Speaker 1: Welcome to Go Ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Speaker 1: Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I don't think
Speaker 1: that there's some one soul mate. It's not like there's one.
Speaker 1: Although bon Jovi is my soul mate, there's always exceptions.
Speaker 1: Are you saying that gossiping is the same as if
Speaker 1: I'm picking lice out of your scalp and eating it? Well,
Speaker 1: you've done both. So what do you think I want
Speaker 1: to give her too much? I don't like her to
Speaker 1: come in with an inflated head, So we won't mentioned
Speaker 1: the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve
Speaker 1: in orgasm. Cis I deserved? Welcome to Go Ask Allie.
Speaker 1: I'm Ellie Wentworth and this season I'm digging into everything
Speaker 1: I can get my hands on, peeling back the layers
Speaker 1: and quite frankly, getting dirty. Today's topic is gossip, digging
Speaker 1: into the history of gossip. Is it good? Is it bad?
Speaker 1: Has social media changed it? What does gossip really mean?
Speaker 1: And how does it affect us? But before we go there,
Speaker 1: one of our listeners, Claudia, has emailed me a question
Speaker 1: about parenting her ten year old son. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 1: I don't want the choices we make now, meaning her
Speaker 1: and her husband, determine how we will relate to one
Speaker 1: another post pandemic. I find that I'm harder on him,
Speaker 1: my son. I scold him more often, and to an extent,
Speaker 1: I may be driving a wedge between us. My fear
Speaker 1: is that I'm shifting my parenting style during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and that once this is behind us, he's going to
Speaker 1: be used to seeing me as a parent who gives
Speaker 1: in more freely and willingly. M What to do, Oh, Claudia,
Speaker 1: that is such a good question, and I think so
Speaker 1: many people are dealing with this, including myself. Um. I
Speaker 1: think the biggest piece of advice I can give you
Speaker 1: is when you find yourself being too hard on him
Speaker 1: and yourself, just take a breath, take a d deep breath.
Speaker 1: That always gives us a moment to de escalate our anger,
Speaker 1: to check in with ourselves. And I mean, we're in
Speaker 1: a global pandemic, whatever the hell that means, and we
Speaker 1: have to be a little bit easier on ourselves and
Speaker 1: on our children. So for me, with my teenage girls, yes,
Speaker 1: they've seen movies that are probably not appropriate for them. Um,
Speaker 1: I let them on FaceTime till late at night. Their
Speaker 1: bed times have shifted, sometimes much later than usual. And
Speaker 1: I do it because I think that there is such
Speaker 1: an undercurrent of anxiety and stress and loneliness with our
Speaker 1: children that I think anyway we can give them comfort,
Speaker 1: whether that be in the form of connecting with friends
Speaker 1: on social media or maybe needing to unplug by gaming
Speaker 1: or watching movies, it's okay. Um. I think it's all
Speaker 1: about self care and care for our children, and if
Speaker 1: these things bring them comfort, then I say let it be.
Speaker 1: So take a breath, and maybe even trying a little
Speaker 1: gaming with him. All Right. Before I started this podcast,
Speaker 1: you know, I was thinking about just gossip in general,
Speaker 1: and how much I enjoy it at times, I enjoy
Speaker 1: hearing it at times, how I get sort of excited
Speaker 1: about a tidbit, and how in times it has been
Speaker 1: kind of the worst thing, whether I've been the butt
Speaker 1: of gossip or I have gossiped about somebody else and
Speaker 1: felt bad about it. And about two years ago I
Speaker 1: went on a gossip cleanse, which means I didn't gossip
Speaker 1: for about three months, and it was actually really hard,
Speaker 1: and I realized how much gossip is used as currency
Speaker 1: in our day to day lives. It was definitely a challenge,
Speaker 1: and so I wanted to dig into the kind of
Speaker 1: roots of gossip and what kind of gossip does good
Speaker 1: and what kind of gossip is incredibly destructive not only
Speaker 1: to ourselves but to our society. And there is no
Speaker 1: better person to talk to me about gossip and gossip
Speaker 1: with me than my friend Jess Caigel. Jess Caigel. He's
Speaker 1: a former editor in chief of People Magazine and editorial
Speaker 1: director of Entertainment Weekly. He is now the chief entertainment
Speaker 1: anchor and host of The Jess Caigel Show at Daily
Speaker 1: Entertainment news and talk program on sirius XM. He's also
Speaker 1: got his own podcast, the Jess Kegel Podcast on Sirius.
Speaker 1: He's appeared as a CBS News contributor and critic and
Speaker 1: co host of ABC's Oscar Red Carpet pre show Listen.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows gossip more than Jess. Hi, Jess Caigel, Hi,
Speaker 1: how are you well? I'm excited to be here. I
Speaker 1: listen to your podcast all the time. Very informative, is
Speaker 1: very funny, You're very sweet. I'm fascinated by gossip. So
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to you because you and I
Speaker 1: gossip all the time together. But besides that, you have
Speaker 1: actually as an editor of people, and so much of
Speaker 1: what you do is deciphering what's gossip, what's not, what's
Speaker 1: purely entertainment news, and what is kind of salacious stories.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to start by talking about the roots
Speaker 1: of gossip, because originally gossip was not a negative thing.
