Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Celebrity Wellness Brands

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

This week, Reese dives into The Cult of Celebrity Wellness Brands, where skincare, mental health, spirituality, supplements, and good old-fashioned celebrity worship have melted together into one extremely Instagrammable belief system. From Goop and Rhode to Rare Beauty, Kardashian supplements, children's skincare, and the spectacularly messy rise and fall of Selena Gomez's mental health startup Wondermind, Marketing critic and Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults author Dr. Mara Einstein (@drmaraeinstein) joins us to unpack parasocial trust, brand cults, wellness grifts, scarcity marketing, and why the most effective sales pitch is just convincing you that something is wrong with you first. Enlightenment is only a 12 step skincare routine, GLP-1-adjacent supplement, and celebrity approved app away. The Cut: What Happened at Wondermind by Angelina Chapman Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube! Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles, @imanharirikia.  Pre-order Iman's new book, Once in a Timeline, here! Your pre-order helps make more books possible! Sounds Like A Cult is coming to you LIVE from The Elysian in LA on October 15th! Get tickets at soundslikeacult.com! Thank you to our sponsors! Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns at https://Quince.com/slac Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/cult Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn, https://www.vinted.com/ Save 20% Off Honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/SLAC #honeylovepod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You didn't hear this for me, but normal gossip could be your new favorite podcast. Join me, Rachel Hampton, as I share the juiciest gossip from the Reefat. world. In every episode, we anonymized some gossip sent in by a listener, and we share that story with a special guest. Normal gossip is available now on YouTube and all of your favorite podcast platforms. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. They are making you feel like you are better than somebody else, that you know something, that somebody else doesn't know,

that you have found the silver bullet. This is what marketers are always trying to do. It's trying to find your vulnerability so that they can push on that pain point and bring you in so you will buy. The basis of marketing is to tell you that there is something wrong with you so that you will need to go out and buy their product and therefore make yourself better. I think it really is that simple sometimes. I think we look for something, for some complex reasoning. And I do think, like, everybody just wants to feel special. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern-day cults we all follow.

I'm Reese Oliver, Sounds Like a Cult's Resident Rhetoric Scholar. Every week on this show, we discuss a different group or guru that puts the cult in culture, from key influencers to Christian nationalism to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? If so, which of our cult categories does it fall into? You live your life, watch you back, or get the fuck out. Because cults and cultish thinking fall along a spectrum, and, you know, not all of them are equally bad.

Sometimes joining a cult is raving with your lifelong besties, and sometimes it's signing your soul over to a grimy podcast bride. And most of the time, modern-day cults show up in the darnest, most unexpected places. But, you know, sometimes they're exactly where the seasoned culty eye would look like a sponsored ad on your TikTok, FYP, for an app that can give you mental health counseling from the same people who instilled the beauty standards that made you need the counseling in the first place. Today, we are getting into the goopy burgeoning cult of Celebrity Wellness Brands. So, Celebrity Wellness Brands, this is a bit of a slippery topic. So, celebrity wellness brands exist along somewhat of a continuum. We're going to break that down with our guest in a little bit.

But basically, I have been noticing a whole bunch of culty happenings in the beauty space, in the wellness space, in the spirituality space. All of the health and wellness and beauty spaces are combining in very cultish ways. And it feels like every day there's a new vitamin, a new lip gloss, a new app, a new something that is supposed to make your life cleaner, sexier, healthier, more well, you know? Life feels really chaotic right now. Everybody feels like we need some stability. And I think that these celebrities are absolutely scrambling to try and get our attention and our money in any way that they can. So I'm thinking about things like Shay Mitchell's recent kids beauty brand. I'm thinking about rare beauty.

I'm thinking about goop. I'm thinking about road. I'm thinking about a lot of these cult brands that have popped up over the last few years, even a lot of them that we have touched on. Brand ambassadorship. Again, just one little blip on the spectrum of ways that a celebrity can involve themselves with a wellness brand. So we're going to get into it. Let's get into some history. Brands and celebrities have been attaching themselves together for marketing purposes for a very long time, at least as early as English royal product endorsements from the 1700s. According to the Washington Post, in 1882, London socialite and West End stage actress Lily Langtree became the

poster girl for Pear's soap, making her the first celebrity to endorse a commercial product. The very first influencer was already giving Clean Girl, which is honestly very telling given the racial politics of both Clean Girl aesthetic movement and Pear's soap, I digress. According to Hollywoodbranded.com, in the 30s and 40s, celebrities like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope would read advertisements on the radio, followed not long after by television commercials starring icons like Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball, who, honestly, guys, I would argue you had the first hot celebrity wellness product with Vitamita Veggemin. What do y'all know about Vitamita Veggimen?

But yeah, celebrity endorsements are obviously still something that exist to this day. I'm thinking about Sidney Sweeney for Kerstas or Zendaya for Lankom. Every celebrity for every brand. Kendall Jenner's face is up in the Macy's and it's up to you to guess which perfume she's shilling you. But anywho, today's most common iteration of the celebrity endorsement is the influencer ambassador, which our guest, Dr. Mara Einstein, highlights in her. her book, Hoodwink, was a practice coined by Slack alum Lulu Lemon. Einstein says that ambassador

is selling you a brand as an integral part of their life imbued the mindset that, quote, shopping at these stores are using these brands, we communicate to the world who we are, or at least how we want to be perceived. Stars turning into entrepreneurs is also nothing new. Trying to find the first one really only begets listicles of rags to riches stories from celebrities who have bolstered their hard-earned riches by starting everything from production companies to emoji apps to laptop-sized burgers. It honestly felt like once celebrities cracked the code and figured out that they could start selling products themselves instead of just being ambassadors for them, there was a period of

just throwing literally anything at the wall to see what stuck. And now via social media, celebrities have kind of found their niche. The biggest one, of course, being wellness, the topic of today's episode. Recently, it feels as though celebrity brands have multiplied exponentially and worked their way into the beauty and wellness world to new degrees. From road to kin euphorics, It feels like especially nowadays, celebrity, beauty, and lifestyle brands are absolutely everywhere from consumables to topicles. The humble endorsement has been long abandoned in favor of DIYC. I think our parasycial relationships with celebrities have reached such a point where it is not enough to consume their content we need to pretend to be. We are already using the internet as a shortcuted way to create a version of ourselves to present to the world.

Celebrities are also a way to create identity. We form who we are through the things and the people that we love. And now the celebrities are kind of taking advantage of the online personalities that we are already building and saying, hey, you want to be a clean girl. You want to be a bedrock girl. I don't even know. I'm not on TikTok anymore. But there's a brand for all of them that is now attached to a celebrity. So just to give you a little bit of an idea of what this landscape looks like, when I'm going to get into a brief, uncomprehensive list of celebrity wellness, beauty lifestyle brand.

