transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, Editor-in-Chief of Eater. We've just launched the newish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City, and save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors and book right in the app. Download the Eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users.

Speaker 2:
[00:38] Burnout at work is a tale as old as time, but a new generation may have found the fix.

Speaker 3:
[00:46] We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would have prevented all of us from burning out in the first place.

Speaker 2:
[00:59] How to win the battle against burnout. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4:
[01:17] Good Noticings, Ashley.

Speaker 5:
[01:18] Good Noticings to you, Claire. This is Good Noticings.

Speaker 4:
[01:24] Hello, Ashley.

Speaker 5:
[01:25] Hello, Claire, how are you?

Speaker 4:
[01:27] You guys, I'll just take you behind the surface of what's happening. I'll take you to where the bacon is underneath the band-aid. I'll take you to the red hot blood of how sausage gets cooked. Ashley and I did just record 20 minutes of this podcast, and it was phenomenal. Ashley then did say that she was not recording. So we're experiencing a minor setback. We're reliving the past, a little bit Minority Report style. We've seen it once. We are doing our best because once again, we're across the world.

Speaker 5:
[01:57] Can I say, it's just really hard when we're not in the same place, because I feel that we are one brain with four legs, and when half my brain is overseas, I did forget my laptop. I did forget to record the first chunk of this podcast. I feel like things are emotionally teetering, but intellectually thriving. We have a really great episode ahead.

Speaker 4:
[02:22] No, and I have to tell you guys, we have so many great topics, and I am working on about three hours of sleep from the last four straight nights, so I'm feeling delusional, I'm feeling insane, and I have to say, that's exactly where you want me. I just say, Rachel said it was so right when she was like, it's actually really hard to make a podcast, and nobody talks about it.

Speaker 5:
[02:41] Okay, we talk about it all the time. I guess that's kind of mostly us, we're the only ones out here saying that it's hard.

Speaker 4:
[02:49] Well, one of my things about how it's so hard to print stuff, and actually it should be, because when you think about what we're doing, I'm like, you're taking the imaginary and making it corporal. I remember in college, the hardest part of college for me was printing things out, and I would just be like, well, of course, Claire, you're inventing something out of nothing and you're touching it, and you're giving it to somebody concretely. Of course, it should be difficult. You've ejected from the mind into the hand, and that's how I feel about podcasting. I'm like, well, when you think about what you're watching right now, we've got two girls across the planet from one another shouting about important stuff like, Emma Grede, and the fact that you can watch it wherever you sit and have the exact experience that we're having, yeah, that should be tough. That should be tough to do, and it is.

Speaker 5:
[03:30] Whenever they say they should make it harder to get podcasting equipment, I want to be like, okay, well, we're actually working so hard. How much harder could you make it?

Speaker 4:
[03:39] It's easy to get the equipment. It's actually quite hard to set up the equipment and find the lighting and then touch all the buttons correctly in order. I actually had something very fun happen to me. I have all my podcasting equipment with me right now, including the camera and the Zoom recorder. When it went through the security at the airport, we had a good laugh. I mean, the security guard, because they took it out and went through it, and they were like, are you an influencer? I was like, no, I'm a podcaster. I go, is that legal in this country? They go, it is, but I wish it wasn't. And I said, you and me both. Anyway, Ashley, do you have any announcements for the people?

Speaker 5:
[04:13] Yes, I have an announcement. We are going to be coming to Boston for the next edition of our book club. Date and exact location, TBD, but we are going to be reading Kin by Ta'ari Jones, and I'm really excited about it. So pick up a copy, and we are gonna be chatting about it on the Patreon. We are going to be posting the eventual live book club meeting also to the Patreon.

Speaker 4:
[04:36] We will also have discussion sections where we like to do it about a third, and a third, and a third through the book. So you can have conversations with other people with no spoilers, and talk about where you think it's going, how you think it's been. It's really great. I have to say, a worm from our community really bailed me out of a pickle this week, and so I'm so pro worm. If you haven't gotten to know the worms yet, get on it, you're making a mistake.

Speaker 5:
[04:56] Yeah, join the book club.

Speaker 4:
[04:57] We also have a kind of crazy Patreon coming up this week, because I've been flying so much, I had an opportunity to finally read Lisa Rinna's book Against My Will. I will be talking about that memoir. We will be talking about the Sierra Cover story written by Hunter Harris, who's one of my favorite online people. What else are we gonna be talking about?

Speaker 5:
[05:12] Also Lauren Sanchez Bezos and the Bezos Met Gala. She had a recent piece in the New York Times Style section that I think is, it's gonna be interesting to take a little peek at, and then a lot of people are, I don't know if a lot of people are boycotting the Met Gala, but a lot of people are saying that people should boycott the Met Gala. And Zoran Mondani, did you see the rat stoppage that he's up to? I mean, the man is on top of the world, on top of my world.

Speaker 4:
[05:38] Well, can I say, I give nobody rat credit till the rats secede.

Speaker 5:
[05:42] Yeah, but I think in terms of making steps towards trash credits, he's doing incredible work. And maybe the rats will find something else to sustain themselves on. Maybe they'll become termites and eat our houses. Yay.

Speaker 4:
[05:53] I'm not even anti-rat. I saw a cute one recently. I thought it was a little baby mouse. It was a baby rat and I thought, that's sweet.

Speaker 5:
[06:00] Claire, do you have any recommendations?

Speaker 4:
[06:02] Can I say, it's been a tough week. My recommendations, I guess, are one, call your grandma, two, get travelers insurance, but also maybe not. I don't know. I'll let you know if they help us out ultimately. And then three, skip.

Speaker 5:
[06:21] Honestly, it's good that you're not in New York this week. Summer ended and I feel like it's kind of depressing to just kind of lose that piece of myself already.

Speaker 4:
[06:29] I think we had enough summer. We got the summer we deserved, which was about three good days. What are your recommendations?

Speaker 5:
[06:35] My recommendations are, I've been going to the movies a ton. Call me Claire Parker. I've been really out in the theater watching things and thinking thoughts. And I feel like, you know, no one's ever talking about it, but the drama, I really liked it. I feel like a lot of people are talking about it. Oh, we're going to talk about that on the Patreon this week too. It's such a movie ripe for discussion.

Speaker 4:
[06:55] It's a perfect dinner and a date movie. Like go to see the movie and then go to dinner with your friend or your paramour.

Speaker 5:
[07:01] I can't believe the way I was able to avoid spoilers about it. I really recommend avoiding spoilers. We are going to talk about it this week, but it's been out for a little while. And also we include time codes on the Patreon so you can skip right past it if you haven't seen it yet and then come back to it later. But it's such an interesting movie. And that Zendaya is so pretty.

Speaker 4:
[07:19] Our producer Audrey was like, she was wearing a flannel shirt that made me go, should I buy flannel or is it just her? And then I was like, that's so interesting because when I saw it, I was like, half up, half down. Why isn't more people doing that? And I'm like, maybe they are all doing it, but it's just different when Zendaya does it.

Speaker 5:
[07:34] Yeah, everything she does is just different and just right. Even that wedding dress, I was like, I don't know, could anyone else wear that wedding dress? I'm sure millions of people have, but I've never seen a plain white dress before. People should wear white to their weddings. It looks great.

Speaker 4:
[07:48] Yeah, think about it. If I could go back in time, I would have, now that I've been influenced.

Speaker 5:
[07:53] What was my next recommendation? Oh, a perfectly ripe blackberry. I guess a perfectly ripe anything that's on this podcast. We find out foods are in season and it turns out they're so good that way. But I was in line at the blackberry store. There's this fruit stand near me, and I was buying a couple containers of blackberries because I knew I would down one container per sitting. I feel like those blackberry containers, those are not for picking two berries. You have to take them in one go. So I got a couple containers because they were on sale. This almond lady next to me goes, she also had a couple containers of blackberries, and she goes, it's the same price as a candy bar, and yet they're so much more delicious. I was like-

Speaker 4:
[08:37] Can I say there's no way you bought two boxes of blackberries for $1.69?

Speaker 5:
[08:42] No, but when she was young, candy bars were $7. So I feel like-

Speaker 4:
[08:49] She has no idea. Bananas are 10, candy is 7.

Speaker 5:
[08:53] Yeah, exactly. Times have changed, of course. Everything's gotten cheaper, but she has no idea. We had a good little laugh.

Speaker 4:
[09:03] I think it makes sense that candy bars, we get cheaper as we get better at the technology, a lot like TVs.

Speaker 5:
[09:07] Yeah, that's so true. It's interesting what gets cheaper and what doesn't. Because I'll tell you what, I broke one of our cameras last week and those things do not get cheaper.

Speaker 4:
[09:19] Digital cameras, every time I go to get one, I'm like, whoa, maybe for my 50th birthday.

Speaker 5:
[09:24] I will say, especially because we bought these cameras a couple of years ago, I thought re-buying the same lens that I bought two or three years ago, I was like, well, surely it'll be a lot cheaper this time. The way I guess they appreciate with rarity, I don't fucking know what's happened. I was like, what do you mean this old, this now like twice revised lens? There's like two new iterations of this lens and yet the old one is more expensive than last time. That's awesome. Good for the camera business for getting theirs.

Speaker 4:
[09:55] Bad for our business, I just found out.

Speaker 5:
[10:00] And then my third recommendation is, oh, there's this brand called Innisfree at Sephora.

Speaker 4:
[10:05] Sure, spell that for the team.

Speaker 5:
[10:06] I-N-N-I-S F-R-E-E.

Speaker 4:
[10:09] Of course, and is it free?

Speaker 5:
[10:10] You know, it costs money, but-

Speaker 4:
[10:13] Sure, tricky.

Speaker 5:
[10:14] Freedom from sun damage.

Speaker 4:
[10:15] What do you think Inn's are? Like, what do you think it's free of? Like, what doesn't it have that it's so proud of?

Speaker 5:
[10:20] Well, I think it's a non-U.S. brand, so I feel like I'd have to understand more about the root language, which I don't know which one that even is.

Speaker 4:
[10:31] I like to imagine that it's Cockney, and it's like, innit free?

Speaker 5:
[10:34] No, it's not, but step on it, and I'll get it anyway.

Speaker 4:
[10:39] Yeah, we're bilingual.

Speaker 5:
[10:42] Anyway, it's a really good sunscreen that I feel like it has enough heft that you're like, yeah, I'm definitely wearing sunscreen, but it's light enough that you don't feel gooped down by it, which I think is important.

Speaker 4:
[10:54] And it's SPF what? I'm under why.

Speaker 5:
[10:57] I know. I feel like sometimes I'll buy a sunscreen that's like 53 or something really random. And I'm just like, but what could that mean?

Speaker 4:
[11:07] It's very little kid who's four and a half.

Speaker 5:
[11:10] Yeah. Especially because I feel like when you talk to any skin experts, they're like, well, unless you apply one quarter per inch of arm, do you know what I mean? They're like the SPF doesn't even make sense unless you're applying it in the exact right amount anyway.

Speaker 4:
[11:25] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[11:26] Should we get into this week's topics?

Speaker 4:
[11:28] I'm so excited to talk about what we're going to talk about. We've got Emma Grede, who now that I said it out loud, has one of the craziest Dickensian names I've ever heard. We're going to talk about whether or not you should have children if you don't want to meet them. Can you be a billionaire who knows your kids? Not for women.

Speaker 5:
[11:43] We are going to talk about Geese, the Psyop turned American rock band.

Speaker 4:
[11:49] I love that Geese are a Psyop and pigeons are spies for the government. Every bird you've ever known is actually quite dangerous.

Speaker 5:
[11:55] Anyway, okay, so we're going to be talking about Geese, whether or not you actually like them or if the Internet just told you to. We are going to be talking about Kash Patel and his drunken disorderly conduct that is leading the nation. Finally, we read Lena Dunham's new memoir, Famesick.

Speaker 4:
[12:14] Before we get into it, Ashley, Lena Dunham's memoir, Yes or No?

Speaker 5:
[12:18] I guess I feel like it's so hard to say because I think so much of it depends on how you already felt about Lena Dunham. I don't know anyone reading this book who didn't already have a feeling about Lena Dunham, and I feel that it only amplified the things that I find most annoying about her. But she's a good writer, and I've always said that.

Speaker 4:
[12:36] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[12:37] She's a good writer and someone who I have grievances with. But goddamn it, after reading this book, I watched five episodes of Girls last night. That is a great, that's such a good show.

Speaker 4:
[12:50] Someone should rewatch it and do a podcast.

Speaker 5:
[12:53] That's such a good idea. I'll call my friends Amelia and Evan. I feel like they might be interested. Okay. So cash, cash money.

Speaker 4:
[13:02] What is he up to? He's having fun.

Speaker 5:
[13:04] The Atlantic was working on another multi-interview analysis of his leadership in the government, much like the New York Times piece that went viral a couple months ago. The Atlantic interviewed a ton of current and former FBI employees, only to have it perfectly buttoned up this past Friday, when Kash Patel apparently could not log in to his work computer, had a full-blown meltdown and left the office, assuming he'd been fired.

Speaker 4:
[13:35] Oh my God. He just assumed that they had kicked him out and hadn't told him.

Speaker 5:
[13:38] Yeah. It turns out it was just a technical error, or I feel like he forgot his password.

Speaker 4:
[13:45] Well, wasn't his password already hacked? Could it stand to reason that somebody went in and changed it?

Speaker 5:
[13:49] Well, I don't think his FBI, like his work password wasn't hacked, his personal Gmail was hacked.

Speaker 4:
[13:55] Okay. Does this seem like a man who has two different passwords? I wonder if they just were like trying all the different syntax, like cash money won, cash money X-Mesh mark, cash money.

