WTW132: But Who Influences the Influencers? with Kat Tenbarge!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. I'm Thomas. That over there is Lydia. How you doing?

0:00:46 Lydia: Hiya, doing pretty well. I sound better right now than I do in the interview that we're going to do. Because time has passed. Because Time.

0:00:52 Thomas: Oh, yeah, yeah. At this point, I got to introduce you as like the host. It's like, hey, here's your end. Here's your host. Well, the guy who prices right or the, you know, and there's like the talk V guy. What are they called now? They don't have those anymore.

0:00:58 Lydia: Yes. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Do they not?

0:01:10 Thomas: And now Lydia Smith. Yeah.

0:01:11 Lydia: Your host, Alex Trebek. Yeah. Man, if they don't have that anymore, that's really depressing.

0:01:17 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, it is kind of like a middleman of a job. You know what I mean? Like corporate was like, why do we have have one guy say who the other guy is.

0:01:22 Lydia: I guess. I don't know. Yeah.

0:01:28 Thomas: Just have the one guy do it. Just have him be the guy. How many guys do we need?

0:01:31 Lydia: Yeah. Apparently one less than we all thought.

0:01:35 Thomas: Anyway, I'm talking myself out of a job. So I've been fired. Anyway, it's Lydia. No.

0:01:39 Lydia: It's the Lydia show.

0:01:42 Thomas: Well, with the guest we have today, maybe we're both fired.

0:01:45 Lydia: Yeah, could be. I'm really excited about today's guest. We invited on Kat Tenbarge. She is an independent journalist, previously with Insider and NBC News, and then made her way into independent journalism. But she's been on a really interesting beat that I think intersects so nicely with a lot of the stuff that we cover on this show, which is Internet culture and the role of influencers and sort of how that role has been part of our lives, sometimes unknowingly, like pre-COVID, and then a little more explicitly that we've seen leading up into like the 2024 election. And the role that those people can play in our decision making and the influence, hence influencers, that they can have on people who are, yeah, who are absorbing their content. Yeah. Yeah, so she's been covering this beat for a while.

0:02:33 Thomas: Oh, is that why they're calling? Okay. I never, I never knew that. Yeah. That's what I think is so, so cool about Cat is, like, nobody was covering this and she had to tell probably the olds, like, hey, there's this thing called the internet and then that's, you know, from there

0:02:47 Lydia: Yeah there's a lot of people telling people, you know, what to do kind of on the internet. Pay attention. So we dig into that. We dig into a whole host of other topics. We obviously ran out of time because there's just so much. Not to mention, you know, the intersection that we have with her on Gavel Gavel at some point. And we'll definitely have her on that show as well, too, to talk about Lake Lively. But yeah, lots of stuff to talk About here. And I'm really excited for everybody to hear this.

0:03:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:17 Thomas: Could talk to Cat for hours.

0:03:19 Lydia: Yeah, absolutely. We should. Let's call her. Let's just call her. Hey.

0:03:22 Thomas: Let's do it. This is right now. This is just right now. Okay, here we go. Well, we're gonna take a break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/wherethereswoke. Support the show, get the goodies, skip the ads, and share the show. Most of all, please share the show. Lydia's been just nailing it lately with all these amazing breakdowns and debunks and all that. And more people need to hear it. So please share with a friend or share with the enemy or share with someone neutral, completely neutral to you. Like Poland. No, what's the one that's yeah, like Switzerland.

0:03:38 Lydia: Thanks. Our frenemy Switzerland.

0:03:58 Thomas: Confused by lands. They both end in land. I mean, there's only, only two of those. It's a joke.

0:03:58 Lydia: Yeah, apparently. No, no, oh my god. He's not very good at geography, folks, but we love him.

0:04:06 Thomas: The only two that didn't land. Patreon.

0:04:13 Lydia: Anyway, Kat.

0:04:15 Thomas: Is

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0:04:20 Lydia: Thanks.

0:04:22 Kat: Thanks so much for having me.

0:04:23 Lydia: So much for joining us today. Yeah, of course. I mentioned before we started recording that there's like so many things we could talk about. I think that your area of expertise aligns so well with so many of the things that we talk talk about on this show. But listeners might not know who you are, which is crazy. But just in case they don't, I do. I'm a big fan. I mean, hey, did you hear what Kat was up to today? It's starting to get a little creepy. But I would love to, if you want to just present some of like your background and stuff so listeners can get to know you a little bit more before we dive into the meat.

0:04:36 Thomas: What, Lydia mentions you all the time, by the way, right?

0:04:53 Kat: Definitely, yeah, and I appreciate it so much. So I'm an independent journalist. I currently run the newsletter Spitfire News at SpitfireNews .com. And before that, I worked at NBC News, and before that I worked a Business Insider. And I've covered a lot of topics related to like the social media trends around influencers and celebrity women. Over the years, I've cover a lot high -profile court cases and allegations and feuds and controversies. And I got started doing it related to, honestly, a lot beauty YouTubers was sort of how I got into this area. And then when Debt Be Heard happened in 2022, the idea of like the modern smear campaign sort of became a huge part of my beat. So that's a lot of what I cover at Spitfire.

0:05:31 Lydia: Yeah, I've heard you referred to as the influencer watchdog. That's been a nickname name you've had for a few years now. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you got that name in particular.

0:05:55 Kat: Yeah. So Influencer Watchdog came from my early years of reporting at Business Insider. I joined that publication right after I graduated college in 2019. And I started as an intern just just covering like all general news topics. But I really wanted to cover YouTubers. It was a big passion of mine. And I was really inspired by people like Taylor Lorenz, who had sort of carved out this beat at the time she was at the New York Times. And so they eventually started letting me cover YouTubers full time, and I became a digital culture reporter. And the reason why they were into it is because it got so much attention in web traffic.

0:06:34 Kat: Like people loved reading these breakdowns of influencer news and controversy. So in doing that reporting, over time, I started to get these really serious investigative tips. And I started investigating like sexual assault allegations against big personalities. And that was where my reporting really, I think, got amplified. And where that term like influencer watchdog, I Think one of the first people to say it was the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. They did like an annual media report. And one of their students was like, you're kind of like the influencer watchdog.

0:06:34 Lydia: Why

0:07:15 Thomas: All

0:07:15 Kat: And I was like that's an amazing term. Yeah.

0:07:18 Lydia: Do you think influencers need someone like watching their behavior? Why is that a space that is kind of demanding of that?

0:07:26 Kat: It's a great question. And traditionally the term watchdog as it pertains to reporting, it's usually investigative reporters who track like politicians and people in business and industry leaders and people who have a lot of power in various communities. And my perspective on this as someone especially who grew up in like the YouTube generation is that these influencers are today's powerful figures.

0:07:36 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

0:07:52 Kat: Like for people in this generation and for people who in their audience and for People who are affected by by their coverage, they are like media titans. And this was true, you know, pre -COVID. And it's especially true after everything that happened in 2020, because we saw just the mass migration of people into becoming more extremely online than ever before.

0:07:52 Lydia: Mm-mm.

0:08:15 Kat: And so over the past six years, influencers have grown even more powerful. And the younger generations especially get most of their news and information from social media first. And it's influencers who are on the front lines who are feeding them that information. So I think especially more than ever, the influencer watchdog role is so necessary. And you have reporters doing it, but increasingly you have other influencers doing it. And that was even a dynamic back when I first started reporting on this.