A work-life article listing the most successful celebrity brands in every category from beverages to clothing to beauty details how complex a celebrity brandcape has become. With the word salad branding we've grown used to thanks to the internet, it seems like any and all of the millions of celebrity brands out there nowadays could be construed as a wellness brand. I'm sure you've seen some of these celebrity brands. I'm just going to rapid fire list off some of these from the beverage, makeup and clothing category. I'm our Chamberlain's Chamberlain Coffee, Logan Paul and KSI's prime hydration, Bella, Hadid's kin euphoric, Blake libelies, Betty,

Nita Jobeb and Julian Huff's fresh fine wine, Billy Bobby Brown's Florence by Mills, Harry Styles is pleasing. Ariana Grande's, Rambute, Haley, Haley, Haley, Breber's, Rode's, and Lauren Ireland's Summer Fridaysies. Jessica Alba's Honest. Alexis Wren's run active, Amanda Seale, Justin Beaver's Drew House, Revolve, Keelot and Ethan Eithin's, Teddy Fresh, and Kate Hudson's Fatletics.

And those are just the ones that this work life article found notable. That's not even including the Coltee-Michel Children's Beauty brand that also made me want to do this episode. There's absolutely a bigillion of them. all of them are kind of wellnessy. So what is a celebrity wellness brand? CXG.com points out the same dichotomy between the age-old celebrity endorsement and the newer celebrity run operation that I talked about earlier.

The idea that celebrities, whether movie stars, musicians, or royalty, epitomize, endorse, and stand-for products is not new. However, the concept of an actual brand being built by and around the celebrity itself in the accompanying evolution of a dedicated segment spanning premium and luxury brands is relatively new. And this is what really hooks me as a modern development of this world. Celebrities attaching themselves to pre-existing products feels a lot more temporary and a lot less culty because it's giving you the presentation that these are regular people also using a product and they just happen to also be someone who you would like to see using the product. And Dr. Dr. Mara will talk about this a little bit later.

But once the celebrity becomes the person running the brand, there is definitely a level of trust that erodes there. And now it is no longer, you are participating in this thing because it makes your life like mine. It's more of a straightforward you're participating in this thing because I told you to. And in that way, I feel the relationship between celebrity and fan becomes cultier in the light of a celebrity wellness brand. The CXG report continues to say that one of the first to capitalize on this all new encompassing method of marketing was Gwyneth Paltrow, of course, with Goop, who built the brand, quote, resting on her global name, recognition, image, and lifestyle choices, end quote.

Gwyneth was the first to tap into a boom and celebrity brand ship that CXG says is motivated by two key words, beauty and Gen Z. CXG continues, to say there has been a lot of hype around celebrity beauty brands like Rhodes Skin by Haley Bieber and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez would be an understatement. The former is a clean beauty brand gaining a massive following with a waitlist of 100,000 people before it even launched, and the latter, a beauty brand focused on mental wellness is purportedly for sale for $2 billion. $2 billion, y'all, for a makeup brand that is selling you mental health messages, which I don't know.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about rare beauty. I think it is a little cult of the beauty space to be selling your products to make you look better while also selling you confidence. But what I wanted to point out was even this report is referring to a road as a clean beauty brand, as if clean really means anything in the marketing world. like clean is a buzzword like natural or healthy or chemical free that like actually when you get down to it, there's no way of proving it. There's no like empirical way of showing whether or not our brand is clean. That's a feeling, that's a vibe, a feeling and a vibe that is often attached to things like I mentioned before, like white supremacy, like suppression of women's rights. Clean often means pure, which often means sterile, which often means exclusive, which often means fucking culty guys. That's what I'm saying.

It is that deep, actually. I'm sorry, your clean girl slick back bond is that deep. I hate to admit it to you. Shit's getting cultish. So yeah, the celebrity wellness brand is what happens when celebrity endorsements combine themselves with what Dr. Einstein explains as cult brands to create the ultimate monster of cultish buying influence. Cult brands, which we love on this show, serve customers who look for alignments between themselves and brand values as opposed to a mere transaction. So again, you're not just buying Glossier. You're buying into being a young, whimsical, bun, but put together, girly. You're not just getting a Jeep. You're becoming one of the Jeeples. You're buying the ducks. It's an identity. It's a way of living. It's a

fucking cult. Dr. Einstein continues to explain that these cult brands create brand communities, or as we would call them, cults, that kind of metastasize around a brand's mythology. The stronger a brand's community, the longer staying power and the high. hire the sales, especially in the age of digital neotribalism where finding a niche to advertise to is hair amount. This is the culty genius of the celebrity wellness brand. They take advantage of the community and mythology that already exists around a celebrity, and then they utilize the halo effect, of course, who talked about the halo effect on the show before. So the thing about celebrity wellness brands is that most often the celebrity who has started the brand has already integrated themselves

into your life parasocially via social media. So now they are able to be both the influencers, selling you the product and the CEO who ends up with the bag at the end. They get to have their cake to eat it too. And by leaning into the mental health related, spiritual and physical insecurities of Gen Z, they're able to do so from both the makeup counter and the therapist's office. So now we're going to get into a worst case scenario of the celebrity wellness brand, which is Wondermind. Until now, I think it's mostly felt a little bit like makeup. But that's kind of my point here is that it starts as makeup. It starts as a Sunday reset and then wellness starts to extrapolate into something much darker and more all-encompassing.

Obviously, mental health is a very hot topic always. Mental health among young ins, especially according to the Gallup and Walton Foundation Family Report, Gen Z has the poorest mental health of any generation. Yikes. So, of course, all of the people in our damn phone are trying to market us ways to feel better. The reason I wanted to do this episode in the first place is because way back in September 2025, I saw a worst-case scenario of this cult unfold in the wild. That is to say, I read a brilliant piece in the cut by Angelina Chapman called What Happened at Wondermind that detailed the culty and

turbulent downward spiral of one of Selena Gomez's wellness startup. You should totally go read the piece, which we will link in the show notes, but I'm going to give you all the culty tidbits here. If you don't know who Selena Gomez is, she's a child star turned pop star and beauty mogul. She makes music, as well as being the owner and founder of Rare Beauty, her first celebrity wellness beauty brand. However, in 2021, Gomez endeavored on a new entrepreneurial journey alongside her mother, Mandy Teefe, whom she enlisted as her new startup Wondermind's co-founder. Wondermind was intended to be a multi-format media hub hosting mental health-related podcasts, TV shows, and films. Basically, it was supposed to be a little app with a bunch of mental fitness tools.

One of Gomez and Tifi's favorite was called After Hours, a quote-unquote special room in the digital world where users could spend time from the hours of like midnight to 4 a.m. when people have supposedly the highest level of suicidal ideation. Inside the space, you could access what is called therapeutic entertainment, which are guided and led by therapists, but no actual therapy would be offered. Things like that. Cutsy, therapy adjacent things. Gomez has been open about living with bipolar since 2020 and has made openly navigating mental health struggles a part of her brand to a degree.