Speaker 5:
[14:07] Then finally, they just tried password and they were like, we're in boys. So anyway, this past week, he thought he'd been fired and for good reason. Apparently, he's on the brink. We know he hasn't been doing a good job, but it's hard to know who agrees that has any power here, because there are people within the government that hate him. But Donald Trump most of the time quite likes him, especially because he is extremely willing to use his powers to rid the FBI of all people who ever participated in any anti-Trump activity. The people he doesn't agree with, he calls them deep state ops. He's been diligently ridding the FBI of anyone who was investigating January 6th. He's done a lot on behalf of Donald Trump, which has earned him pretty good favor within the administration. That being said, he is a big time alcoholic, it seems, which is a huge problem in his position. I think it's a big problem generally in the government, especially holding that much power. But he is someone who I guess regularly is publicly intoxicated, which is super dangerous for American safety. Within the DOJ and their mandate, they're supposed to not be visibly intoxicated, kind of ever, because it makes them targets. In James Bond movies, we're just like a sexy ladies, just have more martinis and tell me your password. It seems like that worked on the director of the FBI.

Speaker 4:
[15:40] They think recently he's given up secrets.

Speaker 5:
[15:42] Well, he does give up secrets whenever he's drunk, asked.

Speaker 4:
[15:46] That's so me.

Speaker 5:
[15:47] I mean, in the news, like when he said, we've got the Brown University shooter, like he'll say things before he's supposed to say them.

Speaker 4:
[15:54] But was that even true, or is he just lying?

Speaker 5:
[15:57] It's hard to know if he's lying or if he just likes to make statements before he has all the information.

Speaker 4:
[16:02] Can I say that it's so hard, because finally we got like a female coded FBI director, and it's like, yeah, he's manifesting. Yeah, he's emotional. I'm sorry, we can't be emotional at work anymore. We can't like hope for the best. We can't speak it into existence.

Speaker 5:
[16:16] So like it's hard to know when he's been intoxicated and just like tweeting crazy shit or when he's sober and just saying things out of pocket. But generally, he's like a deeply untrustworthy person who's like the director of the FBI.

Speaker 4:
[16:31] It sucks to hear that he's untrustworthy, because he sounds so much like me.

Speaker 5:
[16:36] But isn't that the problem?

Speaker 4:
[16:39] A relatable guy shouldn't be the head of the FBI, but you need somebody who's like, you're like a dad. He has no dad qualities.

Speaker 5:
[16:46] He has no good dad qualities. You need a buttoned up loser who loves rules. That's kind of the whole thing.

Speaker 4:
[16:56] I'm not a party boy with a pop star girlfriend. No, she's not a pop star. I tried to act like she was a hot girl, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it, even for the joke.

Speaker 5:
[17:06] I know, you bailed on it halfway through the word.

Speaker 4:
[17:09] I know, I'm just in another country, and I'm worried about what the people here will think of me.

Speaker 5:
[17:14] One thing that has happened, I guess, on several occasions is that he's gotten drunk and then passed out and become unreachable. There was a huge change in FBI scheduling at the beginning of his tenure, where most of the time meetings that were typically in the morning had to be moved to the afternoon because he just will not get there on time. They were like, okay, I guess all important FBI business has to be done after he's had his like hangover bagel.

Speaker 4:
[17:39] Okay, wait, is it so crazy that Alex Earl is like a much more disciplined and harder worker than Kash Patel and she parties just as much? Like it's possible.

Speaker 5:
[17:46] It's so possible.

Speaker 4:
[17:48] If you want like a blackout drunk party boy FBI agent, you do have to get someone recently graduated from you Miami.

Speaker 5:
[17:54] No, exactly. Therein lies the problem is that he is like a blackout drunk party boy, but he also is bad at his job and you can't be bold.

Speaker 4:
[18:03] Some people can't do it all. Alex Earl.

Speaker 5:
[18:06] Alex Earl can have it all. This is my favorite quote from the piece. On several occasions an official told me Patel's delays resulted in normally unflappable agents quote losing their shit end quote.

Speaker 4:
[18:18] Him and Lena Dunham.

Speaker 5:
[18:21] The most unflappable amongst us cannot fucking handle it. At one point there was a request from the SWAT team for breaching equipment because they couldn't reach him because he had passed out drunk behind a locked door and just like no one could get a hold of him. And right now as tensions escalate globally, people are concerned about having an unreachable FBI director.

Speaker 4:
[18:44] What can I say? It's not even preventative. I guess it is.

Speaker 5:
[18:48] It's hard to say.

Speaker 4:
[18:50] Can I say something? You can't have it both ways. You can't be like his presence is a problem. And then also when he gets so drunk, he passes out and locks himself in a room. That's a problem too. Like, which is it? Do you want him there or not?

Speaker 5:
[19:02] That's so true.

Speaker 4:
[19:04] It's very, I don't want to go, but I want to be invited.

Speaker 5:
[19:07] And like we know that when things really pop off, he will show up because he likes to be in front of the camera.

Speaker 4:
[19:12] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[19:13] How about this?

Speaker 4:
[19:14] How about if you want him there, have to do something cool and fun? Actually get Alex Earl.

Speaker 5:
[19:21] Anyways, that's what's up with Kash Patel. I hope he gets back into his passwords. I guess he, maybe write him down on a post-it note, Kashie.

Speaker 4:
[19:30] As someone who has to remake her Apple ID password every time she wants to download a movie, I get it. It's really tricky.

Speaker 6:
[19:38] In a food system this big, Feeding America races to get good food to neighbors facing hunger. That's why we work in real time, using technology to connect food to people fast. Hunger doesn't wait. Give now to help rescue good food for neighbors at feedingamerica.org/rescuefood.

Speaker 1:
[19:55] Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms, citing Psalms, the Resurrection of Jesus, and the Book of Quentin.

Speaker 7:
[20:05] And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.

Speaker 1:
[20:12] President Trump is comparing himself to Christ. Vice President Vance is fighting with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that Hegseth attends. Wilson is a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

Speaker 8:
[20:32] I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains. I see us assembling resources, and I'm encouraged in that labor. But I don't expect to see what we're praying for in my lifetime.

Speaker 1:
[20:46] Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans, on Today Explained from Vox. Weekdays, afternoons, wherever.

Speaker 5:
[20:56] So speaking of people who are good at using their computers, let's talk about Geese. Okay. So Geese is a band that became hugely popular in 2025. They've been around for a couple of years, of course.

Speaker 4:
[21:07] But I think their first album came out in 2021.

Speaker 3:
[21:10] Yes.

Speaker 5:
[21:11] But their tour last fall completely sold out, or almost completely sold out, and their album that came out in the fall of last year topped most of the year-end lists. People were obsessed with it. There were tons of articles like, Geese is saving rock and roll, like Geese is the last vestige of true rock and roll, blah, blah, blah. People were losing their minds about Geese. And because they went from a more niche indie band to the band that everyone claims is saving rock and roll, seemingly overnight, a lot of people were like, is this an industry plan? Or are they, like, what is happening here? I feel like there was some suspicion in the way they exploded.

Speaker 4:
[21:54] I also think whenever something becomes popular, there's always gonna be haters that can't just be like, I don't like them, they're not for me. They have to be like, not only do I not like them, but like morally because I'm superior, I have to find evidence to prove. And there is that thing where like, it's similar to that agoracist thing where it's like, it's not enough to just have a different opinion. You also then have to be able to like objectively just some secondary fact that isn't just taste, be able to show other people who do like this band that they're wrong.

Speaker 5:
[22:20] Exactly. Yeah, you have to be able to prove that like, not only are you right for hating them, but like the people who like them are mindless idiots who don't even know what they're like looking at. They're just liking what they're told to like.

Speaker 4:
[22:32] So Wired came out with an article called The Fanfare Around the Band Geese was Actually a Psi-Op. The Brooklyn Band Geese was labeled an industry planned by those who question it's set in ubiquity. Maybe it was. And so this article mostly cites Eliza McClam's substack, which then poked around our website after listening to a South by Southwest interview. It's one of those funny things about like, where did investigative journalism go? Eliza McClam, if you don't know, was half of Binge Topia. She is now a full time musician. She's an incredible musician. She's a great writer. And I think she's like a wonderful thinker. And she writes about a lot of topics. And she's touring. And so she obviously wrote this article. That was a lot about the types of advertising that are expected of bands today and how it goes beyond even mainstream bands. This article then kind of took what she was saying and took her information and took like a kind of malicious bent at it, which she I think has since rejected. I think she's come out and been like, by the way, that wasn't my point.

Speaker 5:
[23:32] I wasn't here to try to like, especially because multiple times in her piece, she talked about the way that like she would do it too.

Speaker 4:
[23:42] And not only that, but that she loves Geese.

Speaker 5:
[23:44] But okay, so I want to get into chaotic good projects, which is the marketing firm that is being investigated here. They are a music marketing firm that uses a strategy that I actually have a couple of friends who work in music. One of my friends works in like on the tech side at a major label. And this is like kind of their primary marketing.

Speaker 4:
[24:02] Like par for the course.

Speaker 5:
[24:03] Yeah, this is what they do now. What chaotic good projects does is they create like a network of fan accounts basically, that every time the bands they're working with like do something, they clip it to shit, are constantly pushing it out. They're making like fan cam edits using songs that they're trying to get traction on. They just like make tons and tons of videos and things using these songs, highlighting these artists, et cetera, trying to drum up excitement about them and generate awareness about them. So this is not illegal. I mean, not only is it not illegal, but it is marketing. I mean, we have experienced this in podcasting. We haven't done it yet. And I say yet, but there are marketing firms that do this with podcast clips as well. Like you just send them your podcast episode, they clip it to shit and they syndicate it across like bazillions of those.

Speaker 4:
[24:57] Can I say the way you're saying this? It has been described to me that it's like a discord channel full of teenagers. I feel like you're acting like it's like a firm of adults. Like I've been told basically you like hire some dude in the Ukraine who puts it on this discord channel he has where tons of teenagers clip up your podcast. They post it on a fan account they've created that like isn't a real account that only posts these clips of these podcasts and they get paid based on virality. And so it behooves them to like clip a million and see what goes viral. And then what happens is you, the watcher, see a clip, you're reminded of somebody you like, you see them ubiquitous. It helps make you think that they're bigger than they are. It kind of creates a watershed moment or it just like gets laughs and eyeballs. I know Caliparen does it, I know Giggly Squad does it. I mean, anytime you see a podcast clip, look at the name of the person posting if it's not that podcast specifically. And if you go to that account and they don't have other types of clips, like that is one of these clippers. And lots of people do it.

Speaker 5:
[25:56] Yeah. I mean, the only reason we haven't is just because we like haven't spent money on it yet. But it is like an incredibly, potentially valuable marketing tool that lots of podcasts use. Lots of musicians use it and like via label, a lot of labels do it for their musicians. And I think one of the most interesting pieces of the Eliza McClam analysis of this is kind of her saying that it's not that like she would want to necessarily opt in or out. But like we always talk about this, right? When you're trying to get successful in any art form or like media form. The way we started, especially if you're coming from independence, you're carrying all of your luggage on your back. Like you're just walking there carrying your luggage. And there's this hope that at some point, someone will like sign you or start working with you and start carrying stuff for you. And maybe even you get put on like a moving walkway or something. Like there are these things that you're hoping kind of like speed your process along. In her piece, she's saying, you know, this is the way of marketing now. And so to have an agency that comes in and does this for you, it's helpful and it's nice. And the thing that I find most interesting is that this obviously doesn't always work. Like there are people that you see them over and over again. You go, okay, I'm being hit over the head with this person. They don't resonate with me. I don't like them. And then you just don't go see them. Like Geese still sold out their tour last year because people wanted to go see them. And yeah, there's an agency behind them, making sure every moment is amplified as much as possible. But still the individual human beings are purchasing tickets and showing up.

Speaker 4:
[27:31] Well, it's so funny because I was thinking one of the clients of chaotic good projects is Wetleg, for example. I discovered Wetleg. I like loved the Wetleg. It was one of my favorite new bands of last year. I went to go see them live. I discovered them live initially because I saw them at Primavera. I saw them at Primavera because Ashley had heard their song on TikTok, looked them up, and added their songs to her playlist. It's just how marketing works right now. I think it's very interesting this idea of the industry plant because I think there's also a resentment, not just from artists themselves, but from the general public of this idea of like, oh, there's no more money in promoting anybody anymore. All they want to promote is the Alex Warrens. Why don't they promote the quality? Then you promote the quality and then suddenly you go, well, I guess it's not quality if it had to be promoted. The purity to which we hold anybody that's not considered absolutely mainstream is completely unfair. And it's this weird thing of like, well, do you want artists to get paid or not? Do you want musicians to make a living or not? Why do you want them to be eking by? Eliza talks about trying to break even on tour and how it's like you're in a ship full of holes and a bucket that takes out just enough water as long as you never stop hauling water out. And it is like this idea that you would suddenly what, be mad at her if somebody came in and said, hey, we're gonna put some money into helping you grow faster than you've been able to grow yourself as a solo act or solo artist is really, I think the standards we hold artists to are really unfair. People are allowed to want to be comfortable. And also if you want them to make art, then you're gonna have to say, okay, I get that you can't sleep in a van till you're 60.

Speaker 7:
[28:52] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[28:52] If you throw your back out sleeping in a van trying to go on tour, you're not gonna be able to hold your guitar and make new music.

Speaker 5:
[28:57] And exactly, I think Geese popping off using these methods shows that it is worth it for music labels to put a lot of money behind promoting, not just the most bland, commercially viable seeming artist. I think that if shown to enough people, other more unique acts will gain traction. And so you can put money into lots of other types of music. I mean, we see it with movies all the time, right? They say, go see movies in theaters because otherwise the studios will only think they can make money back from making more superhero movies. You have to show that other types of movies are of interest to people. Otherwise, they won't put any money into them and then they won't make any money. And then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The other thing that I think is interesting is like, I don't know, there are lots and lots and lots of extremely talented artists out there. It is hard to break through the noise. Like this idea that always the most talented will rise to the top is like extremely untrue. First of all, I think that there is a lot of burnout when you're doing everything yourself when you don't have an agency kind of like helping you promote and distribute and get all this shit done. I think doing it all yourself in the beginning is like a great way to get started and like strap. Yeah, I think it's like really helpful and it's good to like learn the industry and like learn what you want to do. You're not getting bogged down by like the expectations of you at first. But also, I think that doing everything yourself forever is fucking exhausting. You can't.

