Everything Is Content - Who tf DID she marry?!

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

We’ve stepped out of our ‘This Is Me… Now’ daze to bring you this week’s podcast - which also includes news of the rom-com renaissance, the cliff notes on the 52-part TikTok storytime and a deep-dive into the morality of the personal essay genre.In this episode we discuss a story that's centred around living with poor mental health. If you, or someone you love needs advice or guidance in this area, the NHS is a great place to start. The Samaritans also provide a free listening service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year if you ever need to talk about something that's upsetting you. UK listeners can call 116 123 to access this service. Wherever you're listening, you should always reach out to your doctor or a certified medical professional if you've been affected by anything you've heard and you feel you need more support and guidance.—NEW YORK TIMES: The ‘Daddy’ Will See You NowREESA TEESA: Who TF Did I Marry? ROLLING STONE: ‘Who TF Did I Marry’THIS IS ME… NOW THE CUT: The Lure of DivorceTHE CUT: The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a StrangerTHE TIMES: My husband used to be hotTHE NEW YORKER: Cat PersonTHE TIMES: Dolly AldertonVOX: Everyone’s a sellout nowJIA TOLENTINO: Trick Mirror—Follow us on Instagram:@everythingiscontentpod @beth_mccoll @ruchira_sharma@oenone ---Everything Is Content is produced by Faye Lawrence for We Are GrapeExec Producer: James Norman-FyfeMusic: James RichardsonPhotography: Rebecca Need-Meenar Artwork: Joe Gardner  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

what are your dietary requirements? gluten-free unless the gluten-free option is shit then i'll have anything okay i do think people need to stop remembering i'm gluten-free they'll always come up and be like you know you're eating pizza it's like yeah i can know this is everything is content i'm beth i'm richira. And I'm Anoni. This is the weekly pop culture podcast where we all get together and have a big chat about the stories that have ignited the discourse this week. We're here to add a sprinkle of chocolate on the top of your

content cappuccino. On today's episode, we'll discuss the 52-part TikTok and and brace yourselves JLo's new film. If you love the podcast make sure you're subscribed and follow us on Instagram at everything is content pod. This episode contains some sensitive topics. Please check the episode description for a list of trigger warnings. Every week, we'll tell you what we've been loving since we last spoke. What have you girlies gotten for us this week? So I read a piece in the New York Times about Call Her Daddy.

Do you girls listen to Call Her Daddy? I don't. I've listened to a couple. I'm not a religious listener, but I'm very aware of Call Her Daddy as a show. Okay, so you'll know it's founding father. Well, it's founding fathers, but now one of them having set off on her own path,

Alex Cooper. Yes. So this piece dives into how Alex Cooper has kind of set up a podcasting and I guess video kind of podcasting empire. She's got people like Alex Earl and Madeline Argy kind of setting forth the 2.0 of what she created with Call Her Daddy with their own podcast. It was super interesting because I feel like, I don't know, her story is kind of wild

and the Call Her Daddy podcast is this insane phenomenon that's rivaling possibly only joe rogan and being one of the most popular podcasts there are globally and i think reading this profile was super interesting just hearing what she's got set out for the next 10 years which is basically she has accepted and pre-planned that her podcast won't be the number one women's podcast for the next 10 years which is why she's got these like newer generations doing the next legwork for is why she's got these like newer generations doing the next legwork for her and she's gonna sit back and let call her daddy eventually move out of the way for them to take over it's really interesting i actually did read the piece i found it fascinating because she's also the same age as i'm gonna say us i know we're like give or take a year she's 29

right and she was i didn't know that yeah but it said that I think it says it in the piece and she said that she obviously is not going to be the bright young thing forever yeah but she like studies what Gen Z reels are like she like researches and I was thinking god that's so interesting because I feel like I'm going the other way where I'm really pleased to have aged out of what's cool I'm buzzing for the fact that I it doesn't really matter if I'm uncool now I can't I kind of hate the idea of having to stay up to date forever so she wants like a media empire is that what she's sort of saying in the piece completely completely completely the thing I found really interesting is she's built up this podcast it started off as kind of like locker room chat for women it was really sexualized they were talking about um her and her previous co-host who exited the chat very unceremoniously,

Sophia Franklin, basically used to chat about just like giving blowjobs and like really vauntry sex. And it used to be really, really just like out there. But she's transitioned the podcast, especially on her own, Alex Cooper. I think it seems like she wants it to be taken a lot more seriously.

