Maintenance Phase - Rachel Hollis Part 2: Girl, Start Apologizing

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

In the sequel (sorry) to our first installment, we take a deep dive into Rachel's wildly problematic books and deeply weird downfall. Along the way we discuss allyship etiquette, MLMs and Ronald Reagan. We remain convinced that getting matching tattoos was the right decision for us.  Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!The infamous Tik TokSavy Writes Books' video essaysThe Rise & Fall of Rachel HollisThe Divine Rise of Multilevel MarketingKaitlyn Luckow's "Girl, It’s Okay To Be Dirty: A Look At Toxic Self-Help"Multilevel-marketing companies like LuLaRoe are forcing people into debt and psychological crisisJesus never called us to chase after power, money, and fame “Girl, Wash Your Face” Is A Massive Best-Seller With A Dark MessageYour Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile InsideInfluencer Rachel Hollis Is Facing Accusations She Is Plagiarizing On Her InstagramSupport the show

Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Faze, the podcast that doesn't use a southern accent even when it's in church. We're authentic y'all. You know we love a monogram. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase.

You will get monthly bonus episodes there. This month's bonus episode, Mike and I are shouting at the top of our lungs about fat suits. And if you would like to support the show, great, come on down and join us. And if not, hang out, keep listening. We got a lot to say about Rachel Goddamn Hollis. This is the reluctant accidental part two of our Rachel Hollis.

It's serious. I'm so embarrassed. It's so funny because we have covered so many topics. I know. I've gotten so close to this so many other times before. And like somehow, this is the one we're splitting into two. Tune in for future episodes on, I guess, like, the Paul Brothers and Shane Dawson. Don't fucking tempt me. This is gonna become a YouTube drama show. You've got a lot to say about Jenna Marbles, guys.

But catch us up. What did we cover last week? Herbals, guys. Oh. But catch us up. What did, what all did we cover last week? Okay, so last time we talked about the origin story of Rachel Hollis who it's now emblazoned in my brain is from weed patch, California. We've patched California. We talked about her moving to LA and meeting her husband

who was a real jerk to her. And she decided to power through his jerkiness and defy the lyrics of Body Rates, I can't make you love me. And like make a relationship happen. Let's give him something to talk about, yeah. Oh, and also she has at this point gone viral because of a photo that she has posted of herself post childbirth in a bikini.

Hashtag body positivity. Yes. Looking like a thin woman who gave birth. Like a normal thin woman. Yeah. We're going to sort of collapse together the next couple years because in a very short stint she puts out three books. So in 2018 she puts out girl watch her face. In 2019 she puts out girl watch her face. In 2019, she puts out girl stop apologizing. And in 2020, she puts out, I didn't see that coming, which is her, how to get through hardship,

through grift, I don't know. She also, in 2018, she forms this media empire and she starts doing this thing called the rise conference, which is like teaching people how to, like it's very Tony Robbins style, motivational seminars, they're weekend seminars. There's a documentary about her that's on Amazon Prime that she produced, like she commissioned. I want to do like a content analysis of like the message that she is producing at this

time. I have so much guilt about like how much time we're spending on this, that I'm trying to sort of make this about like the bigger picture, that it's not necessarily only about Rachel Hollis. I think a lot of this goes back to really like the creation of the modern media influencer type. And so we're just kind of going to do a deep dive into the kinds of rhetoric that she's selling around like 2018 to 2020, like when all three of her best-selling books come out, and sort of what lies beneath that, basically. And then we're gonna talk about the downfall and all the drama that happens.

Thumbs up, I'm in. I think the best place to start is one of the things that really bothered people about the TikTok that kind of brought everything crashing down April of 2021 was that Rachel Hollis says, what made you think that I want to be relatable? This is at the end of five years of her putting out books and videos and conferences,

all of which are built around this idea that she is relatable. I think with the rise of social media and with, especially celebrities using social media, this idea of stars they're just like us and these paparazzi photos of, you know, Charlize Theron taking at the garbage or something. There's always been a market for stars doing sort of normal things, but this is really the first era where stars can do that themselves. Yeah.

And so what we found really with the rise of Instagram, like Instagram becoming this canonical platform that so many people use and so many celebrities use, it's celebrities really deliberately putting out videos and posts that are like, look how normal I am. Like wow, also like just underneath that, being like, I don't know, I'm also like really rich and cool. Yeah. It's this performance of authenticity, but like being very careful not to go too far.

Well, it's just, it's like she said, right? Like she's following in the footsteps of other highly unrelatable women. This is just the Harriet Tubman playbook that she's following in here. Oh, fucking god. She's much too far. Who do we do it? Our first Harriet Tubman joke in the show.

Famous? We're famous for Harriet Tubman jokes. You're a maintenance face. I support you in whatever you decide to do with that remark in the end. We'll see. We'll see, we'll see. We'll see. So one of the things that totally fascinates me after watching a million of Rachel videos and reading large sections of all three of her books is how consistent this pattern is that every chapter of all of her books starts with some sort of quote unquote relatable anecdote

that a centimeter below the surface is not that relatable. So the first chapter of her first book, she does the thing that is a very normal part of storytelling where you start with a bold statement. So she starts the chapter with, I peed my pants last week. And you're like, I'm listening. Yeah, totally.

And then she tells a story of she's bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard with her kids. And I guess this is the thing that like after you have a couple kids, it gets harder to hold in the pee. Yeah. I've heard about this phenomenon. So she's apparently doing like a gymnastics move, like jumping up in the air, doing the splits or something. And then a little bit of pee comes out, like a little dribble of P and creates like a dot on her pants. Uh-huh. So immediately you're like, okay,

well you didn't like pee your pants. Yeah, that's a different thing. It's not like as relatable as you said. And then she also mentions that like no one is really around like her kids are there, one of her kids is there, but like nobody really like notices or sees it. And then she then like transitions. She says, the timing was perfection,

because not 30 minutes later, a previously programmed Facebook post went up, showing me trying on dresses for the Oscars. What? Before you get the wrong impression, I'm not fancy enough to go to the Academy Awards. I am however, married to someone ultra-hunky. He's not really fancy either,

but his job certainly is. That means sometimes I get to wear dresses like a princess and drink free wine and well-lit ballrooms. No. Yeah, so again, she's doing this like, no, kind of fake relatability where she's like, oh, I'm married to the super-hunky guy who just happens to be an extremely high-level Disney executive.

And I go get to like drink free wine. It's like, no, you just you, you, you're going to the Oscar. Like you, you're, you're not like sneaking into the Oscars. Like you're, you're invited to the Oscars because your husband is an important person in the film industry. Right. And also like I am guessing that they make a salary where free wine is sort of conceptually nice, but in no way necessary. Exactly. Exactly.