Speaker 1: Gossip was actually something that women did while they were
Speaker 1: dealing with childbirth because back in the day childbirth, there
Speaker 1: was like twenty people in the room as opposed to
Speaker 1: now where it's just a person giving you drugs and
Speaker 1: a husband. Written when they were you know, holding hands
Speaker 1: and getting hot towels and everything, used to gossip as
Speaker 1: a way to sort of make the time go faster.
Speaker 1: And then it had a better positive spin because gossip
Speaker 1: became something that a close friend or sibling had with you,
Speaker 1: meaning that they could tell you anything. So it was
Speaker 1: gossip was more about intimacy, and then it went to
Speaker 1: actually insulting. Yeah, it started. I mean the word gossip
Speaker 1: comes from an Old English word for godfather or godmother,
Speaker 1: and so it really it's all about the intimacy. And
Speaker 1: there was a somewhat sexist evolution because it came to
Speaker 1: mean the women who helped her childbirth, and it came
Speaker 1: to mean idle chatter, always with the assumption that women
Speaker 1: gossip more than men, and it was really a sharing
Speaker 1: of information. In fact, behavioral scientists will tell you men
Speaker 1: and women gossip exactly the same amount. You could probably
Speaker 1: make sweeping generalizations that men and women gossip about different things.
Speaker 1: But if you define gossip as talk about out other people,
Speaker 1: we all do it. We all do it constantly. Most
Speaker 1: of the time it's benign or neutral. And then there's
Speaker 1: also negative gossip, and we can get into that as well.
Speaker 1: But the idea that we talk about other people stems
Speaker 1: from a need from our ancestors to convey information about
Speaker 1: the rest of the group. We as human beings live
Speaker 1: in these very large social structures. We can't know everyone ourselves,
Speaker 1: we can't always go to the source, and so we
Speaker 1: rely on gossip to survive. We rely on other people
Speaker 1: to tell us who's a cheater, who's good, who behaves
Speaker 1: this way, who behaves that way, And it's a survival mechanism, right,
Speaker 1: and it's generally basically good. It serves a good purpose. Basically,
Speaker 1: what you're saying is that it can be used as
Speaker 1: a teaching tools for positive like see that guy who
Speaker 1: cheat and his wife, Look what happened to him? I
Speaker 1: was reading, which I thought was so fascinating that for
Speaker 1: a while, men were really threatened by the fact that
Speaker 1: women were in these little gossip groups because they felt
Speaker 1: like they were gonna create these acts of freedom, and
Speaker 1: they wanted to shut them down, you know, because you know,
Speaker 1: obviously talk is power, and groups of women talking and
Speaker 1: so this kind of female friendship and gossip ended up
Speaker 1: being witch hunts, like literally women were burned at the stakes,
Speaker 1: and they had this really medieval looking thing called the
Speaker 1: gossip bridle, which was like this metal, hannibal electric thing
Speaker 1: they would put over women's mouths if they thought they
Speaker 1: were gossiping too much, which, by the way, if they
Speaker 1: existed today, Georgia would have fought DN. Have you ever
Speaker 1: gotten in trouble gossiping? Like, has it ever you gossiped
Speaker 1: about somebody and it's gotten back to you. It's bad,
Speaker 1: it's humiliated, it's really bad. I remember a bill allon
Speaker 1: years ago. I was a kid, but I was having
Speaker 1: a conversation with a boss, and I opened this conversation
Speaker 1: like it was really bad, and so I thought that
Speaker 1: this was horrifying but also delightful, and I told people, Well,
Speaker 1: eventually the boss got in trouble and I was then
Speaker 1: approached to talk to HR and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel really complicit in this, and so I feel
Speaker 1: awkward talking to HR. And she was like, well, you
Speaker 1: didn't have a problem talking to everybody else about it.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So yeah, I had to come clean.
Speaker 1: I learned a terrible lesson. You don't talk about your colleagues.
Speaker 1: When I was twenty two years old, I got in trouble.
Speaker 1: Ultimately I did do the right thing, and ultimately the
Speaker 1: boss was held accountable. That was gossip as a learning
Speaker 1: tool for you. Well, yeah, it was also really nasty,
Speaker 1: negative gossip that I engaged in, and I learned not
Speaker 1: to do that at work. I think for a long
Speaker 1: time I looked at gossip is currency, like you were
Speaker 1: socially anxious, and you were at some kind of social
Speaker 1: soare you could use gossip as something to kind of
Speaker 1: create an intimate bond with somebody else, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of say like oh did you know that? Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And I remember when I was on a Living Color
Speaker 1: Kim Wayne's used to do the sketch where she played
Speaker 1: the woman that sits on the stoop in the city,
Speaker 1: and she'd always say, well, I'm not one to gossip,
Speaker 1: so you didn't hear it from me. But then she
Speaker 1: would go on and talk about everybody. So anyway, I
Speaker 1: realized that it actually wasn't currency and it did not
Speaker 1: create real intimate bonds at all, because if I said something,
Speaker 1: it would get back to me, and I had sort
Speaker 1: of similar experiences like you did, so you know, it
Speaker 1: came back to thought me in the face, and I learned, Wow,
Speaker 1: it's not about creating a bond, it's actually hurtful. We
Speaker 1: often think of gossip as only the negative gossip with
Speaker 1: in reality, gossip is any kind of talk about other
Speaker 1: people and it is n see like if I hear
Speaker 1: that so and so is about to become the president
Speaker 1: of NBC, well that's good gossip. To know. It's not harmful.