Just this week, she had a podcast with Misha Barton who hasn't done interviews for over a decade, maybe even two decades. it to be taken a lot more seriously just this week she had a podcast with Misha Barton who hasn't done interviews for over a decade maybe even two decades and she talks about what it was like you know during the OC and having a prescription pill problem she really does get these celebrities who refuse to do media literally on her podcast and whether you like her or not what you think about her interview technique which has come under criticism for not being too probing she's getting the people that like you know chat show hosts for like decades have been trying to get I also thought it's so interesting the piece she said that she doesn't let publicists sit in on the interview she doesn't let them have any

control over what they're asked and she makes them sit in a separate room and watch it on camera because publicists are kind of the problem with the death of the celebrity interview I think we've spoken about it before so it is fascinating and I think because she's not probing that's why celebrities trust her yeah because it's not necessarily journalistic it's like allowing them to have their space but they kind of know that they're not going to be she's not going to take the piss she's not going to be probing in that way because otherwise she would lose that she's got this access because she's not putting them too far i do feel like as women especially you get more power and you have to put yourself out there you have to talk about the

blowjobs and all of this at a certain point you transition to being like more of the puppet master because you pay your dues by being like really vulnerable and like doing all the legwork and then at some point you're like i just want to run this shit so like good luck to him but i'm gonna might might read this actually which is i don't have any interest in her until now honestly go down on the deep dive of what happened with her and her fellow uh podcast hosts i just i've been getting really into like business feuds and just like feuds between two people who are best friends like i that is a genre of like gossip is so interesting lauren and heidi that. Yeah, the beginning. What have you been loving this week, Beth?

I've been loving rom-coms, girls. I have watched two rom-coms in the last week and both of them I enjoyed. And I've just got such a hunger now to watch more. What are they? What are they? So I watched Anyone But You, which is the Sidney Sweeney and Glenn Powell.

Glenn Powell. It's about two like almost lovers turned enemies who are like thrown back together when they have to go to a shared loved one's wedding. It's got like so many of the amazing rom-com conventions like Will They Won't They, Fake Relationship, Enemies to Lovers, like it's good. It's good okay okay it's good well it's pretty good but i think it's so good because we haven't had a really good one in a while that i was like breath of fresh air initially all the like stills came out then and everyone was like oh my god sexy beautiful bodies like they're in love and then we kind of got a bit more from the trailers and

everyone was like oh no this is going to be absolutely terrible and then it's been like a massive blockbuster hasn't it so it was i think the budget was about 25 million doll hairs and it's made of this week's made like 190 million so commercially it's doing so well you're right when it first came out or like the trailers first came out there was a lot of confusion it was quite a messy publicity i almost was like maybe i'm not gonna i i i was exactly the same did watch it without high high hopes and was just really impressed because I think it shows I mean the the amount it's gross to show there is like a real appetite for it and it's quite feel good it didn't like blow me away in the way that like a perfect when Harry Matt Sally rom-com will but I think it was a real like return to form it felt very like 2000s

had a bit of that that sparkle was it a fun soundtrack and like fun soundtrack they have like sing-along bits they have like it was it was very fun so I would recommend watching that I think it's in cinemas at the moment out on streamers end of this month I also watched Upgraded which is on did you like it's on Amazon Prime and I sat oh it's another rom-com it's good camila mendez who was in do revenge and riverdale former lover of charles melton in real life yes i stand that relationship and actually she's got some real acting chops i will say yeah gorgeous gorgeous eyebrows if you haven't seen do revenge also watch that love that gorgeous i don't think i've seen

her in anything yeah so i would i'd watch do revenge i'd watch this it's so it's about like a art history graduate who's like kind of struggling to find a job yeah and she kind of miraculously gets taken on this trip to london to be her like scary bosses as third assistant her boss is paid by marissa tomai yep who i love very the whole that segment specifically is very reminiscent of devil wears pride which i loved that um premise kind of reminds me of that other glenn powell film they're like both assistants oh yeah which i did actually really like set it up set it up i thought i watched that zoe two overworked assistants who work in the same building you're right as zoe dutch yeah yeah so it is very similar premise it is very similar and that she's like on the plane she gets upgraded on a different flight and she's mistaken for someone who's like a lot more powerful

and rich than she is and it's like all kind of miscommunications she gets deeper and deeper in this lie there's a lot of snogging in it which i like yes also yeah yeah so the rom-com renaissance is happening and i could not be more thrilled here here and anoni what have you been loving this week i went to cinema also. I went to The Everyman, but I saw a film which is on a very different tack from used guys.