It's not the only way they're getting wine. Even I listen closely to this wording. In these instances, photos show up on Instagram or Facebook of us looking well coiffed and ultra glam and the internet goes wild. So like how do they show up on the internet Rachel? I don't know. Photos just happen to show up on the internet, Rachel? I don't know. What has just happened to show up? They just appear sometimes, Mike. You just said that you've scheduled a Facebook post

to go up, so you're posting them. It's fine. Again, this is the thing, like everything else with Rachel Hollis is like, I don't care, Rachel. Just don't lie about this. I really, I really love the emerging theme of this Rachel Hollis mini series, which is just Mike yelling about something and then going, I don't care. Well, this, this thing, if I went to the Oscars, I would post Alice Selfies and be like, binge.

Yeah. Look at that, go to the Oscars. Like, it's not, it's fine. It's very funny that we're spending this much time talking about this topic. I know, I'm sorry. And then both of us are going, I don't care. It doesn't matter, I know. So the rest of this section is her juxtaposing. Like everyone on the internet is telling me, I'm so glamorous and I have this fabulous life, but also I peed myself the very same day.

Yeah. I'm opening with this because this is a pattern that she does a lot and I don't want to give too many examples of it because it's going to be really boring, but it's like she does an anecdote, and then she switches into this universal advice that we can all learn from. So then she says, this is important because I want you to understand

my sweet precious friend that we're all falling short. Yet even though I fail over and over again, I don't let it deter me. I still wake up every day and try again to become a better version of myself. Nope. It's like she hasn't really earned this lesson where she's like some days I'm falling short, but it's like, but you didn't fall short Rachel. You like, you jumped on the trampoline and then you went to the Oscars. Right. Your body did a thing that bodies do after they have grown a child.

Yeah. Right. Like, that's not like a personal failing, that's not like a, like if she had told a story that was like, I was pissed off about something else and I picked a fight with my husband. And then I had to figure out how to make it up to him. I'm like, that's like relatable, who hasn't done that? Right? Like there are ways of coming at this that are more reflections of like areas for personal growth.

Exactly. And on the same day that I posted photos and everyone told me how hot I look. I'm just, whoa. You're already stressed out. We've been doing this for like six minutes. I know. It takes so little.

It takes so, like I'm gripping, I'm sitting in my office chair and I'm gripping the end of the armrests. Yeah, my knuckles are more white than not. Are wider than Rachel Hollis's Instagram comments? Yeah. Let's go. So I'm leaning with the pee thing also because it's kind of funny and we have to talk about

the dark stuff now. We're going to talk about the ways in which her various books are problematic and there's a couple different categories to go through, but the category I wanna start with is like their unbelievably fat phobic. Like, bad. Who could have seen that coming? It's so bad.

So remember when we were talking last episode about how the body positivity stuff isn't necessarily sort of bad on its face, but like you know something bad is about to come after it. Right, there's sort of like something sinister lurking beneath the surface. This is also a red flag to me.

I realize that it shouldn't be, and I realize that not everybody is like this. But I started flexing reading Rachel's book as soon as she started chapter by saying that she used to be 30 pounds heavier. Oh! There's actually survey data on this. That some of the most fat-filled people in society are people who used to be fat. Yeah, and part of what happens is that folks will start to evangelize about their weight loss.

Exactly. And I think that's the shape that a lot of this often takes. Right. You don't know how great it can be. It's totally within your control. Why would you, you know, blah blah blah blah? Like that's also sort of part of this dynamic. Yeah, that makes it really hard. But then what's so interesting to be about like fatness as a minority status is that you have these people who use Well, that's also part of this dynamics. That makes it really hard. But then what's so interesting to be about like fatness as a minority status

is that you have these people who used to be members of the group who are oftentimes like sitting on boards of like the obesity medicine society or like these institutional boards that will oftentimes have former fat people on them who are considered to be authorities on speaking for what that group wants because like well, they used to be fat. But the group of former fat people on them who are considered to be authorities on speaking for what that group wants because like well They used to be fat, but the group of former fat people is actually very distinct from current fat people in ways that I don't think

Non-fat people are like trained to understand. Yes, they're incentivized to Distance themselves from their former fat selves which means distancing themselves from fat people Which means joining in on the gnarliest judgments that thin people have of fat people and becoming one of the most vocal proponents, because that's how you make sure that everybody around you knows you're not a terrible fat person anymore.

So Rachel talks in like very stigmatizing ways about the fact that she was a size 10 when she moved to LA. Oh my God, so she's not even fat. And then after she moves to LA, of course, it's LA. So there's all this pressure to be thin and conventionally attractive and everything else. So she goes on crash diets and she takes diet pills

and it seems like she has this period of light eating disorder stuff. And then, you know, she gets a day of, she ends up having kids. And then the larger she ever got was size 14. She goes her period of like trying to lose weight and failing and then she lights on like her current plan Which is that she she has a whole video about this of like thinking of food as fuel This is how I made During the downfall stuff which we will get to Buzzfeed interviews a woman named Oshita Moore, who's a black staffer of the Rachel Hollis company.

At the time, Oshita was dieting to try to get down to a size 14. Rachel would come in and talk about how gross and awful it was to be a size 14, to be as high as a size 14. This whole episode is, or two-parter, is becoming a back door into a bunch of the like challenges of like body positivity as embodied by like thin white women. That like the point of body positivity now is perceived as

working through your insecurities about your body, in which case Rachel's comments are totally valid. Problem is she's not fucking thinking about the impacts of that and the insecurities and the body image issues that that will create for people around her. And to have a massive platform and talking about yourself and about this issue in that way. And if she's talking about herself that way, listen, here's the real bitter pill to swallow everybody. She's 100% treating fat people worse as well. Oh, yeah. This is another like common

trope here is like, I just don't like how I felt at that size, but I don't treat fat people any differently. And I'm like, no, no narrator voice she did. Yeah, really. footage not found. narrator voice she did. Yeah, totally. footage not found. Yeah. footage not found of you treating fat people equally in with dignity. So I mean, this kind of leads us into the next quote.

Oh. There's been a lot of articles and videos made about the fat phobia in Rachel's book. And there's like a particularly grisly paragraph in her first book about fat people. And you see this paragraph show up in all of the articles, all of the videos, it's like the passage that sort of goes around.

And whenever I see a passage going around like this, my first instinct is to be like, well, I'm seeing this without context, like what does it actually look like in context? And this is like the rare unicorn that like I kind of have a fetish for this of like quotes that look bad, taken out of context,

that look worse when you see the full context. Mike, will you send me this passage and I'll read it into the microphone? This is a thing, this is kind of long, but like I want to give you the full glory of her argument here, okay, so I'm gonna, I'm putting this in the chat. Send it, I can't wait, I can't wait to be a fat,

whoa, shit. I know. I know. You are not kidding. So this is from her first book. Okay, here's what I can tell you truthfully about diet and exercise and weight and what it means in my life. Who you are today is incredible.