Speaker 1: It's we're trading information that if you work in the
Speaker 1: entertainment industry, that would be good information to have negative gossip.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, it besides being destructive, besides destroying reputations,
Speaker 1: when you're talking to someone and you are describing someone
Speaker 1: else as a cheater, you're describing someone else as a slimeball.
Speaker 1: Those words that you're using. The person listening actually ascribes
Speaker 1: those qualities to you, so it's not good for you either. However,
Speaker 1: engaging in gossip and trading information, our bodies react positively
Speaker 1: to that. If we're trading information about other people in
Speaker 1: the group, biologically, our heart rate slows down, we become calmer.
Speaker 1: We are very evolutionaryly designed to gossip. You just have
Speaker 1: to be careful about what you do, why you gossip
Speaker 1: about I did actually read somewhere that it actually does
Speaker 1: help calm the body, which I'm shocked because it actually
Speaker 1: makes me rev up. Because think about it, when you
Speaker 1: have such a salacious piece of gossip on somebody, and
Speaker 1: I'm being completely honest, there is something very titillating and
Speaker 1: exciting about calling somebody that will appreciatesipy. It just did well.
Speaker 1: You get repped up. But then when you actually share
Speaker 1: the gossip, your body calms down. There must be some
Speaker 1: kind of activity in the pre funnel cortex of our brains.
Speaker 1: There has to be absolutely listening to particularly negative gossip,
Speaker 1: you're talking about someone who is engaged in really aberrant behavior.
Speaker 1: It actually stimulates the part of our brains that is
Speaker 1: designed to de die for complex human behavior. It literally
Speaker 1: does excite part of our brands. Right, Why do you
Speaker 1: think we like it so much? Why do we do
Speaker 1: it so much now? I'm not talking about back when
Speaker 1: I was birth in babies and I have all my
Speaker 1: cousins in the room. But now we still trade on it,
Speaker 1: we still love it. I mean, listen, sometimes I hear
Speaker 1: stuff I can't wait to call you and tell you.
Speaker 1: I think it's because that's what our ancestors did. It
Speaker 1: is literally in our DNA, and it's still just as
Speaker 1: necessary today as ever, when we have many, many different
Speaker 1: venues of getting gossip. I can, you know, get a
Speaker 1: phone call from you and hear something about someone in
Speaker 1: our group or a celebrity or whoever. But also we
Speaker 1: depend on gossip to survive. Look, there's a reason that
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes and yell are such successful platforms because those
Speaker 1: are literally all of us sharing information with ourselves. There's
Speaker 1: something about that that it's necessary for society to survive.
Speaker 1: Imagine if we all lived in a tunnel, we didn't
Speaker 1: know anything about our neighbors, Right, that's actually a dangerous
Speaker 1: place to be. Yeah, we've been talking about more how
Speaker 1: gossip affect us personally and what we do in our groups.
Speaker 1: So now let's we open it up to there's still
Speaker 1: a rabid appetite for gossip about people we don't even know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I want to take us into the world
Speaker 1: of celebrity, which is a place where you swim, because
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by and you have, I know a lot
Speaker 1: of knowledge about this. How very early on, in like
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven, that's when this new slew of fawning magazines
Speaker 1: like Photoplay and screen Land, and these were all created
Speaker 1: only to be publicity machines for early stars, right like
Speaker 1: look up, pretty, look at this. But they have changed
Speaker 1: since then. And there is this young New York newspaper
Speaker 1: man named Winchell. He apparently was the one that brought
Speaker 1: gossip into mainstream media. So he was the one that
Speaker 1: sort of crossed that line of taboo and started getting
Speaker 1: all the dirt on the rich and famous and the powerful,
Speaker 1: and people ate it up. And a lot of people
Speaker 1: that study gossips say, well, that was the great leveler
Speaker 1: gossip about the rich and famous. It was a way
Speaker 1: for society to go, oh, see, they have problems. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter class, race, or gender. We all face
Speaker 1: suicides and affairs and this, that and the other. But
Speaker 1: in the world of celebrity, that turned, right, It absolutely
Speaker 1: turned But it turned really early on, as soon as
Speaker 1: America established, you know, its own gods and goddesses, its
Speaker 1: own royalty, which were movie stars originally. Because we don't
Speaker 1: have a royal family, we created our own and there's
Speaker 1: some need to do that. I mean, human beings are
Speaker 1: designed to live in groups. We look for social hierarchy.
Speaker 1: Then along came Hollywood, and then along came the media.
Speaker 1: And when we know intimate details about another human being,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how we know that. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: if we know that from TV and magazines. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter if we know that because this person is our
Speaker 1: neighbor and we look at them over the fence. Our
Speaker 1: brains are telling us that that person is socially important
Speaker 1: to us. So I know Mariska harget Day through you right,
Speaker 1: forget the fact that she's a celebrity. I'm interested in
Speaker 1: her because I know her, I know who she's married to,
Speaker 1: I've met her kids. She's important to me. She's also
Speaker 1: having a tour at affair is she. Let's get into
Speaker 1: that gossip. But I also know intimate things about Jennifer
Speaker 1: Aniston who I don't know right I know who she
Speaker 1: married to, I know who she slept with. I know
Speaker 1: what water she drinks, I know her eating habits. You
Speaker 1: know who she slept with. We all know who she
Speaker 1: slept with. Just pick up a magazine, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. We know surprisingly intimate details about her just
Speaker 1: because she's famous and we know who she was married to.