I went and saw Zone of Interest. Have you heard of it? I have. I've heard amazing things about it. Yeah. So I thought it was incredible. I think it's quite hard now to tell a story about the Holocaust,

about Auschwitz from a perspective that feels it doesn't feel like it's expanding a story that we've heard before kind of thing and why this is done so powerfully well is it's you're basically in and amongst this really powerful nazi family and you never actually see what's kind of happening beyond the wall of their home but it's basically all done through like sound and light and because they're neighboring so they're neighboring so their house they live in this massive house which apparently genuinely did exist behind the wall like it's actually a real house that's even worse

but you throughout the film you kind of just see how dehumanized um the jewish communities were and like how they were spoken about and you sit in the cinema and the screen just kind of goes dark and there's really weird sounds and it's so unsettling and it does it for like minutes and so you're kind of sat there and straight away you're like on the back foot like you're really uncomfortable and then a lot of the time it'll just be these sirens and you'll see smoke and you'll hear noises and then you just see this really rich family getting rich and richer and their life getting better and better and so that's for me I thought it was actually so poignant and so harrowing and it was done in such a clever way where I feel like it really plays with your

sense of identity of yourself because again as we've spoken about before something not dissimilar is happening and it's kind of like watching two truths coexist at the same time and the fact that we're living through I think made it even more poignant yeah I really really really want to see it this week I think we mentioned this a few weeks ago with the Beyonce Superbowl episode how what we want is for people to want to change things if they have a platform like she does and it just made me think I wonder if people will come away from this film and realize how easy it is to just like burrow into your own personal life and ignore everything around I think that is a topic is really interesting and like really important

so this week a 52 part tiktok series called Who the F... Did I say? That's TF, standing for the fuck, went viral. We asked you on our Instagram, at everything is content pod, if you'd seen it. Most of you hadn't, but at Chelsea underscore Bryn, you said, no, please give Cliff notes. Thanks. And we shall.

So user Risa Tisa shared the wild story of her marriage to her ex-husband, who she says has a United Nations of red flags. The entire series is five hours long if you watch end to end. And I did see some Twitter user talking about it. And I was like, oh, I'm going to watch that 52 part TikTok in my head. I'm imagining it's like five minutes because I just don't have any concept of time apparently. And then she was like, I have to spend five hours watching it. So the first video of the series has 7.5 million views and most of the videos within the series have around a million views have you guys watched it I watched three and then I read a synopsis on Rolling Stone today thank god for Rolling Stone I mean I didn't read

that one but someone had to do it so I watched maybe four at double speed because I wanted to see what kind of storyteller she was and just like kind of get it because I was like either she's an amazing storyteller I'm going to be sucked in or everyone has got too much time in their hands and which one she was taking a goddamn time to get to the point she really she got mine and some of the details and I don't know whether they become relevant later on but she was like this is the kind of the road we got off this is where we we lived precisely. And I was like, are these relevant for later or are you just wasting my goddamn time? You know what's so funny that people say

that they can't be bothered to watch like Colours of the Flower Moon, which is like three and a half hours, but then they're watching five and a half hours. I know, TikTok. TikTok series. Of a woman like talking in a car. And the other way around though,

because I could sit through, I love a long film. I find short form videos on social media much less engaging. I guess if you listen to it As like a podcast A lot of people said They played it on 2 speed And did it while they were

Like doing chores and stuff Which Five hours And only you love A long podcast So maybe that's what People are doing This is longer than

Even like the longest Lord of the Rings Extended edition Yeah And that's got like The elves Justice League What is it

Director's cut or whatever Was like four hours Four hours And people are tapping out That was boring as shit but you also so bath you sent me a summary that was like a quite long summary and then i found a tweet that was literally just like three lines and it's a nice little thing as well because story could boil down to three lines yeah i think it's just like so basically the premise is she meets someone and it's just before lockdown it's just before lockdown in the us and then they have to lock down together that's it and then so

of going on from that, it turns out there's a whole web of lies and her husband isn't really who she thinks he is and lots of kind of like disingenuous stuff going on. And she doesn't name her ex up the series, but another TikTok user later found out his identity and they leak it on the app. God.

Internet going too far yet again. Well, this is the thing. I think even if you think details are really vague people are i've had it before people have like found out weird stuff about me online do very minimal information on the internet so that's almost i think maybe where part of the watching it comes from is maybe people thinking like they want to work it out i don't know yeah because it's the story we actually aren't satisfied what people give us even five hours worth of details we think i'm entitled a bit more i think we've spoken about this before how people just cannibalize content so quickly they're

looking for like more and more and more and more i feel like what's happening with these story time things on tiktok somebody puts something out and everyone's like we've got to continue the story we've got to continue the story let's like dig up more let's like keep it going and it's just like i don't know it's just it's just very very shit i feel like the fact that they've like people have doxxed this guy obviously he doesn't sound like a great guy but it's not for us to like dig into his life and like find some retribution or even like push him into the limelight and also just this thing of like people wanting to to avenge people on their behalf like we've spoken about it with celebrities but what where is that coming from is there something missing in modern human society where we're not filling some kind of hole where we want to feel like we're i don't know if it's

a hero complex i think it's a lack of justice and like finality and a lack of conclusion in a lot of things everything is so shit and there aren't really like comeuppance for the bad people the big bad people so i think we do have that like well I can grab this but adjusted here yeah it's like people really want to out people people want to film people doing wrong people are quite puritanical and it's happening so widespread in so many different places I definitely think it must exactly what you said lack of inclusion lack of justice in our own lives and so we're latching onto some stranger on the internet story that again we don't know how much is true yeah and we get people fired or like i mean yeah i mean not us three here but not the rule but the word you know kind of decides that someone's gonna suffer these

