Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - why are there so many mormon influencers? pt. 2

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

In part two of this definitely minisode series, Jamie talks with ex-Mormon YouTuber and author of How to Leave the Mormon Church: An Ex-Mormons Guide to Rebuilding After Religion Alyssa Grenfell about how the LDS may have found a back channel to bankroll its most powerful influencers, without leaving a paper trail. Alyssa walks Jamie through how she thinks it's done, and how the LDS has succeeded and fumbled its relationships with influencers in the past. Buy Alyssa's book!: https://www.howtoleavethemormonchurch.com/about Watch Alyssa's full theory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGXggLIafrc Subscribe to Alyssa's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@alyssadgrenfellSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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One more minute of fame. I'm not so bad when you're taking your mind. welcome back to 16th minute the podcast where we take a look at the internet's characters of the day to see how their moment affected them and what it says about the internet and us my name's jamie loftus and this is part two of a series trying to answer a question that i honestly thought would be easier to answer influencers. So if you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, I recommend you do, because this is a frustratingly complicated question. Last time, we talked about the origins of the Mormon Church, its stance on race, gender, and sexuality, cliff notes, not great, and its history of intersecting with conservative-leaning social media trends among women. So think Mommy blogs of the 2000s. Mormon women were at the top of that boom, and were more open about their religion than

many influencers are today. Think about another ongoing trend that's a whole subject unto itself, one I'd like to dedicate more time to in the future, Mormon women's intersection with major multi-level marketing schemes, schemes that rely on salespeople spending a lot of their own money with usually diminishing returns if you don't get in on the ground floor. Utah has the highest concentration of MLMs in the country, and the door-to-door element isn't that unlike the missionary spirit that the devout embark on on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints or the LDS when they're young adults. Sales as a mission. Actually, if you're into obscure documentaries as much as I am, one of the most famous contemporary failed MLM schemes was actually founded

by a Mormon couple, that being Lula Row, the ugly leggings company that was busted in a massive legal scandal in the 2010s. You tell the people you love, they're in a pyramid scheme, and they go, no, I'm not. You're just a hater. I own my own business. I'm very successful. My orders would smell disgusting. It was just insane the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get them to ever admit that their product was faulty. I would sometimes open bags and they'd be wet. And when it comes to recruiting for MLMs, Mormon women tend to be excellent marks. Because of the rigid gender roles of the religion that encourage many women to stay at home,

things like Lula Rowe might be the only opportunity for them to make a living on their own, not to mention the close-knit Mormon communities offering a ton of customers. It's not quite that simple, but you see where I'm going with this. And of course, there is significant crossover with Mormon women and the current, if somewhat dwindling, tradwife content that's become extremely popular on Instagram and TikTok. We talk about this quite a bit in the first part of the series, specifically about users from Mom Talk, the stars of the new show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,

and Ballerina Farm, a 10 million follower influencer who presents Stay at Homestead Lifestyle while, say it with me, selling that idea to her followers as a part of what is very much a job unto itself. The more I think about it, trad wives are actually not straying from the similarly flawed girl boss archetypes the way that they think they are, But that's for another day, because now we're going to forge into part two, shall we?

Even with the context I've given you, I was still confused, because, yes, white heteroconservatism sells online. We know that. But why this religion specifically? What about Mormon content is bringing them to the top of your feed? Ex-Mormon influencer Alyssa Grenfell has been asking this question, too. She was raised an extremely devout Utah Mormon, went on a mission, got married at an LDS temple, the whole nine yards. Eventually, like one in three young Mormons today, she left the church in her 20s with her husband after they both found themselves questioning the values they'd grown up with. For Alyssa's husband, the radicalizing issue was the church's stance on gay marriage. And for Alyssa, it was a series of crises of faith. Over and over, what Alyssa felt God wanted for her was directly contradicted by priests and her father.

She was called to do a mission 2,000 miles away from where she expected. She was told by her father that God needed her to be a teacher when she had no interest in teaching and didn't feel she had the natural skill set to do it. So eventually, the two leave the Mormon church. They start drinking coffee and cocktails, and Alyssa was motivated to join YouTube after self-publishing her first book. And while she's been on YouTube for less than a year, she already has nearly a quarter million subscribers. And my favorite video of hers presents a pretty compelling theory. Alyssa suggests that, sure, Mormon tradwife content does play into the algorithm as far as aesthetics,

but it's very possible that the Church of Latter-day Saints itself is bankrolling these Mormon mommy influencers, without the influencers being able to say for sure that it's them. Here's a clip from that video. So different niches, different types of content on the internet make different amounts of money. You can see here off to the side that depending on the type of content you make, you're going to make different amounts of money. For example, anything to do with money and finance makes a lot more money than a video about cooking.