Speaker 4:
[30:23] It's also impossible. There's only a limit. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5:
[30:25] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[30:26] There's only so high you can go.

Speaker 5:
[30:27] This idea that like no impure forces will ever touch your faves, you're just like asking them to stay broke and struggling forever.

Speaker 4:
[30:37] I also think it's interesting the conversation around the bot culture and the fact that so much of what's happening on the Internet seems to be fake. Even if your takeaway is sincere, I think when we could think about the Chapel Rowan situation, how a lot of those conversations seem to be if not bot dominant, bot driven, the Blake Lively attack. The fact that bots can be used to attack people's personas and that we're getting closer and closer to a dead Internet theory. It brings up interesting questions about like, are your thoughts your own? If somebody suggests something to you that's an inauthentic suggestion, is your response therefore inauthentic? You know what I mean? The idea that you heard of Geese because somebody paid to promote Geese to you, does that change if you like them or not? And in the same way, like, if you thought Chapel Rowan was a bitch because you saw somebody respond to a tweet thing, well, I think she's a bitch for what her bodyguard to that kid. Sure that might impact you. I guess we're all sheep to some degrees. But it is like, I don't know, this idea of like, what are your own thoughts? Can you still come to a similar thought, even if it was a thought that was pitched to you first? It's like an interesting conversation. Yeah. About the way bots are being used for good and evil.

Speaker 5:
[31:45] Okay, so Claire, what do you know about Emma Grede?

Speaker 4:
[31:48] I know that she's super rich. I know that she works with the Kardashians. I know that she's beautiful. She like looks at, something about the Kardashians, they only work with women that look like Kardashians, right? They only have like beautiful partners.

Speaker 5:
[31:59] Yeah, cause I guess when you're beautiful, why be around un-beauty?

Speaker 4:
[32:03] I also guess it's like a shared set of values that like the discipline of beauty is just like the discipline of business.

Speaker 5:
[32:09] And many might say for women, that's true.

Speaker 4:
[32:12] I mean, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[32:13] Okay, so just really quick, a background on her. She grew up in London. She was raised not well off. She could not afford to go to university and work. Like she just didn't have the time of the day. So she dropped out.

Speaker 4:
[32:27] I thought she dropped out of high school.

Speaker 5:
[32:28] Is there a level between high school and university in England, like A levels or some shit? Okay.

Speaker 4:
[32:35] Yeah, it says she dropped out of high school, but it seems like she was majoring in fashion.

Speaker 5:
[32:39] Yeah, so I think she was about 16 years old. She ended up spending a couple of years working like about four days a week, according to on the Kiki Palmer podcast, she said she couldn't afford to go to school and work, but she could work like four-ish days a week and then have an unpaid internship. According to the Kiki Palmer podcast I listened to her on, she said that she couldn't afford to work and go to college, but she could work a couple days a week and then also do internships, like unpaid internships a couple days a week. So she was doing that instead. She came up, I think, working in like live production and fashion shows in the fashion industry. And then in 2008, she founded a branding and marketing agency or like a branding and talent agency, which she then sold a decade in for like an undisclosed amount of money, but apparently a lot. And that's when she...

Speaker 4:
[33:38] Well, she was then named the 88th richest self-made woman, right?

Speaker 5:
[33:42] In 2025, she was the 88th richest self-made woman. So when she was like in this talent branding marketing agency world, she met the Kardashians, she pitched the idea of Good American to Kris Jenner. She said, I would like to work with Khloe on this. They ended up launching it. They launched it in 2016 and did a million dollars their first day. Then she ended up doing Skims with Kim Kardashian, and she's launched two other brands since then. She's a chairman of the 15% Pledge, which is the initiative for retailers to reserve 15% of shelf space for Black-owned businesses. Like you said, she is the 88th richest self-made woman in America, according to Forbes. This week, she has been majorly in the news because her book just came out, and people are pissed.

Speaker 4:
[34:33] Can you read the headline that went viral that got a lot of backlash?

Speaker 5:
[34:37] One of the first pieces of information from her recent press tour that went viral was the Kardashian whisperer who says three hours with her kids is enough.

Speaker 4:
[34:47] It's so funny because when this article went viral, of course, a lot of people were upset about this headline, and I was wondering, I like to give benefit of the doubt because I know people like to get riled up and I know that people like to be hard on women. I assumed she was saying three hours a day with your kids. I was like, that probably is on a good day, what most working parents are getting. Kids go to bed really early because they're losers, famously. If you're commuting to work at 9 AM, you're probably leaving around eight. Kids go to school really early once again because they're losers. I'm like, there's a good chance that you get home from work at 6, 6.37, you probably have an hour, maybe two before their bedtime, and that means you have an hour, maybe two when they wake up. I'm like, that's probably what most American parents are getting with their kids, three hours a day. Then she's probably saying, if it's quality, that's fine. That is not what she said.

Speaker 5:
[35:33] That's not what she said.

Speaker 4:
[35:35] She said she's a three-hour mom max. She goes, on weekends, I can do nine to noon, but that's it. Then I need to do the stuff that fills up my own cup.

Speaker 5:
[35:43] Yeah, she compares it to limited-edition fashion collabs. She says that they should be high-impact core memories through big moments like fishing trips or New York getaways. I guess this is why she worked so well with the Kardashians, honestly, because Kris Jenner is a high-impact core memory lady. I feel like they kind of speak the same language. We read Kris Jenner's memoir back for Celebrity Memoir Book Club, and she would talk about how the most important thing to her was creating these massive birthday parties where kids would remember, and that is the sign of good parenting.

Speaker 4:
[36:16] And it's so funny because I think historically that hasn't even been true, that the things you remember as a little kid are very rarely the huge moments. It's often like, I always joke that the best vacation of my childhood was this time we went to Mexico and our TVs had cable and we watched Roly Poly Oly the whole time, and that was huge to us. You know what I mean? That time your parents are like, yeah, you could have two schools. This idea that you could get to control people's core memories is so funny. I feel like my core memories are so random.

Speaker 5:
[36:42] Yeah, in an excerpt from her book that I read from Marie Claire, she says that we need to resist a culture that insists you perform perfectly in both fears simultaneously, which she's talking about business and family. She says our kids don't need us as much as we've either been conditioned or sometimes wanted to believe. I really think that mothering need not be so intense.

Speaker 4:
[37:03] What she's doing is being a grandparent. Yeah. You get to come in for the fun stuff when you're a grandparent. I feel like being a parent is like pretty daily.

Speaker 5:
[37:10] Yeah. She's very open about having a team around her. But I mean, the hard part is, and we're going to get into two other controversies she's had that are related. One's from this book and one is something she said on a podcast a year ago. She was on Diary of a CEO. The problem is that if that's what she believes, that's what she believes and she has become hugely successful.

Speaker 4:
[37:34] Well, my problem is why then have four kids? Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[37:37] It's a great question.

Speaker 4:
[37:39] Four kids in a modern day feels like such a specific. It is not the norm. We have birth control.

Speaker 5:
[37:45] Well, I mean, she did the opposite of birth control. She had them be a surrogate, the last two.

Speaker 4:
[37:52] Why have so many kids if you're not really interested in spending time with them? Because I'm saying I get it. You want to be a mother, but you also are like you're primarily a business woman. Fine. You want to be a dad. Many of us do. But the idea of being like, I don't just want to be a dad. I want to be like a dad to a brood is crazy to me. There was no reason to have, if you can only do three hours a day, that's not even an hour per kid. I know.

Speaker 5:
[38:14] No, it's really interesting. I feel like that is a question. Why do it then? I obviously can't answer for her.

Speaker 4:
[38:22] Can you read the quote that she says about why you shouldn't go to influencer dinners?

Speaker 5:
[38:26] Some of Grede's advice cuts against popular dictums from the 2010s. She recommends women skip those glamorous dinners some female founders splash all over Instagram, calling them mostly about ego gratification.

Speaker 4:
[38:37] I guess this line killed me because I'm like, I feel like your kids are about ego gratification.

Speaker 5:
[38:41] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[38:42] Like right? Like there is something in her image of a successful woman. It's not just the business. It's like, and I have more kids than you and my body is tighter than you. It's like, she's so perpetuating this lean in of like, I can do it all times 10.

Speaker 5:
[38:55] Yeah. That being said, so I listened to her on Kiki Palmer's podcast. I don't want to elevate her too far above Sheryl Sandberg. I just found what she said to be a lot more grounded because she talks a lot about the way that she does not feel that her level of ambition is like a moral imperative in any way and that women do not need to go after promotions or success in this way. But if you want that, this is how she did it and this is how she recommends you do it. And I think that is like a really interesting divide for me, is this idea that like, she's not saying women need to do this, but she's saying if you are a woman who wants this, here's the answer.

Speaker 4:
[39:34] I agree 300 percent and I feel like a lot of the backlash I've been seeing against her is people being like, why is she saying this? This isn't true. It should be better. And I'm like, there's actually, she's not writing a book about the way it should be for women. She's writing about the truth and the truth is if you want to get promoted, you're going to have to kind of work harder than everybody. And if you want to be a self-made billionaire high school dropout, you're really going to have to work harder than everybody. And I kind of think, I don't know, like I saw a lot of people are frustrated because she said you should be working in office, proximity is power, is better to be seen than to be left at home. And I am like, yeah, I get that that hurts women and it hurts like the layers of oppression. It hurts them more.

Speaker 5:
[40:12] A lot of things have been written to debunk. People are really upset about her return to office propaganda as they're calling it. And I saw a bunch of pieces that have been written about it and a bunch of videos that have been made about it. I've seen a bunch of pieces that are offering somewhat counter-statistics that don't actually debunk it. I saw a video from a woman saying, actually, there's another statistic that says, women are more likely to get promoted from home because you're not dealing with the visibility of being a woman. Your work is speaking for itself, essentially. And that maybe is true too. But I think a lot of these are anecdotal and a lot of this conversation has a lot to do with what you're even trying to do. I think in general, for her to say women need to XYZ is probably way off. But also for anyone to say actually she's wrong because of women need to do this, like nothing is that cut and dry.

Speaker 4:
[41:09] I also think the joke of somebody like Emma Grede who is so exceptional, she's not just a successful woman. She's like one of the most successful women. She didn't just come from a difficult background. She's like a high school dropout. She, you know what I mean? She's like really overcome a lot. And I think that kind of drive is just in you are not. You can buy all the books in the world. You can follow everything to a T, but you have it or you don't. And I think truly like 0.0001% of people even have that kind of ambition and fewer percents even have the follow through. So it's so funny for us to sit here and like Hemminhaw over whether or not what she's saying is how all women should be. Of course, not all women should be that way. Majority of women, men, children, aliens can't be. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 5:
[41:47] Exactly.

Speaker 4:
[41:48] Like Jaguars can't run as fast as she's running at this thing. So like who cares?

Speaker 5:
[41:52] That's what I find so interesting about the backlash because I do think that people look at someone like her and they say, like, why won't she pass down her secret and then she passes down her secret? And then you're like, okay, well, this is so unrealistic. Yes. Like a lot of things about her are deeply unrealistic. And if you want to try and follow in her footsteps, like I guess I think it's a little bit preposterous when people say that her ideas are like women become a man, lean in, blah, blah, blah, because I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that she really is living by a lot of what she's saying, whereas I actually don't think Sheryl Sandberg was. I think Sheryl Sandberg had all these theories about what could advance women in the workforce, and they were pretty in opposition to the way she was actually existing in the workforce. And also she did not reward women who came to her using her advice, whereas I feel that Emma Grede is the opposite. I think Emma Grede is living by these unpopular ideas. And I think that in order to get to where she is, you have to do things that are like not what everyone wants to do, and that's why not everyone is in her position, because not a lot of people want to live the way she lives, and they just want like the money and success that comes with it, and that isn't really possible. But I also believe that she rewards people who come to her using her work ethic. Like I bet if you worked for her and you took the advice from her book and worked that way, I'm sure she would love you for it and value you for it. And obviously if you ever worked for her, and I'm dead wrong, I'm really open to that story. But I think that listening to her on Kiki Palmer's podcast where she was saying how much she wants an army of little Emma's in the workforce, obviously she's not saying you have to be, but I don't know, when you look at someone who's very successful and you go, they get that way and then they tell you and then you're mad about it, it's like with celebrities in diet culture. Where it's like, yeah, I don't know the way that they got that way is like not particularly accessible or sustainable.

Speaker 4:
[43:57] I also feel a bit of frustration when people want these women to use their power for good. And I'm not saying they should continue on these toxic business cultures, but this idea that the book she should have written is this idealistic book where women should get two years off every time they have a baby and you get a day off for your period and also you get to work from home and also we accommodate you. I'm sorry, you're not going to become a billionaire that way. I don't even think there should be billionaires on your side, but realistically, it's all fun and good for us to dream about how we think the world should be. We can all admit that the world is not that way today. So if you tomorrow were going to work in figuring out how Emma Grede is doing things, it'd be crazy for her to lie and act like we don't live in the world we do.

Speaker 5:
[44:37] Another thing I found really frustrating about the Emma Grede backlash is this idea that she should be having these ideals about the way the world should be. If not pretending to live them, then she should be changing the system in that way. As a woman in power, it should be up to her to create a more accessible society. It comes down to the structures of business in America, and she should be trying to change those things. She should be advocating for the four-day workweek, she should be doing these things. Meanwhile, the people writing these articles are not doing those things, they're attacking Emma Grede. Do you know what I mean? I'm like, well, who should be then advocating for the four-day workweek? Who should be advocating for longer maternity leave? Like, I guess all of us, but ultimately, like, what is attacking her for not having the things that you think all women should have? What does that do? She's not living this way because she could have become a billionaire or a multimillionaire by taking more time off. Maybe she could have, but that we just don't know.