You have so many wonderful qualities to offer the world and they are uniquely yours. I believe your creator delights in the intricacies of you and he is filled with joy when you live out your potential. Okay, here's the paragraph that is taken out of context, and then we're going to keep reading. I also believe that humans were not made to be out of shape and severely overweight. I think we function better mentally, emotionally, and physically when we take care of our bodies with nourishment, water, and exercise. The lie I used to believe was that my weight would define me, that it would speak volumes

about who I was as a person. Today, I believe it's not your weight that defines you, but the care and consideration you put into your body absolutely does. I already know that my saying this will annoy some people. Understate Rachel. Congratulations, Rachel. You know it's fucked up as it is. I already know that my saying this will annoy some people. I can already imagine the emails I'll get. The list of reasons why you or someone you know is justifiably obese. The trauma you've lived through in some cases, food is your coping mechanism, or maybe you have an eating disorder like anorexia. All of these things are justifiable. All of these are valid reasons to negate caring for yourself for a time. Childhood trauma is not a life sentence

holy fucking show. I know. She's going in hard. I know. Extreme emotional pain doesn't guarantee emotional pain for the rest of your life. I know this is true because I am a living, breathing, flourishing example of someone who chooses to rise above the trauma of her past. The reason I know this is true is because the world is filled with people who haven't so much harder than me and so much harder than you, yet they show up for their lives every single day. What, how do we get from the size of your body to showing up for your life? Non-sequitors. It's just a book of non-sequitors. I'm passively letting my life happen to me, everybody. You need to be healthy.

You don't need to be thin. You don't need to be a certain size or shape or look good in a bikini. You need to be able to run without feeling like you're gonna puke. You need to be able to walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded. You need to drink half your body weight, announces of water every single day.

You need to stretch and get good sleep and stop medicating every ache and pain. You need to stop filling your body with garbage like diet coke and fast food and lattes that are a million and a half calories. You need to take in fuel for your body that hasn't been processed and fuel for your mind that is positive and encouraging. Does your creator love you as you are? Yes, but he gave you a body with all of its strength, even its weaknesses as a gift. It is an offense to your soul to continue to treat yourself so badly, motherfucker.

Right. The context makes it so much worse. It makes it so much worse. It makes it so much worse. Much worse. It's like, it's like that little paragraph is so bad. It's like, you're not meant to be overweight. That's mean. But then it's like, fuck your trauma.

Like, it just gets enough fence to the almighty. Like, what? Ah! Ah! Maybe you have anorexia and I guess that's an excuse for a while. It's fascinating to me how in this passage, four or five times, she bounces between you are lovely as you are and you need to change. It's like she can't decide.

She does this a lot actually where she'll just say two completely opposing ideas, both as like unbreakable rules. Yeah. So she'll be like, you need to prioritize your job. You need to like get up early and like grind and like do whatever it is to like make your goals, right? And then like one chapter later she'll be like you need to prioritize the people in your life. You need to make time for family. You need to make sure you're not sitting at the computer when you should be with your kids. I mean this is sort of like what's happening with like wellness and weight loss culture at the moment,

right? Folks are aware that they can't really just spout off the same old lines about like become beautiful and like live the life you've imagined and whatever the things are, right? So like folks are trying to figure out how to couch that language, but it's really hard to couch it because it is so bald. I think it's this weird thing where it's like she says you don't need to be thin, you do need to be healthy, but her definition of the word healthy includes thin. Well, and also like health is an extremely relative term. Health for a type one diabetic or a person with cerebral palsy or a person with a genetic marker for cancer.

All of those look like different things. So this mandate, I think people think it's like a sort of quote unquote safer thing to say, like, I don't want you to be thin. I just want you to be healthy. That's also fucked up. It's hell I mean. I mean, also like, why just want you to be healthy. That's also fucked up. It's hell I mean. I mean, I feel like why do people have to be healthy, Rachel? Why?

For what reason do people have to be healthy? And what you're saying isn't, I want you to be healthy on your own terms. Right. What you're saying is, I want you to appear to conform to my definition of your health. Yeah.

Yeah. I hate it, Mike. I, yeah. I hate it, Mike. I hate it. I know. I hate it. It's really bad. So hard. There's also this atrocious, like not in a chapter about weight. A chapter where she starts with this absurd humble brag about she's out like at a happy

hour with friends and she gets super drunk. And then she comes home really late like midnight. She promised herself that she was going to jogging three times that week. So she like went to the basement and got on the treadmill for 30 minutes at midnight. But in this chapter, she asked you to imagine like a friend Pam who's like every week, Pam's on a different diet, but like she can't stick to them. And then she says like, would you trust Pam if she made a commitment to you?

She's not gonna be there for you because she can't even stick to these diets. What? Yes. Here's what's happening in this moment. Rachel Hollis is making the argument that like fat people's bodies are a reflection of their character.

Yes, of their morality, like explicitly. Period. You are a bad and unreliable friend. Yes. You're a fat person. I hate this. She says, y'all, would you respect her? This woman who starts and stops over and over again,

would you count on Pam when she committed to something or when she committed to you? Fuck off. And it's like, well, what is Pam like, Rachel? Also, I'm having a strong reaction to this because my mom's name is Pam, so I'm like, Oh, yeah, you're my fucking mom alone, Rachel. Yeah, I'll raise mom's name out of your mouth.

Come on! And I think, okay, there's something sort of darkly fascinating to me about Rachel because I've known people like this. People that are just naturally, I think, very positive. And who have a lot of energy and who are very goal oriented, but also kind of shallow, it's difficult to get them to think deeply about an issue.

It seems like they go through the world constantly baffled by other people where they're just like, well, why don't you overcome your problems? This is maybe a weird flex, but I was listening to a really good Know Your Enemy podcast the other day about Ronald Reagan. He seems to have the same personality type where he's kind of like obsessed with positivity.

He's like really extroverted and really good at sort of working a room and being charming, but he also doesn't have a lot of curiosity about the world. And his worldview and his beliefs and his knowledge is like an inch deep. And the minute you try to penetrate beyond that and try to get him to understand something more complex, he just like, it's like you hit a wall.