Speaker 1: That's one of the reasons that we gossip about celebrities.
Speaker 1: Our brains are telling us that they're important to us
Speaker 1: just because we know intimate details about them. So you
Speaker 1: don't think it's the other way around. You don't think
Speaker 1: it is. If I know negative stuff about Nicole Kidman,
Speaker 1: it humanizes her. It knocks her off her pedestal a
Speaker 1: little bit. It does that too. There are many reasons
Speaker 1: we look at celebrities with Sometimes we aspire to be
Speaker 1: like a celebrity. We all got the Jennifer Aniston haircutt
Speaker 1: back when I had hair. We all got that because
Speaker 1: we wanted to be like Jennifer Andiston. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, we envy people with status and we want
Speaker 1: to bring them down. You know, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: reason that we are fascinated by celebrity death because of
Speaker 1: course death is the great leveler. Also divorces the great leveler,
Speaker 1: or you know, an addiction is the great leveler. We
Speaker 1: revel in the fact that they're not better than us sometimes.
Speaker 1: You know, I think about gossip pre social media, and
Speaker 1: I think about you know, when gossip came out and
Speaker 1: ultimately broke the story of Ingrid Bergman's illegitimate child with
Speaker 1: director Robert to Russell Leany, and then Ingrid Bergman didn't
Speaker 1: work for ten years, or for example, how did this work?
Speaker 1: Rock Hudson is a homosexual? But that didn't really come
Speaker 1: out in any big public way. That was a nice
Speaker 1: piece of gossip that Hollywood was able to keep under
Speaker 1: wraps to protect kind of their own. Social media really
Speaker 1: did change all of that, and also different standards of
Speaker 1: the media. I mean, there used to be very clear
Speaker 1: distinction between legitimate news and tabloid news, and and the
Speaker 1: average person really knew the difference. There was something about
Speaker 1: the establishment papers like the New York Times that were
Speaker 1: very different than the national Enquirer, and everyone knew the difference.
Speaker 1: Something happened. It was more probably in the eighties. It
Speaker 1: was actually a turning point when I believe the National
Speaker 1: Enquirer detailed thing about Nancy Reagan's affair with Frank Sinatra,
Speaker 1: which probably wasn't true. They were friends, but there was
Speaker 1: a lot of speculation around it because of a Kitty
Speaker 1: Kelly book that came out about Nancy Reagan. You probably
Speaker 1: know more about this than I do. But then the
Speaker 1: New York Times picked that up, and it probably wasn't
Speaker 1: the first time that that had ever happened, but it
Speaker 1: was a turning point where something that was in the
Speaker 1: tabloids then became mainstream news, and it was about a
Speaker 1: very important political figure. The National Choir actually broke a
Speaker 1: few things politically, which then it becomes a gray area
Speaker 1: what's true and what's not true. There's a lot more
Speaker 1: to come after this short break. Welcome back. I want
Speaker 1: to talk about when you were editor of People magazine.
Speaker 1: There must have been such an influx of stories and information,
Speaker 1: and how did you decide did you have to fact
Speaker 1: checked everything? Especially as the Internet took off. The way
Speaker 1: that People distinguished itself was you know, there was so
Speaker 1: much competition for eyeballs and clicks and readers and for
Speaker 1: print and online that we really dug into People's the
Speaker 1: place you can trust. So a lot of times People
Speaker 1: was accused of being too celebrity friendly and carrying water
Speaker 1: for celebrities and all of at and it was celebrity
Speaker 1: friendly because a big part of our business was we
Speaker 1: wanted celebrities to give us their baby photos, we wanted
Speaker 1: celebrities to give us their wedding pictures. We wanted to
Speaker 1: be the one celebrity magazine that celebrities would actually talk
Speaker 1: to and do interviews for. That doesn't mean we didn't
Speaker 1: piss them off all the time, because if they got divorced,
Speaker 1: of course we would cover it, or if they got
Speaker 1: caught doing something bad, we would cover it. However, that
Speaker 1: idea that you wanted to be the paper of record
Speaker 1: for celebrity news, and so for example, if there was
Speaker 1: a pregnancy that everybody was discussing, we wouldn't publish it
Speaker 1: until the woman herself confirmed it. Right. So you hear
Speaker 1: people say a lot, oh, if there's a salacious piece
Speaker 1: of news about a celebrity, I immediately go to People
Speaker 1: dot com to see if it's there, because people won't
Speaker 1: publish it unless we are really sure that it's true,
Speaker 1: and said, there must have been a lot of story
Speaker 1: as you turned down, Well, there's a lot of stories
Speaker 1: we waited on. Everybody knew Beyonce, for example, was pregnant
Speaker 1: for a long time. We waited until she confirmed it.
Speaker 1: She confirted by standing on stage and showing her baby,
Speaker 1: but then we would do it. And so there were
Speaker 1: a lot of things that we waited on. I would
Speaker 1: say Caitlin Jenner was a big one. Every single week
Speaker 1: in the National Enquirer, every single hour on the internet,
Speaker 1: there were photos saying that you know, then she was
Speaker 1: known as Bruce Jenner, but all these photo saying Bruce
Speaker 1: Jenner has removed, or Adam's apple, Bruce Jenner has is transitioning.