Speaker 4:
[45:43] No, I mean, that's what makes me laugh is even Lena Dunham, and we'll get into it later. She's like, if I could have gone back and done anything, I wish I would have said no. I'm always like, the problem with really successful people say that in retrospect, I'm like, go find somebody with your success who said no, when you thought you could be saying no and show me how they did.

Speaker 7:
[45:59] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[45:59] I don't know. Is it true that you could have been saying no the whole time and still been as successful and happy as you were?

Speaker 5:
[46:04] That's a really good question. I think to be mad at Emma Grede for explaining how she got to where she is, I don't know. I guess if you don't want to do that, you don't have to do that. And I think most people probably shouldn't do that. And most people can't. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[46:18] So listen, I disagree with all of them, but I am saying I find it ridiculous to think that what she should do is write a book where she lies about what she's done, how she's done it and how the world realistically is.

Speaker 5:
[46:28] I think it's good that she wrote this book showing what she did to get where she is because ultimately there is gonna be someone out there who wants to follow these tips and will try to achieve success. She's achieved success and this is how you do it. Maybe someone else out there will say, well, this is preposterous, we should change the game and work on legislation or something. That'd be good. I don't know that it's Emma Grede's fault for living her life the way she lived it and then telling you the truth.

Speaker 4:
[46:57] I think I agree to your point that that's what Sheryl Sandberg was doing, where she was going, oh, did you know the reason women don't get paid as much as because we just forgot to be asking? That was a lie and that didn't help anybody. In fact, that got a lot of people slapped in the face.

Speaker 5:
[47:09] I also, I think this is very unpopular. I think, listen, I know that work from home has been extremely beneficial to a lot of people and I think it's created a lot better work-life balance for a lot of people. That being said, I think that for extremely ambitious people, FaceTime is important.

Speaker 4:
[47:27] Well, I also just do think it is like if you're super ambitious, and the very small barrier to entry of working in person, which everybody for the history since the dawn of time has been doing, if that was like too much for you, then you probably don't have what it takes. No offense.

Speaker 5:
[47:39] Oh my God. The thing that she got in trouble for on Diary of a CEO is she was asked what you would do if an interviewee asked about work-life balance, and she goes, work-life balance is not my responsibility. People got so mad at her for it, and that is true. I feel like you need to understand what you need, and live your life based on those principles. It's not your boss's job to make sure that you're getting a milk break.

Speaker 4:
[48:13] I think that there should be a standard of living in our country where everybody has healthcare, everybody has housing, everybody can eat. But this idea that everybody should also get to be a billionaire and have weekends is to me, that's what I really lose my mind. When you think you're entitled to have many a Bottega bag, but also you want to be able to make every birthday party, I'm like, we'll shut up.

Speaker 5:
[48:31] Yeah. To not be able to do e-mails, and then also think that you should be able to have everything you've ever. I don't know. Sometimes you do have to work hard, and I don't think you should have to work hard for food, housing, healthcare.

Speaker 4:
[48:45] Basic, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[48:45] I think we should have what we need.

Speaker 4:
[48:47] Then however big your wants are, you might have to work a little harder. So anyway, should we move on?

Speaker 5:
[48:53] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[48:54] To somebody who got to have it all.

Speaker 9:
[48:58] Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.

Speaker 10:
[49:00] President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ICE raids and deportations.

Speaker 4:
[49:05] Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis.

Speaker 11:
[49:10] We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

Speaker 9:
[49:18] But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period?

Speaker 12:
[49:29] I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time.

Speaker 9:
[49:48] The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's This Week on America Actually, every Saturday in your audio and video feeds.

Speaker 5:
[49:59] So now let's get into Famesick by one of our oldest friends, Lena Dunham.

Speaker 4:
[50:05] Can I say something about my feelings about Lena Dunham?

Speaker 5:
[50:07] Of course.

Speaker 4:
[50:09] I don't have too many.

Speaker 5:
[50:10] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[50:11] I know that that sounds crazy, but I was really trying to put my finger on how I feel about this book and I am like of course I read it for this podcast and of course like, I'm going to have an opinion because that's just how my brain works, but I do feel ultimately that I am like she doesn't get under my skin. I don't feel a need to respond to her and I wouldn't have felt a need to seek her out.

Speaker 5:
[50:30] Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[50:30] I don't know that this book will stay with me.

Speaker 5:
[50:32] I don't have a stickiness in my feelings towards her, but I have specific feelings like when she's brought up. I don't think I think about her when I'm not thinking about her.

Speaker 4:
[50:43] There was something where this one I was just like, okay, if it hadn't been for the cultural impact she already had, and of course, how can you remove her from the, like this whole book is about the cultural impact she had. So that feels a bit ridiculous to say. But I do want to say, I find myself in a unique position of being neither here nor there. Anyway. So should we get into the book?

Speaker 5:
[51:01] Yeah, of course.

Speaker 4:
[51:02] I liked it enough reading it and I know, I obviously didn't struggle to finish it, but I also wasn't whizzing through it. Something that I want to say is I feel a lot of the responses is if you like her or not like her, you have to be like, well, you have to admit she's a great writer. I won't not say she's a great writer, but there were certain sentences. I felt frustrated by how Russian nesting dolly her sentences can get. I prefer a tight economic, more poetic sentence where, you know what I mean? Even her writing style isn't my favorite writing style, and I'm not saying it's bad. I just think that some people feel this way of being like, she sucks, but she can write. And I'm like, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[51:42] Do you know what I feel? And this could be absolutely getting in the weeds, but I agree, because I do say that. I say she's a great writer, and I don't think that's what I mean. I think she's a great storyteller. She can turn anything into some fucking tall tale that goes on for 25 pages. And even when I'm getting a little bit-

Speaker 4:
[52:02] She sees story in everything to a fault. And I actually think that the problem is then that quality comes around, and I feel frustrated with the way, when everybody is a narrative or a character in your story, you flatten them and it serves you. All people serve you ultimately because they're characters in your story. And I think that that is unfortunately the narcissism required in all writers or storytellers, especially in a memoirist, especially in a multiple times memoirist, again, a non-fiction writer.

Speaker 5:
[52:29] Right. I feel like that was actually to me, the ultimate shortcoming of this book is that because it's entirely about the way her relationships with other people and her relationship with the public have gone on, like it's about the way they've affected her, it's about the way they've affected her writing, her ability to create, etc. And I think that because she turns everything into this like absolute story, when she's not being honest about someone, it like almost makes the book not conclude right for me, because so many people are integral to this story, but none of their stories. And in a way, that makes any sense to me, like she's only in service of her own narrative, which this is her memoir, so of course she is. But because she's like creating this whole thing with everybody else, and like writing them in and out of these stories that make sense to her, it like almost makes the whole thing wrap up in a way that didn't fit for me.

Speaker 4:
[53:25] Okay, so let's get into what I like about it, because I feel like that's actually a good segue. Something that I do want to say I really like about this book is I really admire the bravery of it and the topic she chooses to tackle. I think women talking about fame and the downsides of fame, the Royal British way of saying never complain, never explain, I do think that that is a good way to go about being in the public eye. I think it's incredibly brave to talk about the downsides of being famous in this smart way, and not necessarily when you're on the floor puking and being attacked by the paparazzi and it's obvious. But I think it's unlikable to do so, and I really admired it when Allie Wong did it, when Allie Wong was like, listen, I know I'm rich, I know I'm successful and I know I have a husband, but it turns out I also want some other thing too, and that might be a boyfriend. I really admire that kind of bravery, and I also think something I admire is she's very honest and does something really difficult, I think, in this book, which is be unlikable. And it's in a way of sticking up for herself and liking herself, which I find more interesting and more honest to me than I think her previous memoir, which was about shocking you into what a fucking weirdo she is. And listen, different strokes for different folks. Maybe that works for more people, but it doesn't work for me. I don't need to hear your gross out stories just to be like, see, I'm weird. But I do think that this book feels to me like the response to someone who got a lot of shit in her 20s, more than she deserved, more than was fair, it kind of broke her. And now she's come back to be like, actually, I'm not the problem. You were kind of the problem. It reminds me of that scene in Mean Girls when she goes, actually, I'm not bad at math. You're kind of bad at math. I'm actually really good at math. This whole book is that to me, which I liked, but still, as you said, I am like, I'm waiting for the third memoir. When we come out with balanced perspectives of both sides, that's something I'll be quite interested in.

Speaker 5:
[55:09] Yeah, I agree with you. I think this book gets a lot closer to the bone. I think the first book she wrote, she had a real idea of what she wanted to project. And I think the first memoir was one of the things, like a symptom of one of the things that I find difficult about her, which is the way that she was unfairly, like, unfairly, like, widely disliked. Like, her name, she talked a lot about in this book, became synonymous with just like a up-your-own-ass, like, millennial.

Speaker 4:
[55:40] Yeah, hipster millennial, faux feminist. Look at my, like, bravery is being naked.

Speaker 5:
[55:47] Yeah, and I think that there are some things about this book that I think fell short that she actually has acknowledged in some of the interviews I've seen about this book. And I feel like writing this book helped her get closer to where I wanted her to get with this book.

Speaker 4:
[56:00] It's interesting you say that because I too have heard her explicitly say things in interviews that I went, wait, where was that in the book?

Speaker 5:
[56:06] Yeah, and I think it's so interesting because, like you said, she was like wildly disliked and part of it was deeply unfair, but then there was a period of time where she was really playing into it, which I've seen her admit in interviews since this book came out, but I don't feel that it's in the book. And I think that her first book was a lot of her playing into this story because she wanted to be in control of it. Like if you're not going to like me because I'm like oversharing about sexual exploits, then I'm going to overshare like the thinkiest sexual exploits I've ever had. And it's just like, yeah, no, I know I didn't like that about you.

Speaker 4:
[56:47] Exactly. And to segue again, one of the topics I heard her talk about in an interview that I admired was she talks about her own ambition and the drive she had and how ambitious she is. Whereas in this book, I don't feel the word ambition is used. It's not acknowledged head on. And in a very Will Smith way, there's a lot of copying to workaholism. There's a lot of copying to the pressures when 200 people look up to you or like, I rely on you financially. This idea of like, I had to keep making this incredibly glamorous, validating art because other people fed their kids. If it weren't for me, if I didn't keep working, how would other people's kids go to college? And listen, if I can hold Will Smith accountable, I can hold Lena Dunham accountable. Yeah, those grips worked before you and they'll work after you, okay? Don't sit here and completely act like you just kept going for the good of others. It's quite rewarding financially, emotionally, spiritually, famously.

Speaker 5:
[57:43] To be the star and creator.

Speaker 4:
[57:46] Of the show you created.

Speaker 5:
[57:47] Of a show that is like widely critically acclaimed as well.

Speaker 10:
[57:50] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[57:51] Anyway, I think something that's so interesting that this book does, it's a huge departure from the first book. It's like in the first book, she really identifies as a woman who just can't figure out how to be a woman the way other women seem to be able to figure it out and she's on the outside, but she loves sisterhood and she's just a group of girls. Here, she really wants to rewrite the narrative and not rewrite, but she's done with that. She got accidentally nepo-baby-ed into fame and now she's like, actually, I was a genius. I was a baby genius and I was poised in the communities of filmmakers that you admire and I came up with all of your faves. That's who I was and that's where I came from. So she talks early on about being like, right after college, I got a studio in this downtown warehouse in Manhattan with all the other filmmakers. Mary Bronstein, her husband who's a collaborator with the Safdies who are also there, the Knightstatt family, those YouTubers.

Speaker 5:
[58:41] Kasey.

Speaker 4:
[58:42] Yeah, Kasey Knight. He has a real punched in face.

Speaker 5:
[58:45] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[58:46] You know?

Speaker 5:
[58:46] Yeah. Probably, it wasn't naturally that way. I bet you it's been punched.

Speaker 4:
[58:51] He has a face like, what were those candies? The sour ones.

Speaker 5:
[58:55] Warhead.

Speaker 4:
[58:56] He had a real warhead cartoon head.

Speaker 5:
[59:00] Maybe from jumping out of too many planes. I feel like he catches a lot of harsh wind. Definitely.

Speaker 4:
[59:06] Something has really bastardized the work of gravity when it comes to that head.

Speaker 5:
[59:13] Her senior thesis short film went to the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah. She met a bunch of filmmakers there and then back in New York. They had this like downtown warehouse studio space. She got a studio there. She shared an office with Greta Gerwig. I do like hearing about this stuff and I think it's so interesting that she, I don't think she's ever talked about it before. We've read every essay she's ever written.

Speaker 4:
[59:36] Well, it's funny because she talks about how much stuff she was making at this point, and she named all these other movies and shorts and stuff, and the only one I had heard of was Downtown Divas, or there was another word in there, but it's basically this delusional Downtown Divas. It's a short web series she made with her friends about the gallery scene in New York. And I do think it's interesting that the thing she was willing to put forth was the messy weekly female based one that she made with her gal pals, but she completely left out that all these other serious filmmakers who were mostly men, and she says they were mostly men, were also around her. And so it's interesting that she's willing to forgo this kind of fake feminist sisterhood of, it was always just me and the gals to be like, oh, do you only take men seriously in art? Well, guess what? They took me seriously too. I was in the boys club, so now what?

Speaker 5:
[60:19] Yeah, she has this line here where I think that this is in service to her new identity, which is very successful indie filmmaker, where she says, I didn't start this looking to be a celebrity. Instead, I'm here because of an almost unrelenting drive towards self-expression, which manifests as workaholism and single-minded obsession that actually runs counter to a skilled manipulation of fame. And while I agree she doesn't have a skilled manipulation of fame, I think that once celebrity became an option, I feel it's hard to say she didn't move towards it.