The reason for this is that the money that you make off your content is driven by how much advertisers are willing to pay for it. Banks, for example, have a lot of money and so they can drive a ton of money into advertising. So if you made content a video about the best bank accounts to open, you could get paid approximately $12.25 for each 1,000 views on that video. When Google or another ad platform goes to put ads on top of that content, they will recognize it as a piece of content that advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money for. So the length of the video could be the same, the person in the video could be the same, but depending on the content, you're getting paid a wildly different amount of money for the type of content you're posting.

A major way that Google and other advertisers figures out where to put ads is through something called keywords. So these keywords will be something like credit card or open bank account that signal to the algorithm, to the ad algorithm, that you've made content that aligns with what advertisers are looking for. Alyssa only started investigating this search term question when she was getting repeated feedback that her viewers were getting ads for the Mormon church on her videos, which is weird because Alyssa's content is doing the opposite of encouraging people to join the church. And what's more, when she looked into the amount that she was making on YouTube and the amount

of algorithmic preference she was getting less than a year into her time versus other creators, she was getting a lot more engagement and making a lot more money. Why? She explains more in the video. You can see here that the keyword new bank costs $25.30. That's how much advertisers are willing to pay for this keyword. So compare that to Catholic, that's a huge difference. So if I'm making my content about finance, I'm going to see a lot more ad revenue coming my way. because there are lots of advertisers who are willing to pay Google to try to capture your eye to open a new bank account with them. The church definitely does advertising online, and if I go to YouTube and type in Mormon missionary, I can see that there's an ad at the top. This is an ad that

the church paid to put there. So Mormon missionary, there's an ad in my YouTube trying to get me to meet with Mormon missionaries. So we already looked at the term Catholic. The cost per click, the ad revenue behind Catholic is $3.58. If you look at the term Baptist, the cost per click is $1.26. I tried looking up a religion that's a little closer to Mormonism. Jehovah's Witness is an American religion. If you want to advertise using the key term Jehovah's Witness, it's going to cost you $4.64. The cost per click for the term Mormon is $24.71. And if you recall, the Mormon church has more money than Wells Fargo. And the reason that that number is so high, I believe, is because there is a multi-billion dollar organization that is funneling money into ad spend around the term

Mormon. So this theory isn't and can't be proven without the LDS being straightforward about their finances, which will never happen. So I'll let Alyssa take it from here. Without any further ado, here is my interview with the fantastic Alyssa Grendon. fell. Hi, my name is Alyssa Grenfell, and I am an ex-Morman content creator and author. I was very Mormon growing up. I grew up in a very devout home, and then I left the church when I was about 23 after serving a Mormon mission and getting married in a Mormon temple and doing all the Mormon things. And now I make content around what, you know, the history of the churches, current church teachings, the doctrine and personal experiences. And that is kind of the

focus of what I put on the internet. I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up like, I didn't know anything about Mormon culture outside of what was in pop culture when I was growing up. Growing up in the Mormon church, I know that you've made a significant amount of content about this. How are women specifically treated and sort of how are you conditioned to view yourself? Some of my earliest memories really are just discussing my wedding dress, discussing my husband, writing letters to my future husband, talking about purity, learning homemaking skills, ironing, you know, I'm eight years old, ironing a shirt, talking about, you know, taking care of my future family. And it's, I think, past just the idea that, you know,

everyone probably should learn how to take care of a home or cook a meal. But it's, it was very much posed as this is your divine role from God. And even, you know, there's something called a patriarchal blessing, which is kind of, I would like call it Mormon fortune telling a little bit where a very important man within the church lays his hands on your head and basically is supposed to be speaking as if he's speaking from God and kind of telling you what's going to happen in your future. Much of my patriarchal blessing was about how I was going to be a mother in Zion and how I was going to, like, it was all just about my, my future children, basically, and my role as a wife and mother, and to think that a man is saying basically the most important