Chapman says, During Wondermind's first year, she started in a documentary, Selina Gomez, My Mind, and Me, intending to offer a behind-the-curtain view of her struggle with her mental health and the effects of her chronic autoimmune disease, lupus. Ahead of the film's release, Gomez told Rolling Stone she'd been checked into mental health treatment facilities four times. Because I have the platform my hob, she said, it's kind of like I'm sacrificing myself a little bit for the greater purpose.

I'm sorry, what? Sacrificing myself for a greater purpose? I almost put that in the culty quotes game we're going to play later, y'all. But I had to tell you first. I understand where she's coming from. For women, discussing mental health especially as something as heavily stigmatized as bipolar, is really difficult. I understand why having the platform that she does and having a history of the Bieber-related scrutiny that she has,

why she feels martyred putting such a vulnerable issue into the spotlight. But still, this quote totally gives Jim Jones to me. I really don't know how much of a mental health-related greater purpose you're achieving by getting people to spend more time on screens via your content and selling them more makeup. I don't know. I can empathize and still not understand. Teefe and Gomez joined up with Daniela Pearson, author of the newsletter The Newsette,

with whom they publicly bonded over mental health struggles in an interview two years prior in 2020. The trio, who at first two employees looked like the perfect chosen family of empowered, healed women, launched Wondermind in 2022 with $5 million in Series A funding. Tifi and Pearson would serve as co-CEOs with Gomez as the company's chief impact officer. Whatever the hell that means.

According to Chapman, employees told her the company's grand mission and basic operations were tanked by Gomez and Tifi's personal and family dysfunction, including the denial of Tifi's instability. None of the women could really work together. Employees described Tifi as slow-moving and unable to deliver, and stark contrast to Pearson's egobinical at times tyrannical behavior. Eventually, Pearson was fired without word to employees and never replaced, and as we all, I'm sure, can deduce a company with no CEO doesn't really do very well. Gomez herself seems to want to keep Wondermind at arm's length despite her earlier claims of martyrdom. The article describes her being difficult to get a hold of for related events, and even

showing up drunk to one Wondermind dinner before announcing she was leaving to have sex. Basically, Wondermind seems like a way for her to cash in quick and get her momager out of her hair. And boy, has it ever, Teefe has made Wondermind her life in always culty. Again, I highly recommend reading this piece in the cut, but here are just a few of the ways in which Teefe's behavior specifically crossed the line, and co-founder and CEO to Colt Leader. So firstly, we have some good old financial abuse. Wondermind thinks to TV was really good at keeping up the appearance that their finances were all in order. According to Chapman, the company had been valued at $100 million and had made Inc's annual list of the fastest growing private companies. This all hit a turning

point when Pearson was fired and a new CEO was never rehired, like I mentioned. In March of 2023, Wondermind began failing to pay their employees in a timely fashion. I'm caring. I'm carrying, the entire company, an employee remembers Teefe saying angrily. If the company went down, me and Selena will be fine, but none of you will be fine. I'm doing this to make sure you all have fucking jobs." End quote. According to several staffers, T.P. Said Gomez had stepped in multiple times to cover employee payroll. So here's, I guess, kind of a cultish green flag, like making sure your employees get paid. Absolutely bare minimum, but not even the bare minimum because they weren't getting paid on time. You didn't set up the company for success to pay them in the first

place and now you're manipulating them by saying that they should be so grateful and by again martyring yourself and making yourself look like the victim because you are taking all this money out of your pocket to pay your fucking employees which is a basic requirement of employment in fact that's actually one whole half of the transaction so yeah it makes sense that all of their financials were kind of a mess considering Pearson was running the business arm of wondermind and was later accused of repeatedly inflating the venue investment and subscriber numbers for both the Newzette and her VC firm, Kazam, which I mean obviously doesn't bode very well for her financial dealings as far as Wondermind goes. All the while, this is happening, the company is

still kind of producing content. They're failing on a bunch of projects, but they're starting a bunch of new ones at the same time. They're totally trying to put up the front that everything is okay, even though they're employees of which there are only like 10 or leaving in droves, so now there's only like two, and everything is falling apart. TV went on to describe her employees losing all of their health, dental, and vision insurance as both somehow the worst day of her life and a little hiccup, cult leadery as fuck. Does it matter to you or not? Are you with these people or are you above them? This was an announcement that she made to them, the health insurance thing, amidst brainstorming new Jessica Chastain projects and developing new trendy snack foods after seeing Chloe Kardashian's protein popcorn,

which could also be a celebrity wellness brand we get into. Moving away from financial abuse and into just a further lack of work-life boundaries and emotional manipulation. Here's a quote from The Cut. Employees at Wondermind had come to expect erratic behavior from their boss, like disappearances that lasted days or even weeks and unpredictable angry outbursts. Since the company was launched a year and a half before, TV had gone through phases of sleeping in her office where she had two couches. She seemed to stay for days without bathing.

There was no shower in the suite, and sometimes without changing her clothes. Tifi treated the office like her refuge from the world in her home life where she could do whatever she wanted. Yeah, this whole situation sounds like a mess. It sounds like she started this company and then essentially just used the office as a rotting lair when she decided to show up. T.F.E. would let projects like Venus Williams documentaries essentially rot. And then when she was there, she was angry and controlling, cursing at employees.

And allegedly, according to some employees, snorting Ritalin, which TV denies. There are further drug use accusations as well, including ivy drips of liquid Benadryl and high amounts from nurses that seemed a little less than nests. qualified. A hallmark effect of liquid benedril in excessive amounts is that it causes hallucinations, which may have caused the incident highlighted in the beginning of the piece as this story's climax, which was Teefe in September 2023, texting all of her employees in the middle of the night from the Wondermind offices that there was an intruder there. Teefe still claims that there was someone there, but according to Chapman, New York found no footage of a man speaking to the

ring cam, and we saw no evidence that anyone had attempted to break in, in line with the police's findings. Obviously, working for a startup that is led by someone so unstable had a lot of effects on the employees of this brand. The cut actually goes on to say that several of these employees of Wondermind have, after this whole situation, developed new or worsened panic disorders and depression that they attribute to both TV's behavior and the business's instability. So this is just so ironic. They set out to advertise this big glitzy mental health startup that would help all of the children and in doing so worse into the mental health of pretty much all of their employees, each other. And I honestly have doubts about the users of this app and what is going on with it.

Okay, you guys, it's time to get into the newest news about Wondermind because as of just a few days ago, August 14th, Ms. Gomez has been accused of defrauding investors in her mental health startup, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday. I am reading from the New York Times. Yes, Wondermind is in some hot legal water. And the lawsuit says that while Wondermind quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to investors. The lawsuit says. Instead, they learned of the companies crumbling through, I mean, obviously, the assets and collaborations that they paid for never materializing, but mostly through the same story from the cut that I based the intro to this episode off of, which is absolutely.

wild. The suit claims that Gomez, Ms. Teefe, and Ms. Pearson, all of whom are named, concealed issues, and defrauded the investors by claiming that Wondermind was performing well and poised for success. Representatives for Ms. Gomez and Ms. Teefe did not return a request for comment. So, yes, the plaintiffs are seeking a full jury trial. I am fully eating my popcorn. I will tell you that much. I think it is going to be fiery because apparently in April, Ms. Teefe told investors in an email that she thought that we had returned your investment, according to the lawsuit, when Wondermind, quote, had returned nothing. So I think it's going to be a spicy trial.