Speaker 4:
[60:56] And we see it a lot and I'm excited to talk about her family. One day, she'll write a memoir when she's able to be genuinely critical of her family, specifically her dad, and that's going to be the most interesting book she ever puts out. But she gets at it a lot, what it's like to grow up as a commercial success in a family of self-serious artists and how they kind of almost look down on her success. And I think that's her great divide internally is like, I wonder if that's actually the subconscious motivator for why she sabotages herself so badly. I wonder if she could just admit to herself, like, I like being famous. I wasn't popular growing up. It's fun to be popular. It's fun to know Taylor Swift. It's fun to go to the Grammys.

Speaker 5:
[61:30] She loves designer clothes.

Speaker 4:
[61:32] If she could just admit that without the shame instilled in her and her parents, maybe she wouldn't have this compulsion to always be like, are all eyes on me? Okay, here's my booger. You know what I mean? She can't just be normal about it.

Speaker 5:
[61:45] Yeah, no, I do think she really needs there to be something weird and off-putting about what she's putting out there, which I think also really goes to explain that first book. Season three is when it came out, and that's when she was skyrocketing towards mainstream fame. And I think she needed to put more out there about how I'm not your famous TV star girl. I'm gross.

Speaker 4:
[62:10] This is flashing forward a lot, but when she's fighting and breaking up with Jack, Jack said when they're having one of their final worst things said breakup fights, he says, it's like you want all these people who love your work to hate you. Artists are supposed to make people happy and you just don't care. And I actually think what he sees as just don't care is the fact that she's driven to try to get people to like her, and then once she has it, she kind of doesn't know what to do with it because of the way her parents have raised her.

Speaker 5:
[62:35] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[62:35] Is that a fair psycho analysis? Would you give me that?

Speaker 5:
[62:37] I'll give you that. I like that. Okay. So going back to her early days, so she's in this downtown studio, she ends up writing a feature film called Tiny Furniture that she wants to have her mom and siblings star in. Her mom ends up making some calls to raise $20,000 for them to shoot this. They shoot it in her parents' house. Her dad goes to their summer home to get out of their way while they make this film. It ends up going to South by Southwest and winning the big prize.

Speaker 4:
[63:09] I guess she later claims she's not a Neppo baby. She still to this day resents this idea that she's a Neppo baby. She also resents the idea that anybody on Girls is considered a Neppo baby. It had nothing to do with it. Then I am like, you could say that once, you could say it twice, but when all four girls are Neppo babies plus, when I was thinking about it, Jenny Conner, who she does deliberately bring up is the daughter of a Sopranos writer. I am like, it is weird. You have to at some point take a step back. It's like when people don't believe in systemic racism. You are like, okay, well, let's look at all these examples. Are we noticing a pattern? What do you think is causing that pattern? Why did you feel so comfortable with exclusively the children of other famous people? Why do those people seem to consistently stand out to you?

Speaker 5:
[63:48] The problem is she just won't acknowledge any lick of it, and I wish she just wouldn't talk about it at all, but she has a couple little lines in here, kind of laughing at the way people call her a Neppo baby. So after her movie wins the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest, the movie that, again, her mom made calls to raise money for, which isn't nepotism, but the way she won't even acknowledge that it's privilege is annoying. Then she gets a bunch of meetings out in LA, because she's at this point now a celebrated filmmaker. At this point, my mother called in her second and last favor. I guess I really am a Neppo baby. The first favor was that her mom's high school boyfriend's brother was the founder of UTA, United Talent Agency, one of the big four talent agencies in the world. Even though she didn't have that through industry connections, she had it through life connections. To act like that's not a big connection is preposterous. At this point, my mother called in her second and last favor. I guess I really am a Neppo baby. She asked my father's college friend Nancy, a gamine brunette who had lived in LA for decades writing for trade newspapers about the ins and outs of business to open her guest room to me. This again, whether you want to call it nepotism or just general privilege, the way she's making fun of it here, having a guest room to stay in for meetings in LA is huge. Lots of people can't afford that. When I moved out to LA, my dad's cousin lived there and I was able to sleep in their guest room while I looked for an apartment and I would not have been able to move to LA had that not been the case.

Speaker 4:
[65:22] But can I say that to me is not like a Neppo baby. That's not what nepotism is. What do you consider yourself a Neppo baby?

Speaker 5:
[65:29] No, but I'm saying the way she makes fun of Neppo baby to skirt even acknowledging privilege is, I think, what makes it so frustrating. I think there is a massive difference between nepotism and privilege, and I think the way that she constantly rails on this nepotism argument to not acknowledge that she ever had any leg up is obnoxious.

Speaker 4:
[65:52] Well, here, can I read the ones that kill me? To me, those are just upper middle class advantages. The cast was a bunch of daughters of. Blessedly, the term nepo baby had not yet been invented, but the fact that we all had parents with various affiliations to arts and entertainment was a constant point of conversation. Never mind that nobody watching HBO had ever heard of my parents, unless they had trawled some of the quieter corners of the Museum of Modern Art and studied all the wall tags. That to me is one of the most insane things I've ever heard. First of all, you don't think anybody who watches HBO has been to MoMA? You don't think anybody who watches The Sopranos?

Speaker 5:
[66:26] The inventor of prestige television? I mean, it's four people who go to the MoMA.

Speaker 4:
[66:32] It's just so funny to both undermine the audience of HBO so bad and then also be undermining your parents. There kind of is no higher elite finding than being in MoMA. That's one of the great museums of the world to be like, whatever, yeah, they're in some small corner of it, who even cares? Billions of people, it's one of the most traveled New York City tourist spots in the world and then to also be like, plus, what does anybody who watches HBO know about fucking art? Does that have to do with anything? It's so funny to me. And then of course, she's like, Adam would get really offended too because his dad was the manager of a Kinko's in Indiana and he goes, does that make me a NEPO baby? And it's like, Adam, you stay out of this conversation. That was the whole joke, that you were the star. You were the first breakout star of Girls Truly and kind of to this day, the only true movie star from that show and that's what we were all noticing. Isn't it interesting what happens when they pick the guy solely based on talent? It drove my mother crazy. We're artists, she would streak. We're hand to mouth. We figured out some years are better than others, but doesn't everybody understand that? My parents were constantly shuffling all the pieces on the chessboard, bargaining with their bank accounts and the impracticality of their chosen careers to keep us in the city, whispering behind closed doors. Well, just whispering. In our loft, there were no doors, save the broken sliding one on the single and always occupied bathroom. She loves saying that they only had one bathroom.

Speaker 5:
[67:42] Isn't that the house that sold for $6 million a couple of years ago?

Speaker 4:
[67:46] Yes. Would they be able to cover another year of tuition for their anxious child who needed very special attention in order to graduate from the ninth grade? Would this finally be the year we had to leave the city and finally enroll in the old Lime High?

Speaker 5:
[67:57] Which is where their lake house is.

Speaker 4:
[67:59] So, that makes me funny. It's so funny to be like, every day we were scared we couldn't cover New York City private school tuition from our Soho loft. I would have to move to our country house in Connecticut and just go to a public school. Don't you understand?

Speaker 5:
[68:12] I just wish she wouldn't even acknowledge it at all, I guess. What is the point of saying anything if what you're saying is that dense?

Speaker 4:
[68:18] I think there was a way she could be like, I'm not ineptly to the extent that I got success. Because to take it back to you being like her mom called her friends for $20,000, her mom calls her friends and goes, listen, this is really good, you'll make your money back. Sure enough, they sold it the next year to IFC.

Speaker 5:
[68:32] Everybody made their money back.

Speaker 4:
[68:33] Made a genuine investment like it was AI or something. I think there's evidence like that. Look at Rob Kardashian's sock company, not everything that gets money in it is good, not everybody with access to funds can create art that succeeds. There's enough evidence that you yourself are very smart and successful, Lena, that you don't have to undermine your parents. But that's a big theme of this book, is what happens when you have these snobbiliest parents that you outperform.

Speaker 5:
[69:00] Yeah, and I think that she has so much trouble understanding her place in the world that she was raised in. So she goes out to LA, she has a bunch of meetings, HBO offers her a blind pilot deal. She goes in and pitches girls. She also clarifies, there's this story that she sold girls on a scribble on the back of a napkin. She's like, we had a meeting, we had some really good ideas. I went home and wrote out a pitch that they then bought the next day.

Speaker 4:
[69:24] And there's a line in that pitch that I actually love about women in our generation, that they have varying degrees of ambition, but have been raised to achieve. And I find that to be an interesting descriptor of women in the millennial generation, specifically looking at the Emma Grede aspect.

Speaker 5:
[69:40] So Judd Apatow calls her and is like, I wanna help you with this, this sounds awesome, I wanna produce it, he becomes like a key player in the creation of Girls. And then she has to meet with a bunch of showrunners because she is 24 years old, she's never even worked on a TV set before. And so she has a call with Jenny Koner, who had worked on, was it Undeclared?

Speaker 4:
[70:01] Yeah, I think she created Undeclared. She had a couple of shows that she created that didn't really go anywhere.

Speaker 5:
[70:06] And they have one call, they really bond. And Lena's like, okay, I wanna work with Jenny. So it becomes Jenny, Judd and Lena. They start working on the pilot of Girls. This is a line about making Hanna Horvath from Michigan.

Speaker 4:
[70:22] As you have every right to be pissed.

Speaker 5:
[70:24] It's not even that I'm pissed. I just think it's illustrative of my issues.

Speaker 4:
[70:28] Go for it.

Speaker 5:
[70:29] I've always felt at home in the Midwest. I'd never had my mother's New York power bitch energy. I couldn't cut a line or chew out a cab driver or get into a subway car where someone had shit themselves without throwing up. And so it was decided Hannah was a transplant from Michigan. I just think the way that she writes these stories and these characters, I understand she's literally writing a character right now, but I feel like she herself in her own personal narrative, she's written about herself to sit here and go, I just didn't relate to the New Yorkiness. Even though her entire persona is this quite entitled, comfortable having sex in her parents' bed, sex on screen, raised in these art circles, obsession with being this niche, interesting artist, that is so, Midwest is conforming. Do you know what I mean? People who don't want to conform, who live in the Midwest, move to New York because they don't feel the Midwest, she is so un-conforming, relentlessly un-conforming, that it's so fascinating to me that she has this story about herself.

Speaker 4:
[71:32] A lot of this story is about the breakup of her and Jenny Conner. And this is an example of the first time she notices a red flag. Looking back, the only hint I ever got during that dreamy week of them writing the pilot, drunk on the possibility of what we were making, that Jenny was more than my new Manic Pixie dream friend, was one afternoon when I arrived to work, must from sleep, she welcomed me in, then said I could sit on the sofa, but she needed to return to bed. I sat alone for a few hours, flipping through home decor magazines until it became clear she wasn't coming back out. I returned to my hotel room. We didn't acknowledge the lost afternoon, and over the coming months, we talked and texted constantly, the kind of rapid fire getting to know you that can feel like falling in love. But occasionally, she would disappear for days, two, three. When she reemerged, I tried not to be needy, never asked where she had been. And I find this very interesting, because when Jenny and Lena met, Jenny just got out of a divorce and was trying to figure out how she was gonna pay for her kids and herself. She needed this job bad, and Lena famously does everything from bed. She is sick, and I'm not saying she's not allowed to be, but I feel like one of the things about Lena is she, throughout girls, is going missing, sometimes for weeks at a time because of illness, because of death. I mean, we know somebody who worked on the set of Girls, and she was like one time, a homeless guy walked onto the set, said, where are all the black people? And Lena started crying so bad, they had to like shut down for the night. So I mean, like this idea that Lena's like a red flag and a person you work with is somebody who like, will randomly need an afternoon off sometimes.

Speaker 5:
[72:53] Yeah, so they filmed the pilot. She starts having like physical reactions pretty immediately.

Speaker 4:
[73:03] She has colitis because of her eating disorder, which is also one of the great departures from her first book. In her first book, she has this like little essay about how she's never ever had an eating disorder and she's fine with her body. Except for one time, like as a joke, she tried. She tried to have an eating disorder, but it wouldn't stick. And so it's interesting because the entirety of this book starts and ends with her identifying as somebody who has an eating disorder. And so I was like, wow, what a new world we live in. And I wonder if there's a couple of things going on. I do believe that sometimes you're in the midst of an eating disorder and you truly don't know. I also think culture around what she represents has changed or like what she feels she needs to represent. I think she, in a very Hillary Clinton feminist-y way, was like, I'm the face of body positivity. You can't catch me not being happy with my body. And now I think there's room for more nuanced conversations. She's definitely no longer held up as anybody's standard of any type of feminism, I don't think. So maybe she feels less pressure to represent other people in that way and she can be more honest. But this whole book is about how even before girls, when she was living at home after college, her mom made a comment about her weight and she tried to stop eating and kind of successfully did.

Speaker 5:
[74:14] Yeah, which again, specifically in her first book, there is an essay about the one time for 36 hours she tried to be anorexic and couldn't do it and then just called it off forever.

Speaker 4:
[74:28] To the point where I think you and I came up with a conclusion of being like, she's so desperate to have had trauma that she's dipping her toe in this ED thing where she doesn't even belong. What another version of her like, I wish I had had an abortion comment that she needs to partake in every female trial.

Speaker 5:
[74:44] Yeah. So she is dealing with colitis, but they're also getting ready to shoot the pilot and she needs to be scouting locations. She has to just kind of like clean up and go to this hotel to scout the location. Looking back, this was another first, the first time I chose to ignore my body's noisy signals in favor of this thing I wanted so badly. It seemed that the film industry was made up of people ignoring their basic human needs. Sleep, time with loved ones, a reliable schedule, no domain over what they ate, or where they went, or when they peed. But who could blame them when the trade-off was a chance to make magic, to play pretend for a job. And it is like, yeah, I don't know. I like obviously feel very sorry for how much illness she dealt with during this time, but I feel like there's also this cry out within this book to be like, but why didn't anyone take care of me? And it goes back to me to this like need she has to be babied which I think is so hard when she also is in this book trying to come across as like a boss.