things about your future, and it's all encompassed around motherhood and wifehood. And then to read, you know, now I read my husband's patriarchal blessing, and a lot of men's patriarchal blessings is not about their children, their future children. And so if you compare what women are taught, if you compare that with what men are taught, it's also very different. So you could, you know, I think I might have been able to like stomach it if the boys were also learning how to take a girl on a date or how to also watch children or change a diaper. But the boys were often doing that, like playing basketball or doing, you know, water rafting or doing boy scouts, learning to tie knots, you know, just more traditional boyhood kind

of things. I think there was the, the actual kind of training around. motherhood and family, but then there was the religious element of gender roles as divinely appointed upon you. As I was sort of learning more about you, as you were coming of age, all of these gut feelings, thinking I'm being guided by God towards this person, towards this mission location, towards this job, receiving different answers that weren't in your gut. What is it like to process that doubt? I think it's really hard because it's very difficult to kind of see outside of yourself and to question the systems you're raised in and embroiled in, especially systems that you're taught as the most moral way to live. I feel like even after leaving, I've had a

lot of moments where I have to kind of question if my desire to pursue a certain path is coming from the real, quote, real me versus if it's coming from the conditioning I was received as a young person. And I think that in following some of those paths, I have often found that I'm still kind of living in this reactionary state, where instead of looking toward what God wants me to do, I'm often kind of living in a way that is reacting to, I just want to do the opposite of Mormonism, even though that's still kind of living my life according to Mormonism. It's just now I'm living the opposite way instead of kind of somewhere in the middle of this like what I really want kind of idea that people have.

How do you move forward with so much of what your life has been structured around being removed? Yeah. I think initially it was very difficult and even kind of admitting it to myself was really difficult. Like you mentioned earlier, I had all of these experiences kind of culminate where, for example, I had a really strong what I felt like was an answer from God that I was going to go on my Mormon mission to Italy and I wrote it in my journal and I wrote, you know, I know I'll go to Italy as sure as I know God lives. And it felt like a little, you know, testimony, my claim to faith on the topic. And when I opened my mission call, it was to Denver, Colorado, not Italy. And, you know, I still served a full Mormon mission. I still went to Denver, Colorado. I still wasn't. the church for years after that, but I think that is kind of the easiest to encapsulate example of these moments that kind of hit me over and over again, where I would have these really strong feelings, major revelations that I was using to kind of walk through life, only to realize that they were either wrong or that if I had made my own decisions about

my own life without consulting God, I probably would have chosen better than, quote, God was choosing for me. So as I kind of came to that realization over years and years, my first year teaching, my dad had given me a blessing that I was meant to be a teacher and that, of course, I'm going to trust this blessing above all else. I didn't pursue any other career paths. And then my first year as a teacher, I realized I absolutely hated it and was not cut out for it. And it was giving me a lot of mental health issues about halfway through the school year broke to my husband. hey, I think I might not believe in this anymore. After a lot of conversations, we both decided that we wanted to leave together, after reading a lot of church history for him, after lots of

conversations, like I said. So it was really helpful. One of my favorite pictures of our whole marriage is us holding our coffee cups for the first time. For most people, such a simple, straightforward thing is like drinking your morning cup of coffee. This is our first ever cup of coffee at I think I was about 24 at that point. Didn't grow horns, didn't fall beneath the floor. Everything proceeded as normal. It was very underwhelming. Most sins after you leave the church, most sins as an ex-mormon, you're like, this is pretty underwhelming. I also, one of my favorite memories is the first time I went to after-work drinks with my coworkers. They're kind of, everybody's getting to know each other. And I'm like, why did you come to New York? And I start

talking about Utah and Mormonism and leaving the church and garments, the religious underwear, the temple endowment, the prayer circle, the ceremony, the oaths, and the handshakes. And I just remember it was probably a group of 15 people, but as I'm just talking, more and more people stop their conversations and just lean in to be like, wait, are you talking about leaving a cult right now? And just like I could, it was kind of affirming to me to have, and I, you know, I always have those experiences talking to people. They don't know much about Mormons because you can tell from the look on their face that

you're not the crazy one for thinking you were raised in a very crazy. religion. Whereas, you know, if you're kind of talking to people in Utah, maybe they'll kind of act like, oh, this is all very normal. You know, of course, Mormons wear garments. But to someone who's never interfaced with the religion, it is probably 10 to 20 times stranger and otter than people who are familiar with it. So that kind of surprise on people's faces has been healing for me in some ways because it helps me feel like, I'm not the sinner, I'm not the crazy one. It was what I was raised in, and that normalcy is not what I experienced as a kid learning to iron shirts as an eight-year-old and writing letters to my husband about how I was saving myself for