I'll be tuning in. Wondermind's website is still active as of today, advertising themselves as in the best five minutes you can spend on your mental health. Their website touts mental fitness, mental health conditions, real stories, newsletters, podcasts, worksheets, and our story. So if anyone's looking for resources, such as, a worksheet for breaking through roadblocks. Selena is here for you.

To help us get a better inside scoop at how these celebrity wellness brands are getting their talents in the youngens, we are going to be joined by marketing expert and the author of Hoodwinked, how marketers use the same tactics as cults, Dr. Mara Einstein. This back-to-school season, spend less on your kids with Amazon. Hi, I'm Laura Clary, mom, overthinker, and someone who has a complicated relationship with the back-to-school supply list. Can we just be honest for a second? Kids are expensive. Last year, I went all out on my daughter's school supplies, color-coded folders, the fancy pencil case, gel pens and 17 colors she absolutely needed. By October, she had one pencil left.

One. I don't know what happened to the rest, and honestly, neither does she. Amazon has everything your kids need for back to school at prices that won't make you want to cry in the school supply aisle. Great prices, huge selection, and when half of it goes missing by October, at least you didn't break the bank. So remember, with Amazon's low back-to-school prices, just spend less on your kids because every dollar you don't spend on them is a dollar you haven't spent on them. If you have nothing nice to say, you can sit with us. I'm Suzanne Lambert, comedian, mean girl, and internet menace, and this is the mean but true

podcast. Every week, a special guest tonight will talk pop culture, current events, romance, whatever we feel like. I don't know. Are you a cop? We'll be keeping it funny, playful, and petty, per usual. You cringe at the site of people posting QR codes to fund their own bachelor's rep parties. You need to know how to respond to that coworker with a bad haircut who's always making digs or just need to get something off your chest.

Make sure to subscribe to mean but true wherever you listen to podcasts, unless of course you hate fun, in which case, don't. I'm Suzanne Lambert, and this is mean but true. All right, Dr. Einstein, welcome to the show. Could you introduce yourself to the culties and tell us a little. little bit about your relationship to cult brands or culty celebrity wellness brands? Sure. So I'm Dr. Mera Einstein. As I like to say online, I'm a former TV and advertising executive turned marketing critic. Now that's very big, so we can pull that out a little bit. I started my career working in advertising agencies, and I worked at MTV and NBC within marketing capacities. And then I realized that

wasn't really a good thing to be doing. My job was to get people to watch more television, And that really wasn't the best use of my time on the planet. So I went back to school and got a PhD in something called Media Ecology, which is studying the impact of media technologies into society. So looking at media as an ecosystem, right? And so then as part of my PhD program, what I was always interested in was looking at the connection between marketing and religion. And so I've been doing that for 30 years.

And most recently, that has, because of digital technology, pivoted to the study of cults. And so that led to my most recent book, which is called Hoodwig, how marketers use the same tactics as cults. And I'm sure we'll parse out some of that. But particularly as it relates to celebrity wellness, I do, of course, talk about Quineath Paltrow in the book, because how could you not?

And, you know, one of the things in terms of her, which I think is more so than some of the other celebrity brands will talk about, is that she's all about, like, high-price. stuff. I mean, I don't think you can get a t-shirt for less than $100 on there. And so from a marketing perspective, we know that people automatically think that something that is of higher price obviously is better, you know, no matter whose name is connected to it. And of course, with her, it could be a t-shirt, but it could also be some kind of wellness thing. It could also be like a $15,000 brooch or something. And so you start to blur these lines between, yeah, I could buy a

celebrity t-shirt, but do I really want to be buying some kind of wellness thing for? from Gwyneth Paltrow, who really doesn't have any sort of expertise in that area. And I also write a lot about MLMs. I talk a lot about MLMs, which is also how I sort of got into this. I was watching The Vow at the same time I was watching Lula Rich, and I was watching them side by side. And I'm going, oh, my God, they're the same thing. MLMs are a cult. And of course, I find out I wasn't the only one to figure that out.

But it gets you into looking at some of these people. So I started looking at Jesse Lee Ward and Bell Gibson and then Jessica Ainskov. So she's the one that Bell Gibson wanted to be like. These people had cancer or claimed to have cancer, right? And it's one thing if you decide for yourself that you don't want to go the traditional chemotherapy route. But it's another thing when you tell your followers, your hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, this is what I'm doing every day and therefore you should do it. Because people are looking up to you.

People already have put you into this wanted position, and so they think you maybe know about everything, and you don't. And then, of course, you get into the Kardashians, who I hate to talk about, but sometimes you can't avoid it. And particularly, I was looking at them recently because somebody had told me about their GLP1 reset supplement, which has no GLP1s in it. has really nothing to do with GLP ones is very deceptive in terms of what it's trying to do and what it's trying to sell. And actually, you know, it's not the first time the Kardashians have been sued for being misleading in terms of what it is that they're selling. And so particularly with them, I get concerned about young people looking up to them and thinking that their lifestyle and what they're selling is something that they should be like. But part of the reason why I've been looking at them more

recently is I'm working on a new book about weight loss and fitness industry, which of course gets into all of the wellness stuff, right? And so then you have something like Serena Williams pitching for Roe. And her whole ad was all about suggesting to people that you don't have to be embarrassed about using GLP ones and that it's not just an easy thing to do and you're not selling out and all of that sort of thing. And look, we can have a whole conversation about GLP. LP-1s and OZMPIC and all of that. But the issue is it's fine for people who really need it for health purposes. But we're striving to hear now as more and more people using it in the middle of the week

to lose a couple of pounds for the weekend. That's not how these products are supposed to be used. But when you get a celebrity saying, I'm using it, it's okay, not talking about the fact that her husband has a stake in the company and therefore she's making. making money by the fact that she's promoting it, that gets to be an issue. And so then just sort of the last part of this is, you know, how are we defining celebrity wellness brands, right? Because this could get into a whole lot of different areas. So, you know, like when I was thinking about this, I mean, it could be something as kind of out there as Teal Swan because

she's a celebrity and she is suggesting a certain kind of not appropriate, but a certain kind of mental health practice in order to be able to get well to rare beauty, which is kind of innocuous, but also has a skincare line. And so is that wellness. So I think there's also like a whole conversation to be had about that too. Oh, for sure. And that, that was actually going to be one of my first questions for you, just because this is such a slippery topic. There is so much there you said that speaks so much of my language. I wrote some of my undergraduate thesis. Well, my thesis was on MLMs, but my intro was about Jesse Lee Ward and her experiences with Proveit and all of that. Jesse Lee Ward, for those who were unaware, was a former member of the MLM, Proveit, who worked her way up to the corporate side, eventually becoming, I want to say, the VP or something like that.