great consequences for being like yeah a shit and a liar but that woman is sharing her story surely she has the right to decide how much of her life and her like previous partner is going to be like affected by this but have people not nothing like i don't know why people tiktok is a funny i think it must be the thing of tiktok where you don't necessarily have a cohesive following but one piece of content could go really viral so it's like people aren't i don't know if that woman would have anticipated well no one could have anticipated that could you well she did a 52 part which makes me feel like there is some thought behind what you're gonna do i don't think she would have realized that potentially could have gone as viral and as crazy as it is now and everyone's talking about this but you don't do a 52 parter unless you're looking for viral fame as well and it's

lower production value than if she'd done it on youtube and i wouldn't have watched on youtube because i only watch people's content i know on youtube whereas tiktok she plugged in her phone she was on a long drive she just told a story where was she driving to it was so fucking long she had her little curlers on that woman was leaving the country like she is fleeing but yeah i just found that really interesting it was very like oh i'll just plug in i'll tell the story versus like youtube to me is a bit more production heavy i just realized she would have been driving for over six hours to record all of that does she continue to do it that way because i only had like the same well i didn't get to the end yeah we all fail to watch maybe our like attention spans are broken or we value our time i want to

think it's that this really reminds me of you do you remember the west elm caleb yeah situation oh my god to the guy that was dating everyone yeah so this guy basically multiple women just came out with these stories about this guy who um was very problematic to them like not great they got their stories out and then what happened is the internet went into a frenzy tracked down the guy and just doxed harassed and trolled him and yeah it's just like this story that keeps repeating where it's like internet vigilantes just like quote-unquote fixing the problem and i feel like there's just there's no nuance with how the internet treats anything where it just feels like it's like

opening up a tidal wave because he wasn't he was just a kind of a bit of a cad he wasn't abusive he wasn't kind of you know in relationships multiple women he was just dating around he was the kind of you'd warn your friends oh don't bother going there yeah like he won't abusive he wasn't kind of you know in relationships multiple women he was just dating around he was the kind of you'd warn your friends oh don't bother going there yeah like he won't text you back wasn't doing anything untoward we do the same as like with like kind of grand schemers as we would with like people who just bits a bit of a shit but this i was going to say that it's like this kind of witch hunt to anyone that's wrong to anyone whereas like i'm sure all of us at some point in our lives have treated someone in a way that we would look back and go god I wish I hadn't done that but that also doesn't define us as like an abusive awful person whereas a story like I'm trying to think I'm sure I've

had an argument with a friend if they retold it in a certain way on TikTok and people found out it was me that would be who I am in the in the eyes of the internet and it's like that's not how it should be because all of us have done things wrong said things wrong actually in a way that's not right hopefully we go and learn and do them less and less but throughout our lives we will continue to offend and and like whatever disagree yeah i think everyone needs to have some humility and not be so moralistic about everything or so puritanical about it agree agree we'll leave a link to the full series in the show notes if you've got i don't know spare five hours and um yeah see if you can get further than we did okay so um we have to talk about jlo's new film this is me now um so this is me now okay yes no this is me now dropped on amazon prime um have you have you seen this yeah well i've seen it i've witnessed it i

feel like it happened to me more than i watched it yeah and i'm offended that it's called a film because i was more than happy to sit down and watch a little new jlo rom-com so you were expecting a film i was expecting a movie i was expecting a movie what is it it's more of a musical adaptation of her dreams steampunk edition i think it's a statement of artistic intent but failed i think she put i want to make a film about me now into an ai script writing bot and this was the result well it's defined as a romantic drama musical film based on JLo's ninth album of the exact same name which also dropped at the same time it's a 65 minute long film directed by Dave Myers starring JLo and it's based on a fictional narrative loosely based on her marriage to Ben Affleck it's part visual album

part rom-com part action movie part sci-fi part madness part nonsense i feel like the whole thing was just completely bonkers i still don't know what happened to me no i went into a sort of like catatonic state which first happened to me when i watched like a cat's live action or like a cat's movie when i was a kid like a really shit like amdram one like i couldn't move i couldn't think i felt like hot and sweaty it was really an experience but i like a conceptual visual animal i don't know like lemonade for example i loved that i watched that i've watched it more than once oh let's not even speak about lemonade in this no but what i mean is i'm not normally offended by an album being turned

into like a kind of feature length yeah visual thing this one however first of all I was so confused because there was so much singing there is no story

that like it just about starts to get feel like it's gonna be a film and then I was like okay I'm seated let's find out what happens she burst into song again the scenes were just

chop and change between sort of like realistic then she was in space she was in her AI house dream sequences she was in a dream she burst into song again the scenes were just chop and change between sort of like realistic then she was in space she was in her AI house dream sequences she was in a dream then she was in therapy

there's a really serious section that runs throughout about star signs there's a zodiac um task force

observing her life with a crazy cast yeah post Malone ZZ Palmer Kiki Palmer I'm sorry Kiki Palmer I was thinking of ZZ Mills Jane Fonda from Monster-in-Law amazing to call that favor back in um Sofia Vergara and obviously these people were never in the same room filming it's all like these people did not meet even in rehearsals because they're so offbeat. Like one person will say something and nothing will make sense.

