australian one. Actually, I think I have been quite naive. Like I've said that I liked this show before because I think that they encourage the contestants to really be introspective. They've got the experts. They actually do seem to do some kind of relationship therapy. But I just actually think that is quite naive, like with the bed sharing, with all of these

stories coming out, with the fact that the welfare teams clearly have not been robust at all. to the fact where someone could say, my partner has taken the condom off, has come inside me, e.g. stealthing, e.g., what, you know, we all know that this is sexual assault. For someone, for a welfare team, working on a show where sex is involved and relationships are involved, not to immediately go, that is a sexual assault. Even if shown her, as she says, you know, it's okay, it's okay, I don't want to leave. We're okay. They should have said, no, it's not okay. I feel like, surely there's no way back at this point. I just, I felt, yeah, I feel really naive. It just didn't feel like the right aftercare situation.

Like I feel like she shouldn't have been made to go and then sit in a room where she's like recounting the episode. She should have been offered like psychological help, a therapist, the ability to go home. Like whatever, it just felt very clinical and them kind of putting up parameters to make sure they have their asses covered. But also just I wonder if part of the fault lines with these reality TV shows. And I said this to you guys. I honestly think my subway take would be I think we need to get rid of reality TV. The way reality TV works is you need certain types of characters and certain types. types of people in order for them to be entertaining. And I think the resounding, repeated thing we

keep seeing is often men who have these types of personalities tend to also be the type of men who are coercively controlling, who are manipulative and who are abusive. We've seen it on probably every iteration of every show that's come out, whether it's Love Island or whether it's this. And so as much as they say, they do these sort of like personality checks and welfare checks and make sure these people are right, in the moment when they thought that he was being controlling, which really shocked me that they'd even said that in the show. Surely at that point you're realizing whoever is casting these people is not doing a good enough job. Like I said, I've not seen the UK version, but I've seen the Australia version. And I watched this year's series. And it is really, really dark. There are so many dark

moments in it. And I think what it does is it tricks the viewer into thinking, well, if we can see this is dark, they must be showing us everything. And it makes you feel like you're included into all of the worst moments. So it can't be worse than what you've seen. But I agree with you, Beth. I feel really, naive and quite foolish actually because why would they show the worst of it? Obviously that must be the best of what we've seen, which is in that case really damning potentially for a lot of the scenes that we don't bear witness to or what happens behind closed doors. There are so many instances where I think it is such an interesting show because it exposes some of the darkest kinds of relationships, controlling experiences, you know, people not communicating properly,

people really having quite escalating, aggressive forms of conflict. And that's what you see. So now I feel really silly because obviously you see such a tiny amount. No wonder a lot of these people would be put in dangerous situations, especially when you're showing a bed with an absolute stranger. And how can you vet for what kind of person somebody is going to be in a relationship behind closed doors? How can you really vet for a sexual assaulter? I don't really know how you do that or how that's even possible. It has really darkened my view on this show. And also it's made me just kind of upset for a lot of the stories that probably haven't been told. I will say as well, they mentioned this in the dark and it's so true.

And I think anyone who's watched the series can identify this exact moment. Because Maths Australia is so conflict-driven, there's this moment that was introduced into that show where all the couples have a dinner party every week and it just becomes like a shouting match, a screaming match, really. Basically, because that was such a successful form of TV, because it is really compelling and so mental to watch, the UK one copied that. In the dock, they make the point that there was almost this turning point of the old maths that was centred around the relationship and the new maths, which is centred around conflict. And from that point onwards, the stakes became ten times higher. The amount of conflict became so much more intense and so aggressive. It is just like kind of horrible, realizing the thing that is so compelling is also the thing that puts so much duress on people. in these scenarios and just feeling quite caught up in it and realizing taking a step back, oh, my favourite part of this show is actually the worst, most toxic part of the show. Surely something, any production that is stoking, screaming matches between these couples and

the men and women at the table. And there was a big thing with the Maths Australia where there was a, kind of a whole bullying storyline for one of the better word this year. You do, you lose so much of the empathy that actually it's a show about relationships and people falling love. And I do think, I mean, there's already a unconfirmed report that the new maths UK series that's been filmed already was due to air in September has been scrapped. I mean, the format does mean that stuff like this will happen. You put together total strangers. And I do feel like as disappointing as I'm sure it would be for any upcoming contestants, I don't know what else. Similar to the Bachelorette in the US, which was just cancelled with Taylor, Frankie Poole.