This is something that I see over and over again with Rachel is that like people confront her with information and she's just like, I don't know about that. All I know is, and she just like goes back to her little talking points. All I know is Southern people love monograms. Yes. I just think that it's like a fascinating

portrait of a personality type that it's easy for these people to become very successful, I think, if they have privileges to begin with, and also reach a level of status where they physically cannot understand like the privileges or the luck or any of the other factors that got them there. Well, and in the United States in particular, we Yes. Because that is like a story that we've gotten comfortable telling ourselves about the US, which is like, it's a place where if you put in the work,

you can become anything you want. So we lift up success stories. I mean, in that way, oh, fuck, Mike, I'm blowing my own mind. In that way, it's a little bit like dieting. Ooh, right. We're lifting up the very, very, very small portion of people who are exceptions to the rule, right? To be like, look, it's possible you can do it too, so that everybody stays in this weird shitty hamster wheel of things that don't work. You lift up

the Rachel Hollis' of the world. You don't actually have to pay attention to. The entrenched nature of poverty and the lack of social mobility, even in a quote unquote, classless society, blah, blah, blah, blah. People who break the rule allows you to keep believing that the rule doesn't exist. Absolutely. So speaking of which, what makes sense? You've one more passage.

Oh, can't wait. You're going to, one of the paragraphs of this is in italics, which I don't think comes through when I copy pastepaste it, so you're gonna have to guess. But I think it's obvious. Is it the one that just says girl? Yeah. She does it a lot in her book. It's just like girl.

It's like the whole show. Okay, so this, this is the section where we're going to talk about the other criticism of Rachel, which is that she's pretty privileged. What? I know how. Twist. Hang on, roll it back. Okay.

Have you spent a lifetime muting yourself for fear of what others will think? Are you an entrepreneur who calls your business a hobby because you worry about what your mother and law will say? Are you hesitating to go back to school because you worry about what your mother-in-law will say. Are you hesitating to go back to school because you think you're not smart enough? Do you hesitate to admit your dreams allowed because you're nervous about others making fun of you or judging you for your choices? Girl, I lived in fear of this for years. I worried that if you knew how much I love to work, you might call into question how I can do any of those things while being a successful mother. I've had too many people question my commitment to my children over the last 10 years and it influenced what I came to believe about being a working woman. It was a long battle from mommy guilt

to acceptance. And here's what I've decided. I refuse to teach my daughter this narrative. I absolutely refuse to raise her with the ideal that only one parent is ultimately responsible for who she will become. I will not consent to the belief that having a mother with a full-time job means that she's not loved and well cared for. There's a very good BuzzFeed article in 2018 by Laura Turner who talks about how like everything that Rachel Hollis is talking about in her books, all of her obstacles are imagined obstacles. She talks about like, I have mommy guilt.

Yeah. She talks about how she felt really bad when she had to leave her daughter, who was, I believe, one at the time to go on like a two-week business trip. Like, oh, everybody's going to be judging me and she thought when she mentioned her daughter to people on the trip, that they would be thinking like, oh, she left her daughter alone. And then it's like, she's overcome that and now she feels fine about balancing work in life. But it's like, what were the obstacles? Uh-huh. Much is made when this book is published about the fact that she doesn't mention that she has a nanny until the acknowledgments at the end.

Ah, fuck, man. Most people who have kids and have to go on business trips, like the problem is not mommy guilt, the problem is childcare for three or four days. There's this excruciating chapter about the recession, how she got through the recession in her third book, and she talks about like, there's no shame in taking a second job.

And like a lot of people can't take second jobs because like they have intermittent schedules at their first job And they they don't know when they're going to be working so they actually can't work more hours like there are structural reasons why people can't get second jobs Or they already have a second and a fucking third job Rachel there's a good review of her book by a woman named Caitlin Luckow, who talks about reading it as somebody with clinical depression. She's talking about how Rachel Hollis is one of her big things is choose happiness. She sells t-shirts that say just choose happiness. Caitlin says, as an individual with depression, nothing is harder to hear from others than hearing that you can just choose happiness and that it will cure you.

Frankly, there is no cure for a mental illness. There are practices and medications that can help you process and live with it, but nothing will get rid of it permanently, certainly not just a simple mind shift. Hearing these messages of choosing happiness can be so difficult to hear because people with depression or other mental illnesses can't choose that. We don't have the luxury to be able to. It can make us think, well, what am I doing wrong? Why can't I just choose happiness? It further perpetuates feelings of self-loathing, which in the end can actually be deadly.

As she's talking about, just choose happiness. I'm thinking about the people who I have known who have not had the opportunity to choose happiness. Like, hey man, say it to a trans person who has suicidal ideation. Right, you can't access gender-affirming healthcare. Say it to a person who's experiencing homelessness. Just choose happiness. Right. Drive an Uber, like no. Yes. I would like you to try that

shit out on like 10 different people with radically different life experiences than yours. Yeah, literally anyone just speak to you. Go for a Drangel. Yeah. Try it out. Come back to me. So the last aspect of her book that I want to talk about before we get to the downfall is I kind of couldn't help myself. I wanted this to be like a motivational guru T episode with like no science and like no academic stuff. But then this is a passage in Rachel's third book. She says back in the 1960s a neuroscientist named Paul D. McLean formulated a model for something called the triune brain theory. Have you heard of this, the triune brain theory?

No, not ever. This is where we get the phrase lizard brain. Oh. And it's like, it's exactly what it sounds like. So the idea is that there's parts of your brain, and these are actual physical parts of your brain that you can see. There's kind of like the inner nugget that is the literal lizard brain that is like our least evolved form of thought.

And then the layer on top of that is like our monkey brains. Basically racial cause at mammal brains. She talks about having like a deer in the backyard. It can kind of learn to trust you or like the way that dogs have personalities and dogs are capable of like much more complex thought than like a lizard. The third layer of our brain is the human brain.

That's the higher order of thinking that's all the outside part of our brain, all the wrinkly stuff. No, that's literally what she says in the book. Wow, all the wrinkly stuff. That's of course where we do the higher order stuff. Right? Where it's writing and socrates and Shakespeare and all that kind of stuff.

I do like thinking about the gray, wrinkly outer layer and then just like, I don't know what, like a soft cream center? Yeah, I was like a little lizard inside with levers. I do like in classic fat lady form. I was like, so it's a candy bar. So it brings our candy bars. So, one thing I've said about Rachel's work is that it is actually quite remarkable

how little she refers to any science. Like this was essentially the only even reference to like academic work that I could find in her books. Yeah, I was gonna say like, I'm actually fine with a self-health book that doesn't reference any science because I'm like, that's not what you're here to do. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. But so, this is easily debunked.

Like, if you Google this, the third result is why the triune theory is fake. The guy that came up with it, this McLean guy, he thought that there were different parts of the brain. And so, he would take monkeys and he would remove specific parts of their brain just to see what would happen. And the only data that this is based on

is he would remove the quote unquote lizard brain part of the monkey brain. And he said male monkeys would no longer growl at themselves when they looked into a mirror. Not? He's like, it's proof, it's a lizard brain. And I'm like, is it? Lizards famously grow growled themselves.

No. So I found this great academic article called, your brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside. It's, I love academics that give like clickbait titles. I love it. I will think point out, we have this idea that sort of evolution runs on this track, and humans are at like the highest level of complexity, and then, you know, dogs and

then lizards. Uh-huh. What they point out in this article is that like all animals are equally evolved, because like we're all here. You're right. We've all had the same time more or less. Right. Like monkeys are not an unevolved version of humans.