him. So yeah. You're coming of age alongside the internet and you're growing up with these very rigid beliefs. What was your relationship with the internet as you were coming of age into your early adulthood? Oh, I think that one of my first Mormon memory. is that there is, there's a YouTuber who would go around and film the temple ceremonies. I remember probably when I was like late middle school, early high school coming across the thumbnail of, you know, secrets inside a Mormon temple. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, I didn't click on it. And I remember I had friends at school who would say, you know, you can see what happens

in the temple if you go on YouTube. And I remember like, you know, that's probably. what they're talking about. It's right there. I didn't click on it. And I, you know, as a Mormon kid, you very much learned the term anti-Mormon literature, that that's a whole thing you're warned against that you shouldn't look at anti-Mormon literature. They're just trying to destroy your testimony. And so I remember just thinking to myself, oh, this is anti-Mormon content, and I shouldn't watch it. And so when I was still in high school, I think if I came across anything disfavorable about the church, I immediately just turned my brain off and thought, you know, this is Satan.

They told me about this. And so because they told me about this, that's how I know that they are kind of foreseeing or foretelling the future because they're warning me of this thing that I shouldn't look at. So you grow up alongside the internet and then you start to see this influx of influencers who I first just saw labeled as trad wives, the like Mormon aspect and not you know, whatever, hashtag, not all tradwives are Mormon, but many of them are, many of the most successful influencers are either Utah Mormon based or create content that really appeals. So when did you start noticing this content? And yeah, what did you make of it? That's a good question. And I mean, I feel like my whole childhood was kind of trad wife content in a way. So I feel like to some extent,

I think that it's also a question of platform because I feel like Instagram is meant for curation and TikTok is kind of meant to question curation and to criticize curation. So I think that a lot of tradwife content kind of came up in the Instagram age, which is beautiful children, beautiful dresses, lovely sourdough. And it's very curated. It's often photos instead of videos. So it's harder to pick apart a curated photo instead of a video where there's like a voice in the background or, you know, you can pause the screenshot and say, what is what's the picture on their wall? So I think that the kind of transition away from Instagram into TikTok is also what kind of opened my mind more to the tradwife movement in specificity, I guess, because prior to that, I just see, you know, beautiful, kind of like a lot of people say that the Mormon trad wife movement came from Mormon mommy bloggers, which were super prevalent in the early 2000s, which is a lot of recipe making and DIY stuff.

And so it's kind of like this movement kind of rematerialized onto Instagram after they already had their original audience on the blogging side of things. I think where it kind of hit its head is when we turn more to a TikTok type of investigation of things where people are no longer looking for perfection or they're not looking to follow people that their posts just feel like a Pinterest board. I think Mormonism is very Pinteresty. Mormons love Pinterest too in my experience. So I think that that is what has kind of kicked back against trad wives is that for a long time, I think people just unquestioningly consumed the beautiful content. And when there's a voiceover to a photo, and the photo is not just, it's a pretty photo of kids and some bread. Now it's, I made this for my husband or I made this for my family.

And then, you know, and there's more of a narrative, like the new video form of. of the Tradwife content is narrative. And so it is developing much more of an ideology, in my opinion, behind the curated video, the pictures that we once had. And I think two Mormons are taught to be so missionary-minded that if someone is Mormon, they've probably talked about it at some point.

I mean, the Mormon church literally expressly says, you should be talking about being Mormon online. You're told that explicitly. And so that also is an element of, I think, Mormon, influencers are louder about their religion than a lot of influencers because they are acting on that kind of command from the prophet to speak loudly and speak often about their religion. It seems also because of how the algorithm works at any given point in time, there have been times where I have gotten content pipes to me from a Mormon influencer, but the content that I get,

it's not immediately clear where a lot of Tadwave accounts that have ended up in my feed, it takes me a little while to catch on that there is a specific religious element. Is that something you've also noticed? Do you feel that there's sort of any reasoning behind that? Because you're saying, you know, the church wants you to talk about your religion as much as possible, but it feels like with some influencers to what end was not always clear to me right away. Yeah. In my opinion, the, the prevalence.

