00:00:00.000Hey, everyone. Here's your semi-regular update about a few episodes that we're working on.
00:00:04.480We would love to get your questions on heartthrobs. Who are our contemporary heartthrobs?
00:00:10.620What does it mean to be a heartthrob today? This one's going to be amazing. Also, women's
00:00:16.400fitness industrial complex. So in some ways, this is about like the pink washing of various things,0.83
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00:01:22.000This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:01:26.960And I'm Nicole Hill, host and creator of Our Ancestors for Messy.
00:01:30.820What is your relationship to gossip, and specifically historical gossip?
00:01:36.960Because we're going to talk about all sorts of gossip today,
00:01:39.720but part of the reason that I really wanted to have you on the show is because, like me,
00:01:43.940you are a freak about historical gossip. So tell me all about it.
00:01:49.540Okay, I really went on a journey because I was very much like, I shouldn't care about these things. We should all care about important things. And I dabbled, of course, in the Vanderpump rules and the housewives of the world. But this was not something that I like, led with. And then during the pandemic, when it was just like, we're all so isolated. One, I found myself really missing, like, I just dove into the housewives like everybody else.
00:02:15.240just I was a bravo just all the way in but I really miss the little dramas yeah everyday life
00:02:21.380and like watching my co-worker flirt with my other co-worker and being like what's gonna happen there
00:02:27.160or like just walking down and always seeing like that lady at the window like with her coffee and
00:02:33.400then like her partner's there what are they gonna do those were the things I really really missed
00:02:39.080Yeah. So like, I feel like I was on the search for gossip anywhere I could find it. And then I happened to stumble into some historical time. But I wouldn't say before that I was all that drawn to historical gossip specifically. I thought it was cool. But I don't think I've, I was like, let me seek it out. If somebody had made a podcast about it, I'm sure they did. And I'm sure I listened. But I wasn't like, actually, I know I did. Oh, I'll never remember the name of the show.
00:03:07.060but it was about historical gossip and there was some lady poisoned a bunch of people and i was
00:03:12.060like tell me everything were you interested in like the history of stardom or like the history
00:03:17.380of black stardom in particular i adore old hollywood it is my favorite thing i have since
00:03:23.060i was a middle schooler so this was this has been my bag and i've always loved and kind of
00:03:29.280Eat True Hollywood or You Must Remember This.
00:03:52.700But one, it was so small and the reporting on it was almost exclusively about their fight for civil rights and like how people had discriminated against them.
00:04:02.440Or if there was gossip, it was like whenever they interacted with a white person.
00:04:20.560i mean i love like talking shit like any high schooler but i uh wasn't into like celebrity0.91
00:04:26.840gossip and then i found my way there when i started to get interested in old hollywood like0.94
00:04:33.760i think a lot of people they understand contemporary hollywood and they think it's
00:04:37.300kind of interesting but also like in some ways i don't know it's just like so right there but then
00:04:42.200once you dive into that like treasure trove that is old hollywood and the construction of all of
00:04:48.860their images and this happened to me in college and it eventually turned into in grad school like
00:04:56.360my focus for my dissertation was the history of celebrity gossip so so i spent so much time
00:05:04.380in the treasure troves of like all of the old newspapers and the sort of gossip that
00:05:11.160that traffics in like the daily columns and that sort of thing but also in the magazines where
00:05:16.400like there was a lot going on there and I still I have this is before like wide-scale digitization
00:05:24.280really took hold I have I cannot tell you I have like seven boxes of like magazines that smell like
00:05:30.740my granddad that I bought on eBay um you're so lucky that's amazing and and I like part of the
00:05:39.540reason i was so interested in your podcast in particular is that i loved seeing the contrast
00:05:46.920in the way that the black press covered dorothy dandridge for example and how like life magazine
00:05:54.480covered her right like what was important the conversations that they were having the
00:05:59.260descriptions of her beauty like even just down to adjective choice like was so interesting and
00:06:06.540And even though it's harder to get your hands on a lot of the historical black magazines, the newspapers have been digitized and are so easy to search and to unearth all of this discourse.
00:06:19.360So once you get in there, you're like, I can't stop.