Like we split off from a common ancestor 7 million years ago, and then we kept evolving and they kept evolving. Right, so what they talk about is this idea that lizard brains are like, you know, lower order animals that their brains are somehow less complex than humans, they talk about how like an ant brain is like, really complex.

Scientists cannot predict what they're going to do. Like every organism is equally complex. Yeah, I mean, I, I heard if you leave a bunch of monkeys in a room with type Raiders. I know that some words will get typed is what I heard. It's not even true. I mean, obviously the stuff about like different parts of your brain aren't even true.

This is something I didn't actually know, but in one of these articles, they actually show cross sections of like a whale brain and a deer brain and a human brain. And it's all like the same parts, but there are different sizes, there are different densities, there are different shapes. Some of them are newget, some of them are carob. You're gonna do this for the rest of the episode aren't you?

You're like one of the forever, right? I'm gonna be insufferable in a surprising new way. I mean, in Rachel's defense, like this theory continues to show up in like textbooks, which is really embarrassing. It's totally fucking embarrassing when it shows up in textbooks, but also it's just become part of common parlance,

which means it's become part of our common beliefs. Right. Lister brain, yes. But people keep saying it, so they keep believing it. Yeah. Maa. So basically, that's the books.

That's Rachel Hollis. That's her whole vibe. Those are the messages that she's sending out into the world. Famous Southern Lister brain. I know. Lister brains. Fat people are bad. Poverty isn't real. Poverty isn't real.

Think your way out of it. And go on business trips always. unless don't. Jesus Christ. okay so now we come to the downfall section. there's a couple chapters of this. so the first wave of backlash comes in 2019 from a bunch of MLM sellers. oh no! is this where Lula Rao comes in?

Yes, so one thing we have not mentioned yet, is that Rachel Hollis is like deeply intertwined with MLMs, because her audience, mostly middle class, white conservative Christian ladies are like the demographic most likely to get into multi-level marketing companies. Right, so we should back up and say for folks who are unfamiliar.

Yeah, we should say. Multi-level marketing is any kind of company that's structured around not just direct sales of a product or service, but around those sales people, recruiting other sales people and then getting a cut of the sales of anyone they recruit. Yes.

So, like, the number that goes around a lot is that 99% of people who join MLMs end up losing money. And that's not true. It's actually higher than that. Ah, shit. Because oftentimes when you look at the revenue statements of these companies, the people who earn money, it's only counting the revenue that they earn. So it'll often say, like, you know, 5% of our sellers made

like $22,000 last year, but some of those people spent like $30,000 on the products. It's gross revenue and not net profit. Exactly. We literally can't even say like how bad they are, but it's like, however bad somebody says they are, like they're probably worse. That's so gnarly. One thing that's so interesting about the intersection between Rachel's audience and NLMs is that she talks a lot about sort of female entrepreneurs and like small business owners. And this is how NLMs pitch themselves to women,

even though it's like the worst of being an employee and the worst of owning a small business at the same time, because you have to buy the stock yourself. Like if you work at a shoe store, you don't have to buy the shoes yourself to sell them. Right. Those shoes aren't in your garage collecting dust. Yeah. Whereas in an MLM, you have to buy all the inventory, but you don't control the inventory. So you can't say like, oh, people like red t-shirts this week. So I'm going to make a bunch of red t-shirts. You don't have control over the actual products or the pricing or all of the things that you

would be able to control as a small business owner and respond to the needs of your consumers. Rachel, almost immediately after her first book is published, she starts speaking at like large MLM conferences. She speaks at Dotera. She speaks at Arbonne. She speaks at Lularo, which everybody's talking about because of this documentary. It's fascinating, people have kind of leaked the clips or some of them are online. Like one of her talks, she starts out like, well who in the room is struggling? And then like every single woman raises their hand because like that's how these things are structured to work, is like you're always going to be struggling.

And then Rachel goes on this like long diatribe about how like I know that it's hard, but the reason you're doing it is because it's hard. And I know that you have people in your life who are telling you not to do this and you need to push through. And it's basically like the core message that she's giving to them is identical

to the message that like their top level MLM people are giving them, which is like, it's your fault. And if you're friends and family members are telling you that this makes them uncomfortable and it's probably not a good idea for you, then you need to cut toxic people out of your life. It's really, she's just physically embodying the role of devil's advocate.

What do you mean? How about I just add physically show up and advocate for the devil? Like literal. Yes! Yes! Hey, it seems like these people might be drifting away from you, devil.

I know. Let me let him back up. Like, it's just like the idea that you're like, yeah, no, no, no, I'll take Dotaera's money and tell people to keep drinking essential oils. I know. So in her latest book, in this passage about getting through the 2008 recession,

you know, rise and grind, drive for Uber, she has this whole thing about like how you should take on more jobs, something, something. She says, if you're not sure how to make extra income, there are so many ideas to help you, but please remember this important prerequisite. Figure out a way to make more income that doesn't cost you any money to start for real. There are so many ideas to help you, but please remember this important prerequisite. Figure out a way to make more income that doesn't cost you any money to start for real.

I'm positive somebody's gonna read this and be inspired and head over to the internet and ask how she could make extra income. And then, four weeks later, her starter kit has arrived for the new at-home business she just paid $700 to join. Don't be dumb. Figure out ways to make money that don't require money. Sure. So like, Rachel is right here.

Like, whatever rise and grind bullshit you're gonna do, don't join an MLM if you need money. But also, if your Rachel Hollis do take money from MLMs to speak of their conferences. It's also deeply hypocritical of her to say this in her book. But like, whatever, at least she says something true. And then like this blows up on like MLM Instagram.

And like MLM influencers go hard after Rachel Hollis for this. And they're like, you've been taking our money. It's supporting us for years. And like people are pissed. Yeah. And I can see how they got there. Well, yeah. You're sort of making things vague enough

that people can sort of attach whatever they want to what you're saying and project all kinds of things onto it. And then as soon as you say something like, I think all-order chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla. Yeah. There will be people who are like, fuck you, vanilla's great. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, you just haven't been saying anything specific. So that sort of starts to create some little cracks in Rachel's public profile. And like this starts to like people, people start sniffing around. And so April 2020 is her second scandal. I'm gonna send you something. This is a Rachel Hollis Instagram post.

Oh no, it's a fucking inspirational graphic. With her own, like with her own name given as the attribution. Oh God, when you really want something, you'll find a way. When you don't really want something, you'll find an excuse. I am so irritated. I feel torn about this because her second scandal is a plagiarism scandal.