0:08:15 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah,

0:08:45 Thomas: Right, we're gonna be the influencer watchdog watchdogs. We're gonna do, we're watching you. Cat, there must be a lot of, like, you know, generational kind of interesting, you know, in your work, like, I'm sure you butted up against, like, the older generation a bit in that you know. Yeah, because it's like they were probably like, "Sorry, you want to watch YouTube for your job? Is that what you're saying?" And

0:08:48 Lydia: We're watching you, watching us, watching them, watching all of us.

0:08:52 Kat: Exactly. Oh,

0:09:03 Lydia: Oh, that divide. You're like, I swear I'm working. I swear.

0:09:10 Kat: Yeah, that goes all the way back to high school for me, because my parents would be like, what are you doing all day? And I'd be like I'm on the internet. I'm learning.

0:09:21 Thomas: It moves so fast. I'm curious, do you already already feel old? Like, what's the media thing? What's does TikTok make you feel old or something? Because when you describe, you're like, "Oh, way back in 2019." It's like, that's wow, we're, that's not the year still.

0:09:27 Kat: Oh my gosh, yes. No, it's so true. And I definitely do feel old. I think, like, Clavicular was one of the people who made, like, I felt really old in that moment, yeah, because it's just like, I think where where it started to lose me was definitely as video got shorter and faster and longer

0:09:41 Thomas: Crap. Oh God. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah.

0:09:54 Lydia: Oh,

0:09:54 Kat: Like the live streaming era and also short form video. I just like, I cannot, I prefer content online that comes in chunks that's more digestible. The fact that people are live streaming for 18 hours, I'm just like, I can't keep up with that. It's ridiculous.

0:09:56 Thomas: Oh, that's a good

0:09:57 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:10:04 Thomas: Point. Yeah, that is a really interesting dichotomy. I haven't thought about that. It's both, like, way too short now, because, like, the context collapse of that is terrible. It's ruining our entire world, I feel like. But then there's also, it's way too fucking long. Okay. I didn't think about how that's happened. I wonder why that is. Do you have any, uh, insight into, like, why that might be? Like, those two different, very, very different, like, forms are kind of the biggest, right?

0:10:12 Lydia: Yeah.

0:10:16 Kat: Yep. Yeah.

0:10:22 Lydia: Right, the Joe

0:10:37 Kat: I have a couple of thoughts about this. One is, like, I think the two major modes of consuming online content today are either, like, hyper fixating on short form video and getting sort of lost in, like, TikTok or Instagram Reels for hours. And then you, like, surface and you're like, what did I just do? What what did I just see? So there's like that kind of consumption. And then the opposite kind of that consumption is like the passive consumption of the podcast. And I think a lot of people when they put on Joe Rogan, whether it's a podcast that's eight hours or two hours or however long it is, I think people are almost listening to that in the background, like on their commute, but then also while they're doing work, while they'RE doing chores, like that's the vibe that I get from long form consumption is that it's a little bit more passive. And then with the short form stuff, it has to be much more attention grabbing because the attention span there has shrunk to like a few milliseconds.

0:10:52 Lydia: Rogan's

0:10:55 Thomas: Now. Yeah.

0:11:12 Lydia: Both end up with context collapse, right? Because if you're listening to something in the background, you're not actually absorbing everything that's happening there, like you're tuning in, you're, you're tuning out. So it effectively almost has the same result.

0:11:40 Kat: Yep.

0:11:40 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting. Yes, but I wonder if, and I wonder, Kat, what you think, but I, having consumed a lot of Joe Joe Rogan, for, like, against my will, just kind of checking out, what I think less than the context collapse, because I think you could very easily have incredibly good information for that kind of format, or at least pretty good information. But I feel like there it's like the collapse of institutions, like the people that people are listening to have absolutely zero qualification of any kind and no reason to be listened to anymore. And so it's like you're going to get the kind of people who, for some reason, people like listening to hours. I do not understand it.

0:12:11 Lydia: Professor

0:12:23 Kat: Yeah.

0:12:23 Thomas: So you're going to have to be the kind of person that people like having in their ear for hours at a time. And that isn't like Walter Cronkite. I don't know. That isn't, like, somebody who knows what they're talking about, maybe, potentially.

0:12:33 Lydia: Somebody. Yeah.

0:12:37 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:38 Kat: Yeah, so I literally just got back from this journalism conference at my alma mater, Ohio University that I was speaking at. And one of of the other speakers was a podcaster named Amber Hunt, who made the Accused podcast. And this was, you know, several years ago, they launched the first season, but it did really, really well. It got like 70 million downloads, something amazing like that. And she was sort of talking about her approach to podcasting as someone with 20 years of newsroom experience at the Cincinnati Inquirer. And like the way she approaches the form, like she's taking investigative journalism and she is turning it into podcasts, and like the ethical considerations and like the rigor that she was describing, I asked her a lot of the incentives of posting content online trend in the opposite direction.

0:12:53 Thomas: Oh, wow. Oh God.

0:12:53 Lydia: Oh, my God.

0:13:28 Kat: Like you are incentivized to make and upload things as quickly as possible. And she was like, yeah, she was I could definitely make way more money if I was doing what a a lot of my true crime podcaster peers are doing. And it was a really interesting conversation because it's just like, yeah, there's good information out there. But I think a lot of the people who are really successful in these spaces are not the people who are applying the most rigor, of course, or the most ethics. A lot of it comes down to personality and projecting relatability and things like that to a much larger audience.

0:13:33 Lydia: Yeah,

0:13:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:06 Thomas: Well, it was also the capitalism, really the podcast boom of the, I don't know, I guess probably the Trump era I'm guessing is like maybe the main podcast boom. And I've been podcasting all through it, but I have no idea. Cause I wasn't part of the boom. I just been doing it like kind of the whole time. The capitalism part really, because companies came in, you know, investors came in and spent so much money on different, bought out different podcasts. And then I think they realized like, oh wait, we're all doing this. Now it's deeply competitive. And a lot of that got abandoned. A lot of them got just kind of like bought and then stopped.

0:14:10 Lydia: When the boom happened.

0:14:37 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:14:40 Thomas: And Dann they realized, oh, the lowest cost thing is some idiot talking. Some guy like me, like, talking forever. Yeah. And maybe that's part of it too, where it's like just the capitalism of it. It's really cool that that person you're talking about put that much work into it, because it is so much work to do that kind of thing. And with no guarantee of return, like, that's the kind of things that our capitalist system just isn't really good at. Like, that's more like a, you know, kind of a government type thing where you're like, hey, let's put a bunch of time and effort into something that might not make money. Gasp.

0:14:40 Kat: Yeah. Yep. Yep,

0:14:47 Lydia: Zero editing. Right.

0:15:14 Thomas: You know, like, so that's got to be a part of it too.

0:15:15 Kat: For sure. And like there's even – it's such a great example with her again because the Cincinnati Inquirer, they invested in them making this podcast years ago. But then just like I believe last year or the year before, they stopped funding it. They were like, we're not going to do it anymore. And it was a huge success. So they ended up taking it. Now they're independent. So yeah, even there, it's like the capitalism angle of it is huge.