Like, what can you do but wipe the sleigh and either start again or just retreat? Like, I don't know how you can continue to air a show like. like this is really such a damning outcome. It's really interesting. I was with my friend Poppy the other day and we did like an IRL, What Have You Been Loving Session on the Tube? And she was like, I have to be honest, I cannot stop watching maths. And she was watching maths Australia.

And I said, what is it about it that's so addictive? She was like, I don't know they're just doing this new thing where it's about this dinners that you were talking about that she was like, didn't used to be a thing before. And she's like, and it's so addictive watching them. And they're all really confrontational. They're all really nasty to each other. And so she had like pinpointed this difference and also noticed how much it made her really

engaged that she couldn't stop watching. And I was thinking Richard when you were saying about that thing, which is what we often land on or people do, like cultural critics will land on. The reason that reality TV is so fascinating is it allows you to play out situations that happen in real life, whether that's conflict or control or emotional abuse. But I guess the problem with that, and I guess, and I've also coached that as my argument for like Love Island a few years ago, but the last time I watched it because you're like it's such a fascinating examination of the way that the world works. You know, it's like us seeing things. But it's almost like animal testing in that sense. It's like you're putting it. You're putting it. You're putting. people into a cage and stress testing them with different factors and seeing how they react to it. And they often are primed to react in quite bad ways. Like when I watch Real Housewives, which is one of the only reality shows I do watch, I often think I can't imagine the level of cortisol I would feel if I was engaging in this type of dramatic argument every day. So even beyond the sexual assault and rape allegations, which are just disgusting and harrowing and really just remarkably awful, even just the thing that we now find to be entertaining,

when you actually think about the people going through it, even if perhaps they do emulate that level of high drama in their real lives, there's something just really, I think, flawed about it. And I do think there's going to be in years to come, a time when we look back and say, can't really believe that we televise that. And they make the point in the show, and I think it's really interesting,

the spectrum of how bad these shows are with, I think in theory, something like Love Island and then maths, and then slightly along a real housewives. Because with Love Island, for example, you're taking people away from their environment, you're putting them in a different world and you're cutting off their access to their real world in an abusive relationship, just to use that as a parable.

I'm not saying Love Island mimics an abusive relationship, but I think there's some kind of parallels you can look at. You know, you are sectioned away, you are denied access to your support. Those are things that these shows can do, which really puts you in quite vulnerable state. With maths, they are given their phones, but they are put in these orchestrated situations

where they can't see their friends and family to maybe share notes about what's going on face to face. There's also all this pressure to make the relationship work. It's a lot to say, I've just gone on this show and this whole thing has fallen apart and I'm picking myself because this is an abusive scenario. You know, there's so many things stacked against getting yourself to that point. You can see how, once you get further down the line to a maths or a love island, just how fucked you are really to think like your normal state, to go through things and perhaps a way you would if you had your friends all around you to talk through every single scenario.

It is quite a messed up situation to really trust all of your actions and to really feel your full self. So Harry Stiles kicked off his Together Together tour in Amsterdam this weekend and lots of attendees have shared their frustrations online, especially that they couldn't actually see him with his set designs. So there were these huge runways erected in the stadium which added more barriers for fans, some of whom couldn't see around them to even see Harry when he zipped by. This stung particularly for them because tickets were not cheap,

ranging from 74 euros for standard C's to 828 euros for top tier VIP packages. I saw a really funny too which made me laugh about the stage because he's running around it and someone was like, honestly, was like watching him do Berlin Marathon again because he's just got this ginormous stage that goes so far around to the crowd. And it's just him just running around and it's little shorts. Was he wearing little shorts? I might have actually just imagined that.

I think you dreamed that bit. I think he, the ones I've seen of him, he's sort of wearing like 80s workwear. I've implemented Harry Styles Berlin Marathon outfit onto the stage. I've just smashed it all together in my mind. Beautiful. He is running around like a kind of hamster in one of those big enclosures. And it seems like a nice thing to do so everyone gets a little glimpse and he comes,

but it just feels like maybe it was slightly badly executed, that the people who should have been able to see him because they were physically very close. He was up there. They had no idea because he was just out of sight. That makes me so sad for them. You would be so. angry. I would be so pissed off. It's not easy to get those tickets. I saw people pushing each

other online basically to try and get ahead and get those tickets. I think there's so much chat at the moment about stadium tours and people really kind of falling out of love with a lot of their favorite artists because of the pricing and also the fact that there's this pressure to say, I'm a star who's hit this status. I'm going to book out the biggest tour and then to make sure that all of those seats are booked. The pricing just becomes an absolute mess. And then I'm I don't know if they can't sell them out. I know Pussycat Dolls had this and a few other artists have had to basically cancel. Some of them using various excuses.