00:06:25.000And they vary in how messy they will be because ultimately the mission of most of the papers I've ever come across is to promote civil rights and is to amplify the sort of like dignified nature of being black because it's being written in contrast to something else.
00:06:43.940But in order to sell papers, you have to appeal to all the sides of a human being.
00:06:50.100And so just, oh my God, these columns were there.
00:06:53.300you know i did an episode about paul robeson yeah and i don't think i've shared this but
00:06:57.520the reason i did that episode is because i was reading a film review of paul robeson
00:07:02.520of his like a movie that had come out and they were saying like first of all i mean the writing
00:07:07.740is so like acerbic and like just like oh cutting and the double entendres and all this stuff is so
00:07:14.040good but they were basically just like we're really glad that paul finally made a good movie
00:07:17.540because he is out here just playing himself.
00:07:20.820The last movie he made was so bad.1.00
00:17:03.160And it allows, when you allow yourself to gossip, I think that you allow yourself to connect with somebody in this, like, it's not as intellectual.
00:17:13.640It doesn't need to be as intellectual.
00:18:41.020And it just, that to me, like, really keys in with this, what you're talking about, about how, like, gossiping about something like Real Housewives allows us to have these more serious conversations.
00:18:54.240Like, you're talking about the same issues.
00:18:57.000You're just not using the same, like, narrative structure of, like, I'm writing a paper, like a five-paragraph essay for college, right?
00:19:05.960And the stakes are low and anyone can enter into the conversation.
00:19:09.400So the Socratic, the kind of nature of like now I'm going to philosophize and teach you and sit at my feet and learn.
00:19:16.340I have like I'm a very visual sort of storyteller.0.82
00:19:18.820And so I really don't ever want to be telling stories where your visual would be me on a stage and you all sitting like cross-legged, listening, looking up at me.
00:19:28.680It's meant to be that we are at the kitchen table surrounded by snacks.
00:19:33.680And I'm like, girl, like there's the meme or whatever that's going around of like.
00:19:38.720two girls and they're like clearly gossiping. And this is so terrible. I don't know why I'm
00:19:43.560going to just try to describe a video to you, but you can't hear any sound, but the girl is just
00:19:47.740like, and everyone's like, like covering her eyes. That is how I want. That's the kind of
00:19:53.900storyteller I want to be. And I just love what it brings out in my guests. Yeah. And your guests
00:19:59.420on the show, they're always like, are you kidding? Like you're telling them this in real time and
00:25:09.400And so I'm so like conflicted on the way things have been done and the way that I want to do them.
00:25:16.760So I'll say like I get a little bit self-conscious in this space, but I do have opinions.
00:25:21.720And I think that when we talk about gossip and we talk about sort of just people chatting about their personal lives, I actually do think that that would be this important and valuable to include in our historical analyses of different people and especially movements because the ways people not liking each other has really tanked a lot of movements.
00:25:51.720And people being like, your wife did not send my wife the proper thank you, and that tells me that you guys are uncouth and we can't work with you.
00:26:04.500And so I think that rather than just saying, you know, it worked out, oh, it didn't work out, oh, it was just over this, over that, the gossip fills in all the lines in color.
00:26:15.340And again, if we're looking at history as a playbook, which that is what I believe in
00:26:18.780doing, you need to know that the interpersonal becomes like, what is it, like the local is
00:26:25.500national, like these small things become everything between the people.
00:26:30.900And we keep repeating these interpersonal mistakes and these interpersonal breakdowns
00:26:36.600keep happening generation after generation in the exact same way, but they don't get
00:26:41.060written down because it just seems like gossip, but it is actually instructive.
00:26:45.340And so I do think that including things like that into, okay, well, why did this league survive and this league didn't is so telling and really informative.
00:26:56.740My difficulty is sometimes history is so concerned in many cases with figuring out the truth, right, like the historical record.
00:27:06.780And what I found with studying gossip is that sometimes the only person who knows what actually happened is like the person themselves in a very small inner circle, right?
00:27:16.960And so what we do know, though, is how people talked about it at the time, which is often very different than how we talk about something now.