Speaker 4:
[75:44] She really wants to be a baby and she's constantly into her late 20s, early 30s going home and like sleeping in her parents' bed. And not to skip ahead, but when they start writing season two, Lena has a dissociative period that lasts for like a week during which she pops her own eardrum that ends in her dad coming out to LA, bringing her home and calling her boss and saying she needs time off, she'll write by herself, it's better that way. I guess I feel like that to me is the nepotism of it all. I don't think if you had a dad who was just like an accountant, would your dad call our network? If we had a TV show, could you imagine your dad calling the producer at FX or something and being like, Ashley's sick, she can't come to work today.

Speaker 5:
[76:24] That would be crazy. The problem is I do have parents who are over-involved in stuff. I remember in high school, I would get a bad grade on something and my dad would be like, I'm calling the school and I would cry and unplug the phone and be like, I did a bad job, don't call the school.

Speaker 4:
[76:43] See, but that's why you hate Lena, not hate, but I do think I don't like this quality in her, but you more than me really cannot stand little baby girl, Itis.

Speaker 5:
[76:52] There's so much baby girl, Itis, in this book. I mean, even at points where it's annoying and points where I feel genuinely frustrated for the people around her by it, there's this one part, she's been hospitalized. She wakes up from surgery and she calls Jenny and she says, you didn't look out for me, no one was looking out for me. And while I do feel the end of this book is her kind of realizing that she needs to look out for herself, I don't think that there's any look back at the way that she unfairly kind of expected it from others. Like I think she's like, well, from this point forward, I have to look out for myself. Not like, and also previously, I had a pretty unrealistic expectation of like how much my co-worker should be my mom.

Speaker 4:
[77:38] It's a bit of naivete to think that the supervisor hired by the network because you are new to this job represents you and not the network.

Speaker 5:
[77:46] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[77:47] That was the mistake she made. And I think it's a mistake probably everybody's made at some point early in their career, but unfortunately for her early in her career was like pretty high up the ladder. Like she started rung 10.

Speaker 5:
[77:57] Yeah, and I do, I feel sorry for her. I think Jenny was hired to be Alina Whisperer. I think from the minute she got hired, I don't think HBO knew that she was a baby, self-proclaimed, but they were aware that she was 24. They did know that they needed someone as like a handler and a guide. I do think that her literal job was to tell Lena what she wanted to hear. And so I wonder like what level of best friendship actually existed between them. Because Lena is someone who wants to lay in bed with her best friend and braid each other's hair and watch a movie and then get to work. And like how much of their best friendship was Jenny being like, okay, this is her work style. And how much of it was her being like, we're in this together.

Speaker 4:
[78:41] Well, something I guess brilliant that HBO did was when they said, you get to choose who this person is. It's like they said, oh, she'll pick her own warden. Yeah. And as you said in a conversation we had, like it is an interesting dynamic because yes, Jenny is older. She's in her late 30s, early 40s maybe. And obviously Lena's in her mid-20s.

Speaker 5:
[78:57] I think when Lena turned 26, Jenny turned 40.

Speaker 4:
[79:00] Okay. So there's a significant age gap between them. But as you pointed out, Lena hired Jenny.

Speaker 5:
[79:04] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[79:05] And ultimately Jenny has a lot of leverage over Lena and uses it professionally to her gain. But these first couple of years, Jenny needed Lena. And then later she resents that. And I think very fully so, clearly Jenny did hitch her star to Lena's wagon or whatever.

Speaker 5:
[79:20] Her wagon to Lena's star. I think that there's a lot of resentment that comes from Lena from this early established dynamic that Lena is never able to shake. And it's hard because in the beginning, Lena is so young. But as she gets older, I feel like she never really establishes autonomy. Eventually in this book, they have this contract negotiation where Lena is offered a shit ton of money from the network. Jenny is offered some money. And Jenny is like, well, we should be paid equal. And so Lena goes back to try to renegotiate. And they're basically like, yeah. I mean, if you want you guys to make the same amount of money, then Lena will make way less so that Jenny can make more. But you guys are not going to get the same deal that Lena was offered. That would be crazy. Jenny is not the star. And Lena agrees. She takes less money so that she and Jenny can be paid equal. And she resents Jenny a lot for putting her in this position. And she acknowledges that she could have said no. But I think she believes Jenny should have told her she could say no. So then they're making a pilot. Like we said, she casts all NEPO babies and Adam Driver.

Speaker 4:
[80:27] Well, as she says, what I like is because it's not only that her parents were too esoterically famous to make her account as a NEPO baby. But then she goes, well, I didn't even know Brian Williams because he was so mainstream. So she wasn't a NEPO baby higher because I didn't even know her dad. I'm like, I love it. You can't be a NEPO baby if your parents are too famous or not famous enough. There is no such like it's just a made up word.

Speaker 5:
[80:44] And she just doesn't even mention Doja's dad.

Speaker 4:
[80:47] Yeah, David Momet. What the fuck could playwriting have to do?

Speaker 5:
[80:50] What would two artists who can be found in the moment know about David Momet?

Speaker 4:
[80:54] Yeah. What could David Momet, one of the most famous playwrights in America, even know about the entertainment industry?

Speaker 5:
[81:00] Such a good question.

Speaker 4:
[81:03] And don't even bring up Jemima Kirk, who was quite literally just hired because she was already Lena's hot best friend.

Speaker 5:
[81:09] That's different. That's not NEPO to them.

Speaker 4:
[81:11] And they only know each other because they went to like rich artist high school, rich artist private high school.

Speaker 5:
[81:16] So then Adam Driver auditions. He has this audition that kind of sweeps them off their feet. It changes kind of the entire concept of what the character of Adam is supposed to be. He bites her shoulder and they're like wowee, zowee and thus begins this odd kind of, I don't want to say entanglement, but they have this interesting push and pull of a relationship where his unexpectedness creates a lot of great momentum between the two of them on screen.

Speaker 4:
[81:45] I have a quote.

Speaker 5:
[81:46] And some confusion for her off screen.

Speaker 4:
[81:48] If Adam had been lackluster in rehearsal, now he was focused as if the sex scene were a mission that had to be completed with as much vigor as basic training. As in his audition, when in character, he was a man possessed. He would often shout filthy improvisation, seemingly unbidden. The same was true here as my careful blocking went out the window and he hurled me this way and that. It felt so real, part of me was afraid that when I turned around, I was suddenly in a full penetration 1970s porno. And after a few mimed thrusts, I called cut. But of course it turns out it's great. She's like the people in Video Village who are watching it were like, that was amazing. And she was like, okay, from then on, we kind of had this tacit agreement. He could do whatever he wanted and I would just trust it. She also can't really tell if he likes her or not. Sometimes he won't speak to her at all. Sometimes he's very gruff. It doesn't seem like he's taking her direction at all. She's like trying to tell him about the character. He likes her, but forgets she exists when she's not in front of him. And she's like, oh yeah, that's fine. Like that works. And it seems like sometimes though he'll like look at her and be like, you don't even know you're beautiful. To me, I wonder if he was just kind of method acting. I feel like he just became Adam to her, and I think she almost fell for it. Which is funny because she based the character of Adam on a situationship she had with this guy who didn't treat her well at all. And then here comes Adam where in playing the character in real life, he mimics also not treating her well at all. And she like falls for it again. She's like, is this love?

Speaker 5:
[83:03] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[83:03] Is this man pretending, treating me like shit because he's pretending to treat me like shit, because he's pretending to be this other guy who treated me like shit. Is this love?

Speaker 5:
[83:11] I mean, she has, when she's explaining the character to him, she's like, he doesn't like know he loves me, but he does.

Speaker 4:
[83:18] Like to be so young and delusional.

Speaker 5:
[83:20] I think that's obviously a really interesting character to write. It's a hard thing to believe someone you wrote that character for is because they are just playing the character you wrote. He is confusing. Like they go through this one period of time where they're hanging out every night while his girlfriend is out of town, his girlfriend that he has been with since I think high school.

Speaker 4:
[83:41] College. They met at Julliard.

Speaker 5:
[83:43] He's hanging out. She calls him and she goes, my parents are out of town and I'm scared, which...

Speaker 4:
[83:49] Can you hear me roll my eyes?

Speaker 5:
[83:51] Yeah, they literally clanked. So he starts hanging out with her every night and then he has this one night where he's like, you know, if I come over this time, it's going to be different. So he comes over. She doesn't let him upstairs when he buzzes and they just kind of never acknowledge it again. And he calls her a week later and is like, oh, by the way, I'm engaged. I think there's one shocking and unforgivable moment from him in this book. And that's when they're rehearsing while she's dissociating and he throws a chair and says, stop just staring, say your lines.

Speaker 4:
[84:24] He seems like an explosive, uncontrollable person who's often punching a wall, blah, blah. But the problem in a situation where you're like the director, creator, most important person on the call sheet, is that there's no one for her to blame for why she had this unsafe set, except for that she did like the fact that he delivered incredible work. Do you know what I mean? Why are we letting men get away with this behavior? And it's like, I don't know, Lena, why did you?

Speaker 5:
[84:50] I mean, exactly.

Speaker 4:
[84:51] Her excuse when she's like, why didn't I do anything when he threw that chair at the wall during rehearsal? Well, I had never been beaten as a child, so, and I'm like, okay.

Speaker 5:
[85:01] I didn't really know about it.

Speaker 4:
[85:02] Did you actually know it's so dangerous to be raised in a loving household?

Speaker 5:
[85:06] Even though she does talk about a relationship that was physically dangerous or like physically bad.

Speaker 4:
[85:12] Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 5:
[85:14] Before Girls, I do think it's complicated that she says, I never told anyone about it. I'm watching Girls. It's amazing. Adam's amazing in it. It's so well-written. It's such a good show. He could have been written out.

Speaker 4:
[85:27] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[85:28] His storyline, I feel, did end at a certain point and they kept him in. The part where he's dating Jessa, that stuff was so preposterous.

Speaker 4:
[85:36] Justice for Amanda Patula. If you like it for Jessa, you must like it for her.

Speaker 5:
[85:41] Ultimately, I do feel that it's hard for her to sit here saying that he was difficult to work with when she is the boss.

Speaker 4:
[85:49] I don't know what it is that she wants us to think here. She very much is just doing this post-mortem gossipy storytelling. I guess I'm too trad here, but I feel bad for the wife. I was like, this is where I'm like, I don't know Lena, are all these stories yours to tell? Of course, you could have talked about the relationship you had with Adam, but leaving that line in specifically to suggest that he married his long-term girlfriend because you wouldn't have sex with him is really unnecessarily mean to a woman who presumably did nothing to you.

Speaker 5:
[86:15] Yeah, it's hard because again, I don't think he should have been acting like that on set. I don't think you can throw a chair, but if you throw a chair at your boss and your boss says, but you're so good at your job, so that stays between us until my book. I don't know. I think that it's hard because she's telling this story now to, I feel, bring him down a peg now that he's a breakout movie star that everybody loves. When at the time that she was in control of his career and actually could have made a difference, if she felt that he is a dangerous or erotic person, she did nothing. And that's one of my ultimate qualms with Lena Dunham is this perpetual shrugs shoulders and curls up in the fetal position and cries in her mom's lap when she is ultimately a person who has had a lot of power in the industry.

Speaker 4:
[87:10] Yeah, and I think that's the Lizzo effect, right? You can't cry, I didn't know I had power, I was so young and successful.

Speaker 5:
[87:16] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[87:17] I mean, when he showed up to the audition, an unknown man and bit you, you can't be like, I can't believe that guy was kind of erratic and scary.

Speaker 5:
[87:25] It's like just specifically what you liked about him, that he was unexpected and erratic and-

Speaker 4:
[87:29] And physical, physically intimidating.

Speaker 5:
[87:33] Yeah, and again, not saying he should be that way, I'm just saying you knew.

Speaker 4:
[87:37] Yeah, when we're saying where did it start and who allowed it to become a problem, unfortunately.

Speaker 5:
[87:43] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[87:44] Okay, so I am interested too, even though her one mother said she needed to lose 15 pounds and that started her anorexia, her other mother, Jenny Conner, told her she couldn't. Jenny Conner paused, I think the issue is you're too thin, and the thing is, it's not funny if you're too thin, it's just sex in the city all over again. What made your movie special is that you weren't that. If we lose it, we don't have a clear voice. So Lena freaks out, is like, I'm so sorry, like I've just been anxious, it's been hard to eat, and she goes, it's not that hard, just put food in your mouth. She then goes on this long tarade about, it took me years until I was in my late thirties working with women in their early twenties to think about how I'd approach someone who was showing signs of disordered eating. It would never occur to me to do anything other than ask if I could help express my concern about their health, their inner life, which resources they had and which they needed. The discussion of what we were eating on camera would be the last of it. I don't know, I find this thing that she does a couple of times where she does the moral high ground of, I would never, I would never, which is interesting to me because I don't know. I think a lot of this book is about how she seems to be losing relationships and she doesn't know why. She seems very out of control over relationships. In addition to not knowing how people feel about her, she often projects in unfair ways and ungenerous ways I think that it gives her the moral high ground to be mad at people. But specifically, and we'll get to it, this is also a woman who came out and lied about having information that undermined a sexual assault allegation. I'm sure if you had come to her now, or had come to her at this point and said, can you imagine saying that this woman's a liar because you're friends with the guy she's accusing, she'd be like, I would never. Do you know what I mean? I'm just interested. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like when you've done some things that are bad, and I get that she's been blamed for a lot of things that weren't that bad, but she's lived some life, she's been wrung through the wringer and she has made some big mistakes. I'm always interested when those people are still looking to be like, well, I would never. I'm like, yeah, I don't know. I guess we don't know. I guess we don't know what she would or wouldn't do. I'm always interested in people who are so sure.