Some of them just fessing up and saying, look, we couldn't sell the tour out so we can't do it. And then just canceling. And it just feels like at the minute there's a really horrible cycle of people either getting these tickets feeling really let down and just feeling really upset and taken advantage of people not being able to see their favorite artists or people doing it and then last minute just having them canceled. I also do feel like there has been no artisties. to get this right at the moment. And maybe it is following the Taylor Swift era's tour, which I didn't, none of us went to anything, but like I saw enough online to know fantastic, really, really raised the bar. Same with Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour, which has elevated people's expectation of these world tours to the point where even though he's hurtling around his like little

scale extract having the time of his life and they've tried to do something pretty impressive here and pretty unique and that Taylor's to his fans, they haven't pulled it off. And I do think it's this scramble to try and reach those levels that Taylor and. Beyonce and I'm sure many other people have sort of set the bar at and people will say these are the greatest. You know, I paid my $800, but I'm thrilled that I've done it because I got so much from it. I don't think anyone that went to either of those tour dates has come away saying anything other than like time my life, whereas people are really having to bless his heart, having to try and say, well, no, it was really good when I got to see him for seven seconds.

No, no, no, he was amazing and this was so, so good. And I don't think it's because he's not, you know, talented enough. I do just think this is maybe a slightly, it really is a scale It's track. You've nailed that on the heard. You're just zooming. Well, we wish him the best. Yes, good luck, Harry, with all we were in Davis. I'm sure you've seen this, but Kendall Jenner and Jacob Alludey seem to be dating. And they were spotted in a car with Kendall's sister Kylie and her partner, Timothy Shalame.

They were also spotted on a beach in Hawaii. But the Euphoria has been getting so much backlash online because allegedly he had a foot injury, which meant that's why he couldn't go to Cannes. and I think he was meant to be on a panel or part of the festival. So all of his fans have been seeing these little snapshots of his sexy little getaway and basically saying that they can't believe that he's throwing away his career for Kendall, which is really quite funny because the other thing that people don't like for some reason is him dating Kendall Jenner. And there's like these two camps of sort of like,

of course Kendall and Jacob Loddy together, they're like the male, female version of each other. And then the opposite, which is something we discussed ages ago with Kylie and Timmy, which is people feeling like the Jenner's almost aren't. highbrow enough to be dating these actors. And it's quite a, I mean, it's, it's parisocial to the endth degree, but how do you feel about it? I personally am quite enjoying it and I personally loved the pictures of them in the car. Kylie is just pissing herself. Timmy's trying to hide and Jacob and Kendall look quite stressed. I think it's so hilarious. There's almost like this assumption that if you do an A24 film, you're not allowed to like an Instagram baddie and it's just,

it's so ridiculous. I also think, who has not pulls a sickie early on when you're dating somebody? I feel like in the first few months of me daying my soon-to-be husband, oh, we pulled a sickie and we went to a casino in Leicester Square and just like had a few drinks and played slots. And it was so fun. And I feel like the worst thing is being a celebrity, you can't pull the sickie because the tabloids will fucking tell on you. TMZ will tell on your ass.

That is so cute, Ritura. I know. I love that story. Yeah, so were the reports about him breaking his feet unverified? Because I didn't see him on the Hawaii beach. with a big boot on. It's so easy to just get away with those sorts of things. Just put a sling on.

I don't know. Get a cast. You're rich. I think it was more the fact that he was driving. People were like, surely if he were putting me how you pushing those pedals. Yeah. He's got an electric vehicle.

Depends which fur. I love the, I mean, it's an immortalised tweet at this point about Kylie and Timothy, which was Kylie is exactly Timothy's type. I don't know why art hoes are crying on here. Like no one told you all to get a bob and a tote bag. It's such good.

Now tote bag gal is just like a shorthand. So bag and a bob. I mean, I do, I think people, his previous partner was Olivia Jade. Like he obviously does have a physical, like a hot, tall, sort of nepo baby, gorgeous, famous woman. That is a physical type that he has. I don't know why anyone would be surprised. And I don't, she gets a rep as being, I suppose, less interesting, a bit more. You know, she gets slagged off for her modelling career.