She held some very big title. And in 2023, she passed away from stage four colon cancer after rejecting chemotherapy and instead attempting to treat it through her ketone drinks that she sold. through Probit, which obviously did not work. And yet, in researching for this episode, she, as part of the Celebrity Wellness Brand Continuum, it did not even clock to me that that would be included in this conversation until you just said that. And it's really opening it up in a lot of different directions for me, because I feel like you can come at it from the angle of celebrities that are moving into the wellness space. And then you have people that kind of start in the wellness space, like deify themselves through that space. So I suppose I'm wondering if you

could kind of build out as you see it, the spectrum or a continuum of celebrity wellness brands from like REM to Teal Swan to Wondermind. If there's a way that you're situating all of these, what do you think is characterizing each stage of cultishness for a celebrity wellness brand? When I was thinking about this, I was thinking about it in the book I create this thing called the cult marketing continuum. And it goes from brand cults to influencers who I call cult light to influencers as conspiracy theorists to multi-level marketing. And you can kind of, that framework within celebrity wellness brands because you have celebrity wellness brands that are brand cults, things like rare beauty, things like road, things like REM, which are pretty innocuous.

They're really not going to hurt anybody, but the people who are very committed to those brands. Then you have the influencers who are celebrities, again, who have their followings. People have parisocial relationships with them. And so therefore are going to buy what they have to sell. Then you get to the ones that are the conspiracy theorists. In that, I was starting to think about trad wives, right? Because trad wives are really selling a kind of wellness. They're selling a kind of back to the land. And when I was thinking about it initially,

I was thinking more in terms of conspiratuality, you know, particularly during COVID when we had a lot of the Maha stuff starting to appear. But if you're thinking about it in terms of celebrity wellness, I mean, you can't think about Neilman without a, you know, ballerina farm without thinking about the fact that she's trying to sell a back to the land kind of wellness for people, which is really tied into politics, is really tied into a lifestyle that most people can't afford if they don't have a millionaire husband supporting that, right?

And then it gets into multi-level marketing, which is still very tied to wellness, because a lot of that is weight loss products, a lot of that is supplements, right, and all of those kinds of things. And even, you know, you might say, sense, you know, essences, right? Those kinds of things are also in the wellness category. And while we might not think, oh, Selena Gomez isn't selling MLMs, there's so much celebrity connected to that, you know, Tony Robbins, for goodness sake. Yeah. Part of me feels like there are so many different cults that we've covered on the show that I feel like fall under the wellness beauty space. It is just such a hot spot. And I think more and more, It's because those spaces are becoming one and the same.

They're coalescing. One of the ones that is really making me crazy. And maybe it's because I'm probably older than a lot of your listeners is the menopause space. All of a sudden, it's like all of these celebrities have discovered menopause. Like it never happened before. It's like, no, women have been going through this forever. Thank you very much. And no, just because you're a celebrity doesn't mean you suddenly have the answer to

to what our issues are. No, no, no, no. Yeah. I think there's a different conversation. happening around women aging now, which I think also plays into the GLP one of it all, which is a topic that we are going, it's getting its own dedicated episodes soon enough. But yeah, I think every time women are allowed to exist from a new angle or a little bit more, it's, okay, here comes all the different ways we can market towards that angle and around it every time. And that's where all the cults

bring the claws out. So if you had to call out like one cultiest thing uniting all of these different kind of vectors of celebrity wellness cults, what would you name that thing? What I think it is, is it has to do with conflating the brand with the celebrity. So it's not that you're buying the brand. You're buying the brand by the celebrity because you want to somehow be connected to them. And this ties in fundamentally to how all brands work, right? Because what a brand is is an image or logo. And in the case of celebrity brands, oftentimes it's the celebrity that is the logo.

And then some kind of tagline if they have it. and then the mythology. And so what marketers know is that you're not buying the product. You're not buying this palette of makeup. You're buying the story behind that. And so if there's a celebrity behind it and the celebrity has a really interesting story, then you can begin to see where people are connecting to that. And then it becomes harder to separate yourself from the brand because you've made the connection

to the celebrity. And a great way to think about this is if somebody joins a church, right? If somebody joins a megachurch, you go into the megachurch, and the first thing they want to do is surround you. They want to love Bamiu, right? Just like Cults do it, make you feel really comfortable. And the reason why Megachurch do that is they have constant churn. There are people coming in the front door, but they have a lot of people going out the back door. So they have to get more people coming in all the time.

So they're going to surround you and make you feel like you are part of the group. And then if you stay for any period of time, I realize, you know what, maybe this is not the place for me. It's harder to leave because you're not disconnecting from the church. You're disconnecting from all the relationships you have made in the church. So the same thing begins to be true of brands and brand cults because brand cult came out of what we know is brand communities. And brand communities were started specifically in digital spaces in the early 2000s. And so some of those were facilitated by marketers, but some of them were created by people who seriously liked a brand.

So it might be Apple, it might be Oprah, it might be Harley Davidson. And then by 2005, they became brand cults. So when you decide that you no longer want to be part of the brand cult, again, like the church, you're not just leaving the church. You're not just leaving the brand. You're leaving everything else that you got from that brand, including relationships. Such a brilliant way of putting it. I think that they've really cracked the code too.

We can just kind of cut out the middleman of having any kind of reason to create the product beyond there being a celebrity behind it. Particularly as it pertains to the Kardashians, I'm thinking about when I was younger and more impressionable than I am now. I remember it was Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian doing like the skinny tea advertisements. And that was kind of the era of the endorsement, which I feel like was the first wave of this. And from endorsements, these celebrities have realized like, well, I can make all of the money from being the influencer of the product. and from being the person who's actually producing, making, and just putting my face in the label from the get-go. Which is really interesting, because if you think about it, what did celebrities put their name on? Because it used to be considered gauche.