And I'm an astrological girlie. I like asking people their star signs. But like two minutes into the film, she asked her therapist what his wife's star sign is. Her therapist is Fat Joe, the rapper, by the way. As he would be. And then there's this other guy that has a really bad British accent who's killing me. Horrific accent. Really bad. Worse than Anne Hathaway's Yorkshire in One Day. the guy that has a really bad british accent who's killing me horrific accent really bad

worse than anne hathaway's yorkshire and one day don't know how she got such a diverse cast like the most famous people in the world and then kind of movie extras for this can you imagine sending them the script so apparently this was self-funded can see that can see that 20 million dollars yeah how many 20 million oh that she's really wasted that i feel like the point of the film i've retrospectively tried to work out what the fuck the point was i think the point was she's trying to assert some kind of narrative around the fact that for the last 15 years j-lo has been kind of oh poor j-lo can't make a marriage work poor j-lo it's pathetic and kind of like sad that she can't make a marriage work poor JLo it's pathetic and kind of like sad that

she can't make a marriage work I feel like this is her trying to get the narrative on track and also make some kind of statement to be like I figured it out I figured out what my life is eventually it was about loving myself which is a really nice thing but the whole thing is I had to work so hard to figure that out yeah it's kind of a vanity project with that message like taxed on at the end about like yeah I'm you know it's been me all along so she's trying to say I know you're making these jokes about me because all of these friends and characters that are like around her going oh she's never gonna make this work they're like making bets on how long the relationship's gonna last and so she's obviously kind of like saying I've heard you all bitching about me and I'm gonna prove to you.

It just feels like, is she not old enough now to kind of think, you know, you're really successful. You have fan love. Fair enough, put another album out there. But like, who is this for? I actually would have loved a new JLo film. I quite enjoy it.

I love JLo the actress. I really like her rom-coms. I enjoy it. Find them quite like cathartic and fun. I don't really see the appeal of this. Maybe if you are a diehard everything JLo touches you want. But why did also Ben Affleck

is a credible actor. He's got his name as a director on the film. I think he's a producer and he's in the film. And he's in the film and he at no point was like look my gorgeous beautiful wife

you are talented and I love you. But this is batshit. I do love a man that will prop up his wife's delusions and like be a part of it. She was obviously like, listen, I've got this money. I'm going to make this film. And he was like, hand me the prosthetic nose. I'm going to be able to. So, I mean, props to him.

I'm kind of have to give her props to make something so like boldly weird and shit and properly like stand by it and be like this is me now some of the positive reviews on rotten tomatoes really make me laugh because they are just as confusing as the plot so one of them was the poignancy of that dilemma cannot be underestimated even as the absurdist tendencies of this musical drama takes the cake absurdist tendencies they all sing the same song of survival dude it's not tendency i don't even know i don't even know what that means are we missing the point is this a great film no no if that is if that is the case then like you will never hear from playful self-indulgence and lopez's homage to

singing in the rain leave a sweet taste in the mouth just like the post-credits outtake involving Wedding Cake, a wonderfully self-important autobiographical musical reworking of The Clash of Titans. None of this is words. What are you talking about? The one that I believed was, as a short film, it's nonsensical. As a commercial for Jennifer Lopez's album, it's even worse. It is. I don't think her album is doing particularly well

no it's a schlop i so i'm subscribed to her newsletter and are you yeah i am how long was that been around was that for research or just generally no so i subscribed for research because apparently that's where she revealed that her and ben affleck got married she yes yes yeah so i i am subscribed to it i keep thinking i mean to delete it because it's just honestly like spam. She lied and said that her song is at number one and we know that that's not true. I checked today. Was it number one for like a minute?