of people who are influencers mentioning Mormonism is greatest in their early stages. When they're first getting an audience, when they're first kind of finding their voice, I think once people reach like a critical mass of no longer just having Mormon followers, they have a lot of just general interest in their platforms, it's almost like a graph where the bigger they get, the less they mention Mormonism. Because I think they realize that it's unpopular to a general audience, but it's very popular with an audience that you're growing early on. So I think that, you know, for example, I know Ballerina Farm used to have a blog specifically about Mormonism, but if you Google is so-and-so Mormon, you can always find

an answer because they talked about it a lot early on. And there's always like an early interview. Same with Brooklyn and Bailey. They're not really tradwife stuff anymore, but they just have a big YouTube channel. And they talked quite a bit about Mormonism early on, and now it essentially never appears. I think one of them has left. I'm not sure. Initially, to grow their audience, they're talking a lot about Mormonism because Mormons will follow you because they know you're Mormon. And then after they get big, they see it as maybe a bit more of a risk or maybe that because they have more money and they're like a little bit less beholden to their community. Maybe they're less likely to talk about it because they kind of can take on their own form of what they want to be talking about on the internet. So many Christians, I think if they see Mormon content and don't know what's more. Or just like, you know, even trad wife content obviously appeals to kind of a more far-right ideology. And I think all of those people, if they come across, you know, trad-wife content in general, they'll upvote it or like it or

interact with it. The hard thing for Mormons is that a lot of people just, especially like evangelical Christians, do not really like Mormons. And especially they don't like that they're trying to kind of co-op, then they would say the Christian movement or whatever and say they're Christians. And there's a lot of tension between, are they Christians? Aren't they Christians? So I think that that's another difficulty that they kind of have to interface with is that their content by its nature of being kind of traditionally minded appeals to this audience of a more like conservative Republican audience. But if they're too overt about their specific religion, I think, you know, if you're viewing it, which I do a little bit more as kind of like a brand that they're selling

versus like their quote true real life or whatever, then they are recognizing that there's a risk to the brand in bringing that to the forefront. Now the brand is large enough that it's kind of reaching a mass audience. But I don't know. I don't know if I'm just jaded or something, like if I'm viewing them too much as like business minded versus if they just, you know, if they're just kind of waking up each morning, rolling out of bed, posting their pictures and not really wondering about audience retention or who sees what when and how can I reach the broadest number of people. So it's hard to get into the mind of these people, really. We'll be right back with more with a Lisa Grenfell.

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Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I sort of had to wear something like temple garments in my youth, but it was these shoulder-to-knee, stinky cotton shirts. I wore underneath my back brace. And unfortunately, there's no question about my personality that can't be answered with the sentence, I wore a back brace for my entire adolescence. And now we continue our conversation with ex-Morman influencer and great theory haver, Alyssa Grenfell. As I was sort of learning more about a recent subject I was covering,

I found out that the family was Mormon but didn't really talk about it. And a lot of people were saying like, oh, you should do an episode of, but like, why are there so many successful Mormon women in the influencing space? And I was like, oh, I have no idea. And you mentioned sort of the most popular answer given, which is what I was encountering a lot, which was that young Mormon women are taught to journal a lot. So that's probably why they're successful at influencing. It doesn't not make sense, but felt just like a very incomplete answer. you take me through, what made you start asking this question? Because people were telling you that they were getting ads for the Mormon church on your content. That was how that started, right? Yeah, every interview I've ever spoken to is like, why are there so many Mormon influencers? And I think they often ask it almost like in this secret, like, can you tell me the answer? Like, I have this secret that I'm keeping. And if I could just explain it like then, that would explain the phenomenon. And I think it's, you know, I think something like,

in journal and there was the mommy bloggers and blogging is like journaling and then once they're blogging then they're on Instagram and it feels easy to understand but I agree like it feels kind of thin because lots of people journal and it doesn't mean that you're going to be famous one day just because you are journaling a lot when you were a little kid but sure when I was posting my videos I you know especially initially I'm still like learning YouTube I think my first YouTube video was like 10 months ago or something I'm still under one year of learning this whole platform and stuff, but I would have people say, so funny, I just got an ad for the Mormon church while I was watching this video. And I'm thinking, it's so funny that they are advertising on my content,