Speaker 1: And so we waited on that for the longest time
Speaker 1: until Caitlin actually confirmed it herself. So there's sometimes when
Speaker 1: we wait because we're not sure, and there's sometimes we
Speaker 1: wait out of respect for another human being. It must
Speaker 1: have been very curious for you. Did you find that
Speaker 1: you could really get a sense of people's appetite based
Speaker 1: on what kind of celebrity stories they wanted to read,
Speaker 1: or you must have gotten a sense of what the
Speaker 1: public loved based on who did well in a cover
Speaker 1: and who didn't. One of the big shifts that happened culturally,
Speaker 1: you know, I would say from the early two thousands
Speaker 1: or even back in the nineties when I worked at
Speaker 1: the Entertainment Weekly, that movie stars really were movie stars.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could put Julia Roberts on a magazine
Speaker 1: cover and really not even have a story, but it
Speaker 1: would sell because people flocked to Julia Roberts. And then
Speaker 1: things really changed. But it had a lot to do
Speaker 1: with the constant flow of information because of the Internet,
Speaker 1: but it also had to do with social media, and
Speaker 1: people really became much more interested in reality stars. And again,
Speaker 1: we know so much more intimate information about reality stars
Speaker 1: that we are therefore more interested in them. It goes
Speaker 1: back to our brains really being tickled by people that
Speaker 1: we know a lot of information about. So the Kardashians,
Speaker 1: of course, became so much more interesting to people than
Speaker 1: any movie star that they didn't know a lot about
Speaker 1: what we discovered going into I would say two thousand, fourteen,
Speaker 1: fifteen sixteen. By then it was Chip and Joanna Gaines.
Speaker 1: People really loved them, you know, the Magnolia people, the
Speaker 1: Megan Markel and Prince Harry. The royals were always fascinating
Speaker 1: for many many reasons, but because Megan and Harry shared
Speaker 1: so much information about themselves, they became the most interesting.
Speaker 1: So sharing information about yourself is not necessarily giving away
Speaker 1: the milk for free, it's actually tickling the public. Celebrities
Speaker 1: that are really good at social media and using their
Speaker 1: Instagram and sharing just enough to tickle the public's interest
Speaker 1: without totally pouring themselves out are the most effective celebrities
Speaker 1: of marketing themselves out there. If there were two magazine covers,
Speaker 1: not People magazine, any cover, and one was a positive
Speaker 1: cover about a wedding and happiness and love and and
Speaker 1: the other cover was a you know, a fair he
Speaker 1: tried to hire someone to kill the wife, which would
Speaker 1: sell more. I think it really depends on your audience generally,
Speaker 1: based on the universe of magazines that I would always
Speaker 1: keep very close track of the positive story would well,
Speaker 1: that's good to know. It also depends on you know,
Speaker 1: just because the story is positive doesn't mean it's not interesting.
Speaker 1: That a positive story would just because people feel better
Speaker 1: about buying it and The other thing to factor in
Speaker 1: there is if you're running a magazine, how do the
Speaker 1: advertisers feel about it? I think people revel in dark
Speaker 1: gossip too. I mean you think of why crime stories
Speaker 1: go on and on. You think about how the gossip
Speaker 1: of people you don't know who. Maybe the guy murdered
Speaker 1: his wife and everybody hasn't oh, I think he did it.
Speaker 1: My biggest thing now is like every drama now has
Speaker 1: a naked missing teenage girl. But so any local crime
Speaker 1: or anything, any dark sort of undercurrent gossip is also
Speaker 1: seems to be like wildfire too, just as much as
Speaker 1: a positive birth and death of the two, you know,
Speaker 1: major human events, and so when we know something about
Speaker 1: the way someone died, that's very interesting to us. People
Speaker 1: who die are very interesting to us. True crime actually
Speaker 1: beats just about any celebrity news. Really. I would say
Speaker 1: a great true crime story on a magazine cover or
Speaker 1: even on you know, your internet website, that's going to
Speaker 1: get more clicks than you know, Ben Affleck and Jennifer
Speaker 1: Lopez getting back together again. It's all about speculating the outcome.
Speaker 1: Then it's all about our opinion of what happened with
Speaker 1: the crime. It's it's I hate to say it, especially
Speaker 1: with true crime, because you know, people get hurt, but
Speaker 1: it's entertainment because we imagine ourselves in that situation. So
Speaker 1: as we read that story, you know, what would it
Speaker 1: feel to go through that? What would I do in
Speaker 1: that situation. It's also we're fascinated by aberrant human behavior.