Do you think people might be lying to her? Well, everyone's lying to her. That's why the film got made. I feel quite, I mean, no, actually, I don't feel sad for her in the least. I think she's probably really proud of this. Something to do, isn't it? Yeah there yeah I just we all need a hobby I just feel sad that she feels like this is the way to confirm that you know she's made it whatever it's like if you really are that happy and you found your love like why do you have to make this just exist

in the narrative that is true yeah it didn't give me didn't teach me anything it felt like it could have been an email she was just having a fun maybe we're being too deep about it maybe she just generally thought this is creative this is fun yeah maybe i've got 20 million cash spare i could have had that jay just have like just even one million 110 grand is there a chance this is meta and she's just poking fun at the whole thing because there's one scene where she talks about being a hopeless meta and she's just poking fun at the whole thing because there's one scene where she talks about being a hopeless romantic and she's wearing a t-shirt that says endangered species i believe she's so earnest as a person like there's very heavy-handed metaphors throughout this like at one point she's literally in a glass house yeah i just thought

oh my god there's no new i actually loved that i mean where'd you get changed in that but also why was she in space i mean there was so i had so many questions in two minutes i was like what is going on i do want people to watch this just to join us in the kind of like jaylo induced psychosis that we're experiencing it felt like a psychosis so listeners please do watch this it is on amazon so I want to talk personal essays this week one because I've read some absolute corkers and I'm hoping you've read them too and two just because I have been thinking about personal essays thinking about like do I want to write more are we kind of exploiting young writers are we like sharing too much of the internet basically which is sort of what we've touched on this week and last week but i just want to flesh that out a bit so on valentine's day last week the cut published an

essay called the law of divorce by writer and author emily gould um the day after they also published um a piece by their financial advice columnist charlotte cows who detailed an account of getting scammed for 50 000 pounds or 50 000 dollars so like they had these two like quite personal essays go really viral at the same time and so everyone was discussing both the pieces what happens in them the women involved and like personal essays as a medium. The sort of morality and like the ethics involved in commissioning these pieces, what we get from them and like why they go viral. Yeah, especially with the both of them. I think it's really interesting.

They got a lot of flack I saw online and it was like I saw it and I just went. But the scamming one. I i mean what were your thoughts the scamming one was bonkers i mean one the fact that she is a financial advice columnist was the scam was elaborate but it was like a one-day scam it involved like fake fbi agents murder plots kind of like she went to the bank and took out this huge amount of money the fact that she works in this and she got scammed it was really mind-bending I try not to be judgmental because the thing is literally anyone can get scammed but it kind of pushed the boundaries of like believability at times I've never been so grateful to not have 50,000 pounds available to me like if they tried to scam me luckily like you'd be like well well fine have 500 quid you did get scammed though that time not that you have to talk about it but sorry

um but it was a thousand times less than that lady it was quite a cute scam it was a 50 pound scam i tried to sign my dog up to be my emotional support animal and um i got an a4 laminated piece of paper and then i googled it afterwards and it's like a really famous scam and that like everyone's known about fears and I don't know it can happen and I think the reaction to this shocked me because I mean okay maybe she did like ruin her credibility by writing this piece yeah I was quite surprised she wrote this because her job is like financial advisor would you really trust a financial advisor that had been scammed so egregiously hell no so the other piece content wise was about emily gould who is a writer that i'm familiar with she had a kind of psychiatric crisis a few years ago which led to

all kinds of like erratic behavior and basically like the functional breakdown of her marriage and her deciding you know she was in an impatient facility deciding whether her marriage was over kind of got to the point where they announced their divorce and only after that did she and her husband kind of sit down and decide are we going to do the very hard grueling work of mending this marriage or are we going to end it so i thought it was this fascinating interesting piece where she lays bare like the worst thing she's ever done which i think is a really vulnerable generous thing to do and readers were like what a toxic bitch what a manipulator like really went in the way she frames that essay is basically like her year of deciding whether she's going to divorce her husband but really the story is her psychiatric uh breakdown and her uh time at

the facility and like realizing about herself so I thought that was kind of bizarre and I think that probably opened the gateway for people to be really angry because she kind of leads you through this path of fixating on her husband's inability to do things you know the way he like fails to show up for her blah blah blah blah so it feels like it feels quite blamey on him yeah but I understand why it's framed like that because it's an interesting narrative device to be like well actually I had some stake in this and I was part of the problem but I think people just didn't read it like that people were just like oh she's blaming her husband and actually she was awful to him as well and never fesses up to it she was being honest about resentment she

was like there's gender roles and drudgery in my marriage even though my husband's like a good feminist man I'm still doing all the cooking he's still his career is still first because I've had the children which I think is really fascinating yeah I guess to go back to the concept of being a personal essay my question is I think you're right it's very generous to talk about the worst sides of ourselves we never want to talk about that but to me this is the kind of thing I love reading and fiction and as someone who writes I would prefer the idea of being that vulnerable and honest in a body of work which was a fictionalized story because in a weird way I feel like that carries more where I think you can convey more it feels sad to me that she would write such a harrowing personal expose,

which will live on the internet forever. And everyone who knows her will read. And that also will be quite ephemeral in that like next week, there'll be another article that everyone will be talking about. That could have been like a really transformative novel about the complexities between. Yeah, I mean, I agree. But I think there's some real value in knowing in no uncertain terms that other people are living those worst moments as well I think we learn a lot more from people's worst