0:15:28 Lydia: Yeah

0:15:39 Thomas: Well, That's just stupid, because if you had a a podcast that got 70 million downloads, that's a massive asset, like You're just, that's just a dumb business decision. That's the other thing, is like, we can blame capitalism, but it's also often just like inept idiots at the top of capitalism. I'm not, I don't know specifically who is making these decisions, but that's also a part of it. We're like, that's kind of short

0:15:44 Kat: Oh, Oh, yeah. For sure. Yes.

0:15:56 Lydia: It's like old media versus new media like not really understanding it too.

0:15:58 Kat: Yes!

0:15:58 Thomas: -sighted. Yeah, like you could actually do a capitalism and have it be good here. Like, you can actually make this work, you know? Yeah.

0:16:03 Lydia: Just do the capitalism.

0:16:06 Kat: Yeah, no, that's such a good point, too, because it's like, working at traditional media companies, even ones that are really successful online, there were so many times when I was just like, we're leaving so much money on the table. Like, why aren't we doing this thing? But they just didn't know or were resistant to it for whatever reason.

0:16:16 Thomas: Right.

0:16:16 Lydia: Yeah. I have a question. When we look at the understanding of the power that influencers hold, do you feel like there's better understanding of that now post -2024 election? Because I think people were really, really blind to it before. And then we sort of saw it get more directly involved in politics in a way that people of other generations particularly understood better. Do you think that we're seeing a a transition there, or is there still a lot of, like, misunderstanding of kind of what we're looking at in this space?

0:16:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:16:34 Kat: Yeah.

0:16:52 Kat: Yeah, that is a great question. And it has evolved because pre -COVID, I feel like the big challenge for digital culture reporters was just convincing editors and people at these publications that it mattered.

0:17:06 Lydia: Why we care. Yeah.

0:17:06 Kat: And yeah. And also explaining to them who these influencers were, even though the influencers were already massive celebrities. It would be like, "This person has hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of engaged fans," and trying to convey that. Is someone who was very resistant to understanding or appreciating it or viewing it as important. And that has definitely shifted. You've seen now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where it's like news outlets and institutions are desperate to understand influencer power and to capture it. But now they only see it through the lens of, like, these are the influencers who helped Trump get elected.

0:17:12 Lydia: Yeah, yeah,

0:17:49 Kat: And that is important and it is worth examining. But I think there is still a lot of like media illiteracy around influencers and it's coming from the institutions and the gatekeepers. But it's also, there's a widespread, there are a lot of widespread misconceptions about influencers. And I see an attitude on the left of like very dismissive toward influencing and toward content creation. Like kind of now it's become almost associated with the manosphere and the people who supported Trump to the degree that I'm like, okay, but some influencers are doing really important work. And also we have to do this because if we don't do it, then there's not going to be any opposition on these massive media platforms. So that's almost where I'm at with it is now trying to convince people. For years, I felt like I was trying to convinced people that influencers mattered because they had power and they were abusing it. And now I'm trying to convince people that influencers matter because we actually need to be doing this as well. Like, we need to become the influencers, I feel like is sometimes what I feel like I'm saying.

0:17:50 Lydia: Yeah.

0:18:21 Thomas: Well, That's interesting. I'm not sure. Feel free to punt if this isn't a good question to ask you. But since you talk about that, I feel like I just don't trust or have a good idea of how much the quote unquote influencers who gave us Trump, or what that whole storyline after the election. I just do not know how much to believe that. I am not saying I disbelieve it or believe it by default. I do not. To your point, I do think this is well understood. I certainly don't understand it very well.

0:19:14 Kat: Mm-hmm. Mm -huh.

0:19:21 Thomas: I don't. I feel like the media loves the storyline of look at this weird guy called Clavicular.

0:19:27 Kat: Ha-ha-ha.

0:19:27 Thomas: Do people listen to him? Like, I know it's not nothing, but do you have a feel or sense or anything in your kind of work experience of like how popular folks like that or, you know, name somebody else I probably have never heard of, like how much influence do they have? Has it been overblown in the wake of the the election or or is it still like underblown, if that's a word? Oh

0:19:41 Kat: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. No, so it's super nuanced because in some cases, like, first of all, the media loves a coherent narrative about why did Trump win or why did Kamala lose? Like, and people in general love coherent narratives like this. They love to be like, it was this one thing when the reality is it was a million things and it was something different for every person. And that's always the case when you look at influencers, just like how siloed people are in just like dramatically different experiences. And this comes out sometimes when places like the New York Times will survey random voters and you'll get to hear a little bit more about individuals, like what's motivating them and like who are they getting their news and information from. And you will hear people, like you'll see a young guy, let's say like a 26 -year -old male who's like, I get all my political news from the Twitch streamer Asmongold. And like for me, for me when I hear stuff like that, I'm like my worst fears and also everything I've been saying, totally confirmed, right?

0:20:27 Thomas: God.

0:20:45 Thomas: Execute that person on the spot. I'm sorry, do you know who that is, hun? Sorry, do YOU know who THAT is? God, I don't remember why I came across this person, but

0:20:57 Lydia: Vindicated. I know the name. Wait, was he?

0:21:04 Thomas: There I might have mentioned him to you. No, no, no, I might mention him to you. He's the worst.

0:21:04 Kat: Oh,

0:21:04 Lydia: Did he show up at the Mythicist Milwaukee? No. Okay. Mm hmm.

0:21:11 Kat: Yeah.

0:21:11 Thomas: Oh, I know why I came across him because I wanted to talk about when Elon Musk pretended to be good at video games. That's what it was. And so I was watching this other guy. It was kind of interesting because I don't like any of those people. I can't watch them for any length of time. But when it came to this thing, I like video games, but it wasn't a video game I knew anything about. So I was like, oh, I have to see what people actually know this video game are saying. Andso I had to watch these people that I'm like, God, I hate every second of watching it.

0:21:17 Lydia: Oh, right. Right.

0:21:34 Thomas: But what's funny is that he wouldn't criticize, like this Asmongold guy wouldn't criticize Elon Musk. And it became a bit of a weird rift because so many of those people are MAGA, you know, right wing, love Elon Musk, but they, you Know, he, well, he yeah, exactly. He did a thing that was so bad that even they were like, dude, no, but Asmongold still wouldn't say anything. It was a big, that's why I knew it. And then I saw some other stuff he said, and I was like, this guy, hon, you would die. His whole thing is he has no personal hygiene. Like his teeth are fucking falling out. He's disgusting.

0:21:47 Lydia: But also love their video games. Yeah. Huh?

0:21:53 Kat: Yeah.

0:22:03 Lydia: No?

0:22:05 Thomas: He is the most, like, stereotype. Yeah. Check me, me, if I'm wrong, Cat, but like, he's like the worst stereotype of a, like, dude streamer. It's gross. Yep.

0:22:09 Lydia: Oh,

0:22:05 Kat: Yep. Yep, nope. Yes, yes. You're absolutely right. His room is filthy and it looks like a hoarding situation. Famously, there are dead animals in the room. He told this story where he was like, there's a dead – Oh, what was it? It. It was like a, not a squirrel, but it was something like a creature like that, like a rat, or I think it was a rat.

0:22:24 Thomas: Oh

0:22:35 Kat: He had like a dead rat in his room and he was like, I don't need to set an alarm because when the sun reaches a certain point in the sky, it shines directly onto the rat and I can smell the rat and the smell of the rat wakes me up.