00:27:26.360So an apropos example for this conversation is the story of Dorothy Dandridge, who was an incredible, incredible Hollywood star, was on the cover of Life magazine, so beautiful, so talented.
00:27:44.120Yeah. Halle Berry famously played her in an HBO miniseries. And that is how she's understood now, though, is how Halle Berry interpreted, like almost to the extent that I think when a lot of people think of Dorothy Dandridge's face, they actually think of Halle Berry's face playing Dorothy Dandridge.
00:28:03.960and that like becomes the way that we understand something that happened is how we can like
00:28:11.460now narrativize it so even something like the constant like the founding of america
00:28:16.000right or abraham lincoln like i think i think of daniel day lewis's face instead of
00:28:22.600and the voice yeah that was wild totally sounds like that the example that was really difficult
00:28:32.820for me when i was writing my book about the scandals of classic hollywood is what everything
00:28:38.240that happened to judy garland essentially right and it's really complicated it's really sad there's
00:28:44.860a lot of trauma and there's how people talked about it in the gossip press at the time which
00:28:50.300was very layered and omitted a lot in terms of information about her suicide attempts
00:28:57.440and abortions and there is how various biographers have talked about it
00:29:03.660and then there's also interviews that she's done and the other thing too is that like even the
00:29:09.080individuals themselves aren't always reliable narrators 100 how did you think about that
00:29:15.600with like the oscar michaud episode with using a ton from his own autobiography
00:29:21.860like how did you like did you think of him as a reliable narrator i actually did in a lot of ways
00:29:30.240there are parts where i'm like okay i know that you are exaggerating here or whatever well i assume
00:29:37.780because he there are like things that he really does not like his father-in-law and so it's like
00:29:42.580that i know you're not giving this guy a fair shake so i'm gonna have to do some research to
00:29:46.680see like what a person who had his beliefs would say in the situation in an argument and not just
00:29:52.880go off of what Oscar said um I really do like to tell I was hoping to tell the story from his
00:29:59.500perspective and from his point of view and then what I do is I try to learn as much context as I
00:30:04.920can around what's happening so that I can paint a fuller picture of the world that he's moving
00:30:11.100through and you can better understand what he's doing I think without the context let's say if I
00:30:15.700just focus on the chicago chapter and he is quitting a bunch of jobs maybe my assumption
00:30:20.620would be he was experiencing racism because that is typically speaking what you would read about
00:30:26.800in history yeah but if you have the context of he the way he describes himself he's like i don't
00:30:32.700want to work it's too hot it's too cold it's too early it's too late and then all that his family
00:30:36.760has said i can add this this context and this bring out his humanity and saying that like
00:30:42.020Like, this is likely, he's probably a Quidditch house because he's kind of like a lazy guy.
00:30:47.780So I try to take everything they say with the, allow that to build out a character, let's say.
00:30:54.440But with my guests, what's really nice and the fact they're not experts is we can kind of speculate.
00:30:58.740And my guest in that one, Dr. Ray Christian, what was really fun is that he is a person, he's like older and he's lived and has kids.
00:31:08.060So he was sometimes on Oscar's side, sometimes on the father-in-law's side.
00:31:12.420He was willing to see it from a lot of different perspectives.
00:31:14.860So I think in that way, we're able to kind of take this first-person narrative of what happened and question it in some places, build it out in other places, accept it if we'd like in other places like that.
00:31:27.700It's tricky to go off of what everybody said about themselves.
00:31:30.760And I am using a lot of their letters and what they are saying about themselves.
00:31:34.820And they're all interlocking. And this is going back to our inner our the original question of like the place of gossip in the larger field of history is you have like how the gossip columns are talking about whether or not someone is a good match for someone.
00:31:49.460A lot of it has to do with like their perceived value within society, which is in turn connected, especially at this time and in the black community to their proximity to whiteness.0.53
00:32:01.500Can you talk a little bit about that? That was so interesting to me.
00:32:05.480So it is, it's, it's, and it really is city dependent.
00:32:09.780But I do think in some cities, you know, there's this expectation.
00:32:12.820I think I talked about this in the first episode, Stings for Our Enemy, Honey for Our Friends,
00:32:17.060where it's set in D.C. and it's set in Victorian era, Washington, D.C., where it's immediately after slavery.