No, did somebody else say this? Yeah, so she, apparently this was nearly identical to a quote from another motivational speaker named Jim Rohn. Oh, huh. So there's this whole, there's this Buzzfeed article comes out and it's sort of like catalogs all of the sketchy plagiarism that she's done. There's obviously, I'm not defending plagiarism, but every single one of the quotes is so vacuous that I have trouble getting worked up about this. One of the other ones that she's attributed to

herself is the phrase ambition is not a dirty word. What? Which I guess is like a 2008 self-help book title? Who thinks it's a what? Another one is someone else's opinion of you is none of your business, which she stole from RuPaul. What? But then RuPaul stole it from the title of a 1979 self-help book. Right, like all of these are so sort of like,

it's so dumb. Gestures at whittiness? They're not cute. They're not cute and they're not especially insightful. And even if they were, I would be really shocked all the hell if like 2019 was the first time someone said, if you really want something, you'll find a way. And if you don't, you'll find an excuse.

But then, okay, but the really bad one. So the legitimately indefensible one is in April 2020, she posts on Instagram a graphic that just says, still I rise. What? But it doesn't have any attribution. Come on. So she didn't say that it was from her,

but considering how many quotes she puts out that are from her, it doesn't mention Maya Angelou. Right, there's a reputation building. Yeah, so this is like her first real, like, scandal that goes mainstream. Ugh. I love these, like, quote unquote, cancellations, because so often it's not necessarily about

what the person did in the first place. It's about how they respond. Uh-huh. So I am going to send you Rachel's apology, and you're gonna read it. Oh God, oh no. It's good. Quote, this morning I found out that my social team

posted a graphic on my Instagram yesterday that said, still I rise. That is obviously an immortal line from a Maya Angelou poem, only no credit was given to her. I immediately deleted the post, but I wanted to make sure and publicly apologize. While I didn't create or post the graphic, I'm the leader of the team that did so,

and I accept full responsibility for their actions. Wow. I can't imagine how deeply hurtful it is to the African-American community to see the words of your heroes used without credit. This has happened to you far too often and I hate, I literally hate that anything produced by my company added to your pain. I heard once that the only real apology was one where you don't make an excuse, so I won't. Three sentences after making two excuses. I'll just blame it on my employees. Yes. I'm deeply sorry.

I understand that this post without credit is not a little thing to you. This is death by a thousand cuts. This is the millionth type of incident like this you've experienced. This is not okay. I apologize sincerely. We will do better. Thoughts. You know what this reminds me of?

Is this reminds me of her church talk where she's like, you're beautiful just as you are. Now here's how to lose weight. That's the thing. It's just like completely contradictory sentences right next to each other, basically. I didn't do it, but I understand that saying I didn't do it won't be well received. So I'm gonna take the blame for other people who did it. Congratulations to me. Exactly. It's's like I'm trying to rise above it and be like, I am ultimately not responsible for it, but I'll take responsibility anyway.

Like wow Rachel. It's not a world-ender, do you know what I mean? Like nothing about this, no one's gonna live or die as a result of fucking Rachel Hollis posting an uncredited Maya Angelou quote to her Instagram feed, like every part of that sentence is nonsense. But like, it is so egregious.

And the apology is so aggressively bad. There's also this is like the most 2021 detail of this. According to an anonymous former employee who was interviewed by the YouTuber Savvy Rights books who does all these videos deep diving into Rachel Hollis. In this interview, the employee said that somebody got fired for this and the person who got fired was like a woman of color. I don't know that I needed anybody to get fired over this, Rachel. Right.

It just is weird now. This was a call for her to work on her own whiteness. Yes. Not a call for her to fire a person of color. I know. What? I don't know that's what anybody wanted, Rachel. But again, we don't we don't 100% know that this is true. So we want to be totally totally totally. But either way, right? Like the things that would be meaningful anti-racist accountability, I'm guessing are not things that have shown up on her feed since then. No. There's also, okay, this, I wasn't gonna mention this, but like, I got obsessed with this.

So, in this summer, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, Rachel Hollis doesn't post anything. Finally, she puts out like a really long post. She's using the metaphor of like tomatoes. She's like, these are tomatoes I grew in my garden. They grow in the soil and they absorb all the nutrients from the soil. And if you're a white person in America,

the soil that you grow up in is white supremacy and racism. And you've probably absorbed a lot of nutrients from that soil, even if you're not aware of it. And one of the fucking weirdest things that she does in this is like, she's trying to talk about the legacy of racism and like how long racism has gone on in America, and she says, think about it everybody.

We had racism for 400 years in America, and we've learned from Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. No, I'm not fucking kidding. And she breaks it down, she's like, that's like, I don't know, 6,000 days or whatever it is. And then she's like 10,000 hours of those days. Michael, I'm going to die here.

She does all this weird math. And then she ends up, she's like, that means we've mastered racism for 72,000 times or something. She's trying, but it's just like, Rachel, this, why are you doing math? Also, why are you bringing Malcolm Gladwell into this? I know. It's like so much.

It's like, oh my God. You know, according to the secret, we could manifest our way out. Like what? Also, what's so weird is because usually when public figures and influencers are decidedly silent on political stuff, it usually means that they're like secretly conservatives.

Yeah, but I think Rachel is secretly a liberal. Do you think? Oh, absolutely, because she went out of her way in her first book to have a like, I'm cool with gay people chapter. Honestly, like by the standards of like us in 2018 or whatever is not clearing a high bar, but it was a Christian publisher

and the publisher asked her to remove the chapter. And she wouldn't do it. Wow. And this is the other piece of evidence. This is, man, I'm struggling to say this without a lot of ridicule in my voice. Her husband has a tattoo that says ally. No. Because he's on boards of charities fuel in my voice, her husband has a tattoo that says ally.

No. Because he's on like boards of charities, like LGBT charities and stuff in LA. So that's another reason why I think that they're like kind of, kind of woke, but also like kind of like it's sufferable. All I fucking tattoo. I mean, so this is like a little pet peeve of mine. You don't get to decide if you're an ally to a community.

They get to decide. Wait, is this your, I have my tattoo removed? Yeah, sorry, this is very awkward. I'm sending you a certificate for laser tattoo removal, Mike. But being an ally isn't just being like, I don't intend gay people harm. And also, anyone who's a that self-congratulatory, I'm always just a little suspicious of, like,

if that's like a big part of their identity, like, I'm nice. Yeah, totally. It feels more like a message to other straight people than it is a message to gay people. Like, that's how I perceive it. It's like, you want to show off to other straight people that you have like the cred of the gaze.

You know what it's like? Oh my God, Mike. It's like when we were in the sort of fight for marriage. And like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie did the thing of like we're not getting married until everyone can get married. And then a bunch of other street says people did that, thinking that that did something.

Like accomplished, someone was counting all the straight people who didn't get married, which wasn't happening. I know. Where I'm like, you could've just written a check, you could've just gone and knocked on some doors. We want your money, Brad. Oh, there are things you could've done. So the next sub downfall before the real downfall.