0:22:42 Lydia: My God. Stop. No, no. Oh my God, what city does he live in? And can we call health inspectors on this?

0:22:43 Thomas: Oh my God. No. Oh God. Can we bomb it? Yeah, okay. I was thinking we just clear out the whole city with a nuke, but yeah, no, that's probably better. Yeah.

0:22:53 Lydia: Like have his place condemned?

0:22:56 Kat: It's so bad. It is so bad and then,

0:22:58 Lydia: Fewer, uh, bystanders in my, in my version.

0:23:00 Thomas: I don't, yeah, we'll try your approach first, I guess.

0:23:03 Kat: But yeah, it's disturbing. And so then you read people like young guys who are like, Like I get all my news and information with this guy and you're like, that's terrible. But it's certainly not demonstrative of a huge demographic of guys. It's just that like people are in these silos now. And so the influencer landscape has fractured so much, even in just the years that I've been covering it, where it was like in 2019, I was writing stories about a specific group of YouTubers who were just sort of like dominating the platform. Platform and it was almost like a reality show where it's like everyone watching YouTube knows these characters but well

0:23:16 Lydia: Right. Yeah.

0:23:17 Thomas: Oh, who was it? Just a blast from the past.

0:23:43 Kat: Trisha Paytas who is still you know thriving and around him well Trisha

0:23:47 Lydia: The Broadway community feels very strongly about Trisha Paytas.

0:23:48 Thomas: Who's that? I don't know who that is. Okay. I don't want to derail you. Never mind. I thought it was somebody I would recognize, but I don't. So never mind.

0:23:52 Kat: Paytas. Well, there were multiple sides of YouTube at this point and I was more on the girls and gays side of YouTube so there was like the straight guy side of youtube with like PewDiePie and Keemstar yeah yeah so there's that side of YouTube too but then the side that I was reporting on was like Jeffree Star, James Charles, Trisha Paytas, Shane Dawson, those types of people. Yeah.

0:23:57 Thomas: Okay. Sure. Oh no. Oh God, that's right.

0:23:59 Lydia: Yeah. Oh.

0:24:16 Thomas: Okay, sorry. I derailed you.

0:24:18 Kat: No, no, you're good. You're good, but yeah, so basically like at that point in time, I didn't have as hard of a time figuring out which influencers to cover because it was almost like there was this main stage narrative happening, but then after 2020, things started to, and with With the rise of TikTok, that was where it became really hard to say like, what is the central narrative of internet drama?

0:24:42 Lydia: Yeah, right.

0:24:43 Kat: There isn't one anymore. There's just a thousand niche internet dramas. And so that was when you actually saw like the team I worked on at Business Insider at our peak, we had like eight people on this team covering these influencers like day in and day out. And then at a certain point in around late 2021, early 2022, it just kind of like crumbled bold because the internet had grown so fractured. And now there aren't as many people covering influencers in the mainstream media anymore because I think a lot of outlets were just sort of like, what do we focus on?

0:24:43 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Huh.

0:24:57 Lydia: Wow.

0:25:15 Lydia: Just felt like impossible.

0:25:16 Thomas: Yeah. So many thoughts.

0:25:16 Kat: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

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0:25:23 Lydia: Yeah.

0:25:23 Thomas: It's so interesting. One thing I've found, and I want to ask you as someone who knows way more about this, but when it comes to the bad influence, in my opinion, that a lot of these people are having on our politics, like on our collective kind of level of being informed and just, you know, all that on our Collective Epistemology almost. Most. I found that the most sinister thing, and this is probably mainly Joe Rogan inspired, but some other random streamers I've consumed a little bit and stuff. I've found that maybe the biggest and possibly underrated problem isn't so much that they are taking misinformation and like directly feeding it to people, although That does happen with Joe Rogin plenty. What I worry about and what I think is maybe the bigger sinister influence is how often it's just the under current unsaid assumption behind their seven hours of streaming that day. There's just little ways they talk that are not explicit.

But like with Joe Rogan, for example, if you listen to Joe RogAN for any length of time and if you were susceptible or just kind of, you know, going along with him, for example, you would start to get the feeling that there's all these conspiracies all the time, even if he didn't directly tell you like there's all these. It's just always in the background of his questions. You know, it's always like, well, oh, and they probably, you know, they want you to blah, blah, blah.

Like it's, it'S a lot of that kind of stuff. And I worry, especially with that. And especially with like misogyny where, you Know, itS going to be in the background or it'S going to be, it might be in foreground, but it'S also like a lot of the unsaid assumptions behind what they're saying. And I guess that scares me too, because it feels like, how do you fight that?

0:26:01 Lydia: Yeah.

0:26:34 Kat: Yeah.

0:26:59 Thomas: Where it'S like, it'S not just, oh there'S these viral misinformation stories that I feel like is more of the Trump Trump one era thing we're worried about. It's also like, well, Yeah, like The people who are gathering all these eyeballs just have a lot of really bad views that infect everything they kind of say in some way. Is there anything there? This is just kind of a hypothesis I've been thinking about. What do you think about that?

0:27:06 Lydia: Right, subconscious adoption of, yeah.

0:27:10 Kat: I definitely

0:27:18 Lydia: Yeah, right.

0:27:25 Kat: Think that there is something there. And I think that it trends alongside the declining trust in institutions institutions and the fact that, and you're seeing this on all sides of the political spectrum, like people are less likely to trust the media. They're less likely to trust like medical establishments. They'RE less likely to trust, like the legal system. And a lot of this lack of institutional trust and failing trust in institutions comes from a real place, a reasonable place. Like how can you trust the department of justice after watching how they handled the Epstein files.

0:27:55 Thomas: Oh, God. Well, now, yeah. Yeah, now. But that wasn't warranted as much when they were bashing it. It is like a lot people ruined our trust in institutions and then like to say, well, you know, people don't trust our institutions.

0:27:57 Lydia: Right

0:27:57 Kat: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

0:28:05 Lydia: Preemptively Monkey.

0:28:07 Thomas: It's like, you did it, you're the, you're the guy in the suit. The

0:28:08 Kat: Yes. Yes, yes. There's also a ton of that.

0:28:10 Thomas: The, what is it? I already forget. Banana, no, what is the suit? I'm blanking. What's the suit he's in? No, the, you know, the meme where we're all trying to find it, the hot dog, sorry. Oh God, I just like had a brain, a totally brain lapse. Okay, yeah, we're, you're in the hotdog suit.

0:28:18 Kat: We're all looking at the guys with this.

0:28:16 Lydia: Oh. The, the, it's the hot dog, yeah, and the Wienermobile.

0:28:27 Kat: Yes, 100%. I think conservative pundits in particular did this because it was so much, and they still do it. They still do because it's still the same rhetoric of the left went too far. The liberal media did this, like, this story never got any coverage, and the reality is, like, it did get coverage. The, the media doesn't have, like, the exact liberal bias that you claim that it does. Like, if anything, there's centrist bias.

0:28:39 Lydia: Yeah.

0:28:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Just a quick yes, and I also love when it's literally will be be like the fucking president. And it'll be like, yeah, the government, you know, they're like talking shit on the institution. What was the one the other day? Yeah. It was a, it might've been Bondi or somebody where they're Like, that's you.