which obviously, if you understand the back end, the Mormon church purchases ad space through Google, Google AdSense. And then Google AdSense looks for content that is relevant to put the ad on top of. So it's not like the Mormon Church is saying, we like Alyssa Grenfell, definitely not saying that, but the algorithm is basically looking for people saying, Mormon, Mormon, Mormon, or Utah, or whatever, and then putting their ad space, their ad spend behind that content. And I also, kind of in tandem with that, was on the YouTube subreddit and looking up stuff about YouTube and realizing that my CPM and my RPM, which is kind of how much you make off of your videos, was way higher than basically almost anyone else was quoting, that like my average kind of pay per view or pay per click or whatever was much higher than just kind of your average channel. I used to do some SEO for a previous employer, and I went and looked at the ad spend estimated behind different keywords, because people don't realize that the ad spend behind something like crafting is not the same as the ad spend behind something like open a new credit card,

because it's basically the ad spend is proportionate to how much the advertiser is willing to spend to get the eyes of the viewer. So I realized, basically, when I went and looked at the ad spend behind some of these terms, that the ad spend was as high as very expensive advertising terms. So, like, to open a new credit card was $30 per click, and something like crafting or maybe, like, sourdough bread is, like, $2. It's very low. So when I looked at Mormon terms, like Mormon missionary was $30. And Utah Influencer was $19. Mormon was $25, and these are ad spends that are phenomenally high, especially when compared even with another religion, you know, Catholicism or Catholic is $2.

Judaism or Jew is maybe $4. As someone raised Catholic, I was like, wow, Catholics found dead in a ditch, like not a profitable, not a profitable YouTube group. I was truly blown away with how many times higher those keywords were. scanning. Yeah, and it felt like people don't realize that the Mormon church is the richest church on the planet. It's similar to the net worth of Disney, you know, so I mean, which I also had no idea. The value of Disney, I think it's potentially even worth more than Disney. So it felt like there has to be some connection between the high ad spend on these

keywords. I'm seeing it literally in my content. I'm seeing that I'm making more off of my videos than the average YouTuber, and then extending that to Utah influencers, which is that when they're making content, they're making more money. And basically realizing that because there's more money to be had out in Utah, that it can just support a far larger number of creators, especially in that phase of getting off the ground right when they're talking about Mormonism the most, right when they're kind of like, let me try influencing for a bit, right? You know, before they get the brand sponsorship, before they get all the clicks for the commissions on Amazon, whatever. Like, I think I just basically took what was happening to me and thought, what's happening to me is happening to all these Utah Mormon influencers.

They're being paid the same amount. Like, if a guy is making finance content about investing in the S&P and they're making videos about sourdough, those people are making the same amount of money, which is highly irregular. I had no idea how much money, the more. Mormon church has. As you explained in the video, the church is welcome to pour as much money into these keywords as they like, but they can't control whether the keywords are being talked about favorably. So it seems like there's like a world where the Mormon church is accidentally cutting you checks for talking about why you left the church in details. And I think that maybe to them it's worth it. I mean, I haven't seen those comments of, I just got an ad for the Mormon church. I'm still getting those comments. So I don't know, like, I don't think I outed them to the point that they're changing

their strategy or anything. But it is kind of funny to realize that they are kind of engineering their own crisis by making it so that it's profitable enough to be a YouTuber talking about Mormonism that they are kind of supporting the YouTuber's little, you know, rent payment or whatever. So the YouTuber can keep going and keep making the negative videos. And that's a very funny little cycle, considering I once paid 10% of my income to the church. and now I'm slowly making it back. Trad wife influencers that started by talking about Mormonism quite a bit and probably don't talk about it as much now, they are also sort of getting cuts of this, even if they're not explicitly talking about the Mormon church anymore, do you think even if an influencer who started talking about Mormonism isn't anymore, does this still help the church? The most fascinating was that the term, the search term, Utah influencer, I think, Utah influencer made about $19 per click. So if you compare that with New York City influencer, you know, San Francisco influencer, places where you assume, you know, that's the influencer capital of the world, because that's especially of the U.S., those are all under $5. So, you know, like I said, it's almost three times, they're making three times as much. So a woman, a woman with her kids in New York,

a woman with her kids in L.A. and a woman with her kids in Lehigh, Utah. The woman in Lehigh, Utah, will probably make three times as much the ad revenue. With a lower cost of living, right? And lower cost of living. And, you know, probably her husband already has a job because he's been kind of trained to be the breadwinner, just like she's been trained to be the housewife. As far as the church benefiting from it, I think it definitely does. I think I've had people tell me through comments or I've had some emails of people saying that Ballerina Farm just her content made them Google. You know, Mormons started looking to the church considering getting a visit from the missionaries, consider getting a book of Mormon. And it's kind of like a very soft advertisement,