Speaker 5:
[89:38] It goes back, first of all, to this balance of is Jenny her best friend or her boss? Obviously, a best friend or a boss shouldn't act that way, but we are talking showbiz baby, a famously toxic industry, especially regarding bodies. Like you said, she expects a lot of consideration that she doesn't necessarily afford others. We don't know what she would and wouldn't ever do. There are a lot of things that she regrets heavily that she has done.

Speaker 4:
[90:03] I also think she's never been in the position of not being absolutely in charge.

Speaker 5:
[90:06] Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[90:07] This idea that you have to curry favor with the network in order to get your shit made. I'm not saying what Jenny did was right. Her job was to pass notes for the network. This was the network's notes. Maybe Lena would have done it better, but she also has a lot of power. I don't know. For someone who spent all of her 20s talking about how she had never had an eating disorder to only then realize, go wait, maybe that entire thing was an eating disorder. She seems very sure about how she would talk about other people's bodies. Oh my God. Sorry. Also, now that I'm thinking about it, all she does is talk about other people's bodies in this book. Whenever there's a thin or sexy woman, she's like her pert breasts, her tiny waist, her thick legs, she's in shape, rump shaken both ways.

Speaker 5:
[90:43] She had a situationship with a guy who had a cleft lip, and her and all of her friends call him lip.

Speaker 4:
[90:48] That's a really-

Speaker 5:
[90:49] Throughout this book.

Speaker 4:
[90:49] Sorry, that happened so early that I also was like, that's weird.

Speaker 5:
[90:53] That is weird. Also, for her to sit here and be like, I would never talk about someone's body that way. That's just not true. But the other thing that I think is interesting about the way this dialogue is written is that this book is a lot about her reflections on her relationships with Jenny and Jack, and now she hates them both. I think it's hard to read early moments from them because I don't think she can look back at them with the same wide-eyed optimism that she once had because she's writing it through what she's been through.

Speaker 4:
[91:35] You know what else is interesting as another good example? I mean, just to bring it in again, I believe she would never talk to someone younger than her, the way that Jenny was talking to Lena. But also, she's never had someone younger than her be her boss. Do you know what I mean? She's only ever speaking to employees. I think it's interesting to compare to her relationship with her brother, which was very strained and very difficult, and it seems like it's only recently thought and been fixed. The way Lena treats her brother, she was completely out of touch with how she made her brother feel. At one point, she shows up to her brother's college to give a lecture. Her brother hated that Lena was famous. She shows up to her brother's college to give a lecture, and is shocked that he won't hang out with her. I was like, well, did you ask if he wanted you to? I was like, oh, you hadn't even asked. You just showed up. You wanted brother time, so you just went to a school to give a lecture. I am like, you actually also are very unsure of how to deal with people and dealing with your fame.

Speaker 5:
[92:24] You know what I mean? Can I say something about the relationship with the brother? Because I don't think we're going to really get into it again, but I feel that it's a really interesting example of when she wants to make a relationship work, she still doesn't know how to have balance and conversation. I feel the relationship with the brother is just like, and I don't even know if this is the wrong way to handle it, especially with family, but just kind of this absolute surrender to whatever the brother's perspective is from this point forward. I feel that there are some slightly, like I think Lena's fame is really hard on the entire family. I think that Lena's brother had a really hard time with it, especially while coming out.

Speaker 4:
[93:06] I mean, especially the fact that one of the biggest Lena Dunham scandal is this accusation that she molested her brother as a baby. I'm sorry if my brother wrote a memoir about me, and then for the rest of my life, I had Fox conservatives in my mentions saying, you got molested, you got molested, you got molested by your sister. I would be like, I fucking hate you.

Speaker 5:
[93:25] Right. But there are certain moments where I am like, I think it's the right choice. The brother also made mistakes and also became an adult and still made mistakes. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[93:33] Like when he ditched her book tour to hook up with somebody on the Great British Bake Off.

Speaker 5:
[93:37] Yes. And even more so to not show up for your sister's hysterectomy. I think that that's like hard. Lena talks about having a lot of friends come by, whatever, but I don't know. I think having a major, major invasive surgery, at a certain point, I can be like, I'm sorry for the way that my book caused you pain, but there are also moments when I think Lena has had to just put it all aside and surrender and be like, I was dead wrong. I'll be whoever you want me to be in order to maintain this relationship. That's also not entirely fair, but it is a choice. It doesn't feel that there's ever any middle ground finding in her relationships. It's either she agrees to surrender to someone else, or someone else is expected to surrender to her.

Speaker 4:
[94:21] I also, this is my final thing I'll say about how she turns everyone into a character, because she is somebody who's been very hurt by that. She talks a lot about how six years ago she paid for somebody's dinner as a favor, and now they're writing a blog about how much they hate her. I think for somebody who's been through that, and also caused so much pain with their own writing about other people, the way she still is so quick to reduce people to stories. I'm sure she had her brother sign off on everything she said about him this time, but I don't know. The way she'll be like, at these conferences, there's always some anonymous Emily or Hannah taking this. I'm like, they're not anonymous to them. I don't know. That's a mean thing to say. I feel like the way she talks about all of her friends, I think that's a meanness because she wants to be snarky and funny. Then I think the really interesting thing is the fact that she leaves Taylor Swift out altogether. Do it. Yes.

Speaker 5:
[95:04] She understands what privacy is. Girls comes out. It's extremely successful. The premiere night is, she says, the greatest night of her life. She slept on her parents' couch because she wanted to be as close to their room as humanly possible. Even the guest room in their house was too far away. She becomes very famous and she has a really hard time dealing with the way that people expect things of her now that she's famous. She's paying for drinks, paying for meals, paying for funding people's projects.

Speaker 4:
[95:33] I don't want to take this with a flip in tone because I think it's true. She's suddenly overnight, everybody has been asking me, and of course the problem is the people who are most aggressive in asking for favors are the most insane people. So you're getting a weird, you know what I mean? Nobody normal is costing you for not going to their short film, but everybody feels they get to ask you for something and then the people who are insane ask you a hundred times and make you feel insane. And I get that she was like, I didn't know how to have friends anymore because one, I was busy and two, I was struggling, but I felt like I couldn't complain to anybody about my life because they're all still figuring things out in their 20s and here I am complaining about having too many employees and too much responsibility and I should be lucky. And I am like, no, I get it, that's hard. That's very isolating. Yeah. So in order to get through this, she starts being prescribed colonipin in order to handle bigger moments of anxiety.

Speaker 5:
[96:19] Yeah, it begins a bit of a downward spiral.

Speaker 4:
[96:23] Oh my God, there's such a theme in this book of all the shitty apartments she buys. And I'm like, yeah, that's so crazy. It's crazy when you're like 27 and you own so many apartments and they all suck.

Speaker 5:
[96:31] Okay. She has never liked one of her apartments. She also only ever lives in them like part-time, I guess because she mostly stays with her parents.

Speaker 4:
[96:38] Well, also she's like bi-coastal plus mostly living with her parents. She's bi-coastal, bi-burl. That's when you live in both boroughs, burl.

Speaker 5:
[96:45] Yeah. First, she is living with her parents, then she rents an apartment with her money from the first season of Girls that is super shitty. She's like, fun fact, it's actually the disgusting apartment from the end of Francis Ha because my apartment was so shitty. It's like, yeah, I guess I don't know why you rented such a shitty apartment. I guess I don't know why. Then six months later, she buys property and that's ugly until Nora Ephron tells her how to renovate it. Then she moves in with Jack and she lives in an apartment she hates with him. I guess I just don't really understand why she won't go on one apartment tour before she signs something.

Speaker 4:
[97:20] Yeah. Let's talk about her relationship. She comes home after her first date to her parents, even though at this point she doesn't own an apartment and says, he's really funny, he lives with his parents too, and he also has OCD and a bad immune system, and he also loves Robin and he seems like he'd make a very good boyfriend. Oh God, my mother said, we can't handle two of you.

Speaker 5:
[97:37] And they are similar in ways that are deeply, deeply not compatible.

Speaker 4:
[97:45] Well, I think at first it works and they're so busy. They're both like, I forgot, We Are Young was the number one song of the summer when they first started getting together, and I also cannot remember how We Are Young goes, because all I can think about is that TikTok parody.

Speaker 5:
[97:57] Oh yeah, Kyle.

Speaker 4:
[97:58] Kyle Gordon's parody. I am like, I can't think of anything but that.

Speaker 5:
[98:02] I was like, no, I know exactly how it goes, and then I realized I think I'm probably singing the parody. Jack is very successful. Lena is very successful. She's also so busy. He's on tour, but she's also working insane amounts. And then she films in New York, but goes to LA to write the next season and also to edit the previous season. So she's out of town a lot. He's out of town a lot. I think their first couple of dates were over the course of months, before finally she was like, are you my boyfriend? And he was like, for sure.

Speaker 4:
[98:33] I think this is interesting. She's talking about how all the girls handled fame differently. I was living on the internet despite pretending that I wasn't. Instagram was brand new and Twitter was only just coming into its insidious final form. And although there was praise, it was very hard to receive when so much of what I saw was enough to confirm every suspicion I'd ever had about myself. That I was fat, my face was men, my voice was grating, there was plenty of hotter, better actresses. And then she's like, but the thing that made me feel better was how I had this great boyfriend that proved I was worthy.

Speaker 5:
[99:01] Yeah, and I think that she got a lot out of being like a buzzy couple.

Speaker 4:
[99:06] Well, I think it is like, here's this guy that could have models and he chose me. I mean, it's very validating to be chosen by somebody with options.

Speaker 5:
[99:13] I mean, he dated Scarlett Johansson for Christ sakes.

Speaker 4:
[99:16] And then Margaret Quality.

Speaker 5:
[99:19] Yeah, Quality Margaret.

Speaker 4:
[99:21] I do have a working theory right now that so much of Margaret Quality's bizarre public persona where she like refused to say anything in that Vanity Fair interview we covered a few weeks ago might be out of anxiety for sounding like Lena Dunham. Like I wonder if in their relationship the specter of Lena Dunham looms large and something Jack seemed to not like about her is how much hate she invoked and how much hate she attracted. And I wonder if she like Margaret Quality is just so scared of not being what Jack wants that she's like, okay, don't make anybody think about me at all.

Speaker 5:
[99:51] And it's so interesting because she I feel in that relationship is the one that people are like her with him. Like I think they make sense as like a little indie couple.

Speaker 4:
[100:03] I mean, he's so successful. I get it. And can I say and a lot of her success came post him, not to give anybody too much credit.

Speaker 5:
[100:10] That's true.

Speaker 4:
[100:11] She did the substance married.

Speaker 5:
[100:12] Yeah, but that Kenzo perfume commercial was before.

Speaker 4:
[100:16] Yeah, that only got her two weeks with Pete Davidson though.

Speaker 5:
[100:18] I know, but forever on my mind.

Speaker 4:
[100:22] In early fame, the problem was crippling. The guilt of being the one who got the thing seemed to propel me into near eternal state of generosity. I felt deeply that if I didn't give away much of what I had, then I might never get to keep it. Somehow the idea of drawing a boundary seemed like bad karma. For starters, I had been them once and hadn't people been kind to me. What if my name came up at a party and someone said, Oh, I know her. She's a flake, a snob. She's ungenerous. I could handle a lot of accusations, but the idea that I did not give wasn't one of them. Only the most unrealistic people ask you favors. We know famous people. I don't ask them favors at all, because I don't want to be annoying, and that's what normal people think.

Speaker 5:
[100:57] I also think that she feels so consumed by the negative, and I know she gets a lot of blowback. She does get a lot of hate, but I also think that she lives so in fear of it, that when it's not something that she courted, again, she says, Sometimes I've leaned into it because I wanted it out of my terms. I think when there's someone that she, especially an individual, she wants to be liked so much by every individual, I think she can take it a little bit more when it's coming from the masses or some no-face entity. But I think a lot of people will sit here and go, I'm a people pleaser. I'm a people pleaser. I think she will drive herself into the depths of hell trying to please people.

Speaker 4:
[101:37] Then turn around and be like, Throw batteries at my face for TV Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[101:44] Though her relationship with Jack, they were in not the same city a lot. When they were, her health was declining pretty rapidly. After the second season of Girls, she was supposed to make this Scott Rudin film that she ended up having to back out of and she was so stressed about how upset he was, that she poked her own eardrum out. While dissociating, she had a lot of other health problems. Season 3 is when she wrote a book also and went on a book tour to promote that book and had all these obligations. We've talked to people who say, You get this massive advance, but then you have to earn it back for them. If you're not promoting it, then you're in trouble. She's putting herself through just so much. This is where I think you got really frustrated especially by her not wanting to admit that it was ambition. You don't have to be doing a book tour during your couple weeks off from your very consuming job.

Speaker 4:
[102:40] Especially when you're somebody whose body is constantly falling apart. I think the thing that frustrated me is she has this moment with Jenny where Jenny asks her not to do the book right now or is worried about what it means for the show. Lena acts like this is jealousy and I'm sure it was. I'm sure there was a part of it that was jealousy, but I think it's actually very reasonable that this woman whose whole job is holding your hand and helping you write and making sure you're not in the hospital and you're not upset. Her job is to deliver to the network and you are somebody who's worn down, sick, punctured her own eardrum. It makes sense to me that this woman would be like, wait, you're going to sell a book into a book tour? When?

Speaker 5:
[103:16] Yeah. If you have extra energy, then why wouldn't you use it here?

Speaker 4:
[103:20] She gets the cover of Vogue and gets to do SNL in the same week. She tells her parents and they're like, would you want to do that? Which I'm like, God, come on, enough. Put your fucking snob nose down. Look her dead in the ass.

Speaker 5:
[103:31] You guys are in New York City. You know about SNL.