0:28:58 Lydia: Like, that's you. Yeah.

0:28:58 Kat: Yeah.

0:29:05 Lydia: Wow.

0:29:05 Thomas: You're that she's like, well, you can't trust what the blah, blah, is saying. It's like that's your job.

0:29:06 Kat: Yes. Yeah, no, there's a ton of that too, and I think that even when people have, like, legitimate reasons to distrust institutions, so much of the, the problem with conspiratorial thinking is that it's always deflecting away from the point. And I've been covering Epstein my whole career, basically, since I was an intern. And I haven't done, I'm not one of the reporters who's broken any major scoops about Epstein.

0:29:26 Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah.

0:29:31 Lydia: Yeah.

0:29:38 Kat: It's always been a part of my coverage. But especially now, I've Been doing a lot of stuff with regards to the Epstein files and digging into the aspects that pertain to my other coverage. Reporting on the, the Epstein case for all of these years, one of the things that's always stood out to me is the way the general public talks about the case and believes things about the case trends way more toward conspiracy than the actual horrifying reality to the point where I'm like, what's happening? Like, we have all the evidence right in front of us, and yet people are still choosing to believe in stuff that's not supported. And I almost wonder if it's like a form of mass denial where it's like, we can't cope with what we know to be true. So we're constantly like deflecting from it and, and believing things about it that are conspiratorial versus supported.

0:29:41 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah yeah.

0:30:28 Kat: And it's really, it's been interesting to watch to say the least. Yeah.

0:30:31 Lydia: That's such an interesting psychology question. Yeah.

0:30:33 Thomas: I know, know, I keep bringing it back to Joe Rogan, but another funny thing that happens with him is he literally will have people on who were in the Epstein files and like he barely asked him, or maybe he'll ask him like, oh, you knew Epstein, like Peter Thiel, and there's another one, and they'll be like, yeah, well, you know, he did my taxes or whatever the fuck, and then he doesn't care. But then when someone's on who's not in the Epstein files, and he's going to do his conspiracy mongering about it, then it's all this crazy stuff. It's like, dude, you just had a guy who was in it, like you could, you know like if you actually cared about the truth, you could actually get, yeah, and it's so funny because I, I think Joe Rogan and others, like, we really, our epistemology is ruined, like people just think, I saw it with this latest shooting, people's brains are broken in terms of what tends to be true, like people think all

0:30:41 Kat: Oh my gosh. Yep. Yes. Yes,

0:30:45 Lydia: Grill that guy. Yeah.

0:31:19 Thomas: These things, just in general, I'm talking about specific, that there tend to be conspiracies, and it's just like there's never been a false assassination attempt that has like ever. That's never happened. There's a couple things that you could maybe classify as that, that are nowhere near what it would take to be, you know, the shooting, the guy that got his ear in, in, or the, you know, The Latest One. There's never been a thing that is that, and yet everyone is like, well, you know, they always do that. It's like, what do you mean they always do that? There's never a time that that's ever happened.

0:31:19 Kat: Yeah, yes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And I feel like a great encapsulation of this problem is over the past month or two, the House Oversight Committee has been pulling people in to force them to testify under oath about Jeffrey Epstein. They brought in Hillary and Bill Clinton and they brought in Leslie Wexner, the former CEO of L Brands, which owned Victoria's Secret, who was was Epstein's most wealthy client.

0:32:07 Lydia: Right. Right?

0:32:07 Thomas: Mm. Right. Mm. I watched that entire deposition actually, or that maybe had two. I watched one of them. It was interesting.

0:32:19 Lydia: Mm

0:32:19 Kat: Yeah, yeah, yes. And then they also brought in Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, the co -executors of Epstein'S estate. One of them was his longtime lawyer and the other was his long -time accountant. And the most recent one was Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, but they didn't videotape his.

0:32:36 Thomas: Thing. Oh, wow.

0:32:38 Kat: They're only releasing the transcript. And I I read through it today and it was insane. But so that, yeah, there's so much to keep up with. But yeah, so with these like taped and released

0:32:28 Lydia: Hmm. Oh, oh,

0:32:42 Thomas: Okay, we gotta check that out. It's too much to keep up with. God damn.

0:32:43 Lydia: Wow. Okay. Yeah? Note to self.

0:32:52 Kat: Depositions, it's been so interesting to watch the Republicans, the GOP oversight committee has put them on their YouTube channel. And the one with the most views by far is Hillary

0:33:00 Thomas: It-- Right, of course. Who has nothing the fuck to do with Jeffrey Epstein, like, oh.

0:33:04 Lydia: Hilary, yeah, of course. Yep.

0:33:04 Kat: Clinton. Hillary Clinton, exactly, exactly.

0:33:11 Thomas: Wow, the one woman. Yeah.

0:33:12 Kat: First of all, the one woman, but also, but also the woman who's never met the guy before, who's never been in the same room as Jeffrey Epstein. That's the one that everyone cares about Like, The conspiracy brain rot is so on display here, because it's like people should be watching the ones that are more interesting, are like the accountant and the lawyer who worked with him for decades, but those videos have like 22,000 views a piece and the Hillary Clinton one has over 300 ,000 views. So it's like you can literally measure. And then, of course, clips from the Hillary one went mega viral on like X and like Instagram and all these other platforms. So, it just goes to show like people are drawn. And I've noticed this, again, like my whole career, even with like influencer controversies, people preferred the BS over the real stories. People were more drawn to the nonsense. It was such a frustrating – it's always been so frustrating.

0:33:13 Lydia: Yeah, Oh, Wow. Right.

0:33:16 Thomas: Yeah, oh boy. Yikes. Right, right. Right.

0:34:07 Lydia: How much of that, like, because I grew up, you know, early 2000s, so reality TV kind of like the, the beginnings of it was like really, really big in my life, even though like when I was young, did not know it was scripted, um, but like even so, like like, like, the draw to reality TV and this idea of like, even though it's not real, it's like it's performative. There's always something it's, like, going above and beyond for entertainment's value and stuff and people being sucked into that. And then that becoming a version of reality for people. Like, do you feel like there's a connection there?

0:34:43 Kat: Yes, yes, yes. And I find the reality TV link super interesting because one thing that I have noticed in covering a lot of influencer drama, as well as like the high profile celebrity court cases is like you go on Reddit, which is the epicenter for a lot

0:34:44 Lydia: Okay. Tell me more about that. What are your thoughts?

0:35:03 Kat: Of these communities. And you look at individual users who are super, super active in the discussion about Amber Heard, Blake Lively, or James Charles and Jeffree Star, and then you go look at their comment histories, and they're oftentimes really, really active in the reality TV communities as well. And I suspect, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest this, it's more anecdotal, but just what I've come across in my reporting, I feel like the demographic of people who are the most interested in pop culture. It's the same demographic of people who have watched reality TV for years and are really, really into it. And I think that the reality TV genre encourages viewers to do this. It curates this type of like relationship between the audience and the cast of the show that is totally parasocial.

0:35:03 Lydia: Yep. Yeah.