in my opinion, where it's not someone coming on and saying, I'd like to talk to you about why you should join them with church. But when you see a lifestyle presented that's very alluring and very beautiful and you think to yourself, what is this about this person that made this lifestyle possible and you realize they're part of the church, I think it kind of gives a higher level of influence to potentially someone who's curious and wondering what they can do to kind of live that life that they're seeing fantasized. Final thing, I mean, I just wanted to mention and talk a little bit as far as your theory goes, is that this is a way to sort of have these poster board influencers kind of representing

if not the church explicitly, the gender roles and the ideals of the church in the day-to-day without having it be traced back to supposing ballerina farm, you know, wakes up tomorrow and is like, I'm done with the Mormon church. It's not like she can say, and the church has been paying me this much for this long to create this content. It creates this middleman. The church had a ton of success from Donnie and Marie Osmond, because They're Mormon. They're raised Mormon, still Mormon to this day. And they were phenomenal brand ambassadors for the church throughout their kind of heyday. Gladys Knight is also Mormon. And she did a concert at our ward in Kentucky, at our big congregation. And she's another example of someone who kind of became a bit of a brand ambassador. She's doing concerts. And I think pre-internet, and before gay issues, the awareness around LGBTQ issues, Those people did really well, and typically it seems like they mostly stayed in the church. And so the church had a lot of success with these famous people being brand ambassadors for them.

Whereas now they've had it, I think, in more recent years, backfire more often than they've had it work. Like with the David Archiletta. So David Archiletta was very well known within the church. He also gave concerts for the church. He served a Mormon mission. You can find a picture of him in the Mormon-Tabernacle choir where they did his, slow zoom on him. And he was another poster child and another famous person. And he's the sweetest, you know, if you've ever heard him in interviews, he's so sweet. He's like, he just has

the kindest presence. And so I think he was kind of the perfect example of a great Mormon and a great ambassador. And then in like a few years ago, he came out as gay. He also kind of simultaneously came out as leaving the church and now has written a song about, you know, I'd rather go to health and not love the people who I love, and in many ways has kind of been a reverse of all of the kind of quote good he would have done for the image of the Mormon Church. Now he's just basically a living, breathing example of the church's bigotry towards gay people. Because the church really tried to up their proximity to his image, from a PR perspective, really hurt them now that they are no longer able to, you know, now they've been damaged by his coming out

against them and saying, hey, this church is homophobic. So I think that that's another reason they don't want to maybe formally approach someone like a ballerina farm or any of these tradwife creators because they know it will backfire against them, but they also know that these women are making the church look very good and very beautiful and traditional and feminine. And so I think this advertising revenue is kind of a way for them to support the blogosphere of the early 2000s through the, you know, Instagrammers and YouTubers of today by giving them ad revenue. We'll be right back with more with Alyssa Grenfell. If a baby is giggling in the backseat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the

back seat, they're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher. It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly. So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave. The message from NHTSA and the ad council. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all,

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security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock a prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th minute. And now we continue our conversation with Alyssa Grenfell. You know, when you're a YouTuber or when you get ad revenue from any social media platform, it just tells you the amount and it tells you basically your cost per view. And that's it. It just says advertisers we're willing to pay. And it's like a black box.

They're not telling you like, which this percentage came from this organization. This percentage came from this organization. So it's like a black box in that you can't, you don't even know. So the women can just make their content and look up in the morning and be like, look, babe, like, look at this money I made. I'll make more content tomorrow. I'm going to tell my friends.

They won't necessarily see through, kind of read the tea leaves of, why am I making this much? I don't know if any of them are doing that. And maybe they are. And I'm just kind of one of the first that have talked about it. There's no one answer that's going to completely unlock why are there so many successful trad wife accounts at this specific moment. That answer ranges, you know, far beyond Mormonism. But I think your content has just helped me have a better sense of not just you and the

culture that you had to leave behind, but also who is shaping the internet. And it seems like the Mormon church has no small part in doing that. And it's so funny because when you say it like that it sounds so kind of conspiratorial. It sounds, you know, the Mormons, they're controlling the internet. But it is funny because it, I think, to some extent, it's true. I mean, not that they are literally holding the mouse and clicking the clicks, but in that they are exercising, I think, a pretty broad ad spend, the way that they are actively petitioning members to go on and share the gospel,