Like cereal. It was like kind of cheesy, yeah. Right. I mean, yeah, maybe if you won the Olympics, right, you would get your face on a weaie's box or something, right? But, you know, maybe perfume. But that was really it, right? Elizabeth Taylor made a perfume. And that was very upscale and it was a lot of money and all of that. that kind of stuff. But it added to her cachet. But now it's like celebrities will slap their name on just about anything. And when we talk about celebrities connecting themselves to brand, we talk about it in terms of what's known as borrowed interest. And when we talk about borrowed interest, what we mean by that is that the brand in it of itself is not interesting

enough for people to want to connect to it. So if you bring in a celebrity, then all of a sudden the celebrity brings the attention to the brand. But what's really interesting, and this is exactly what you're saying, when the celebrity connects themselves to the brand, because all of a sudden they realize, why should they be making money from this? Let me make the money from it. Because they're not stupid on their part. It's really pretty smart on their part. But it becomes a different relationship between the brand and the consumer when you start to conflate who the celebrity is and what they're selling. And I would say it in the same way in terms of if you think about brands connecting themselves to, you.

to a cause, right? Because we see a lot of brands connecting themselves to causes, rare beauty connecting themselves to mental health, right? Great example. But they're not the only one was. Almost every brand does it. Part of the reason why they do it is that we use brands to create our identities. And so we want the brands that we use to align with our value system. So then we'll wear Fenty or we'll use rare beauty or all of that kind of stuff. And those things are fine and those brands are committed to those causes in that way. But what you want to really be aware of as a company is the value you're supporting, better align with who the company is. So like when people in June, all of a sudden are waving pride flags and never had anything to do with the LGBTQ community,

the rest of the year, that is disingenuous at best. I think the same thing is true when you talk about celebrity wellness brands. It's one thing to be Selena Gomez and talk about mental health and really have a commitment and the brand is small enough and she started it to be able to do that. It's something completely different to suddenly say that we're the Kardashians and we know about supplements and we know about makeup and we know about skims and we know like how many things can you be that well versed in? Right. Right. I think they've kind of just positioned themselves as like the lifestyle experts and thus everything falls into that bucket. And I think they might see themselves as the leader of this cult overall.

But if there is one central leader of the Celebrity Wellness Brand cult, do you think there is one or do you think each celebrity kind of operates independently? I think it's separate. And that just goes down to basic capitalism, right? Is we want to grab as much money as we can for ourselves, whether it's ultimately going to be used for good or not. You know, I don't see that there's anyone running this particular show. Certainly the Kardashians have their fingers into a lot of things.

things, but I think they have the benefit of having had the show. They have the benefit of there being 12 of them or however many of them there are. But no, I don't think there's any one person there. I think they do. It's just a side point, but I think they do a really interesting Gwynethy thing, too, where they kind of reject or accept wellness to the degree that it suits them when it suits them. Like they can live the clean girl lifestyle and do the healthy thing, or they can promote doing whatever you want. And either way, it's still chic because they're Kardashians. Yeah. Do you have an example of when they haven't been healthy and they put that out into the world? I think like in retrospective speaking, I'm thinking about Kylie opening up about her usage of fillers and stuff in the past and just kind of like the doctoring of your body and kind of putting that appearance forth when you want to.

And then now she's kind of stepping away from it in recent years. But I think they're as much victims of this system. Maybe not as much. But I think they're also victims of systems that they are perpetrators of. So I don't want to dawdle too much on them. One thing, though, I will say about that is when you think about Chris Jenner right now and the whole issue with her facelift and one second she's complaining about it and next second she's suggesting that it's like she didn't do anything and it's all natural and all of that kind of thing. I think there's also something in terms of wellness and the whole idea of plastic surgery and how that's become much more normalized than it ever was before.

What I would keep an eye out for is more and more celebrities suggest, if they're not on GLP ones, the older ones suggesting that plastic surgery is something that they will put their name in their face on. I'm just going to throw that out there as a possibility. I could be proof wrong, but I'm going to toss that out there. I don't think you will be. I don't think it will be. Okay. In Hoodwing, do you say, quote, research from Variety found that teens were more connected to influencers than to celebrities because the influencers weren't being managed by a public relations machine, end quote. In what ways have you found that celebrity wellness brands circumvent this gap and trust.

The way we think about celebrities now is very different than the way we thought about celebrities 50, 60, 70 years ago. When we used to think about celebrities, and this comes out of the old Hollywood studio system, is we didn't know that much about them a little bit, right? They told them a little bit so we could feel like we knew who they were. But they used to have those big movie openings and people would line up outside the theaters in L.A. and the celebrities would come down the red carpet. But we never thought we were going to be like them.

We never thought we could connect to them. Now, that's very different than having somebody in your hand that you can look at, right? And it's this connection, this feeling like you can talk to them, and that they're talking to you changes the way that we think about our relationship to celebrity. And so if somebody has any kind of social media presence, and they all do, we are connected to them in a very different way. And so that, in a sense, allows them to circumvent this need to be somehow distant and separate. It also, to a certain extent, though if people think about it for more than a nanosecond,

realize that people have a PR team behind them. Though most tend to think, and particularly young people, don't think about it that way, just because they haven't lived life enough to know that people have assistance when they do this kind of thing. And so it allows it to appear more natural. The other thing is, too, I mean, this relates to how we relate to each other online, too. We forget how performative the online spaces are. And so we're not seeing people having a fight with their significant other. We're seeing people present themselves on their very best day in the very best way that they possibly can.

So we never see the Kardashians like the laundry all over their house or, you know, or whoever it is, right? Ariana Grande having to clean up her kitchen or whatever. No. Well, I mean, the internet has created a lot of opportunities for parasyciality where there is both that distance because their persona online is so contrived. And yet what they are feeding you oftentimes is day in the life vlogs and content that is curated to look very hyper personal because that is our behavior online as digital natives. We treat the digital space as a very hyperpersonal space. It's where we feel comfortable. And I think that by both holding themselves as something that's like unattainable to us, but also they're our friends and they're just in our social space and they're right

where we are. It's a really, really tricky space for marketing and advertising as a whole. Because it's about saying, yeah, I'm just like you. And what's really interesting when we're getting to this conversation made me think, this is exactly what the Mormon church does. And what they did in they had a marketing campaign called I'm a Mormon. And it, came out around the time of Mitt Romney. Do you remember this? I do vaguely, yes. And so what they did in that campaign was they created a whole bunch of videos and tons and tons of them of people who were just a little bit special, but not so special as to feel like they were out of reach.

So it was like the longboard surfing champion from Hawaii. But then you saw her, you know, shoving her surfboard and her in the back of her car and, you know, hugging her dead and all. of that kind of stuff. But what that campaign was all about was to get you to their website so that you could then engage, and they had drop-down menus, so you could find somebody who was just like you. So I could find a woman who's in her 60s, who was Jewish, who converted to Mormonism, and then talk to them, and then they could bring me out and board. So, you know, it's the same sort of thing that happens in these online spaces in terms of social media. It's like, I'm a little bit different from you, but I'm just. like you. I'm just like you. I'm still available to you to project all of your hopes and desires onto and to give me money. And in this case, in the cult of the celebrity wellness brand, not even so that way you make any kind of significant lifestyle change or attain any kind of thing that I have, but so you can put my lip gloss in your phone case and use it as an advertisement for my brand. That phone case, I think, is a masterclass in marketing, by the way.

Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced Ellie Me products for always 375 and get life brand pure vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each at real Canadian superstore when you're ready we're ready with a whole world and more hey I'm Ike barrenholz on my new show funny you ask trivia starts the conversation and then things immediately go off the rails I ask a question my guests think they know the answer sometimes they do more often they do not and then the conversation takes a turn One trivia question turns into stories about career highs, painful bombs, and behind-the-scenes moments that probably should have remained private. You'll hear confidence, misplaced confidence, bold guesses, wrong answers, quick laughs, and the slow realization that maybe this was a bad idea to say out loud.