0:35:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:54 Kat: But it's also like, it's very look over here because it's like a staged artificial drama that takes up the most attention in the episode. And then a lot of times there are really interesting things happening in reality TV from like a sociological standpoint even. You'll notice how people will overlook that, and like they'll overlook the exploitative elements of reality TV and like the treatment of women and like things like that. But they'll be really drawn toward like the staged catfights and they'll get, yeah, they'll get really into like the team sport aspect of it. And that is also how people increasingly talk about politics. You watched this behavior. At one point, it was mainly pop culture and like the extremely online. So people who cared a lot about influencers, it felt like the behavior was more stuck in that niche. But then when everyone got online during COVID, that sort of relationship infiltrated the whole information sphere. So now it's in everything. And it's like, seems to be.

0:35:55 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:36:22 Lydia: The drama. Yeah.

0:36:48 Thomas: I feel like COVID wasn't good.

0:36:57 Lydia: Hot take.

0:36:57 Thomas: Just like starting to think. Yeah, gosh, that makes me think so many things. For one, I've always hated reality TV, so that fits. I'm like, yeah, OK,

0:37:05 Lydia: I know I still love it.

0:37:05 Thomas: I get it. I get why I feel so disconnected from everybody and their stuff and the weird stuff they believe. No, but also I sort of wonder that plus what I was getting to before, which I'm always like painfully like philosophical about it, but I just feel like in a big sense, people have lost the things that keep people grounded, you know, like experience in actual reality is the thing that checks your beliefs. To have a correct belief, you only find out if it's wrong if something makes you like if there's that, you know, I can have all these wrong beliefs about, oh, well, the shooter was hired by them. It never matters unless it's tested. And maybe now that we're living so much more of our lives just digitally, we're just not yet.

0:37:26 Lydia: Sorry, And increasingly siloed, right? Because you can find your specific community, your specific niche, the people that are going to validate exactly what you're saying. You will find that, as opposed to, you know, 10 years ago, you might not have. Mm.

0:37:50 Kat: Yeah. Yep.

0:37:51 Thomas: Right. And the things people think are plausible are based on what their past experiences have told them. And if all of our experiences are instead of being like real, so many of them are just like, well, it's a person talking about something online, probably in an inaccurate way. Maybe that's part of why we've lost our ability to know what's true.

0:38:04 Lydia: Hmm. Oh.

0:38:05 Kat: Yep, yes.

0:38:20 Kat: Yeah. And I feel like in addition to reality TV, the other thing that I've seen people talk about a lot is the culture around wrestling and fighting. What's the term? There's the term for when they're making up, like, fake narratives, like wrestlers.

0:38:28 Thomas: Oh, yeah, I've heard those. I forget the terms, but I know what you mean.

0:38:37 Kat: Yeah, it'll come to me because I'm like, it's on the tip of my tongue. But basically, like, people are always like, "It's THIS, they're doing THIS," and we know that Trump and his administration and, like, his whole, like, the whole, they love MMA and they love all of this stuff, and so it makes sense that they're, oh, it's kayfabe. That's what people are also saying. It's kayfabe. Yeah.

0:38:37 Lydia: Kayfabe.

0:38:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:55 Thomas: Oh, I just saw that word today and didn't remember what it meant. Yeah. What does that mean again?

0:38:59 Lydia: Huh, huh.

0:39:00 Kat: Yeah. So basically it's like in these, and I'm probably getting, like, the terminology wrong and someone who really loves wrestling could correct me on this. Yeah. In, like, the professional fighting space, kayfabe, as I understand it, are the fake narratives, like the feuds.

0:39:07 Thomas: Sure. They'll be so mad at you, but don't worry about it. We won't. Right.

0:39:18 Kat: And I've seen this because there's a crossover with influencers because Jake and Logan Paul got really into boxing and fighting. And so they do this. And basically, it's a fake, mutually beneficial feud where two YouTubers pretend to hate each other, and they trash talk each other. And they do viral moments and stunts. And then they eventually fight each other and people pay to watch that physical altercation after all of this cinematic buildup. And that is sort of like kayfabe.

0:39:24 Lydia: Right. Huh.

0:39:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:48 Kat: And so people say that Trump and Elon Musk, for example, are doing this. And I think they're right because Trump and Elon Musk will go on Truth Social and X and tweet the most heinous things about each other. And then like three weeks later, they're now they're going they're about to visit China together. They're going to China together as like a U .S. delegation. So it's like it is mutually beneficial, like feuding that gets both of them a lot of attention.

0:39:48 Thomas: Right, right.

0:40:02 Lydia: And then they're buddies. Yeah.

0:40:09 Thomas: Oh, interesting.

0:40:16 Kat: And I'm like, huh, it's kind of like, I think people are right about that. And like, how can people be expected to know? It's so manipulative. And like, I feel for the masses, because I myself am like, oh, I'm supposed to know what to believe at a certain point

0:40:15 Lydia: Yeah, so manipulative. Right?

0:40:28 Thomas: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I agree with it. That's made up. I, I, don't, I'm not sure. It feels like there could be a lot going on there because he genuinely was like, he's in the Epstein file. You know, like he was going for blood with Trump, but I think he realized he just couldn't win and then had to like, you know, kind of tail between his legs a little bit.

0:40:37 Kat: True. Yeah, yeah.

0:40:46 Thomas: I dunno. I who knows? I mean, they are doing stuff for attention, but, I I don' think that feud was made up,

0:40:51 Kat: I've thought the exact same thing, and like, I've gone back and forth on it where I'm like, how much of it is real? How much of it is fake? Like, I also wonder, I'm like, are these guys actually that manipulative? Like, are they that smart, or are we giving them too much credit it?

0:41:02 Thomas: No. Yeah. But in some, I mean, they're savvy in certain ways. Well, Trump certainly is savvy. I think Elon Musk is such a dope.

0:41:12 Kat: Oh,

0:41:16 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:41:17 Lydia: There's been a lot of attention, specifically on influencers in the men's wellness space, the manosphere, right? You know, the Louis Thoreau documentary just coming out, And sort of diving into like what's going on with young men today and understanding their media consumption, their digital consumption, and seeing how they're influenced by problematic men. But I think an area that I feel like it's starting to be talked about a little bit, I wish it were being talked about more, is the flip side of that, which is how women are getting influenced and what that looks like because there is an alt-right pipeline for women too. And it looks very, very different from what men experience, and I would love to hear kind of your thoughts on that and, and dive into sort of this different dynamic

0:41:48 Kat: Yeah.

0:42:02 Kat: Absolutely. Yeah. There are so many different, similar to the pipelines that are established for men, a lot of it is presented to the target demographic as something that's really benign on the surface. So I've examined the alt -right pipeline for women through beauty and skincare content, through celebrity gossip. That's a huge one. And then also through just general lifestyle content. A lot of parenting content lends you down this pathway. Stuff about cooking and cleaning and domestic labor will take you down this pathway.

0:42:22 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:26 Thomas: Sure.

0:42:32 Lydia: Aesthetic videos, right? Like the lifestyle aesthetic.

0:42:42 Kat: Yes. And you're totally bombarded with it almost no matter where you go, because I get it in just the wildest ways. Like one of the funniest alt -right pipelines I've been served on my For You page is I watch a lot of like Disney content, like people going to Disney World. It's like a guilty pleasure of mine. And I've literally gotten the alt -Right Disney pipeline, which I didn't know was a thing.

0:42:55 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:43:03 Thomas: No. Really? Wow.