But we don't know really anything about Kendall Jenner. She might be a hoot. She might be as a real good time gal. We just don't know. Also, I feel like Zoe Kravitz was sketched. all the flack for like collecting hot men like Pokemon's but Kendall Jenner's roster of men she's dating some fantastic men she is getting all the hot ones oh my god two words bad bunny hamster Harry who else I can't remember but they're all really hot because I saw a

collage and I thought yes lovely men you've picked there good girl yeah yeah I like do you know what as being like not really a Kardashian Jenna involved woman I recently have been being said a lot of clips of Kylie. And actually we're going to talk about clipping later on. Maybe, maybe this is all manufactured. But I've become supremely endeared to Kylie Jenner. And loads of people sent me a quote from her the other day where she said, sometimes I think I'm depressed, but then I just fake tan and I realized I was pale. That really was me. But now I just, that actually almost convinced me to go back to fake tanning. So I was like, maybe my baseline of happiness is really low at the minute because I'm pale. Much to think about the prophet Kylie Jenner, which to be fair,

If she's paying money for this like a good PR campaign, it's working. She seems to have a really nice time with Timothy Shalameh. As celebrities go, I'm not going to say she's totally unproblematic because I think she does whizz around in a private jet. But I will say, I'm not as angry as other people are about her lip kits and the fact that she got, you know, she had augmentations when she was a very young woman. I know that it is all very layered and she encouraged other people, but she was also a victim and she was very young. And also from that same interview where she was talking about the Depression, fake tan complex, she talks about how she was nice. when she got pregnant and I had completely wiped from my memory that she was that young and she talks about like how scared she was and how she kind of knew deep within her this is something she wanted

to do even though she was so young even as she had to be a single mother and I found it really fascinating to get an insight to her because for so long she has been so young when she's been having this critique leveled at her and I'm interested to see how she what kind of woman she grows up into because I'm really enjoying her at this current moment. Let's go on the pod. Yeah good plan. Kylie. Come on. Small pivot but I don't know if you guys are have seen all the kind of ferrory around Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. It is so bleak, but for anyone who hasn't or needs a bit of a recap, last week Forbes reported that Elon Musk had spent every day boosting misinformation about the film, including false claims about the cast. The Odyssey is an

adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek poem that is set for release in July. Musk has been spreading misinformation about the casting of Lupita Niyongo as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page claiming that he is playing the Greek warrior Achilles, even though the movie has never confirmed this. Naturally, this has opened up the pair of them for targets of transphobic and racist abuse. I read a piece in Vulture, I believe it was, that said right-wing pundits have now said horrendous things about Lupita on their lame fucking podcasts, saying all sorts of horrendous things I will not say. But the main thing that I wanted to draw attention to is that they're claiming her casting is, quote, racist to all white people. Musk has accused Nolan of

hiring a diverse cast for The Odyssey because he wants to win an Oscar. There's just so much to say and both nothing to say about this. What do you guys think? It's utterly pathetic, isn't it? The first I saw of it was Elon Musk engaging with Matt Walsh, who had taken an exception to Lipita's casting as Helen of Troy, because Helen of Troy famously faced, launched a thousand ships,

Most Beautiful Women in the World. And he couldn't believe that Le Peter, who is widely considered, one of the most beautiful working actresses, would, you know, he thinks that that's sort of tokenistic casting, which obviously just betrays how he thinks, which is assuming that everyone else in the world has the same sort of hateful ends down. And then Elon Musk, of course, just hopped on that because if there's a party of fucking losers, you know he's at the door ringing the bell. Like I just to say of the rumoured casting of belly page as well, like one of the most, one of the dumbest and most twisted things I've heard. What do you mean? It's a film that's not out. It's a film in which by that point, spoiler, Achilles has already died. I am so fed up. up with this man and his just, just like, warming his way into the most ridiculous discourse. I'm really excited for the film. And I actually, I'm certain that all of these people

who are jumping on the bandwagon, the blue tics, will also be queuing up and they will watch it. I cannot wait for this film. I also agree that my favorite part of this argument is this idea that La Pita is not one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen in my life. Every time I see her face, I think, wow, that is a face that I just cannot believe.

She looks like she's been carved by the gods, which is the concept. of who she's supposed to be playing. So yeah, I don't understand. It's also a story that has been told a million times over. It's also a fantastical story. There are Cyclops in it. And also, have they read The Odyssey?

