00:06:58.280These two private citizens that were just, I mean, like, cheating on their spouses, sure, but just, like, enjoying a concert together ended up having their lives and personal lives.
00:07:08.300And also, last time I checked, cheating on your spouse.
00:07:18.260But that is a great example, because then what happened is that this became this cultural moment where Ryan Reynolds turned it into a commercial. And then the woman involved in the scandal ended up doing like a sit down tell all, I believe, with Oprah. And so you really do get into this feeling again, where it's not like she got a reality television show. But the experience of consuming that story was reality TV.
00:07:40.700That was the point. People were trying to find out details about them. They felt entitled to their indiscretion. And again, we were then like basically losing our minds over the fact that this has happened. And this was for cheating. That is not illegal. But very quickly, it's immoral. I think we've seen the same thing with the summer house drama that has been playing out where it's like you have people who have theoretically, again, we don't know these people. You have people who have theoretically like basically gone behind their friends or their partner's backs and hooked up.
00:08:09.520is it unseemly sure is it illegal no are we acting like it's illegal absolutely was there
00:08:15.700a summer house reunion recently i feel like i saw a cut headline yes and that's what i was going to
00:08:20.640talk about okay great i'm i do want the update because i have not followed it at all so i have
00:08:25.820no idea what ended up happening but i just saw headlines about the reunion happening dude it was
00:08:31.880nuts first of all it's it's i think it's going to be a two or a three-part series and i think by the
00:08:36.480time this episode comes out, the second part will have come out. We, I have only watched the first
00:08:39.920part. I got Riley up at 6am to watch it the other day while we were in San Francisco for tour. It
00:08:45.280was nuts. I mean, it was exactly what you would imagine. Amanda and Wes, who are the offending
00:08:49.420party, were just annihilated. And the reason actually why I wanted to talk about this today
00:08:55.280was because I was watching that reunion and something that happened in that reunion that
00:08:59.540kind of struck me as new was that Amanda and Wes, who are the ones essentially in the hot seats
00:09:05.280while all the contestants are furious with them.
00:09:35.280They were mad, essentially, that they had been cheated of the opportunity to watch these people
00:09:40.820really suffer. Like, it's not enough for you to be there. You have to look uncomfortable. You have
00:09:46.960to experience this, and I have to see you experience it. There has been this whole wave of like, no,
00:09:53.520if you're going to go up there, you got to actually take it, and we need to see you be upset. We need
00:09:57.400to see you be sad. And it felt like the next iteration of this expectation of like the compact
00:10:02.540we have with these people, where it's like, not only do they have to share their personal lives
00:10:06.820or lean into these narratives or show up for the reunion, but they've got to emote the way that we
00:10:11.980want them to. Like a commercial for benzodiazepines. Right, right. And so I was just watching this
00:10:18.940unfold because honestly, I felt a little cheated. And I was like, why do I care that they're not
00:10:23.480reacting more emotionally? Yeah. I felt kind of like I was sitting in the Roman stadium where
00:10:29.960you're like, well, I paid a lot of money to watch this person get eaten alive. And they're just
00:10:33.860taking it. It's very anticlimactic. You have this expectation. So we're not going to talk about
00:10:39.300Summer House at length today, but that was kind of one of those tipping moments for me. I think
00:10:44.540I've talked about this in the bonus episode as well, that we have this belief that mainstream
00:10:48.380media is liberal. That's something that we push quite a bit. And that we have a liberal bias.
00:10:53.700And I think you and I spend a lot of time unpacking just how not true that is.
00:10:59.020There was a great episode, by the way, of, I think it was Citations Needed recently about this, like how conservative thinkers in the late 20th century kind of embedded that notion into society that media is liberal.
00:11:14.120Yeah. So in the bonus episode, we talked quite a bit about Taylor, Frankie Paul, and Amanda Bichula and the kind of psychological weirdness of watching reality TV. Today, we're going to talk about the political connection with reality television, the way that politicians move in and out of the reality television sphere.
00:11:31.680And what I want to think about this in terms of metaphorical resonance is the idea of reality
00:11:36.560television as this swamp. And we often talk about the people who walk into and out of it,
00:11:41.180but we don't really talk about the fact that we are all sitting in the swamp at all times.
00:11:45.900Like, we're in the swamp. We're just ambiently bathing in the swamp. And we're talking about
00:11:50.200the people who enter and exit it, but we're not really thinking about, like, well, what are they
00:11:53.620entering and exiting? And what is our proximity to it? So that's what we're talking about today,
00:11:58.100which is basically my intellectual explanation for my burning desire to talk about Spencer
00:12:02.620Pratt's mayoral campaign for the city of Los Angeles, which ended on June 2nd when he didn't
00:12:07.940receive a high enough percentage of the votes to reach runoff status with incumbent mayor Karen
00:12:12.660Bass. But Pratt's involvement in this mayoral campaign has essentially defined the conversation
00:12:17.080for the last six-ish months that he ran. And that is what we are talking about today.
00:12:22.540So Katie, okay, what do you know about Spencer Pratt?
00:12:24.260Spencer Pratt, Spencer Pratt. Well, I did notice in my Liz Lenz newsletter this morning that she did a dingus of the week about Spencer Pratt, and it was like, spiritually, he is always wearing two-layered pastel-colored polo shirts with the collars popped.
00:12:39.560It's like, yeah, that tracks. Spencer Pratt was kind of like the villain on the hills, which was an early 2000s reality television show, which introduced the world to unproblematic queen Lauren Conrad.
00:12:56.280and spencer was one half of this villainous couple spidey spencer and heidi and i know he's
00:13:05.580a blonde man which i have feelings about i know he loves crystals wait wait wait wait what are
00:13:14.100your feelings about blonde men or can you not air them are they too hot jail illegal it just
00:13:21.400Never the twain shall meet is my feelings about blonde adult men.
00:13:49.060Yeah, so Spencer Pratt was a character, emphasis on the word character, who was a villain on a reality television show called The Hills, a very formative reality television show.
00:13:59.280And you're right, it's centered around Lauren Conrad, who had kind of sprung to fame from an earlier reality television show, one of the earlier ones, Laguna Beach.
00:14:17.060Yeah, to around 2010. And in the first season, Lauren meets Heidi. They become fast friends and eventual roommates. And then in season two, Heidi's got a bad boyfriend and his name is Spencer Puatt.
00:14:31.420Spencer Puatt. He famously comes between Lauren and Heidi. It's a whole thing. It inspired a number of infamous quotes, including Lauren telling Heidi, I want to forgive you and I want to forget you, which is fucking bars.
00:14:44.780So yeah, Spencer's a bit of a nightmare.
00:14:46.180I was looking for like a series of montages