0:43:05 Kat: But what it was is like moms will make like here's my itinerary for my Disney morning. And I followed one of these women. And the reason I followed her is because she was like here is my morning and my Disney day in my life. She would get up at 4 a .m. and work out in the gym before going to Disney World.

0:43:22 Thomas: What? Why? Yeah.

0:43:23 Lydia: Like You're about to get your steps in, girl. You don't have to do that. Yeah.

0:43:26 Kat: Exactly. And of course, I was so like immediately fascinated by this woman that I followed her. And I followed her now for a couple of years. And she is – her husband is like – I believe he's a lawyer who works for the Republican Party in some capacity. But he's embedded in Republican politics. They don't really talk about that, but you can figure it out. And she makes this like hustle entrepreneurial mom content.

0:43:41 Thomas: By

0:43:42 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

0:43:52 Kat: She's basically like, I quit my job to become a full -time homeschooling stay -at -home mom to five boys, buy my course, buy my Disney itinerary.

0:43:57 Lydia: Look at my house.

0:44:02 Kat: Like, yes, look at my massive house.

0:44:03 Thomas: My course, it's called already being wealthy. Wow.

0:44:04 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:44:06 Kat: Exactly. Exactly, but yeah, so that's like just one example that I stumbled upon, but there's so many different like varieties of this.

0:44:11 Thomas: But what's the pipeline? Like, do you get the sense that she's like actively trying to recruit people into something or is it just in a subtle influence thing? What kinds of things led you to say it's like an alt -right pipeline?

0:44:26 Kat: So I I would say I think for most of these creators, it's not like a master evil plan. I think it is a lot more like in the sense that it's like natural, organic, like it manifests from these belief systems. But those belief systems are basically just like reinforcing Christian patriarchal narratives about how people should live. And like, and with this woman in particular, like, you, once you realize what you're looking at, you see it a little bit more clearly, because she's literally encouraging a lifestyle of, like, women should be in the home And homeschool your kids and don't trust the government. Even though my husband works for the government, it's just like what we were just talking about.

0:44:32 Thomas: Sure. Sure. Oh, okay. Hmm. Right.

0:45:01 Lydia: Right, yeah. I

0:45:08 Kat: Like, why would you trust the department, which my husband works for? Why would you ask them to teach your kids? Exactly, yeah, yeah. And then that becomes the ideal that's projected, and she's making a ton of money off of it, but it's all kind of a facade, but I've seen this manifest in so many different ways.

0:45:11 Thomas: Right?

0:45:12 Lydia: Know my husband, don't trust him, like, that's what that feels like. It's weird, yeah. Yeah.

0:45:14 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm?

0:45:25 Kat: I did a story for Teen Vogue about this creator who I've followed for a long time because she's a beauty influencer And her name is Raw Beauty Christy, and around 2020 she did start to go down, like, an alt-right pipeline. And it's fascinating because she is, like, kind of a victim to it, but she's also still an influencer.

0:45:32 Lydia: Hmm. Yeah.

0:45:46 Kat: So it's like, you can see how it corrupted her and how she's also spreading it to others at the same time. And I really feel, I feel for her because she had a ton of struggles with fertility. It took her a really long time to get pregnant. And this is where it really got her is right after she had her baby. She had postpartum depression And she's very open about all of this, like super open about medical anxiety. But literally, like hers is even more overt. It's at this point, she's supported kind of like anti-vax conservative movements is where her content's gotten to. Yep.

0:45:59 Lydia: Oh, yeah.

0:46:16 Thomas: Hmm.

0:46:19 Lydia: Exactly. And, like, the openness, that that's something that is, like, so key for women from my experience, is this, this openness about things that aren't talked about a lot of times related to fertility, related to postpartum space, and you don't feel listened to by your doctor, but you find someone online who is going through something that feels so similar to you, and they're being open about it, and you can see into their life, and you get to know them in some sort of way. And then they start going down these journeys into potentially anti -vax or the MAHA sort of thing.

0:46:29 Kat: Yep. Mm -hmm. Yep, yep.

0:46:54 Lydia: And And then you kind of end up going along on that pathway with them, too, right? Because you feel like your identity is connected with who they are. And so if they've come to this conclusion from the things that they've experienced that you've also experienced, you might also come to that conclusion, too. Because they're a trusted source for you now.

0:47:11 Kat: Exactly. Exactly, yeah. There's kind of a political theory in that that I've seen, like, some writers, like, kind of talk about this a little bit, where it's like the power of suggestion through social media and feeling like other people modeling behaviors for you online is a really big social influence right now. And what you just described is a great example of this because it's like, I watched Raw Beauty Christy and bought her makeup palettes when I was in college.

0:47:24 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:47:41 Thomas: Hmm, hmm.

0:47:41 Kat: So if I was also experiencing the same stuff that she was, if I were struggling to get pregnant, if I was struggling with PPD, like a hundred percent, I could fall down that pipeline right next to her. And then we would both end up in this space that's literally like, move off the grid, homeschool your kids, don't get vaccinated. And at a certain point, you're just too deep. You're getting so deep to it.

0:48:03 Lydia: Yeah. I'm concerned about that because I, man, it's so hard because I think a lot of this this stuff just gets brushed aside as, you know, that's like women's interests and stuff. And we don't need to care about that. And in the same way with like celebrity gossip and things like that, and it almost feels like it's more nefarious in some ways, because it's almost like breadcrumbing, not just you as the viewer, but like the person who's experiencing it too, like you said, like they're almost a victim of it as well, where it's just little tiny pieces here and there. It's like how a cult would work, right? And I'm concerned that it's not as like bombastic as as you would see with the manosphere, where it's like, okay, well, that guy's just an idiot, right?

0:48:14 Kat: Yes. Yep.

0:48:41 Lydia: Like the things that he's saying are insane. And it's so clear. It's so obvious that that stuff is like, like, that's from zero to 100. And I feel like when we're talking about this pipeline, it's So incremental over such a long period of time, especially for women or people who consume this content in general. It doesn't necessarily have to be just women who started years ago, you know, potentially during COVID. And they've been along on this journey with so many of these creators and I don't know how to, how to tackle that. It feels insurmountable in some ways.

0:48:41 Thomas: So

0:48:42 Kat: Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yes. I completely agree, and it's something where the consequences are just as large, if not in some cases even larger, than what we see with the manosphere, because I think about how MAHA and, like, the anti-vax stuff, like RFK Jr. is in the position he's in today because of the alt-right pipeline. And the consequences of that are already enormous, and they're going to be so enormous potentially for generations to come. And like, I think about how successful, like, Candace Owens has been doing this stuff, and like, her numbers are staggering right now. And also, like, with the celebrity gossip part of this pipeline, it's the same infrastructure that works for Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

It's literally like, it's the same PR companies that represented Johnny Depp, who previously represented Jeffrey Epsteen, who have worked with the Trump campaign. Like, the connections there are extremely tangible. It is literally a lot of times the exact same people. And so it is really frustrating to see it get overlooked, because I am just like, how much more more obvious could it be? But I do think we're starting to see people come around and recognize that. And I think something that has made me more optimistic in recent years is we're starting to more and more creators really respond to this.

0:49:27 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, mm hmm. Yeah.