I would love to know. That would be interesting. They haven't read The Odyssey. I would actually love to one day read The Odyssey, but I say this about so many things. I mean, it's never going to happen. How long would it take? Not long at all.

It's not. The Iliad is longer, I think, if you read... Sorry, that is what I mean. Read Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. So the Iliad is Homer's other work, which I think is what's happening. I think they basically have seen Troy, which is sort of crib from the Iliad, which is a poem by Homer, which is about the last year or sort of the last year or like a period of time during the last year of the 10-year Trojan War. That features a lot of Achilles in Troy as played by Brad Pitt, who is this wily kind of God-touched warrior who goes about killing and shagging and kidnapping women. At the end of Troy, he does die and Odysseus burns his body.

It's slightly different in the Iliad. He doesn't actually die, but his death is foreshadowed. But anyway, the two of them are basically colleagues in war. But then the Odyssey is each, like, it's Odysseus on his 10-year journey home. I mean, it's basically about the world's worst commute. But by that point, Achilles is dead. You know, their colleagues, it is him making his way home. I am convinced that they have seen Troy think Elliot Page has been cast as.

a modern-day Brad Pitt, gotten their panties in a twist and are now boycotting a huge film that will be fantastic, I hope, for no other reason that Daddy Musk told them to do. I genuinely, I mean, I would also say, I know you can absolutely read The Odyssey, it will take you a few days.

And you should, it's very good. Oh, Fab. So maybe it was the Illet, I was thinking, is that the one that's crazy, crazy, crazy long? I mean, it's not as long as Ulysses. I've read the Iliad in school. Oh my God, maybe I'm thinking of Ulysses. Ulysses is thick.

Ulysses is a big, big lad. Oh God, guys, I'm so thick. And I've got a Greek name, so I should really be like knowing things. Did you know? Before Paris of Troy met Helen of Troy, he fell in love with a water nymph, mountain imp called Anoni.

And then he left Anoni for Helen of Troy. She scribed his name on a poplar tree, and then she killed herself. And that is who I'm named after. So I really should have read these books. Yeah, that's such good provenance. Well, now you can. You can succeed over every one of these damp

in-cell fanboys and read the fucking book and then have an opinion. Also, the other thing of like Elon Musk accusing Christopher Nolan of wanting an Oscar is like, well, yeah, you fucking idiot. Like, every filmmaker would want an Oscar. So last week, Lane Brown published a piece with Vulture titled, The Feed is Fake. That viral song movie meme influencer and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.

And in a recent Everything in Conversation episode, we touched on the allegations against rock band geese and how they'd worked with a digital marketing company called Chaotic Good to help boost their online profile through orchestrated height. This piece takes the issue a whole lot further and argues nearly everything on the internet is an advert or orchestrated debate and everything from the Sydney-Sweeney American Eagle jeans slash jeans ad to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show was boosted by these fake posts. So the journalist writes that in the lead up to Bad Bunny's performance, there was a polarising debate online from Magasimi voices against having a Spanish speaker taking the lead and those defending him in return. He writes, Goodyear analyzed 3.7 million related social media posts and found that fewer than 4% of the accounts in the conversation generated more than a

quarter of the content. So I guess the question is, why would somebody want to have backlash against them in the case of Bad Bunny. Well, it drives up the conversation and as the journalist notes, quote, by the time the controversy burned itself out, the NFL had gotten exactly what it wanted from the halftime show, a week of saturation coverage with a culturally divided country griping about its programming choices, while Bad Bunny got the kind of attention that even a global superstar can't always buy directly. But the problem is politicians and outlets like the New York Times and even us, the consumers of this content, then pick up. these stories because they're seemingly big talking points and this then legitimises the topics

turning them into news stories. And in terms of the Sydney-Sweeney example, the peace states, the bot detection firm, Chyabra, analyzed seven days of activity around the ad and determined that 15% of the TikTok accounts commenting on it were fake, but had created a disproportionately large percentage of the uproar. The public reaction wasn't all fake, Kiabra's CEO Dan Brami says, but it was amplified by inauthentic activity. We already know that was a strong whiff of this activity with the Blake lively slash Justin Baldoni conflict and allegations that his team have pursued an online smear campaign through bots and orchestrated vitriol online. But the piece makes an incredible point of asking what is actually real online. Everything we see is designed to focus