moments and knowing that that's true that it's not kind of hammed up in a way that there's not like a natural circularity because it's a narrative construct it's like life got very difficult and I had to do xyz work I hear what you mean about it being forever because the news cycle is so quick but like her kids could obviously read that and do you think it's like because it's difficult because like you said it's really worthy and it's really going to help people but as an individual are we pushing writers to get deeper and farther into their personal lives in order to stay valuable to publications or whatever like is the payoff worth it would you think I know that we all talk quite personally but there's some things that I do think is it an exploitation I completely get what you mean and I feel like when I first started

out as a journalist I feel like I put everything on a plate for people to just like ravage at and I really do feel icky about those moments and And if I had my way, I would have changed that and I would have them deleted off the internet. I agree. Not about you, about me. I was going to say, did you read my pieces? Fuck no. I don't know what it is like now for like young writers and whether they feel like they get pushed into it as much.

I will say when I was coming up about like maybe five years ago, there was like a real time of like everyone just writing personal essays personal essays personal essays and like it was almost like everyone's oppressed by just like existing so you can write about anything whether it's like the fact that your hair is short that there's oppression in that or like i don't know you're like being empowered by like wearing red shoes write about that it was just like the bar was so fucking low yeah i i actually that's probably a little bit before our kind of our time but like exo jane do you remember which it was no oh it was the most bonkers place on the internet i think it began in 2011 like kat monell was a writer there

um they did the most bonkers it was like the kind of personal essay industrial complex they had a they had a piece go viral that was like my friend joined isis it happened to you another piece that was like i had a cat hairball in my vagina like the most and were they name attached uh yeah often they were it was such a time on the internet and like we i think it's good that we don't have that anymore like it went under but it was the most bonkers kind of like personal essays and i think it was a real moment that I wonder whether we're skewing back towards kind of humiliation bait. Do you remember that?

Actually, perfect segue, as in for you to say that, just because I was about to say the piece from the woman who was like, I think my husband's really ugly now. Do you remember this? I remember that. And he was so good looking. And also it kind of, that kind of wasn't the piece. That also kind of wasn't what she was saying,

but they had a full photo shoot. Do you remember what paper it was in? I was, it was like a, is it like a kind of Sunday? Sunday time style, something like that. Yeah.

And so there was like a full photo shoot, them at home as a family. And then the title was literally like, I don't think my husband's attractive anymore. Cut to this absolutely stunning man. But then the problem with that was, the piece was obviously way more complex and nuanced than that. And she was obviously way more complex in your sense than

that she was talking about how like your attraction wanes with time which is normal but obviously everyone was just ripping into the fact that this woman had called her husband unattractive and then all of these women were just kind of like quote tweeting it being like I remember I'll get with you or like and has this happened to you guys when a headline has been like really misleading and constantly journalists I follow have to be like guys remember i don't use a headline and i don't think it's ever happened to me like that but i see it all the time happened to me in a women's health piece where it was like i was writing a piece that i thought was called the psyche of social media and i was supposed to be investigating like why people do social media and then they called it am i really a narcissist

by an only format and i was like i was devastated and then my friend was like it was in the print edition she was like don't worry way more people read your Instagram than they read the print edition of women's health true and also like now I kind of get it because I'd never really done journalism before I was like are you joking me and they didn't tell me it was gonna be that before I think it's weird luring people to write these things and Richard to go back to what you said about what you wrote at the beginning of your career I I really I'm very glad I didn't write more personal pieces when young writers come to me I say just sit on it yeah I said this is an interview the other day just sit on those stories allow them to kind of become what they become get some hindsight and

then you can write about them if you want because you can never get that back the internet is forever even if it's buried you know page 45 of google it is there and i think a lot of the time editors are not thoughtful when they commission young women they just know they'll get clicks and they just they're at the mercy of the internet and internet as we've seen cruel wasteland but do you think this article would have carried less weight if she was anonymous if we didn't know who'd i think it matters it's her because she is a writer who has never kind of shied away from saying like yes this is me and i think it's it's her because she is a writer who has never kind of shied away from saying like yes this is me and I think it's the fact that she is a quite a well-known writer she'd

announced her divorce like the end of last year so like people are aware of her and her husband so I think for them to announce their divorce and then now say spoiler alert we're actually not getting divorced I think that is a really interesting like to have a public divorce and then like publicly say no we've found a way to make this work maybe just being a journalist part of the job is signing a contract in a way of knowing that anything that happens in your personal life can and will be used in an article that you write like a cat person and things like i loved cat person i did as well i didn't watch the film no me neither no i didn't watch the film but it was such a moment in time i absolutely love personal essays and then I do get this conflict because it's