00:32:23.000And we're talking about a class of black people who have achieved some degree of wealth.
00:32:27.000We may not consider them to be the richest people in the world today, but at the time they are living much better than the average American, black or white.
00:32:34.820And for them, what success looked like was imitating the things that white people were doing.
00:32:41.520And then for the larger culture, this becomes this definition of success.
00:32:46.400There's always a strain of people who are fighting against that kind of thinking.
00:32:51.060But when the power structure looks a certain way and you want power and you want safety,
00:32:57.740it's not wild to me to imitate that power structure in hopes that you will be accepted,
00:33:03.360that you will be safe that you will you know all these things but it creates a lot of tension
00:33:07.540within the black community which I talk about in the gossip columns because then people are just
00:33:11.060like they're pretending to be white and they think that this is going to help them and it's
00:33:15.280absolutely not and that is sort of a like a more fun way to examine this larger sort of liberation
00:33:22.660debate that's going on within the community at the time of like do we need to fully separate
00:33:27.700and get away or should we try to integrate by um sort of assimilating to some of the things that
00:33:34.420we're seeing it's very much sort of the thing of like you come from another country and then you
00:33:37.700don't teach your child the language because you want them to assimilate that is a little bit of
00:33:42.580what's happening and some of the gossip columns are just absolutely just dragging people for doing
00:33:48.700it and other ones are dragging people for not and saying like you're not good enough if you're not
00:33:54.800wearing the right clothes and your hair isn't just so and your hat isn't this every city had
00:33:59.840a different theory and I'm really really interested in it but I try not to judge it because
00:34:03.760a thing that my research producer Chioki Aynsen and I talk about a lot is that there's no way
00:34:10.680even though they are black and I am black I cannot know what it would be like to be the first
00:34:16.240generation of people born free in America it just is an impossible thing to know I can guess but I
00:34:22.780don't know right and how they talk too about like whether or not they were slaves or not slaves or
00:34:28.400their parents were slaves or not slaves and trying to yeah yeah a big source of shame yeah um but
00:34:37.020then also sometimes not because if your dad was white sometimes it was helpful it's really strange
00:34:43.640this is a small anecdote but cleveland i'm i'm learning there was this was a community where
00:34:49.440enslaved women who presumably, I mean, you know, they had these children by the men that were
00:34:57.720enslaving them could be sent to Cleveland and have like some semblance of an okay life. And
00:35:02.460the men would send them money. Um, that's the thing. That's another thing that's really
00:35:06.440complicated about the past is the relationship, the actual relationship between black and white
00:35:10.540people. Yeah. I always learned that it was super separate and it's so integrated and messy and
00:35:16.740there's strange kind of affection and there's strange love and strange envy and strange hate
00:35:22.140and strange like curiosity and it's all much messier than we've made it out to be but we've0.67
00:35:27.200been way more interconnected than we've said and I think it's a lot more visible in the black press
00:35:31.720than it is in the white press yes yes yes completely they're always talking about it in
00:35:37.980the black press yes and the white press like there's some stuff that's sublimated but it's
00:35:41.980not explicit totally yeah so that in and of itself is like a really interesting place to
00:35:48.840delve into the historical record and look at how the discourse shifts depending on who is the
00:35:54.860perceived audience oh my gosh you are like speaking my exact language I really wanted to do
00:35:59.780just like tell a bunch of stories as reported in the white press yes is how they were reported in
00:36:05.260the black press it's really interesting to see the comparison yeah okay next question is about
00:36:12.480the different forms that gossip takes and who engages in them this is from katie ann while