Speaker 1: We are wired genetically evolutionarily to look out for that,
Speaker 1: and so when we hear about the guy that killed
Speaker 1: his wife and kids, that is horrifying to us, it's
Speaker 1: also really interesting to us. There's part of us that
Speaker 1: feels like we need to know about this because this
Speaker 1: could happen to me, This could happen to someone who's
Speaker 1: important to me. Yeah, we're gonna take a short break
Speaker 1: and we'll be right back, and we're back. I remember
Speaker 1: sort of time I dealt with godsip in any mainstream way,
Speaker 1: because the gossip I had always been I meshed in
Speaker 1: before when I was younger, was just localized gossip, meaning
Speaker 1: people I knew, And it wasn't until I married George
Speaker 1: Stephanopolis that I first was confronted with that kind of
Speaker 1: mainstream gossip. And The New York Post wrote a story
Speaker 1: that George and I were getting divorced. I've never been
Speaker 1: sort of accused of something so wrong. Also, I was
Speaker 1: never sort of in the public eye. Nobody would have cared,
Speaker 1: you know, who I was dating or what was going on.
Speaker 1: There's been no interest. Did George not tell you that
Speaker 1: you were getting divorced? Was that the problem? He didn't?
Speaker 1: I mean, I got I got a letter from my lawyer,
Speaker 1: but I didn't think to open it. I thought it
Speaker 1: was just more criminal stuff that I had to pay. No.
Speaker 1: I was shocked. I was like, wow, you you really
Speaker 1: can write whatever you want, whether it's true or not.
Speaker 1: And you know, I didn't deal with it well. But
Speaker 1: my point was I didn't really understand that side of
Speaker 1: gossip until I was the subject of it. It was
Speaker 1: kind of painful and shocking, and it made me after
Speaker 1: that look at tabloids and stuff with a different eye.
Speaker 1: Whereas before I used to love to believe them, like
Speaker 1: I bet there are aliens inside Lollyparton's uterus, But now
Speaker 1: I became much more skeptical and much more like, oh
Speaker 1: they lie. But we had touched upon the Internet and
Speaker 1: how the Internet has completely changed gossip. But I mean,
Speaker 1: gossip found another place to roost when when politics and
Speaker 1: social media came into play. So you know Matt Drudge,
Speaker 1: he started spreading rumors about President Clinton's extra marital affair
Speaker 1: airs and soon that became mainstream news. So I think
Speaker 1: gossip is now weaponized politically because you can put stuff
Speaker 1: out there that's a total eye and pure gossip and
Speaker 1: people are going to believe it or it's gonna get
Speaker 1: sort of embedded in their brain. And it's to me scary.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's sort of how fake news is created.
Speaker 1: The biggest dangers to our civilization is that the facebooks
Speaker 1: and twitters of the world really are doing nothing to
Speaker 1: keep it in chat and I don't know what they
Speaker 1: could do, and certainly if they did, it would probably
Speaker 1: find other places to live and be shared and thrive
Speaker 1: and you know, spread like cancer. There's an interesting scene
Speaker 1: in notting Hill, Remember when Joey Roberts goes to the
Speaker 1: door and all the photographers are there and she's upset,
Speaker 1: and Hugh Grant says, it'll just be trashed tomorrow. People
Speaker 1: throw those papers away, and she says, no, those newspaper
Speaker 1: clippings are filed away, and then it comes up every time.
Speaker 1: You will never be able to escape any scurrilous rumor,
Speaker 1: even if it's completely made up, it sticks to people,
Speaker 1: and that is really to me, that's really sad. As
Speaker 1: a magazine editor, watching people get saddled with these things
Speaker 1: that were absolutely untrue was incredibly disturbing to me, and
Speaker 1: it made me not want to be part of that problem.
Speaker 1: But you can say anything now, I mean Trump was
Speaker 1: a master of it. He would define someone as a
Speaker 1: certain way or say something that was absolutely untrue, but
Speaker 1: half the country would believe it. I have all kinds
Speaker 1: of issues with social media. I think there's great things
Speaker 1: about it. I think there's horrible things about it. But
Speaker 1: I do worry that gossip in social media. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a wildfire that gets out of control,
Speaker 1: and it gets so out of control you don't know
Speaker 1: what's true or not anymore. You could just call somebody
Speaker 1: a pedophile and there's no accountability, you know. And this
Speaker 1: is and I'm just talking about gossip, which you know,
Speaker 1: I think leads to a lot of fake news, but
Speaker 1: even just gossip for gossip's sake destroys lives. And you know,
Speaker 1: for me, it's terrifying. And I think social media is
Speaker 1: just gas on the fire. So I do worry about that.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, we as human beings really like to hear
Speaker 1: what we want to hear. So, for example, I mean,
Speaker 1: Fox News is the perfect example of that. They tell
Speaker 1: people what they want to hear, and they reinforce that
Speaker 1: often with scurreless facts. Right, although you know they say
Speaker 1: that MSNBC and other cable outlets do exactly the same thing,
Speaker 1: You're right, and they they actually do. Here's what I
Speaker 1: wish would happen. Every newspaper in the country would get
Speaker 1: rid of their editorial page. Uh. I don't think that
Speaker 1: opinion has a place in news because it ends up
Speaker 1: tainting all of the great reporting. All the great reporters
Speaker 1: at the Wall Street Journal, for example, to me, are
Speaker 1: tainted by the editorial page. I don't trust the management
Speaker 1: of the paper. People on the other side of the
Speaker 1: aisle would say the exact same thing about the New
Speaker 1: York Times, because there are just so many angry polemicists
Speaker 1: on the left writing editorials for the New York Times.