into responding or feeling like everyone else is angry or loving something when they're possibly not. Perhaps lots of the topics we've brought to this podcast weren't real debates until we help bring them to people's attention, which is quite a frightening thought. Did that, make the two of you sort of stop and take stock and think back over the things we've covered and whether we were savvy enough at the time. Because a few times I think we have said there's something about this. But other times I wonder, I don't know, did you get that feeling as well? I felt so shaky reading the piece because it made me feel like obviously our MO with the podcast is that we bring trending topics, discourse points, debates, anything people are talking about

online to this podcast to discuss further. The point of these marketing campaigns is, is to create discussions. Some of it is orchestrated, which then leads to people discussing it, because as we've said, if you see somebody else talking about something and somebody else responding to something, that becomes a conversation in your mind. So then you respond to it. That's how the internet works. It made me feel really horrible because then I just now feel like how will we ever know what is legitimate conversation, what is really a trend, i.e. organic conversation starters of things that people care about. The internet is no longer a metric to understand public conversation. It's just been completely warped. And when we spoke about geese,

I think I only understood it in a smaller sense. This piece made me realise the whole internet has been co-opted by these fake conversation starters and orchestrated hype points. And I feel really on edge having a podcast that talks about the internet now. I don't know about you guys. I know what you mean. I think luckily we do skew towards talking about things that we find interesting. So sometimes, yes, we do tackle the thing that's going really viral. But often our question will be, why is this so viral? Why are people talking about it? We actually do ask that quite often.

We're like, why are people bothering to talk about this? Is this rage bait? There was a really good quote in the piece actually that said, the dominant technique now isn't so much inventing a controversy from nothing as choosing which real minor outrage to fuel because you can usually find someone on the internet mad about almost anything. The job is mostly to choose which objection to amplify and how loudly. So I think, funny enough, I do think we tapped on this

and we do then often relate things out to bigger pictures and how does this impact whatever. I think where it is dangerous is when you're just consuming thing after thing after thing after thing, nothing is really that informative. It is simply to get your attention and your eyeballs. And another quote that I love from the piece was, we've locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato's Cave,

where what looks like the spontaneous consensus for the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketeers, political operatives, foreign influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell. And I think you can feel this in real life. Like we spoke about this in the Lena Dynam episode when you remember that you can kind of just not go on the internet

and when you don't go on it, it doesn't exist. And what really permeates is when you're at lunch or with your friends or doing something or your mum or someone actually has a real world opinion on something that's going on. That happens with maybe 3% of the things that you see online. And I think that's quite a good marker of knowing. Is this just like a random campaign where on the internet it feels so noisy? But if you turn around to someone on the street,

they'd be like, what are you talking about? I think that's quite interesting. It does scare me, but it makes so much sense seeing it now. It's just, I also just think I feel a bit like, it just makes me feel disenfranchised and disinterested. And I hate that we're kind of playing a game that we didn't necessarily know we were playing. Yeah, it makes me feel less inclined to try and, or just that my work to engage with art and discover things and try and tap into the conversation, which is what we're trying to do, is futile because the conversation highway has been completely hijacked by these external forces. that want to, like their modus operandi is to sort of lie to journalists and make journalists believe that what they're seeing is real when in fact it's puffery and it's inflated. And there's a few pieces

that really left me cold, which is what you mentioned earlier, where the quote, manipulating algorithms is only part of the goal. The other is fooling humans, particularly the dwindling number of journalists, critics and other gatekeepers who are still capable of conferring legitimacy by paying attention. And it's this idea that music critics and publications that, exist to assess and critique and engage so thoroughly with music as an art, are that insignificant and that, you know, it doesn't matter to try and trick them and diminish their work and to kind of shut off the supply of maybe something exciting and organic. There are ways that artists have always done that to kind of pad things out and they pay teams to create this law and create this hype.

But the idea of fooling and wanting to fool and succeeding in fooling music journalists just feels like it's just very anti-art, very anti-culture, and it's clear that it's already happening. But to think of these huge apparatus existing with that sole aim just makes me feel very cold. The thing I find, like, is the double whammy with this is obviously so much of journalism has been skin to the bone. I've said this before. I don't have a job right now. And I'm trying to kind of change the industry I'm going into. We all saw the Devilwe's Prada too.