00:36:17.580gossip columns have never been my cup of tea i enjoy reality tv shows and am obsessed with
00:36:24.480anonymous advice columns to me these are all just different mediums for gossip why is it that no0.95
00:36:31.460matter your favorite flavor of gossip these spaces are so femme dominated and why is it that consuming1.00
00:36:38.520this media has to be couched as a guilty pleasure so many very smart women love consuming gossip1.00
00:36:44.500but society seems to really turn its nose up at it why can't we enjoy it out in the open0.98
00:36:50.240yes why can't we let's do it everybody over your windows scream it well and that's the thing is i
00:36:59.700think that people do enjoy it more publicly now but they don't like to call it gossip right it's
00:37:04.460like i love the point about anonymous advice columns because that that is absolutely reading
00:37:13.000someone else's business and then coming to your own opinion about what it is right what they should
00:37:18.120do what's fucked up about their lives like all that sort of thing there's so many good little
00:37:23.740stories in there i love to read an anonymous gossip like in the old papers that the first0.86
00:37:28.240one that i really came across it was the court of afro relations or maybe it was called the court
00:37:33.340of human relations it's in the afro-american newspaper and it's just people uh there's a
00:37:38.500picture of a judge and then it's just everybody's little anecdotes the first i will never forget
00:37:42.740this one uh a neighbor this is like 1938 they're complaining because they live in a boarding house
00:37:48.220and then one neighbor has a dog and the dog is so like loud and untrained and out of control they're
00:37:54.000like they just let this dog do whatever one's sick of this and and the judge offers you know
00:37:59.640his judgment what you learn from that story is like oh my gosh there are people living in a
00:38:04.380boarding house with dogs in 1938 and and then the judgment tells you a lot about the time
00:38:11.860yeah um i why is it so femme dominated i mean i think you spoke to that i actually don't think
00:38:19.140it's even i think some of the pop culture forums that we are talking about today are pretty femme
00:38:26.740dominated in terms of like reality television femme or like i know a lot of gay men who are
00:38:33.580also very very even back in the day too yeah yes for sure and um there were many gossip columnists
00:38:40.780who were gay men and used the columns as a way of actually like subtly outing who was gay and who
00:38:48.420wasn't there one of my favorite anecdotes is like there was this columnist mike connelly
00:38:53.240who was uh the gossip columnist for the hollywood porter in i think the 50s maybe the early 60s
00:38:58.980and he would report on like who went out to dinner with whom the night before
00:39:05.360and if it was like two gay men in their beards he would like the way that he would arrange their
00:39:13.100names it would be woman's name and like the ampersand would connote who was actually having0.91
00:39:21.760sex with who and he knew this in part because he was also a gay man and privy to what was going on0.98
00:39:28.240um but i think that men gossip about sports all the fucking time 100 percent and they just don't0.98
00:39:38.360call it gossip exactly that's exactly that's exactly it i love i listen to this podcast the0.86
00:39:45.140town but that's yeah yeah which is fun but i really like um big picture yes and then uh what's
00:39:52.480the one with chris ryan and andy uh uh the watch the watch the watch yes thank you big picture and
00:39:58.780the watch these are two of my favorites i love to hear them talk about sports i don't know anything
00:40:02.460about sports i love to hear them just going back and forth and and it's absolutely gossip and it's
00:40:07.860Absolutely them being like, if I was in this man's shoes, this is what I would have done.
00:40:27.560I would actually argue that all of those Bill Simmons universe shows on The Ringer, they are all inflected with this like pop culture sensibility.
00:40:37.140as a means to describe or understand what's going on in sports.
00:40:41.940And when we say that, what they're actually doing,
00:40:43.860like they're mapping celebrity and gossip narratives
00:40:47.320onto what is happening on the field and off the field.