Speaker 1: It really does make you think everybody at that organization
Speaker 1: is giving you information through a certain lens, when in
Speaker 1: reality they're not. I mean, every single journalist in the
Speaker 1: world has their own political religious beliefs. But a real
Speaker 1: journalist they're gonna put that aside. They're gonna honor their
Speaker 1: duty to give you the news as objectively as they
Speaker 1: possibly can. But so putting news aside and putting you know,
Speaker 1: whatever political party you are involved aside, one could say
Speaker 1: that gossip, not political gossip, human gossip, is actually the
Speaker 1: one thing that everyone can share. You know that if
Speaker 1: j Lo and Ben Affleck are hooking up, I don't
Speaker 1: care if you're a Republican or a Democrat or an
Speaker 1: independent or a fascist. That is interesting to everybody. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And that's what it's valuable about gossip. Yeah, Behavioral scientists
Speaker 1: who have really studied our interaction with gossip will tell
Speaker 1: you that most of what we gossip about is really
Speaker 1: neutral or even benign. And so if you're a family
Speaker 1: thanksgiving with your crazy uncle, what do you want to
Speaker 1: talk about politics? Or do you want to talk about
Speaker 1: Ben and j Loo hooking out? Or how did Scarlett
Speaker 1: Johanson keeper pregnancy a secret for so long? These are
Speaker 1: things that you can all talk about. They're not necessarily negative,
Speaker 1: but they're a way for us to bond with each other.
Speaker 1: I mean There was one evolutionary psychologist who said gossiping
Speaker 1: is to humans what grooming is to primates. They get
Speaker 1: information by grooming each other. They bond by grooming each other,
Speaker 1: and we do that with gossip as human beings. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if it's about our neighbors or it's about
Speaker 1: you know, a celebrity. So are you saying that gossiping
Speaker 1: is the same as if I'm picking lice out of
Speaker 1: your scalp and eating it. Well, you've done both, So
Speaker 1: what do you think Are you calling me a gorilla?
Speaker 1: I think it is the big denominator. So let me
Speaker 1: ask you this, what do you like to gossip about
Speaker 1: the things that I will gossip most about her? When
Speaker 1: somebody does something completely aver like, you know, you read
Speaker 1: this stuff about Army Hammer, for example, who I know
Speaker 1: a little bit always seem like a very nice guy.
Speaker 1: But you read the stuff about it, and you then
Speaker 1: you start trying to pick it apart. And I can
Speaker 1: try to pick that apart with absolutely no extra information, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: why would he send somebody a tad saying I'm gonna
Speaker 1: eat you? Like? What what is that about? I don't
Speaker 1: think he's actually cannibal? So why does he do that?
Speaker 1: What is it in his background? I want to know
Speaker 1: more about his parents, Where did he come from, what's
Speaker 1: he gonna do. What's the problem. Is he gonna go
Speaker 1: to rehab? When somebody does something, I like to dissect
Speaker 1: where did this come from? I want to know what's
Speaker 1: true and what's not in all the gossip and the reporting.
Speaker 1: But I also want to know what is it in
Speaker 1: their background that brought them to this point. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, now, for somebody who doesn't
Speaker 1: know Army Hammer, all I can think of is he's
Speaker 1: a cannibal. If I ever need him, I'm gonna be scared.
Speaker 1: He's gonna take the white out of my left breath.
Speaker 1: Whether it's true or not, I kind of think too
Speaker 1: main back what I said about Rock Hudson, there was
Speaker 1: a time pre Internet and everything where you know, politically
Speaker 1: there were gay men in the White House, where in
Speaker 1: Hollywood they were gay men and women and people with
Speaker 1: all kinds of gossip worthy stuff that was kept under wraps.
Speaker 1: And now it's impossible it's made up or not made up.
Speaker 1: There's no protecting gossip. But there's also you know the
Speaker 1: fact that the media became more independent from the White House.
Speaker 1: But the fact that it became more independent from Hollywood
Speaker 1: was really a good thing. It was a good thing that,
Speaker 1: you know, the media didn't exist just to issue press releases.
Speaker 1: Was it really all that healthy that the media kept
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy's affairs to itself and can helped him
Speaker 1: keep them secret? I don't know, because in fact, John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy was probably putting national security in danger with all
Speaker 1: of these affairs, and and one kind of connected him
Speaker 1: to the mob and all of those things. Would it
Speaker 1: have been good to know about that? And would it
Speaker 1: have been even better for him to be afraid of
Speaker 1: that getting out and therefore checked his behavior, Which is
Speaker 1: one of the values of gossip and why it is
Speaker 1: a human behavior that has lasted so long ever since
Speaker 1: our you know, fur covered ancestors, because fear of being
Speaker 1: found out that you did something wrong actually keeps people
Speaker 1: in check morally, don't you think too. I mean, while
Speaker 1: we're dissecting the Kennedy's things like Marilyn Monrose death, I
Speaker 1: mean like unsolved cultural mysteries are also fodder for gossip forever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And unsolved mystery particularly around the death, particularly around the
Speaker 1: death of a famous person. Well, I mean, look the
Speaker 1: assassination of Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe of it. Yeah, those are
Speaker 1: the main ones. Yeah, okay, so that's what you like
Speaker 1: to gossip about. I think it's important to note because
Speaker 1: it was brought up earlier that Jess Cagel, Well, it's
Speaker 1: Notting Hill. It's his favorite movie. I don't have a
Speaker 1: conversation without it. I actually wanted to see if we
Speaker 1: could get through the podcast without you referring to it,
Speaker 1: but you did. I thought it super relevant to our confesstation.