It is really bleak. So a lot of the internet journalists that I looked up to who were my, like, inadvertent mentors from afar, have now, you know, moved on to Substack, they now have their own podcast, they have their own kind of independent media ventures. But the amount of internet culture criticism to my mind has dwindled compared to like a golden age, you know, around the BuzzFeed era and like around that time where you had so many internet literate people, the nature of the internet has changed so much. So something like the New York Times profiling clavicular, I found deeply distressing because that is an extremist voice on the internet. Undeniably, that is an extremist man on the internet,

saying all sorts of bad shit things and just really nihilistically only in pursuit of his own growth and ambition, whatever he does not care. The New York Times profiled him for a weekend slot and this comes into part of this play as well where I think that discernment of what is an internet story that seems to be picking up, i.e. a clavicular has become a big, you know, conversation versus what should be reported on. That barrier seems to have disintegrated, which allows all of these hype campaigns to basically find themselves in the broadsheets. and the important outlets which are meant to be discerning about these things. Because now you don't have the same internet reporters who could maybe identify, that's a hype campaign.

This doesn't feel so right and maybe give it the due diligence that it is required in this very difficult online landscape we now have. That depresses me on a much deeper level. I think what poked a hole in the ozone layer of media literacy, which is now allowed for all of this pollution of kind of slot to come through, was social media giving celebrities a voice with which they were able to tell their own stories. which kind of made celebrity profiling become redundant, it then gave a lot less access to kind of proper journalists to do certain types of reporting because they would get clapped back.

Then you had obviously like social media and clips, everything we saw with the double-ers parted, that just totally diluted the value in the minds of investors and stuff of real reporting because it didn't get clicks. And all of this has just come together. We are now finally seeing the end product of what happens when you start to value the attention economy me as short form content, video content, eyeballs, quick hooks, three second things that make people

want to look at stuff versus actually people engaging with and enjoying real literature and journalism. I'd say, of course, this is where we've ended up, even though there were so many kind of like early investors and adopters in this new landscape of social media and this modern way of informing each other. I now think that we're seeing the fallout from that. And the other thing I wanted to bring in quickly, because it's just happened recently and I've just been kind of absorbed, reading about it was that the Commonwealth Foundation announced the regional winners is at short story prize and a few days later it started drawing attention because some people thought that the one that won and other prize winning stories read uncomfortably like

AI generated text. I've read snippets of this and it really does read like AI generated text. One of the sentences is the way she walks turns men into benches. So that piece was called that is the feed fake. Even the literature now that is winning prizes is fake. It's like there's so much intervention from both algorithmic AI manipulation and also invested money, that what is real anymore, maybe the internet now can never be real. We just simply cannot trust anything on the internet. How bizarrely depressing then the end of the piece, that is the prophecy from somebody involved in these digital marketing campaigns. The founder of Floodify, who is basically the person, the piece, starts off with, says all of this is nonsense because in three to five more years,

people will stop trusting what they see on social media. Quote, you'll have to start distributing your content towards AI agents and then they'll teach humans what they want. Yeah, and it's these tech CEOs that are so culpable for these, these social media platforms themselves. And the piece goes into this. Platforms wanted video even more because they could charge more for video ads than they could for the banner ads.

So those platforms repave most of the internet into surfaces that could host video ads, then incentivize users and publishers to roll their cameras. The pivot worked. Meta's revenue. has grown more than 10fold since the mid-2010s and TikTok's global revenue is expected to top $30 billion this year. But the same shift that made these platforms rich

also created a monster that they couldn't control. And it is greed and hubris across the board that basically means we can't have nice things that art has been faulted into this that as far as I can see, people are utilising these, you know, AI technology and these clipping campaigns, tech overlords with like no souls and no maids, basically bulldozing the internet as we knew it.

an art as we knew it so that they could make a buck. And I do just think it's the greatest shame. And they think that they can get away with it by saying, no, we don't incentivise this. When we find this sort of clipping content on our site, we remove it and we ban it. And it's what it's made of now. Like that is the stuff of the internet now.

You cannot separate these sites from that kind of conduct. It's sort of over. Thank you so much for listening this week. Before we go, just making sure that you've listened to our latest everything in conversation episode where we asked, is the Girl Boss back, thanks to Emma Greed. If you enjoy listening to us, then please do give us a rating and a review

wherever you're listening to this right now. I know we say it every week, every single week, but it really helps us to keep making this podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and TikTok, Everything's Content Pod, for extra content and to take part in our Wednesday conversation episodes. See you next week.

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