00:41:07.140yeah it's really their fun listen and you know what i always wish like i'm having so much fun
00:41:12.560in this conversation and i always wish that we would talk about podcasts in this way yes in that
00:41:18.460kind of fun way that they do and not this like kind of stayed sort of like i think this was good
00:41:24.760or bad but like just have some have a little bit of fun take it a little less seriously i think that
00:41:29.480that is the way the culture is going as people just want to feel girls just want to have fun
00:41:34.460Well, this is okay. We're going to get super meta. Don't you think that this is the two
00:41:38.520like modes of podcasting energy right now are like, let's, let's arrive at some thinking about
00:41:45.560a large, big, like capital letters issue in our society by extended conversation and consensus
00:41:53.760building or by heavily produced argumentation. Right. I think you're right. I think that these
00:42:03.760are the only two modes right now or one person just talking yeah just talking like into the
00:42:12.660universe that one too for some reason that works um and it's really interesting to me because
00:42:18.780there is still i think this understanding within the podcast world and you are way more familiar
00:42:24.940than with this than i am that like the high art podcasts are always heavily produced right like
00:42:32.120the serious stuff is not conversational in this way. But also I think that those podcasts are
00:42:39.860struggling. Yeah. Unless they're like a more straight news type of thing. Like even the
00:42:45.160success of something like Today Explained. Oh yeah. Yeah. And contrast that with something like
00:42:51.020The Daily, which both of them are juggernauts. But Today Explained is much more like, let me
00:42:57.040talk with a journalist about how this works like what's happening let's explain it to one another
00:43:04.480as opposed to a more like this is what what is happening in the world today yeah fascinating
00:43:11.300it's format stuff you know i so when i was working on my well wait are there more questions
00:43:17.800there are more questions but keep going on this keep going okay yeah i when i was working on my
00:43:22.260show you know i was really torn because i wanted to make something that i wanted to listen to
00:43:26.220yeah and increasingly it's like that bill simmons world that kind of recap world where two people
00:43:33.240who not are just very knowledgeable but really like each other yeah like have something in common
00:43:39.060not intellectual but actually something in common kind of in from the heart realm and i think this
00:43:44.960is sort of this has been a big theme with the show is like can i connect with you emotionally and
00:43:49.180in your heart and not just your head that's really important for me for this show specifically
00:43:54.240yeah and so when I was trying to figure out format I ended up needing to do something that
00:43:59.860is very much not like even though it's so heavily produced and I gotta find some way to do less but
00:44:05.540it's so in the vein of all the shows that I love but when I was thinking about like do you want to
00:44:11.400listen to one of the shows that you love tell this story and I was like honestly no I would much
00:44:17.420rather the dudes at the watch tell me this story and what do i do about that you know and to connect
00:44:24.580this to our larger forum i've always thought that part of the brilliance of the ringer universe
00:44:31.300is that he told like he hired people and then he said like hire your best friend
00:44:36.680like people that were already intentional like if you like chris ryan and andy greenwald were like
00:44:42.240friends from before right like they like that's part of why they have this chemistry and think
00:44:47.400about who you have the best gossip with like yeah like you can when you have that intimacy that
00:44:54.780allows you to like get deep and talk about these issues that matter you can do it whether it's
00:45:01.900about sports or it's about a new television show or whatever it is like it just yeah you're able
00:45:07.100to do that and i saw that with you on the show like there is i don't really know any of these
00:45:11.680people there you you were able to create some intimacy though you know what it is it's like i
00:45:19.280think i because i spent a lot of time playing with this and i did improv so i know what it is to like
00:45:23.720put on a character and when you get to it's so funny when you are asked to be the black person
00:45:31.620and the black authority on something and it's an experience that all of us can share and have had0.95
00:45:37.620And so I think that in that way, that's our that's the thing that is our intimate moment where we start to build some is this question of like, what kind of black are you?
00:45:47.600And then we get to talk about how the world perceives your blackness and how you perceive your blackness.
00:45:53.640And we get to like laugh at what they're getting right and what they're getting wrong.
00:45:58.420And then we move through the story as two people who have this identity that is so massive that you walk into a room and people are seeing generations of history before you've even said a word.
00:46:11.820And you get to play with it and be like, you're totally wrong.
00:46:14.900I don't or I want to I'm going to go about it this way or that way, you know, and that that creates that connection because that was really important to me.
00:46:21.440Yeah. And blackness is the thing that we're we're being intimate.
00:56:44.860But their jobs are to protect this company.
00:56:46.720You can't just be telling them all these secrets.
00:56:48.860But, oh, I had this one friend, and she has the wildest stories.