share talks, share resources about the church. And so I think that they do have a fairly coordinated PR effort for the internet specifically. Even one thing I didn't mention in that video is they have all these people who are hired to do SEO. And if you Google something like Bible, the Mormon Church has, like, their free Bible is one of the first organic things you see on Google is Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Same with, I think, Jesus Christ, same with New Testament, you know, all of these terms that are kind of general Christian terms. the Mormon church has one of the top organic rankings for those searches, which is very purposeful and specific, you know, in that their attempt to kind of say, hey, if someone wants a Bible, we want to be the ones giving it to them. So I think that they do, you know, it's not just conspiratorial. They have what I view to be like a very specific targeted plan for how to get people on the internet interested in Mormonism. And it's multifaceted. And they have whole department. hired for this kind of thing. It just seems like the Mormon church has adapted to the internet age unusually well.

I think they've definitely viewed it as a great opportunity. And I think they've also viewed it. You know, people will also talk about how the Mormon church will kind of spam the front page of Google so that ex-Mormon stuff gets further and further down. So they'll, you know, instead of just having one article on a subject, they'll have like 10 articles on a subject and they'll try to get them all to rank so that the whole front page of Google is just faithful responses to questions about the origins of the church. They even put out all these essays that are about the history of the church so that they can

kind of counter the anti-mormon literature. Is there anything I didn't ask that you feel like is relevant to this discussion? Sometimes I struggle with, you know, when I talk about Tradwife things. I feel like people really want kind of the silver bullet answer. And I also think that I struggle sometimes with, it's not a demonization of something like a trad wife, but it's maybe the critique because I often feel like tradwives didn't invent motherhood. Tadwives didn't invent being a wife or like being in a loving relationship and partnership. And so sometimes I have a, I struggle with the nuance of critiquing something that is genuinely human and genuinely

like I think demonizing motherhood is not something we want to do demonizing being a loving partner is not something we want to do but we want to critique the approach that these accounts are kind of sharing and so in the critique sometimes there's a demonization

that I think is kind of dangerous and not good for families or children specifically so I think just a final infusion of nuance is the final thing I'd want to leave It's just that it's not something that's quite as straightforward as saying Mormon women like to journal. It's very complicated. It's about the internet, but it's also about conservatism, and it's about Roe versus Wade,

and it's about all of these different cultural forces. People should be allowed to live their lives comfortably, however they choose to. And so it's just like, let's not go after a specific woman. Let's go after maybe the system that you can trace it back up to, which seems like a lot of what your work is, is trying. trying to do is interrogate the system that creates and not, you know, bully the byproducts of the system. It's kind of why I always say I'm anti-Mormonism, but I'm not anti-Mormon because I think people can still be criticized, obviously. But I think that in a more broad sense, the systems and the organizations and the dogmas are what are forming human behavior.

And so instead of saying this one person sucks because of this X, Y, Z, it's better and more helpful. think, more informative, more educational to say this is the system that made this phenomenon exist to begin with. Thanks so much again to Alyssa for her time and patience. I really recommend her YouTube channel if you have any further questions about what it's like to grow up in the Mormon faith, what it's like to decondition oneself from a cult-like upbringing, as well as some interesting interviews with fellow ex-Mormons. You can also check out her book at the link in the description.

So listeners, to conclude, why are there so many? many successful Mormon wives in the influencing space today, the answer is money. Okay, see you next week. In all seriousness, thank you so much again for listening. Please remember to subscribe to the show if you like it, leave a friendly review, tell your friends, it all helps. I had a lot of fun making this episode. I learned a lot and it was really hard, so please let me know your thoughts. And for your moment of fun, or I guess more of a moment of reflection this week, here is former American Idol contestant David Arjoletta talking about why he left the Mormon church. See you next week. One day I was just praying and got on my knees and I said, God, if you're really there,

and if you really have a purpose for me, just please take this from me. Please change me because I don't want to be a way I shouldn't, I don't want to be like this and I don't know why I am. And I just basically heard what I understood is what was always God told me, David, you need to stop asking me this. You're asking me the wrong thing. Because I don't intend to change you. You've been spending over half of your life now praying about this asking me to change something that I don't intend to change. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson

is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye.

It's Black Business Month, and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk. Legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I had the skill and I had the talent.

I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people, you're sitting in their kitchen tables, and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search all the smoke and listen now.

If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the back seat. They're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher.

It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly. So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave. The message from NHTSA and the ad council. This is an IHeart podcast.