Speaker 4:
[103:33] Yeah, you're a short man. You can get your nose out of the air. Anyway, the week before the Vogue shoot, I broke out in shingles and in Patigo. For those who aren't familiar, it's a fungal rash that covered Amy Winehouse's face and some of the most famous paparazzi images of her downfall. When she asked the doctor how this happened, he's like, your immune system is telling you something. So I'm like, I don't know. It's interesting that she simultaneously was like, they were working me to the death.

Speaker 5:
[103:55] They were working her to death, but then she was doing more. And she also had a lot of resentment about how much they expected of her at the network. When it is like, yeah, I guess, starring in and writing and directing your own show, there just is a lot of money in it.

Speaker 4:
[104:12] And she's getting sicker and sicker. Something that I think is really interesting is her parents keep coming back to bail her out, which I understand is like very loving of parents, but she's like always sleeping in their room, in their apartment. Like her dad is always coming to get her physically at one point, she's really down and out and living in West Village. And he like brings her a coffee every morning at 730. And then her mom checks on her every night. And I was very kind of perturbed by the amount of babying. She gets from her adult parents who can see her succeed. But I also, again, wonder if this comes from a sickness in them. They kind of like that she's baby because they don't like her success. Do you know what I mean? There's something very bizarre about they're really tight as a unit. They really kind of freak me out.

Speaker 5:
[104:49] I was wondering if part of Cyrus' kind of rejection of Lena was, because Cyrus lives across the country for a lot of their life. Obviously, I think Lena was a difficult sibling, especially becoming incredibly famous and writing about you. But I also wonder how much of it was just a rejection and not wanting to fall into that same pattern that your parents are clearly very eager to continue, to be like, I actually can't talk to any of you guys while I establish myself as an adult human elsewhere. Because Lena never did that and she was into her 30s, saying like, when I'm an adult, then I'll be able to figure this out. I mean, at one point, it's season three of Girls, and she's talking about being in a bathrobe, dangling her feet over the director's chair, feeling like a child who was put in charge of a Fortune 500 company. And it's like, well, at this point, it's season three, you're 27, grow up. That's still very young, but now you've been doing it for some time. So she's getting sicker and sicker. Her relationship with Jack, I think, is getting more and more distant. It was an understatement to say that we hadn't been connecting. I was unable to have sex, unable to engage in playful banter and work, and Jenny seemed to be the only place I could invest in real time and care, the last little bit that I had to give. So then she has this surgery where instead of doing the automatic, I guess there's a robot surgery where they go in and they clear lesions when you have endometriosis, but she met a doctor who was like, no, I'm gonna go in and do it manually and found so many lesions that he was like, I actually don't know how you were standing. And she wakes up to Jack sobbing next to her bed saying, I just didn't realize it was that bad. He says, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Sorry, I thought that he hadn't taken me more seriously, that the doctor's words had alerted him to the irrefutable truth of my pain and that he couldn't bear having ignored it. But what I hear now 10 years later is, I'm so sorry you have to live with this and I'm so sorry that I can't. And I think this is a really heartbreaking part about her chronic illness because I think she has like a really bizarre relationship with her parents and an interesting expectation of care. But as a chronically ill person, there is a version of care that I think she really needs, that I think he really was not ready or willing to provide.

Speaker 4:
[107:06] Yeah, I agree. Basically, the rest of this is like girls ramps up, it's more and more. She's an interesting perspective that like you have this idea that you have to say yes to everything because who knows how much longer it'll last. But the truth is the more you say yes to, the more that comes. And so she's getting more and more sick, she's getting more and more stressed out, she's taking more and more clonopin, and she does slowly find out she's addicted. So girls ends, they call it, her and Jenny decide to embark on a new voyage, it's called camping. At this point, Lena is like non-functioning. She is so sick, she decides to get a hysterectomy.

Speaker 5:
[107:37] Yeah, so her doctor really was advising her against it. Finally, she just like puts her foot down, and she's like, no, it like doesn't even feel right in my body anymore. It's so fucked up. I can't live like this. This is a really unflattering line about Jack. She gets her uterus taken out of her body. Jack shows up two hours later, sweeping into my hospital room with some bodega flowers. He was wearing hotel slippers and Bermuda shorts, a hoodie covered in patches. Sorry, the tour bus got stuck in a tunnel. I texted to see if you guys could wait. Yeah, my father said, looking like he was considering a grievous bodily harm for the first time in his life. Surgery is like a train, not a tour bus. You either make it or you don't. I do think Jack had a hard time being a caretaker because he's also a baby who wanted to be taken care of.

Speaker 4:
[108:19] The problem is two babies can't date, but also a baby can't date an adult, so it is hard.

Speaker 5:
[108:24] They both have this concept of wanting to be nice, and so he can't break up with her. He can just show up with bodega flowers and hotel slippers, and actually the nicest thing to do would have been not making her think she had a boyfriend who would show up for her full-blown hysterectomy.

Speaker 4:
[108:42] So here's where it gets weird. If you guys remember, and I do vividly remember this as being such a bizarre thing, a woman named Aurora accused a writer of girls of assault.

Speaker 5:
[108:54] A writer for girls. She accused him of rape when she was 17 years old.

Speaker 4:
[109:00] And he was 35, right?

Speaker 5:
[109:02] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[109:03] So they put out a statement saying, while our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story, our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that, sadly, this accusation is one of the 3% of assault cases that are misreported every year.

Speaker 5:
[109:16] Okay. So this happened in the days following her procedure.

Speaker 4:
[109:20] I think she claims it happens the day of her procedure. She claims she was still on anesthesia when Jenny is very tricky, because she says Jenny came to see her, but then also that it was finalized via text, and then also they hit that they post it while she was still coming out of general anesthesia.

Speaker 5:
[109:37] And she never says what it is. You have to do the Googling, because I forgot this happened, to be honest. I knew it happened. I didn't know that that's what she was referring to here. It is not acknowledged head on. It's only talked about as this unspecific moment that she feels unrelenting shame about. She says, I had no tools for apologizing for making amends for understanding why it had happened in the first place. And so I stopped then and there and gave up. I laid down and I didn't get up for a very long time.

Speaker 4:
[110:07] So she kind of suggests that Jennie like, while she was on drugs posted them to do it. I don't know. It's crazy because it doesn't seem like she knows right away that what she did was so wrong. Later, someone suggests to her that maybe you were trying to like self-sabotage your own life. You were like in such a bad place. She neither has an explainer nor does she take full, I think by saying like, oh, well, I was on drugs. Because if the situation is true, that you left your mom in the hoods, no, but if the situation is true, that you got out of surgery and while still coming off of general anesthesia, someone came to you and said, should we post this? And you went, yeah, sure. And then regretted it. I mean, you were just on laughing gas. I've been on laughing gas and been completely out of touch with what was happening. I think that that is fully an excuse. I guess a week or two later, you're like, wait, sorry, I was on drugs. I just realized what happened.

Speaker 5:
[110:58] It's so funny because when I was coming off laughing gas, we watched an episode of Summer House. And then the next day when we were talking about it on the Patreon, some of the things you said, I was like, wow, really? That's what Amanda said. And now imagine, imagine if it was my social media.

Speaker 4:
[111:15] Anyway, so my point is, I just feel that that is such a valid excuse that I am kind of like, if that's true, why not use it? But it seems like I guess that's not really true. It seems like they had been figuring out a statement to put out together, that she was on drugs when they finally hit send. And then I guess she like stood by it for a while. I saw in 2018, in November 2018, she like apologizes to Aurora, which I think is one year later. It is just like kind of an unforgivable thing she did to a woman that, on behalf of what, a fucking comedy writer?

Speaker 5:
[111:46] I mean, the statement itself was pretty obscene. I know that she has apologized to Aurora. I think she has done work to make amends, but I think the way it's addressed in this book is really, if you aren't hyper aware of the situation, it's pretty ridiculous, because you know that this is something that took her out for a while.

Speaker 4:
[112:06] Yeah, it's definitely used as a catalyst, as an emotional catalyst of her drug addiction. It's seen as both a death of self that she did and a moment of self-sabotage when after her hysterectomy, when she was just feeling so hated by the world and so down and out, she kind of killed any goodwill left by doing something genuinely fucked up. She says it's one of the first times when she went viral for something bad or when there was a scandal around her that even her close friends were like, hey, what are you doing here? You cannot do it. You're making a huge mistake. We can't stand by you.

Speaker 5:
[112:33] There are a lot of people that blew up every little thing she did into something ridiculous. This was something really bad. She calls it then the big bad in this way that I feel makes light of it. I think calling something the big bad, that's what they did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer about fictional demons. You know what I mean?

Speaker 7:
[112:52] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[112:53] Then it seems like she's just taking more and more drugs. She's so out of it. This is when she moves to the West Village. She's barely working, she's barely functioning.

Speaker 7:
[112:59] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[113:00] Her and Jack have officially broken up.

Speaker 4:
[113:01] She dates this full-fledged drug addict that she knows from childhood, who moves in with her because he's homeless and has a problem with seizures, which are him withdrawing from alcohol even though he claims he's sober. But I would just use a seizure, it means it's like that's the first time he's been sober in a while.

Speaker 5:
[113:22] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[113:23] They get engaged, her parents find them an apartment upstairs from their own house.

Speaker 5:
[113:27] She hates it. It's an ugly apartment, she says. She's never lived in an apartment that she didn't think was ugly. They're still making this show camping. It's not going great. I'd never heard of it.

Speaker 4:
[113:38] I had heard of it. It starred Jennifer Garner.

Speaker 5:
[113:40] Wow, really? It's a shame that didn't work out. I think an important detail that is getting brought up a lot about this book is that she actually started her affair with Nick, the drug addict's former childhood friend, before her and Jack officially broke up. I don't think it's ultimately that salacious, to be honest. I think this idea that her and Jack hadn't had their official breakup yet. After her hysterectomy, when he showed up late, there wasn't even a question of who would take care of her. She went straight to her parents' house and he didn't even stay at her parents' house with her. She was at her parents' house and he was at their apartment. Then maybe six weeks later, she started her affair with Nick and a few weeks after that, her and Jack officially broke up. I think that if you have a major surgery and your partner is like, text me when you're back, you broke up.

Speaker 4:
[114:23] Yeah. She's like, I never checked his phone. Of course, this is the whole Lord thing. I'm sure you guys have probably read. All that comes out is that she did in fact DM the woman who made that PowerPoint because she was like, wait, what? Was he cheating on me? With Lord who we had moved into her house who called her Aunt Lena, which I'm like, come on Lord, that's mean. But it's never a teenager's fault. It's never a teenager's fault. But I will say if you're a teenager, don't call a woman in her 20s or even 30s aunt.

Speaker 5:
[114:51] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[114:52] Especially not if you know you're having an affair with her boyfriend.

Speaker 5:
[114:56] Or even want to.

Speaker 4:
[114:58] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[114:59] Anyway, so she is working on the show and finally, she realizes how dependent on pills she is.

Speaker 4:
[115:08] Jenny is like, I think you need rehab. Her parents are like, what does Jenny know? She's just jealous. That's true.

Speaker 5:
[115:15] But she did need rehab. I think this chapter is really heartfelt and well-written. She goes through these phases in rehab of having to acknowledge that she is a drug addict who is in rehab for drugs, not like someone who just circumstantially was taking too many medicines.

Speaker 4:
[115:34] Then she slowly comes back into real life and it's harder, obviously, at first because she's feeling things for the first time, but at least she can feel her body. Then she tries to date guys that keep screwing her over, so she's like guy sober for a while. Then she gets the industry pilot to direct and it saves her life. She moves to London. She's happy for the first time. She accepts that she's a chronically ill person. She gets this tattoo of the word sick on her neck and her mom's like, Why would you do that? Don't label yourself. She's like, This is who I am. There's no getting better, there's just managing. It seems like she's married and she's doing better and she's back on tap. Everybody's forgiven her. They read her book and they said, Everybody was too mean to you. I really feel for her.

Speaker 5:
[116:10] It is heartbreaking. I think she had all these moments where she was feeling so awful and then someone would come in and be like, And if we do this surgery. I think she kept on having this feeling that if we find the thing, then I'm back to normal and having the realization of like, Oh, I don't feel good and here are the things I can do to make myself feel better most days. It's hard. It's really hard to come to terms with and I really admire the work she's done.

Speaker 4:
[116:40] Yeah. I think the way she talks about chronic illness is really interesting and helpful and I'm sure a lot of people feel seen and appreciate what she's done. Listen and God bless. I hope that guy that she met and they got married within six months. We'll see in a couple of years.

Speaker 5:
[116:54] I hope it works out. I want to read this one quote from Bruce Springsteen just to call back to CNBC because he had quite a banger of how to write a memoir.

Speaker 10:
[117:03] Sure.

Speaker 5:
[117:04] She talks to Bruce Springsteen, who was at that point really good friends with Jack because she had made the intro. She said, I'm going to write a memoir one day and I don't know how not to just call it, I hate you, Jack, you broke me, Jack. Bruce Springsteen was like golly.

Speaker 4:
[117:20] They're friends, him and Bruce Springsteen and Jack Antonoff.

Speaker 5:
[117:23] Yeah. He laughed and said, well, Lena, this is the hard stuff. These are the questions that artists must ask ourselves. None of us had that answer about how best to express our hurt through art. But when I was writing my memoir, I told myself this again and again. First off, it's boring, stop writing it. Second, you don't owe people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn't mean you lie. It just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show them how your mind works. I think in the context of talking about Jack, I'm like, well, I don't know if that's relevant, but I do think in the context of memoir, that's really good.

Speaker 4:
[117:54] Well, in conclusion, thank you Bruce Springsteen.

Speaker 5:
[117:58] For wrapping up Celebrity Memoir Book Club.

Speaker 4:
[118:01] Listen, I know you've got to caps off. I think we've given them enough.

Speaker 5:
[118:04] Yeah, we'll cap next time.

Speaker 4:
[118:06] All right. Good night.

Speaker 5:
[118:08] And good noticings.

Speaker 13:
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