This is another weird one. In June of 2020, Rachel and Dave announced that they're getting divorced. Uh huh. This is the one that I feel kind of weird about because they've both received a lot of criticism for basically putting on this nice face to the world. Like we looked at their Instagram photos, right?

Like were this happy couple and everything's great and they were doing a daily feed together where they were like wake up and every morning they would sort of livestream. Every day, as like a couple, like it's us in bed hanging out. And then they said in their divorce announcement that like they had been having problems as

early as 2017 and had been working on it. They've received criticism for like keeping that a secret which I honestly think is like a little bit unfair. I think if people want to have like secret marital troubles that's fine but also people have also pointed out that they were also selling marital counseling. They were doing these weekend retreats and charging $1,800 for people to come

and get marital advice from them. And they would do these like how to have a healthy relationship seminars. And like they were extremely explicit in the marketing for these seminars. They're like, we're not licensed counselors. We don't have any expertise in this, but we're in a great marriage.

And then it's not so great. Yeah, and it's like this weird thing where it's like, I feel weird about semi sort of criticizing somebody for getting divorced or criticizing a public figure for keeping a like personal thing personal, which I think is totally fine. But then it's like you're literally selling something

that wasn't true for this entire time. Like why, why were people listening to your marital advice, then? I feel a little bit like about influencers having their relationships, be sort of part of their brand, similarly to how I feel when people get like matching tattoos. Oh yeah, which is like maybe it works out. I know. In which case, congratulations. And if it doesn't, this is gonna be like a thing for you. I know.

I mean, it really does seem like they kind of painted themselves into a little bit of a corner, right? By like, having live streams that are that frequent and that regular, by having sort of this like cornerstone of their work be defined around the success of their relationship. It's another one of those ones where I'm like, I don't care. Like I don't care that I've got divorced.

But maybe don't sell your learn to have a perfect relationship from us, packages for a couple of years. Yeah, it's just so weird when influencers have like their families, like their kids are in a lot of their Instagram posts too. Yeah. These families are also like an economic unit at the same time.

Yeah, I don't really have anything to say about any particular influencers like relationship, they're a romantic relationship or they're parenting or any of that sort of stuff. But I do, it makes me nervous on their behalf when that becomes part of their brand. Yeah. Because I'm like, you're gonna have things happen that sort of contradict your quote unquote brand. They're then tying this sense of like, a quote unquote perfect personal life

to their like ability to make money and to who they're answerable to and when and all of that. Like that's the stuff that just like, I just get vicarious like hives. I'm thinking about it. So this, I mean, it's part of the downfall because this is like, they receive a huge wave of criticism for this.

They basically, the narrative starts to form that like they're scammers, which I think is like on some level fair. Yeah. So I just wanna pause here before we circle back to the infamous TikTok. I think the reason why I struggle to get worked up about any of these scandals that are part of the downfall

is because her written work is so bad. Oh, buddy. But this is something that I've seen with so many people where it's like they're actually the core of their work, the publicly available stuff that they do is odious. But then what sort of takes them down is some weird legalistic technical rule that they broke. Yeah, that makes sense to me like this is such a weird amalgam of things that don't matter and things that now do matter because we've decided they matter. This is what's so weird and why I was tearing my hair out for so much of the research on this and like

people are mad at her for saying something mean about an MLM. Like, her book is terrible. And like, I'm supposed to be mad at her like, yes, hypocrisy, fine. But like, this is what we're mad at her about. It just is like over and over again. I'm like, I'm reading through her book. And I'm like, why are we talking about plagiarizing right now? Like her book is bad. I don't know, man. Again plagiarizing right now? Like, her book is bad.

I don't know, man. Again, it doesn't matter, but we've decided it does. So it does. So this brings us back around to the infamous TikTok. Yeah. So the infamous TikTok was Rachel Hollis saying that she had said something sort of publicly about like there was somebody who came to her house twice a week to clean her toilets. I believe was the phrasing. And then she made a TikTok saying like, people are criticizing me because that's unrelatable, but yeah, I am unrelatable and I've worked really hard to be unrelatable. I worked my ass off to be unrelatable.

I'm unrelatable in the way that a lot of women that I admire are unrelatable throughout history like Harriet Tubman is the thing that she said, good God. And especially now knowing that that came on the heels of the still-I-rise thing is just like mind-blowingly your decision-making on her. It's bad. So, the TikTok happens and people are pissed. It seems she lost 100,000 Instagram followers. She had to postpone her conference.

It was supposed to be in May, but they had to postpone it until, I think it was like last month, because nobody was signing up because everybody was so mad at her. And it seems like Target might have pulled a product line. Like it's just like things, just like everything deflated very quickly.

And just like with the Maya Angelou thing, the apology, this is like a masterclass and like how not to apologize for something. So you are a Rachel Hollistermatic reader. So I'm gonna send the entire text here. Oh, okay. We got quite a bit of text here. Look how long it is.

Quote, I made a post last week that was upsetting to people, and even though it was never my intent, I owned that it was, and I apologize. Was my post upsetting because I said, I have someone who cleansed my house twice a week? Ha, ha, ha, ha. This is, this is my favorite thing. She's like, are you mad at me

because somebody cleans cleans my house? No, Rachel. No. No one's mad that you're employing someone. No one fucking cares, you have a cleaner, Rachel. Congratulations job creator. I know. No.

She's like a little kid. You're like, don't hit your brother. And they're like, oh, I'm not allowed to wave my arm through the air or something. You're like, that's not why I'm mad. Oh my God. Okay, boof. Was my post upsetting because I said

I have someone who cleans my house twice a week? I've talked a lot about this over the years. I have a nanny, I have someone who helps with cleaning, I have a team at work who helped build this business. It's crucial that I keep talking about it. I want you to know that it's a group effort. Was my post upsetting because I mentioned some of my favorite women in history?

Wow! Again, no one cares that those are your favorite women in history. If you put out a post, just saying like, one of my favorite women is Harriet Tubman. Like, no one would have cared. They'd be like, this is weird, but okay. What are you talking about? This one is even harder for me

because those women are the most badass I could even think of. Someone on my team said, quote, I think people believe you're comparing yourself to them. There is no comparison. To believe that because I mention them, I am comparing myself to them. There is no comparison to believe that because I mention them, I am comparing myself to them is ridiculous. Do I aspire to be as brave, as fierce, to live life on my own terms and hopefully inspire other women to do the same? Hell yes, but I cannot now or

ever compare myself to those women and I don't want to. I don't want to try and be the next fill in the blank. I'd rather try and be the first me, Jesus. I didn't respond to these things on Friday when I heard people were upset. I listened to my team instead of my gut. I listened when they told me not to respond to let it blow over. I listened when they said they would monitor

the situation, which meant monitor comments. Because people had been noticing that comments, like angry comments by like women of color of color were, like, disappearing. Oh, God! So this is Rachel being, like, my team told me to ignore it, and they deleted a bunch of the comments. But also, like, we just went through this with Maya Angelou. We just did this.