always like this idea of like I just feel worried that people are writing them maybe not on her I don't know but people are writing them because they know that that's a transaction in order to be successful and that if you don't do it like in the devil wears prada or like in how to lose a guy in 10 days these really kind of arbitrary journalism jobs they've got like 10 girls waiting on the wings to like fill up maybe i'm literally just like watching many rom-coms but i'm thinking i do think that is the state of things because we do see these people are searching for the kind of virality that we've seen with these two pieces and maybe it's just luck or maybe it is the model

i think it's by design i think there's something to be said about the kinds of fame you can get as a writer I'm thinking of like Dolly Alderton and how she's recently I think in her in her profile with Annie Lord in the Sunday Times from a few months ago spoke about how um her runaway success everything I know about love she put a lot of her life and her friendships and herself into that people consumed it people still consume it there's a new generation of like gen z's loving it now but now she's older she feels a certain way about like how much she overshared about herself and i think that about all these writers if you get to the stratospheric level she has most of them share a lot of their personal life or have done in the past so that people feel like they know them and have these relationships to them. And have a parasocial relationship to them.

Everyone thinks of Dolly as like their bestie, which is part of the charm of her. Everyone feels like they know her. And I feel like obviously it depends on what kind of writer you want to be. But I do think there is this assumption. and I think it's true that if you want to be ultra famous if you want to be very successful you have to basically open up your life to people because only then will you get the audience that someone like Dolly has I also love that piece with Annie Lord but you've so succinctly put I guess what I was trying to get at but couldn't quite conceptualize which is that people tell these stories because maybe not this writer I'm actually not familiar with her but when you're maybe not

that well known or your name isn't like in everybody's mouths and you can write something and then maybe won't be that many real life consequences to you having bared your soul and like maybe there'll be a bit of buzz but a few days later it's gone but if you do create like reach stratospheric heights of fame and then there is this story out that like when you walk down the street you're like oh shit I've said that thing and like that person looking at me are they looking at me because they've read it I think that's where the trouble comes in is maybe as a writer you can be under the radar for a long time people don't necessarily know what journalists look like there's something about burying yourself even thinking about influence

and I've done this like doing the get ready with me videos where they start from the underwear and they get dressed there's something about burying yourself it's like a buy-in yeah to a potential later fame or whatever and then actually maybe you feel icky and when you get that because you're like god look how much i traded to get here and it's just very like the chances of getting to where you want to go by like exchanging this is quite low it just feels a bit like we're all trying to keep up and like what a metric to try and keep up with where we have to become more and more vulnerable it just doesn't feel sustainable so did you guys read the essay by Rebecca Jennings in Vox where it was called everyone's a sellout now and it's basically talking about much like we're talking about now

not particularly about personal essays but about social media how everyone is having to almost like brand themselves and like get onto TikTok and she talks about I think maybe I can't remember was it like an accountant or a doctor or something whose boss was encouraging them not a doctor i think it was an accountant or something to get onto tiktok to like get a bigger audience and progress in their career and it's just like no industry is safe from this idea of doing unpaid labor of exploiting and basically like yeah pimping out your life on social media to try and get people to notice you and it's it's cringy no one wants to do it there's no promise that it will ever even work out for you but we're all being made to feel like we have to yeah statistically it's not going to yield financial success or like material success so what like and i think it

changes like the lived experience of a moment to wonder about how it's going to be perceived on a second screen so whether it is a personal essay a blog a tiktok 52 parts or otherwise we're encouraged to like cannibalize our own lives zero in on the most difficult moments most embarrassing moments and share them without real incentive or reason to it's like in trick marriage you know to latino comment which says but she's like the self is the last frontier of capitalism or something it's like the last thing we have to sell i've completely misquoted that with something like i feel like i need to reread that it's just never it just continues to be relevant in a really spooky scary way so we mentioned the devil wears prada earlier up top did you guys know that the musical is coming

it's opening from the west end in october i'm so excited me too yes we have to vanessa williams is going to be miranda priestly i know she's from ugly betty and desperate housewives oh legend yes do we know any other cast members i haven't seen any we only know miranda they did a big announcement for her so it could be like a real author i've actually never been to see a play when it's like the all-star cast i always by the time i go and see it it's just like well they're still really good actors but it's not like this you know they like start them off and it'll be like really famous yeah was that rude sorry no i don't think so and then you just call them b list

z list so on book club news we have i think about two weeks until we're discussing eliza clark's penance i know richie has a copy and is reading it i have my copy and i'm reading it and no need has not done the shopping but i will soon okay yeah you need the 11th hour pressure yeah don't forget to have a look in the show notes because we leave all the links to everything we've discussed down there any article personal essay tiktok that we've mentioned they are always in the show notes so do double check there and please do leave us a review five stars if you don't mind it really helps us out and it helps other people find it and it makes us smile

thanks for listening we'll see you next week bye