Speaker 1: It is very relevant. But it is your favorite movie,
Speaker 1: and it is referred to many, many times. What's your
Speaker 1: favorite line from Notting Hill? It's everybody's favorite line. I'm
Speaker 1: just a girl standing in front of a boy, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Then there's the other great line, nice try, when Judy
Speaker 1: Roberts tries to get the cookie by telling how terrible
Speaker 1: her life is and they all laugh at her. The
Speaker 1: movie star and nothing's better than her face at the
Speaker 1: press conference when he asks the question how long will
Speaker 1: you be staying indefinitely? We could? We could talk about
Speaker 1: it for yeah, we could. Okay, Now it's my turn
Speaker 1: for the hot seat what do you gossip about? Well,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think because, like, celebrity gossip isn't that
Speaker 1: interesting to me, because first of all, it's everywhere. I
Speaker 1: think I fall more into the gossiping about people we know,
Speaker 1: because again, there is some kind of a moral lesson
Speaker 1: in it, whether it's good or bad. So that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff is more Oh my god, do you know
Speaker 1: this happened or that happened. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: lessons I've learned early on is that gossiping in a
Speaker 1: way that would blow up a family or that you know,
Speaker 1: that's not good, that's hurtful. My teenage daughter, Elliott has
Speaker 1: scolded me in gossiping about kids. She's like, grown ups
Speaker 1: should not gossip about children. And I'll tell you a tale.
Speaker 1: So Elliott was in middle school or high school and
Speaker 1: another parent made up something about her which is completely untrue,
Speaker 1: and so made up this gossip and was basically telling
Speaker 1: Elliott's friends about it, and I lost my mind because
Speaker 1: that's when it really hit me that no adult person
Speaker 1: should gossip about children. And I got really upset and
Speaker 1: I wrote a very angry email to the mother about
Speaker 1: how she shouldn't be doing that to which she answered
Speaker 1: she was going to call the school and tell them
Speaker 1: I was bullying her. You can do that, but then
Speaker 1: tell them why I'm bullying. You know. It just became
Speaker 1: like a crazy thing. But that was a situation where
Speaker 1: I felt I needed to step up as a parent
Speaker 1: and go, this is not okay. So kids are off limits.
Speaker 1: I don't like to gossip about affairs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: although people getting divorced is a big one I think
Speaker 1: for married people in my age bracket, because that again
Speaker 1: is like, oh my god, why are they getting divorced?
Speaker 1: Could this happen to us? Are we having those problems? Again,
Speaker 1: it goes back to the way we're wired. It goes
Speaker 1: back to where d n A. You are tickled by, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, an event or or people or behavior that
Speaker 1: could affect you. Right, is this Could this happen to me?
Speaker 1: Are we okay? Are we? And again that's probably healthy.
Speaker 1: I'm tickled by really as behavior because whether it's Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: or whether it's reporting on a movie star, or whether
Speaker 1: it's someone in my neighborhood, I need to know why
Speaker 1: they're doing that. There's something in me that needs to
Speaker 1: know why is that happening? If I said to you, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's this guy in town and he was taken to
Speaker 1: the emvergency room because he had a toaster up his
Speaker 1: ask it would be all over that. We can talk
Speaker 1: about that for six hours. Whether it's true or not,
Speaker 1: it's just what does that mean? Why did he do it?
Speaker 1: How big was the toaster? Is an enormous part of that.
Speaker 1: Was there toast in? It wasn't plugged in? Did he
Speaker 1: inserted himself or did someone else do it? Oh God,
Speaker 1: I wish that was true. That's those are just sort
Speaker 1: of human interest gossip, which you know, I think I
Speaker 1: can say the majority of people, that's the kind of
Speaker 1: gossip they really love because it makes you kind of
Speaker 1: dissected in another way. Jess giggle. As soon as we
Speaker 1: sign off, I have something to tell you. Thank you
Speaker 1: for being here, Thank you for talking about gossip. I
Speaker 1: love your podcast, I love you, thanks for having me
Speaker 1: on it. I think gossip is here to stay. I think,
Speaker 1: unfortunately because of social media, God knows where it's going
Speaker 1: to go. It's gonna get worse and earlier I talked
Speaker 1: about my gossip cleans. I don't think you have to
Speaker 1: go to that extreme. I think there's always going to
Speaker 1: be an appetite for gossip. I think what we have
Speaker 1: to ask ourselves is when we use gossip as a
Speaker 1: tool that could potentially hurt people' tis a bad thing.
Speaker 1: And I think when gossip is just innocuous celebrity stuff,
Speaker 1: I think it's actually okay. But there is kind of
Speaker 1: a moral checkpoint one has to go through when deciding
Speaker 1: if it's something that is worth perpetuating. And I will
Speaker 1: leave you with this, though Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott
Speaker 1: are pregnant with their second child. Do with it what
Speaker 1: you will. Thank you for listening to Go Ask Gali.
Speaker 1: Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and
Speaker 1: follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e
Speaker 1: Wentworth and on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to ask me a question or suggested
Speaker 1: guests or a topic to dig into, I would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you, and there's a bunch of ways
Speaker 1: to do it. You can call or text me at
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