Why are you doing the... In Rachel's defense, she does have an entire book called Girl Stop Apologizing, so it makes sense that she's bad at this. But also, like, listen, it's so bizarre to be like, I want you to know that this is a group effort, and I need to be better about saying it, and I'm like, you've built a whole fucking self-help book empire on,

you don't need anybody else, you can do it yourself, I know. I'm like, acknowledging that it's a group effort would mean reorienting yourself help work to focus on interdependence, and focus on building systems that do right by people, not focusing on telling people to like, fuck the haters and you do what you want,

and rise and grind, and like, blah, blah, blah. And then I guess it was like a day later, or something, she then deleted that, because like, obviously people were mad. And then, she then, like, I don't know, a couple more days went by, and then she released another apology

that is slightly better. We're not gonna read it, because it's also long, but it's like, I acknowledge my privilege, I caused pain to women of color. Like, she finally was like specific about like, acknowledging like what she actually did. And she basically said like,

I'm gonna do better something like it, it was like a better celebrity apology, but it was like a pretty standard celebrity apology. And as people do like she went dark for a while, but then like, she's now kind of gone back to posting things and like, that's basically where we are now that she just had her conference and it was virtual, like half virtual, half people in the room, but it seems like

there weren't that many people in the room. It seems like they didn't even sell out the much smaller venue they had because of COVID. I don't know. At this point, it seems like the air has kind of gone out of her to some extent. Although what's interesting is if you read the comments on her apology post, they're all from conservatives saying like, I'm disgusted that you're giving in to the woke mob. Oh, Lord!

Given who her audience is, some of the popularity that she's losing might be because of her apology. She had to make the implicit explicit, right? She had to say like, I've harmed women of color. Like she said all these things that like, you can't say and remain an A political public figure in America at this point. Yeah. And like, I mean, what does it mean for the air to come out of what she's doing, right? Like she's still got 1.6 million followers.

Yes. Presumably, she still has, you know, pretty decent staff team working around her. She might be losing out on opportunities, but I'm guessing that she is still significantly financially solvent. Oh, yeah. In these moments when we're talking about like people being canceled, it feels really important

to me to be really precise about like, what does that mean for them? This is, I mean, this to me is the real ending, is that nobody ever really gets canceled. And if you're not somebody who follows Instagram and Twitter obsessively, you have no idea that any of this is going on. Yeah, I can see her kind of going down one level

and not being a top tier influencer but being a mid-tier influencer. But yeah, she's gonna continue to make huge sums of money and be an influential person for her audience. I also will say, there is something about this phrasing of the woke mob is a truly wild way to talk about. People of color want you not to say racist things.

I know. She went about them. Don't go to her comments right now. I can't think of a thing that I'm less likely to do. Yeah, please don't. Go check the comments on our Rachel Hollis post on Instagram. So that was it. That was our journey, our long and winding journey

through Rachel Hollis. I'm exhausted. I know. Don't look at me too. I'm exhausted, not because of anything particular to Rachel Hollis, but because of the ways in which it just feels like she's drawing a bunch of our existing cultural logic to its natural conclusion.

Yeah, she's saying it out loud. There is something here that feels really interesting about the ways in which white middle class American womanhood is centered in body-positive spaces and in world-less spaces in this very uncritical kind of way that like part of the story of this Rachel Hollis downfall is just like when you just scratch at the surface of the centering of those that like extremely narrow set of identities, it all just falls apart. And she's this parallel trajectory of like

what has happened to that rhetoric since 2015. Like there was a time when you could hold all of these contradictions and nobody would point them out. And I think what Rachel has come up against in 2021 is just like these contradictions can't hold. Right. You can't keep telling people like work hard

but also like parent hard, work hard, but also, like, parent hard. Love your body, but also change. Like, you just can't maintain that cognitive dissonance for that long. Yeah, that's right. And that there is, you know, outside of Rachel Hollis-Perce, I think there's this sort of, like, growing realization that's happening.

It's one that I've been through. It's one that you've been through. Of, like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe we're in a real, the emperor has no clothes. Kind of moment here. I also, I want to end with something that really struck me reading so much of what Rachel has written.

This is an excerpt from a Christian blogger who reviewed very negatively Rachel's book. She's talking about how Rachel says to like chase after your dreams no no matter what, and she says, what is Rachel Hollis' dream? Jesus never called us to chase after power, money, and fame. He actually had quite a bit to say about those things. He called us to lay our pursuit of all that stuff down and follow him. He said, whoever finds his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it, Matthew 1039.

And I'm not in the business of like ending our show with Bible quotes typically, but one of the things I noticed in everything that Rachel has written and said over the years is there's almost nothing in there about morality. You know, she says in her famous like Bikini photo talk, she ends it by saying that like, you know, what's on the outside doesn't matter,

what's on the inside that matters. But like, nothing anywhere in her books tells you about how to be a good person on the inside. That to me is like the biggest lost opportunity and something that I see so much in various other self-help books I've read over the years, it's all self-stuff. Like part of being a person is like finding out what problems there are in the world and like helping other people

And like how to help other people and how to serve yourself Spiritually and how to be a good person is actually really hard. Yeah, there's not that much advice about that Right totally like what would it look like to try and be a better mom and also let yourself off the hook when you fall short of what you're Yeah, you know what you're aiming for Or what would it look like to talk about integrating volunteer work and community building work into your family routine and getting your kids in the habit of volunteering? Yeah, there are things that are sort of in the pocket of what she's aiming for that could have mobilized quite a bit more, quite a bit further and could have mobilized more people to be of service either to others or to themselves

and not to like fucking capitalism, which is really what it seems like is happening here. Yeah, 100%. It's just a restatement of the existing ideology as if it's a revelation when it's just like, no, you're just saying things that people mostly already believe ultimately. Right. And it's not like a radical thing to be like, as if it's a revelation, when it's just like, no, you're just saying things that people mostly already believe ultimately. Right, and it's not like a radical thing

to be like, I want money and I want the things that I want and I don't want to have to wait for them. And Rachel would have been really good at giving advice because she's Southern and Southern people are super moral. The Rubik's cube of my week has been, why the fuck would Rachel Hollis lie about being SOTHER. Like I can't stop turning that over in my brain. And I- and you're right, I don't care.

But now it's all I can think about. And it's a very confusing combination. I'm so glad I've done this to you. This is my only goal with the show. It's just to make you think about the dumbest shit all day. Now I have to get you to start watching Bachelor in Paradise and then we'll be even. Thank you. you