00:56:53.120and she won't give me anything even though we are have no we're in different states our industries
00:56:57.840are so different and there's something about it where I'm like just give me a name like just I
00:57:02.520just can we please just make up a name and she's like no because she won't even do like any kind
00:57:07.380of gender identifiers like nothing everything is they and I'm like I just cannot I just want to0.60
00:57:11.880visualize I'm trying to create a little scene in my head and she's like absolutely not well that's
00:57:16.600like in your podcast where you ask the person like you're describing a character and you say
00:57:22.180to the person that's your co-host for the show like i want who are you picturing in your mind
00:57:27.380what contemporary star are you picturing in your mind yes exactly idris elba as oscar michaud
00:57:34.780is very funny to me um but uh the other thing i want to say about like teacher gossip what was
00:57:43.560it going to be about unionize oh okay this is inside baseball but we're on this podcast and
00:57:50.960culture study is just on patreon now we made the switch over there's a bunch of people who also
00:57:54.880came over at the same time there's just like when you switch to any new platform there are always
00:57:59.540problems and before patreon and i don't have a problem saying with this patreon was siloing us
00:58:07.120so that like each one of us would communicate to the person who is trying to manage our problems
00:58:12.060like this is an issue this is an issue this is an issue right but we got a background chat right so
00:58:19.120like all of these writers and podcasters are talking about the issue and then it's it's not
00:58:25.620a union but it is solidarity that when we all say this is a massive problem it becomes a bigger
00:58:32.560force against like the people who are trying to fix the problem right or trying we're not doing
00:58:37.920as much to fix the problem and to me like yeah that that like group thread is gossip but it's
00:58:45.540also power it is power exactly yeah gossip is power i think that's a great way to be to look
00:58:52.560at it you're exactly right because now i'm thinking about all the times that we all got
00:58:55.880together we were like did you get this email i didn't get that email what's going on and then
00:59:00.400it starts to bubble it starts to create a collective and now we're moving as uh as one
00:59:05.580which of course you have so much more power if you're moving as a collective versus as an
00:59:10.140individual right or i think of like the shitty media man list do you remember this oh i do
00:59:15.760remember that oh my god i haven't thought about that in so long it was like and again this was
00:59:21.320meant to be private gossip right and when it became public is when it became libelous yeah
00:59:27.000sometimes some of these things do need to stay a little bit like in the group chat for a while
00:59:30.840like you don't want to put everything out there right so i think of it in layers right like gossip
00:59:35.400is like the way that we like share information and then for something to become like actionable
00:59:41.420then you have to like it has to be handed over to professionals in some capacity so
00:59:45.900that could be a lawyer that could be I guess law enforcement or it could be journalists who then
00:59:52.500do the work of like okay I'm going to interview this person I'm going to interview this person
00:59:56.000I'm going to get this person on the record like whatever yes but it has to start somewhere people
01:00:00.000have to start talking about something somewhere that's it that's it exactly right this was so fun
01:00:06.080this was so fun i've actually been not doing interviews anymore well not until the fall
01:00:13.640because i'm working on my second season yeah um of my show and i'm deep like that i'm in a different
01:00:19.180time period than i'm used to and so the gossip is like to understand it i need scholars and
01:00:24.680interpretation and because it's really like some golden age reconstruction era double on you know
01:00:32.120like we're speaking underneath the this is what it means this is not what it means um and so i've
01:00:37.760been really really deep in that um but i'm so glad that we talked this was really wonderful
01:00:46.240no and like that well first of all we will promote the hell out of it um but that like i i totally
01:00:54.180get to the like I'm not doing press for that anymore like this is like well it's just like
01:00:59.780I can't talk to anybody about usually you know what it is I really really appreciate the questions
01:01:05.520that you're asking me because a lot of times I get asked about the gossip of the show in a way
01:01:11.520that makes me worried that the larger meaning of what this kind of these kind of conversations are
01:01:18.180doing are lost and I don't know if you can convey the meaning if I just do a dissertation about it
01:01:23.260But I think that the things that you enjoy about gossip and the things that I enjoy about gossip are similar.
01:01:29.360And it could be because of our relationship to old Hollywood and the role that gossip played there, which is, I think, more pronounced and more kind of professionalized and appreciated.
01:01:39.640It was like we're going to construct a whole image and we're going to give you stories.
01:01:43.140We're feeding all these things to the press and then we're able to go over here and actually live our lives and do whatever it is we're trying to do.
01:01:49.560I appreciate being able to talk about the show