If you like smart comedy, sharp conversations, and trivia that exists purely to melt people's brains, this is Funny You Ask with me, Ike Barrenholz. Follow Funny You Ask with Ike Barronholds on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So what are some ritualistic behaviors that you notice amongst followers of cult brands generally? And I'm wondering if any cult brand behaviors in either the wellness or beauty space overlap to you. Well, I mean, if we're talking about cults and we're talking about cult brands, I mean, one of the things that cult brands do well, at least like from a marketing standpoint, is creating community. What they want to do is make you feel like you are part of the group.

And this is what we talked about before. So they do that specifically because they want to make it so it's hard for you to ever leave. And a great example of this is something like the Nike Run Club. That's a wellness brand. Come to think about it, not celebrity necessarily, but a wellness brand, right? What the Nike Run Club does is it gives you different trainings to do so you constantly come back. And there's leaderboards in there and all of that stuff allows you to connect with other people, which is also really interesting on why the ad that they posted at the Boston Marathon

that said runners welcome walkers tolerated, you know, why that particular ad was so offensive to people because it is about being inclusive. Their whole brand is supposed to be about being inclusive. So that's one of the things that brands are going to do. The other thing that cult brands do is they teach others, and this connects to the community part, but it's different. They teach others how to use the brand that. the right way. And so you see this a lot in a great example of this is Apple, right? Apple forums. So if somebody doesn't know the right way to use it, there's all kinds of people there that are going to run in and tell you how to do that. I mean, that's what Get Ready With

Me videos are or makeup tutorials are. That's exactly what those are. Those are teaching people how to become part of the community. The rituals, and I'm not sure that I can think of any off the top of my head in terms of wellness stuff, but there are things like, you know, You know, Subaru brands, you know, people honk at each other if they're driving by another Subaru driver and things like that. So there are rituals that brand owners have if they are really committed to a brand. For sure. Yeah, I think just the internet trends is really the biggest one that piques my interest here in terms of how trends can intersect with ritual because at a certain point, using the correct face mask from Goop becomes part of your Sunday reset, which you do

every Sunday, which you put on your Instagram. And there becomes a devotion to the brand. And that kind of way. I think just all the little ways in which the brands kind of work themselves into your daily life. One of the things that's really interesting that you said is I was just trying to buy a new toiletry case to bring on a flight. Now, traditionally, these have been very flat and you just throw in your bandits and all those kind of stuff. They're all now these really big cases with a bunch of bottles in them. And I was talking to my daughters like, is everybody's facial, ritual, like 12 bottles long? She's like, yes. I don't know. I don't Really? Everyone is going to carry all that stuff every time the travel. She's just like, yeah, they are.

I've never even thought about like the larger cult of just beauty and cosmetics. Like, yeah, buying the 12 bottles, like, well, I guess I need 12 products to fill these 12 bottles if I didn't have them before. And to kind of on that note, what are some of the varying entry and exit costs to being involved with some of these celebrity wellness brands? Obviously not a lot of them are going to be as worst case scenarios, things like Selena Gomez's Wonderbind. But, you know, more mundane losses, one experience. as a result of either involving oneself or leaving. Well, when we talk about any kind of cult, first and foremost, what they're looking to do is find vulnerable people. And this is a very essence of marketing. This is what marketers are always trying to do. It's trying to find your vulnerability so that they can push on that pain point and bring you in so you will buy. The basis of marketing is to tell you that there is something wrong with you so that you will need to go out and buy their product and therefore make yourself better.

Why didn't you want to do that for the rest of your? life. I don't get it. Well, that's what was really funny is when I was writing the book. I didn't tell people what the subtitle was. And I was interviewing a lot of marketers. And so when I said that on the subtitle of the book is how marketers use the same tactics as cults. And I got two responses. One was, yeah, of course. That's what we do. And the other response was, yeah, that's what we do. Oh, no. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, so some people have over time contacted me and said, you know, How do I get out of this? You got out.

How do I get out? Because marketing can be a cult, too. I mean, you get into that head of, you know, my old boss used to say to me when I worked on Miller beer, our job is to get people to drink so much beer. Their livers will burst. That's the job. You have to be able to push a product that hard. That's cultish.

Noble cause. Yeah, that's really cultish. So underlying all these brands is that you are not okay. And so if you think that you're not okay, then you're going to look for somebody who's going to tell you you are okay. So whether that's a celebrity wellness brand or Apple or any of the other cult condoference, Trader Joe's Dollar Shave Club, you need, a gazillion of them, it's that those brands are going to fill a void for you. And some of them are legitimate things that you need and you'll use and all of that's great. But even something like Trader Joe's, they're going to manipulate you so you keep coming back. So they use scarcity marketing like nobody else, right?

And think about those little Trader Joe's bags that people will get online at 4 o'clock in the morning to buy. There's a counterfeit store, two doors down for me, that sells fake Fridge Trader Joe's bags. I kid you not. Which is absolutely crazy. And there's no reason, but that's really cult behavior, right? And so if you get that wrapped up into a celebrity cult brand, a celebrity wellness kind of brand, and you find, I don't know, maybe you use it and find out it doesn't work for you, or maybe you find out it's way too expensive because it has their name on it. Or maybe you find out it's the same thing that's made by a discount brand that they just slap their name on.

You know, there may be a feeling of, which happens all the time with cults when you leave, this feeling of disappointment, this feeling of disappointment, this feeling. of having been taken, this feeling of how stupid could I have been, feeling of shame. But it's a waking up process. It's a realizing that you don't need to spend $100 on a face screen that some celebrity threw their name on, who has absolutely no expertise in that area to begin with. Yeah, I do. I think it's so nefarious because when you realize a product doesn't work for you in this case, when really what it is is just this celebrity didn't sell you the right thing that worked for you. But you're seeing it as like, I'm not succeeding at wellness because I can't equate myself with this celebrity that has all of these resources that I don't have, all of this money. Like, obviously their own skincare product is not the only thing that they're using.

But by aligning themselves with this brand, you're failing on two fronts. You're failing out aligning yourself with the celebrity that you thought you identified with. And you're failing to better yourself or become well. Yeah, I mean, and that's something we haven't really dug into. and we don't need to dig into it a lot, but just thinking in terms of who are the specific audiences that these wellness influencers are going after. So it's one thing when you're targeting young people. And when we're talking about young people now, we're talking about makeup companies targeting eight-year-olds. Shea Mitchell's brand for children, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. There's no reason for that. And we had the whole drunk elephant thing at Sephora and specifically targeting girls. They're not targeting boys. Why, is boy skin okay at that age, but somehow girls skin has a problem? I mean, that's nuts. Yeah, and I hate that it gets spun as like an enjoyment thing, and it's well because girls, like, it's for them, it's like, it's playtime

and they like doing this and they're more inclined to do these things. So why is it being sold in Sephora and why is it like an actual product and why is it not a toy? And also, why is that the kind of play that they're being drawn towards what's being shown to them? You know, like we can think a little bit harder about that, I think. Yes, absolutely. And again, what we're talking about before in terms of, look, what marketers will always do,

if they see their sales start to go flat, they will start to look at other markets in order to be able to grow their sales. And so if the main target of women 18 to 45 is not buying their product, they're going to go older, so they're going to go after the menopausal women. They're going to go younger where they go after the kids. And then when that doesn't work anymore, then they're going to start going after men. But they won't go after them. They got a long way to go.