0:50:30 Kat: It's not enough yet, but I've been heartened by seeing the rise of some liberal and leftist and progressive content creators who have made this a big focus of their work. And if people keep repeating this message over and over again, then it will continue to reach more people. And I think that is the only – like, you can't make everyone believe it. People have to be receptive to the information to get themselves out of those pipelines. But just even being aware of them goes a really long way.

0:50:30 Thomas: What

0:50:54 Lydia: Mm.

0:51:03 Thomas: Kinds of messages are you talking about? And I think my question with all of this is always like, I just wonder, how intentional is it? You know, how top down is it, or how much is it that, well, the people because it's hard to like, plan on becoming an influencer, you know, it's It's hard to bank on it. It's kind of random sometimes. How much is it? Well, it just so happens that because we live in a country with, you know, a significant chunk of people who have certain views, some number of influencers are going to just have those views. And it's not any sort of top down thing. I genuinely don't know. Like sometimes I think it's like it feels like a dastardly, you know, from the top down conspiracy or whatever. And sometimes it's like, or is it just a bunch of people who tend to have certain beliefs and they're going to say stuff that reflects their beliefs? Least. And that's going to rub off on other people. Where are you on that? Like, what do you think?

0:51:11 Kat: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that it's a little bit of both because, like, for example, the message that's being put out there in some of these pipelines, the celebrity gossip pipeline, a lot of what I feel like I look at in my work is a message that I think of as, it's backlash to the Me Too movement. And the rhetoric often falls into DARVO, which is, you guys I think are familiar with this, but DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, basically the victim-blaming phenomenon. And so this rhetoric that I see over and over and again is basically like, a powerful man is victim to a celebrity woman and her allegations against him. It's a narrative that flips the script on who has power. And it is a refutation of what the Me Too movement was saying, which was basically like, powerful men are using that power to exploit and oppress women.

And so now we're seeing that opposite be recycled in this rhetoric over and over again. And that message, you see it coming from people at the very top of the system. Like you see it coming from propagandists like Steve Bannon, who was really explicit in the immediate wake of the Me Too movement. He was like, this is, I remember he did an interview with a reporter where he was like this is so bad.

0:52:09 Thomas: Yep. Yep.

0:52:11 Lydia: Hmm.

0:53:00 Lydia: Yeah, I

0:53:10 Thomas: What?

0:53:10 Kat: 5 ,000 years of patriarchy like about to be toppled. They're going after like so many different kinds of guys with this. He Was like, he was losing his mind.

0:53:19 Thomas: Boy, that guy does not mind being the bad guy. He just is the bad guy. Yeah. No, I'm the worst. That's why my face is rotting off all the time.

0:53:22 Lydia: Was gonna

0:53:25 Kat: He Yeah, Steve Bannon is the worst and he's very transparent about it. But what sucks is that his strategies are so effective because like flood the zone is such an effective media strategy. And so like you saw Steve Bannen and propagandists like him rallying like how do we stop the Me Too movement? And you saw like people in the institutions, like you saw columns in the Atlantic being like the Me Too movement has gone too far. Like you saw a lot of this stuff happening at these higher levels.

But then you also see it really take hold among people who do not necessarily have access to institutional power, who I think genuinely believe these things. And this is oftentimes like when we talk about smear campaigns and astroturfing and manufacturing opinion online, people get super defensive because they're like, nobody told me that I don't believe this woman. I just don't believe her. And it's like, you're right. You're not getting paid. Like nobody came and told you, but what you're not understanding is like the reason why you saw the information that led you to form this belief. Sometimes that is the result of, you know, PR campaigns.

0:53:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yep. Yep. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:54:04 Lydia: Say right, right, manufactured yeah

0:54:39 Kat: And sometimes, yeah, sometimes it's manufactured and sometimes it's just garden variety misogyny. It'S like a mix of all of it.

0:54:46 Thomas: It's just pushing downhill. Like it's so it's so easy. I mean, I've had so many of these interactions with the, you know, anti black lively people where it's like they're like, it's not because of sexism. It'S like, well, I mean it is. It' s like they think sexism means somebody. Well, Steve Bannon, I guess that'd be like the one exception. They think it means someone who's directly saying like, I don't believe this person because they're a woman, you know? And it's like, no, it's just that you just dismiss Blake and everything she's saying so much faster, you know?

0:54:54 Kat: Yep.

0:55:16 Thomas: And there's no, that's like imperceptible to them, but that's what they're doing. And that's where it's also hard to know. Yeah. It kind of blurs that question. Like how intentional is this versus this is just people's biases. Like this is society's bias as a whole, you know? And it, it, and it's really hard to tease that apart. Yeah.

0:55:16 Lydia: Yeah

0:55:30 Kat: Yeah. Yeah, I mean the famous Melissa Nathan text message, it just goes to show you people really hate women. Like I think about it all the time because I really do think that with these PR campaigns, they're expensive and they are people with lots of experience and they have sophisticated tools at their disposal. But at the end of the day, it's not that hard. Like it's not that hard to get people to turn on a celebrity women like 13 year olds with Stan accounts on Twitter do it all the time for

0:55:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:59 Lydia: Yeah for free, yeah, because it's good times for them

0:56:01 Kat: For free of their own volition. Yep, exactly. Exactly.

0:56:08 Thomas: Well, Kat, it was an absolute pleasure. Speaking with you uh seriously we could have gone on for hours and hours this flew by please yeah

0:56:13 Kat: Absolutely.

0:56:14 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, we'll have you on again for sure

0:56:16 Kat: Yeah.

0:56:16 Thomas: I hope, hey, do you want to uh shout out anything or point people to find more of your work or where do you want to send people

0:56:23 Kat: The best way to follow my work is spitfirenews.com. You can sign up for free and I release the newsletter at least once a week. And then I'm also, I'm mainly on Blue Sky and Instagram are my main platforms. My handle is at Kat Tenbard on both of them. And yeah, those are the best places to find me.

0:56:42 Lydia: Yeah, we will link all that stuff in the show notes too to make it easier for people to just click on through and follow you. Kat's a great follow, guys. Do it's true, Wokies would do it. Yeah.

0:56:48 Thomas: Absolutely thanks so much. Let

0:56:49 Kat: Yeah thank you so much for having me on. This was such a great

0:57:15 Thomas: Me just have this cough that will not go. We're hoping we're not in the beginning of a movie where it's like, oh, you know like, yeah I've been taking a lot of like pre-wife funeral video though, just in case, because I might. Yeah, because I might. I don't think I'm a protagonist, but like, maybe I guess if she's gonna have a cough that doesn't go away, maybe I have to do something in my life. Yeah, we gotta take a trip to, what, the beach? We gotta drive a bit. We gotta, oh, there's a lot of waking up in the morning and turning over on the pillow. We've been

0:57:17 Lydia: I've been sick for a bit, have a virus or something is what I

0:57:23 Kat: Discussion. Oh, I hope

0:57:27 Lydia: Have good as you should at least I don't have to do my own funeral video compilations, that that trend. Yes, yeah, you need to to capture me laughing or while I'm brushing my teeth, you like come in the bathroom and I'm like, oh my god, and rolling my eyes, leave me alone, stop it. Yeah.

0:57:47 Kat: Not yes

0:57:47 Thomas: Doing that one a lot, you want to be prepared, we got all the footage just in case I feel like COVID wasn't good.

0:57:55 Kat: Yes, oh yeah, you need the montage