Yeah. That is kind of funny. I'm thinking about how all these cults connect. I'm wondering if it's like, well, all of the people in the middle are preoccupied by GLP1. So I guess all of our skin care will have to go to the children now. Dostopian to think about. And following up on what you said about who is being marketed to here, do you think there is an us and a them in this cult? Yes.

Because it's so funny because you ended on GOP. ones. I mean, there's something about being in that space. And it's not just GLP ones. It's all of this stuff. What a cult always wants to do is suggest that they have some kind of insider information that other people don't have. And that's one of the things that marketers also do. And this actually ties to targeting. If you ever sit around with somebody else who's not part of the same demographic that you are, and they watch an ad, and they look at it and they go, I don't get it. Well, it's not supposed to talk to you. It's only supposed to talk to the people who are part of the group, who are part of the cult, who will understand what we're talking about. So this sense of having

insider information is very much a creation of us versus them. That's what targeting is. It's really funny because when I ask my students, it's like, if you have a target audience, do you care about people who aren't in your target? And most of the time, they'll say yes. And I'm like, no, this is the whole point. You don't care. You do not care. Now, are some people going to aspire up, and some people are going to aspire down, of course. And if you get them along the way, fine. But you have to target your message in a very specific way to get the people that you want to be part of your in-group to want you.

If you get other people along the way, that's great. But no. You start specific and you work out from there. It's like acting. You work your typecast. One of my favorite quotes from Hoodwink is, our interactions with brands are not about physical products. They are about what we think and feel about the products beyond their physical attributes.

They are about what hopes and dreams and voids we want products to fulfill. So following that, what do you think the central dogma that celebrity wellness brands are selling you on is? What a void do you think is being filled? Wanting to feel special. They are making you feel like you are better than somebody else, that you know something, that somebody else doesn't know, that you have found the silver bullet. I think it really is that simple sometimes.

I think we look for something, for some complex reasoning. And I do think like everybody, everybody just wants to feel special. Yeah. And because there's so few places where this happens, you know, I hate to bring up AI, but it's really fighting back against that, I think is so important right now because what it is doing is turning everything into milk toast. And it fights against everything that we want to be. And what we want to be is special.

What we want to be is heard. What we want to be is distinct. Now, it's bad enough that the consumer marketplace is trying to fill that void, but it gets even worse if AI is trying to do it. Celebrity, anybody. Yeah. Okay. So, hard part is over.

Now it's time to play a game. Oh, okay. It's called culty quotes. I am going to read you a quote, and you are going to tell me if it is from a famous cult leader or a celebrity wellness brand CEO. Okay, go for it. If I'm going to be known for anything, I hope it's simply for the way I care about people.

Wellness influencer. Correct. That's Selena Gomez. Okay. People in this country have gone to great deaths to make everything change but themselves. They will suck their fat out with lepectomies. They will take pills that make their hearts raised. They will make airplanes change the seat sizes. You have whole industries creating diet food.

But my message is drawing people back in to examine themselves. I would say cult leader. Bonus points for which one? Do you have a guess? I was going to say Mel Robbins. It's Gwen Shamblin, Lara. She's a fascinating rabbit hole if you have not fallen down. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes, yes.

The OGGLB1 influencer. Yes, yes. Sorry. Weird that she died. Yeah, no. That's so funny that I didn't get that. I started looking at religious weight loss programs 15 years ago. And so much has happened to her since then.

But yeah, for sure. My life is good because I am not passive about it. I invest in what is real, like real people, to do real things for the real me. Oh, that's got to be a celebrity wellness influencer. That's Gwyneth, baby. I thought that was too good. Like, that's such a Gwyneth quote. Yeah, yeah.

Well, because you can also tell the difference when it's a little bit softer when it's a wellness influencer versus a cult leader who's going to slap you in the head and tell you there's something wrong with you. Yeah, there's still a little bit of an aspect of I need to do. like me. Absolutely. Right, exactly. This one's a little vaguer. What is not integrated is exaggerated. Hmm, I'll go with cult later. Correct. That's Nicole Deidone, leader of one taste. Last one, I think that God kind of put me in the place in my life to not be quiet about it, but to reach out and inspire people. I'm going to say cult, but it really could go either way. Right? This one's so vague. That is

Haley Bieber. Right. And I think it's the God bit of that that really gives it away as Haley Bieber. Yeah. It's very grandiose of her. Well, I was looking at the website because they talk about the road as having a philosophy and that what they do is an intention. That's all very religious kind of language. Yeah, very, very fundy. That's very Haley. All righty. Well, Dr. Einstein, thank you so much for joining us. If our listeners want to follow you and your cult, how can they do so? Oh, I'm Dr. Mara Einstein, D.R. Mera Einstein, across social media. My website's Dr. MeraEinstein.com. And you can find my books, my podcasts, all my writings, all there. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.

So, friends, out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, or get the fuck out. What do we think? A cult of Celebrity Wellness Brands falls. into. I want you want to leave your answers in the comments. I am having some trouble with this one because I think at their worst, they can be very dangerous. I think someone who sings you pretty songs or influences how your Instagram photos should look should not be the same person you turn to for mental or physical health advice. So the celebrity wellness brands that are concerned with that, like the wonder minds, the goops, even the lemmys kind of concern me. However, I do think that like the biggest danger for most consumers here for most people interacting with these cults is wasting

their money, which like most consumer cults, well obviously very dangerous and very pervasive, is ultimately something that I do think is more insular and more solvable, i.e. a little less cultish because you can unfollow Haley Bieber, delete TikTok, you know, they're not offering you things that you actually need to live. They're more nice to haves. And I mean, it depends how much you idolize a celebrity, and at which point their like-to-haves become you need-to-havs. But I think by and large, for most people, these are Live Your Life cults. I think that that is changing, and I think that celebrity brands generally are becoming more and more of Watch Your Backs over time.

Like I've been mentioning, I'm keeping eyes on you, Haley Bieber. But yeah, overall, I think this is a Live Your Life Cult. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below. And anywho, that is our show. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to stick around for a new episode next week. In the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty. Sounds like a cult was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Podcaven.

This episode was hosted by Reese Oliver. This episode was produced by Reese Oliver. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Oversinking, notes on

modern irrationality, and word slut, a feminist guide to taking back the English language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult pod or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad-free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult.