Goop

You hear it?

You're getting it.

There's that microphone.

Hello.

Boop, boop.

There we go.

Hello, radio voice.

I gotta go down two octaves now.

You have a challenging task this morning.

You haven't given me anything to work with.

I have not told you what we're recording about.

All my taglines were like, the podcast that's a mystery box inside an enigma.

That's like all I have.

It's kind of like empty.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that tells you two weeks ago that you're recording a secret podcast, and today you're doing it.

Surprise, I'm the podcast.

In this catchphrase, the podcast is me.

That's just me narrating what's happening right now.

That's not really a tagline.

I'm Aubrey Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/slash maintenancephase, where you'll get bonus episodes every month.

And today, Michael Hobbs, we have a surprise topic.

I'm so excited.

Do you have any guesses?

I think this is about a show that you've been wanting to do, but you didn't want to tell me that you were doing it.

So maybe this is you finally doing a show about salads.

Maybe this is it.

I love that your theory is.

It's the driest topic I have ever pitched to you.

You're like, Mike was on the fence about the salads one.

Maybe I'll just do it and tell him it's a surprise.

No, Michael, this is one that we have discussed.

Okay.

Michael, the goop episode is upon us.

It's finally the goop episode.

We're doing goop.

So where are we starting with Gwyneth and the Goop Empire?

So this is maybe the highest volume of research I've done for an episode in a while.

More words written about Goop than like the history of calories.

That's for fucking sure.

What I wanted to do for this episode is try and take Goop pretty seriously, right?

It's a $430 million company.

It has really significant influence over the wellness industry as a whole.

So we're going to talk a little bit about like, why is that and what draws people to Goop in a sea of media coverage that really only seems to be like, can you believe it?

Yeah.

This again.

I also, I love that you're starting with like, this is not going to be fun.

This is going to be, this is going to be homework.

Look, we're going to fucking dunk on goop real hard.

Don't worry.

But also, I wanted to like get us grounded in like, no, there's stuff here worth exploring.

Part of what made the research on this episode so hard is that everything was eye rolling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I wanted to be like, no, no, no, let's like try and take this on its own terms a little bit more, right?

This is also an episode that both of us have resisted doing for a long time like we've been doing the show for two years and this is yeah like a pretty obvious episode for us to do and one of the reasons neither one of us wanted to do it earlier was because there's already so many goop dunk fests yeah absolutely so i'm glad that we're like actually taking this seriously as a phenomenon and not just like going from like dunk to dunk on gwyneth even though she she deserves it in many ways but also like i mean this this company's one of the first kind of like influencer business models really I mean Gwyneth kind of like as a businesswoman did something like relatively innovative.

Yes, absolutely Gwyneth Paltrow starts Goop and that actually unleashes a whole wave of sort of celebrity like wellness and lifestyle brands, right?

That's where we get the honest company.

Blake Lively launches a lifestyle brand like all of these sort of Hollywood it girls.

I don't know who any of those people are.

Do you know who Blake Lively is?

I do not.

You absolutely fucking do.

Michael.

No, I know her.

She's the one that did haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

Nope, nope, nope.

That's Taylor Swift, and you absolutely know that that's Taylor Swift.

No, I do know that.

But I don't know.

I genuinely don't know who Blake Lively is.

But from context clues, she appears to be a fans person.

So the other thing I wanted to say context-wise for the goop episode is like the Oprah soads, there is just too much to cover in one episode.

So this is designed as a like mothership mothership episode that we can then come back if we want to tell other goop-related stories.

But this is sort of the like, how did it come to be?

And what are a few key things to sort of know about it?

All right.

Beam me up.

So we today are going to explore goop in three acts.

Act one.

The birth of goop, the advent of goop.

Gwyneth Paltrow was born in 1972 in Los Angeles to Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow.

Blythe Danner is an actor.

She works on Broadway.

She works in TV.

She works in movies.

She was in a bunch of Woody Allen movies.

Her dad is Bruce Paltrow.

He was a TV director and producer.

His biggest sort of project that he's most known for was Saint Elsewhere.

Also, fascinatingly, her cousins include Gabby Giffords.

What?

Catherine Munig, who played Shane from the L-Word.

Really?

And Rebecca Paltrow-Newman, whose husband, Adam Newman, was the founder of WeWork.

That explains why his hair is so lustrous.

Earlier this year, Gwyneth Paltrow did an interview with Haley Bieber, Justin Bieber's wife and also daughter of Stephen Baldwin, where Gwyneth Paltrow gave this like wild and terrible quote about how like nepotism kids have to work twice as hard to prove themselves.

Oh, no.

And I was like, man.

No,

that's not.

That's not it, Gwyneth.

That's...

We said we weren't going to roast you, Gwyneth, but you're making it hard.

It's a bad one.

Yeah.

I imagine, look, if you walked onto a set and you got a job, you know, in part or full because of who you know or whose kid you are.

And you're surrounded by a bunch of other actors who have been auditioning for years just to get a role.

Like, absolutely, they're going to be like, who the fuck are you?

Do you even deserve to be here?

Sure.

So, like, I see how she gets there.

And also, please stop.

No.

It's like the

economic equivalent of skinny shaming i feel like is it mean to say to somebody like eat a sandwich when they post a photo of themselves in a bathing suit like yes it's mean but is there like on a structural level oppression against skinny people just objectively there is not i'm sorry i know this is harder for you than most days and i'm real sorry about that but also On average,

the difficulty level of your days is like a five.

Right.

And you're talking to a group of people whose difficulty level on a given day is like 70.

That's a good way to put it.

So after graduating from these fancy private schools, her first films come out in 1991.

She's 19 at the time.

Oh, wow.

She's in a movie called Shout, starring John Travolta, and she's in Hook as Wendy.

She's what?

She was Wendy in Hook?

Do you want to know who cast her?

Is it Steven Spielberg?

Her godfather, Steven Spielberg.

Oh,

life is hard for

nepotism kids.

Life is hard for me.

Life is hard for 19, and you can cast in a Steven Spielberg movie because he's your godfather.

When I get just hours of FaceTime with like the most acclaimed American director, really tough times.

I know.

I'm sorry.

I don't mean to be mean, but it's so hard not to be mean to Gwyneth Baldwin.

It's okay to be.

Again, I feel like it's fine to dunk on her.

I'm just looking for nutritious dunking.

Oh, man.

So by 1995, she graduates to some more sort of adult films.

She's in seven.

She's in Emma.

She's in great expectations.

By 1998, she stars in Shakespeare and Love.

She wins an Oscar for that.

Oh, yeah.

In 2001, she stars in the Royal Tenenbaums.

That is the same year that she puts on a fat suit for Shallow Hal.

Oh, right.

It was the best of times.

It was the worst of times, Gwyneth Paltrow.

I'll also say, I have always felt weird about her like later wellness turn because I actually think she's like a really good actress.

Shallow Hal obviously is a fucking nightmare which we did a whole episode on.

But in general, she's done like a really diverse, interesting array of movies, and like she's good in them.

Yes, and I would say a bunch of the early press coverage of Goop bears that out.

They talk to a bunch of people who've worked with her, and they're like, She's good at acting, and I don't understand why she's doing this.

It's like a thing that like a number of people say in early coverage, they're just like, What the fuck is this?

Why?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I started pulling together a timeline of her film and TV work, and she has credits almost every year for over 30 years at this point.

Oh, wow.

And as her acting career takes off, so does her sort of commitment to dieting and wellness and all of that kind of stuff.

She, in 1999, she does her first master cleanse and starts talking about it in the press.

Okay.

In 2002, a terrible thing happens, which is her father passes away of throat cancer.

And she talks about just wanting to make things better for him and seeing him go through the ringer of, you know, traditional cancer treatments, right?

It's really hard to watch your loved one go through that.

And she starts looking around.

She's like, there's got to be something else that I can do for him.

She has this story about her dad that she was trying out sort of gluten-free, sugar-free, vegan recipes.

She made some muffins.

Okay.

And she made one for him.

And she was like, he took a bite of it and said it tasted like biting into the New York Times.

And that's like,

which is like a genuinely good story.

And she's like, you know, we've come a long way.

And like, I knew I had my work cut out for me.

And what it like, it's like a good little launch pad, right?

Yeah, that's pretty good.

In 2004, she goes to the premiere of Anchorman and wears a strappy, exposed shoulder, exposed back dress that shows that she has big marks from having been in cupping.

Oh, is that the thing?

It's like hot.

Yep.

They sort of do these little suction, heat suction cups to your back.

So that becomes a big little like like sort of news wave about her.

So she's already long before

the start of Goop, wellness stuff has very much been part of her public image, right?

Also, I mean, I've always had a sort of a complicated relationship with the social construction of Gwyneth Paltrow because she doesn't strike me as like an evil person.

Yeah, totally.

Like I think one of the challenges of talking about this kind of wellness grift space is that you have genuine, like bad actors like Pete Evans, right?

Yeah.

But then you have have people like Gwyneth Palter who I think is genuinely well-meaning.

I don't think she like knows that this stuff is fake.

I think she's doing it because she really believes in it, but also I do think that her influence on the culture has arguably been quite malign.

Yeah.

She strikes me as someone who is deeply and genuinely out of touch.

Like that's not just a character she plays on TV, right?

Oh, yeah.

That's the wild thing about the gaffes.

And part of what sits weirdly with me about coverage of the gaffes is like, can you believe she said it?

And I'm like i i can believe that she believes it yeah oh yeah but there are some things i will say we will get to some stuff where you're like oh no she knows oh no she knows we'll get there she knows yeah okay so in 2008 gwyneth paltrow starts a newsletter called goop Michael, do you know why she calls it goop?

I don't, actually.

I feel like I should.

Well, so the main thing is that her initials are GP.

Oh, right.

Goopity goop.

Duh, okay.

But she adds the double O because a branding expert told her, quote, that all successful internet companies have double O's in their names.

What?

Which I was like, all right.

So I get you on Google and Facebook.

Amazon, Microsoft.

She's right.

Scroof.

Yeah.

So when she launches Goop, it is just an email newsletter.

That is the start of Goop.

Oh, yeah.

And at the outset, the press is really puzzled by why this is happening.

One of the early stories about Goop is from the New York Times, and the headline is, Gwyneth Paltrow's off-stage roles, dot, dot, dot, but why?

That's some cold shit.

She also has interests.

So she talks to people about sort of like why she starts the website at the beginning.

And it's really interesting to me because it is so dramatically different than the website that we have now.

She tells people that she has filmed in a lot of different locations, and that each time she goes to a different location, she would ask the crew and locals about like, where do you get the best cup of coffee?

What's the meal you can't miss here?

Who gives the best massage in town?

Where's the best juice bar?

So, it's sort of like a little insider guide to travel in generally pretty fancy locations, right?

This is some like genuine innovation in that this was a time before Instagram and like the institution of like the celebrity doing their own celebrities they're just like us shtick.

Yeah, like she was pretty early on like forming a relationship, a direct relationship with her audience in a way that is like totally taken for granted now.

Yeah, absolutely.

She's like trying to be this sort of insider travel guide, right?

But the press moves really quickly past any level of even like surface puzzlement and gets over it really quickly.

So, here is a quote from a piece on the late great racked.

It says, A New York Times columnist lamented, I feel undernourished already.

Joy of Cooking editor Beth Wareham mused, Does the world really need another banana muffin recipe?

I think someone like Gwyneth Paltrow would be better at telling people what not to eat.

Oh, that's kind of like mean-spirited.

A lot of this coverage came out after her release of the very first newsletter.

Right.

Just like, give it a minute.

And then, I mean, granted, if you gave it a minute, it would not be better.

Right.

And I mean, we did give it, we gave it a decade, it's become what it's become.

So, like, these people on sublevel were correct.

Maybe it's just we're comparing it to what goop is now and what celebrity culture has become now.

But this seat, this just seems so harmless to me.

Yeah, totally.

And I also think people didn't really know how to read that as cynically as we know how to read that now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So 2008, she releases the newsletter.

And in 2009, she creates the first Goop goop detox.

Man, that first detox is sort of like a more restrictive version of whole 30.

Okay, it's just a lot of sort of like clean eating shit.

It's a seven-day quote-unquote detox, which I'm like, hey, man, if it's seven days where you're restricting what you eat, congratulations, that's a fucking diet.

Yeah, it's just a diet.

So, there is a writer from GQ who does the goop detox at the time

and talks about it being absolutely terrible.

Oh, Oh, yeah.

The person writes about vomiting on the subway platform.

Which I have done, but not on a detox, so I'm not going to judge.

This person keeps like, you know, a couple of short sentences of notes a day about being on the goop detox.

Day one, feel incredibly strange, if not a little better, lighter.

Someone in the office says I look pinker.

Day two, feel hungover.

The hunger isn't in my stomach, but in my throat.

I'm craving KFC.

I never crave KFC.

I don't even like KFC, and yet I want it.

My tongue feels swollen.

I have a headache.

This, I am told, is part of the natural detoxification process.

It blows.

Day three, the world has lost all its sharp edges.

My thoughts are sluggish.

I sat through a story meeting and didn't say a single word.

I wonder if I'll get fired.

It's just like, every time I've been around a person who's on a wild diet in a workplace, I'm like, ooh, things seem bad in there.

But it's also, is she selling the detox?

No, she's just coming out in the newsletter.

She's like, here you go, do my detox.

I mean, so this is another thing to know about Goop is that at this point, it really does seem like it's her doing this in her house as a passion project.

By 2011,

she hires a CEO.

Okay.

His name is Seb Bishop.

He ran Red, the big celebrity AIDS charity.

And at that point, we don't get a ton of windows into Goop's finances, but by 2014, Goop is $1.6 million in debt.

But today it has bounced back really significantly again, like valued at $430 million, right?

So it's hard to get there unintentionally to $430 million

and to $82 million in venture capital funding.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this profit-making part is like not all the way back to the beginning, but there is one thing that is really constant, and that is the tone and sort of the outlook of goop stuff.

So, when she releases that original Goop Detox in 2009,

she includes this quote about the detox.

I just zoomed it to you.

It says, My life is good because I'm not passive about it.

Oh no, Gwyneth.

Oh, no.

Make your life good.

Invest in what's real.

Cook a meal for someone you love.

Pause before reacting.

Clean out your space.

Read something beautiful.

Learn something new.

Don't be lazy.

Work out and stick with it.

Some of that's fine.

Some of it's gross.

It's like 60% fine.

40% not as great.

Yeah.

That's about the ratio I expect from Gwyneth.

Goop as a project seems really dedicated to confusing privilege for enlightenment.

Yeah, I know.

Right?

But she's like, my life is good because I work at it.

And I'm like, you don't think that the fact that you have literal millions of dollars has anything to do with how good your life is?

I want to know how much money you have when you check your bank account online and it's literally just an infinity symbol.

I have friends who are on SSDI and have known people who are on food stamps and so on and so forth.

They work at their lives.

Their lives are, you know, as good as they can make them.

And there's a fucking ceiling on how good you can make your life when you have such limited resources.

And that feels like one of the more insidious parts of goop.

Yeah.

Now I have this kind of life because I've put in this kind of effort, not because I have these kinds of resources.

The old phrase is that rich people were born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.

Yes.

This is exactly what she's expressing here, that it's like, yeah, it's hard work to run to home base.

Yeah.

It is.

I get it.

Sure.

No one's going to take that away from you.

But also.

Most people are running four times that far.

It's funny because I feel like I would be fine with celebrities that just like admitted all this stuff of like, I'm crazy rich.

Here's the restaurants I go to in Tuscany.

I don't really mind people being rich.

It's just like, don't ask me to tell you you're a good person for that.

Right.

And don't sell other people on the idea that like you too can be a good person if you can afford all the shit that I have.

I remember there was a series on video gum like 10,000 years ago where they would go through these like what I eat in a day or like various interviews with Gwyneth and kind of laugh at her and make fun of her.

And there was there was one interview where she said she was talking about interior decorating and she was talking about how she just likes really clean spaces and clean lines and right angles and minimalistic environments and I remember the writer saying like Gwyneth everybody likes that like everybody likes their environment to be clean and nice and to feel comfortable like that's that's not unique to you but it was like she just couldn't see that like she has wealth and privilege that allow her to create spaces like this and basically design a life that is her going from like clean, comfortable space to clean, comfortable space.

Totally.

I mean, I noticed this happening to myself genuinely.

Like, I did a podcast recently where they were like, What are you watching and listening to?

And I was like, I just had this moment of thinking that I was much more interesting than I am.

You were like, Stranger Things.

I'm the only person watching Stranger Things.

Guys, have I got a bombshell for you?

Great British bake-off.

Okay.

there is something that happens when people start to ask your opinion on mundane things as if your opinion really matters where you do start to kind of think that you matter more than you do or that your opinion on this thing is more consequential than just an opinion on a thing or whatever Aubrey that that interview was the first step in like a process that ends with you launching a perfume line in like two years

this is the only place this can go

I've launched my own lines of dust.

Loud dust, fat dust, gay dust.

Yeah.

Okay, so that's the sort of beginnings of goop.

Between

then and now are all the scandals we all know.

The J-Deggs, the vaginal steaming, the defective candle.

Oh my God.

As part of this episode, I pulled together a timeline of goop stuff.

That timeline was 26 pages.

Every year, Michael, there were like a minimum of three big goop scandals, usually closer to five or six.

Yeah.

That everyone listening to this episode would probably remember most of them.

We could just do a bonus like lightning round

on most of these.

So there are all those scandals we know.

There are a couple scandals that we don't.

really talk about as much.

In 2018, two separate sources filed public complaints in the US and UK alleging false advertising and non-allowable medical claims against Goop.

In 2017, Gwynne Paltrow launched a Goop magazine.

Okay.

Did you catch wind of any of this?

I had next to no recollection of this.

Anyone launching a magazine is extremely weird to me in the last like 10 years.

It is a Condé Nast magazine.

It premieres.

First issue is the premiere issue.

The second issue is the final issue.

Nice.

The thing that ended that partnership was that Condé Nast insisted on fact-checking.

Well, that's a deal breaker, ladies.

So, hang on, I'm going to send you a quote that is outstanding.

I always love these.

Really play in the hits with this one.

She argued that they were interviewing experts and didn't need to check whether what they were saying was scientifically accurate.

We're never making statements, she said.

At least Lonin, Goop's head of content, added that Goop was just asking asking questions.

Oh,

yeah.

That's a defense people use only when they're doing something good.

Did the Holocaust really happen?

I'm just asking questions.

It's like a little parachute ripcord that you have.

You're just like, I'm just asking questions.

And then you just like float away.

There's also, so like after this happens, Gwyneth Paltrow does like a series of interviews and she keeps calling Conde Nast like, you know, we're just really trying to innovate.

And Conde Nast is just like old school.

That's just who they are.

Oh my God.

It's also worth noting all of this shit, all of these little scandals, all of these little firestorms, Gwyneth Paltrow calls them cultural firestorms,

are a feature of Goop.

They are not a bug.

Goop over time has aimed more and more of its marketing around creating controversy to generate press, which drives up traffic to their website.

Aw man.

So the New York Times magazine does a piece called How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow's Company Worth $250 million.

So clearly this is from a few years ago.

Essentially what they advance in that piece is that the wilder and more expensive Goop's shit gets, the more their readers seem to really eat it up.

So in this piece they talk about Gwyneth Paltrow speaking to Harvard business school students and this is from that section of that piece.

It says, every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site.

Among them, those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn't find help in mainstream medicine.

At Harvard, Gwyneth Paltrow called these moments cultural firestorms.

I can monetize those eyeballs, she told the students.

Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art, to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present, shall we call it, cultural ambivalence about Paltrow herself and turn them into cash.

It's never clickbait, she told a class.

It's a cultural firestorm when it's about a woman's vagina.

The room was silent.

She then, what?

She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, vagina, vagina, vagina, as if she were yodeling.

I am not going to do that.

No, I don't think that you should, and I also don't want to do that.

I'm trying to imagine it in my brain what that actually sounds like, and I can't get there.

I mean, I think it feels very telling to me that she would say to a room full of business students in a public speaking engagement with a reporter from the Times in the room, we've figured out that this is a way that works to drive up the revenue of our website is to make people kind of hate us.

Right.

So that same year that Goop was accused of so much false advertising, 2018, it received more criticism than it ever had before, and its revenue doubled.

Oh, God.

Right.

So it's like dark.

And I will say, I feel wary about doing this show for this exact reason.

Right.

Is it possible to do this at all without

seeing what we're talking about?

Yeah.

I don't know, but I also know that, you know, this is such a major force in the industry at this point that it feels difficult not to talk about it.

Yeah.

As of 2021, last year, the wellness industry was worth $4.4 trillion,

and it's projected to reach $7 trillion by 2025.

But then, I mean, I guess it's similar to like Madonna making videos in the 90s that she knew was going to get banned from MTV.

Which, like, the only thing better than being on MTV is getting banned from MTV because then it leaks over into all this other media that isn't talking about Madonna, right?

It's on news pages.

And so, I guess what Gwyneth is doing is the same thing where you get earned media.

Everybody in the country is talking about you and like your name and your website is on their lips.

And then people start going to website and they're like, ooh, a cream.

I can get the cream.

Totally.

And I think the other thing that that particular little quote shifted for me was it shifted my understanding of the sort of like...

Gwyneth Paltrow eye roll industrial complex.

Yeah.

There is a little cottage industry, right?

Anytime Gwyneth Paltrow says or does anything, you can write about that thing and be like, get a load of this lady, and you will get pretty good traffic, right?

So like, I think it's like a gross realization to go, oh no, the things that benefit Gwyneth Paltrow's critics are the same things that benefit Gwyneth Paltrow, and that feels icky and sticky and gross.

Dude, one of my first jobs in journalism was at MSN, which is like your homepage when you had to check your hot mail.

And there was like, it wasn't an official rule, but it was like an informal rule that there had to be at least one story about Paris Hilton on the homepage.

Anything.

If it was like, she switched it from Coke to Diet Coke, it was like, write it up.

We're going to get a shitload of clicks for it.

Did you have a quota for stories you had to write in a day?

No, because I was editing.

It was stories that were already in the day.

Ah, gotcha, gotcha.

I know people, though, that have to write like three stories a day.

Yeah.

They're like such smart journalists and they're so great, but it's like nobody can produce three good stories a day.

Like literally, it is humanly impossible.

Part of the reason that there is this kind of eye roll industrial complex thing happening is because journalists and writers are so under the gun.

So if you get something that feels like a slam dunk, it is certainly in your self-interest to take that story.

Yeah.

And it does bad things in the long term.

It is corrosive in the long term.

Yeah.

Which leads us to our next act.

Are you ready for our next act?

Act two?

Yeah, give it to me.

I'm calling act two the food stamp challenge or why we're all so mad.

Okay.

Act two begins with a tweet.

I'm sending you a tweet, Michael.

Oh, it's a Gwyneth Paltrow tweet.

I didn't know Gwyneth Paltrow was on Twitter.

She's definitely on Twitter.

Wait, can I go on Gwyneth Paltrow's timeline right now and see what she's tweeting about?

Sure, go for it.

Oh no, she's peddling NFTs.

Her last tweet is from February 4th and it's an NFT.

She's big on Board Ape Yacht Club.

And then, what the fuck?

Oh no.

Buying crypto has often felt exclusionary.

In order to democratize, you can participate.

Cash app is now making it easy to gift Bitcoin.

I'm giving out 500K worth of Bitcoin for the holidays.

That's from December.

I love, I love

to hear what is exclusionary from the single most exclusionary public figure that I can think of.

Man, she barely tweets though, because before that, it's like 2019.

Oh, wow.

So it's like she left Twitter for two fucking years and then tweeted like seven times about crypto and then stopped tweeting.

Okay, so I'm sending you a tweet, Michael.

I'm going to see if you remember this one.

I do remember this.

So the tweet is from April 9th, 2015.

And it's a photo of like a bunch of groceries, like lettuce, rice, eggs, like normal grocery store groceries.

It says, this is what $29 gets you at the grocery store.

What families on Snap, i.e.

food stamps, have to live on for a week.

So

this is one of those tweets that's instant pre-cringe for me.

Yeah, because like it's like Gwyneth Paltrow or anyone is talking about like poverty and welfare in America.

Just like, it's not going to go well.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

The photo that she has includes a dozen eggs, a head of romaine lettuce, an avocado, an onion, a bunch of green onions, a ear of corn, a tomato, a head of garlic, a bunch of curly kale, some cilantro, corn tortillas, seven limes,

which the Washington Post describes as a baffling number of limes.

Fair point.

A bag of frozen peas, one chili of some kind, a sweet potato, a bag of black beans, and a bag of brown rice.

So Gwyneth Paltrow tweets out this picture in 2015.

At that time, the internet just all at once turns into the Christian Bale temper tantrum on the set of the Dark Knight.

Oh, good, good for you.

People are just like, I fucking hate this.

One of the tweets is, don't worry, poor people.

Gwyneth Paltrow is here to show you how to goop your food stamp benefits.

What's so funny about this is that Gwyneth Paltrow is completely right.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, she's absolutely correct to highlight this, but also it's just the worst imaginable messenger.

Right.

At this point, she has been a professionally out-of-touch rich lady for seven years.

So people are totally, understandably primed to be like, look at this fucking shit.

She said she was going to live on $29 for a week.

So that's what this tweet is announcing is she goes, here's what you can get.

And what that's leading up to is she's doing a thing where she says, I'm going to live on this $29 of groceries and my staff is going to do it too.

And we're all going to talk about what we eat and make and all that kind of stuff.

She's making other people do it.

That's so mean.

I know.

How fucking pissed off would you be?

Isn't that like a labor rights violation?

Your boss can't just like take away your food money.

So the Washington Post wrote a piece where the headline was, a hungry Gwyneth Paltrow fails the food stamp challenge four days in.

That's the first big story about this.

And then there's like the image that they use is a picture of her at a red carpet premiere in like a very fancy dress with very fancy jewelry.

Okay.

And the lead is, quote, after four long days living like America's poor, Gwyneth Paltrow broke her much-mocked attempt at shopping on a food stamp budget in search of some chicken and black licorice.

Quote, as I suspected, we only made it through about four days when I personally broke and had some chicken and fresh vegetables, and in full transparency, half a bag of black licorice, she wrote on her blog, Goop.

My perspective has forever been altered by how difficult it was to eat wholesome, nutritious food on that budget, even for just a few days, a challenge that 47 million Americans face every day, week, and year.

Okay.

Here's the thing that is fascinating to me, that is missing from this entire account.

This was the point was to illustrate that it's not possible to survive on $29 of food stamps.

Gwyneth Palter was responding to a request that was originally issued by the New York Food Bank.

Oh, they had initially challenged a number of celebrities, sort of ice bucket challenge style, to try and eat for a week on $29.

That was the average amount a person on Snap was receiving at that time.

And the point of this exercise was to go, even if you have a personal chef, even if you have all the resources at your disposal, it is not possible for a human being to subsist on $29 worth of groceries.

So they issue this challenge and celebrities start doing it and start challenging each other.

Gwyneth Paltrow,

in a particularly cursed moment, Gwyneth Paltrow is challenged to do this by Mario Batali.

Oh, yeah.

And at the start of the challenge, she also makes a pretty significant contribution to the food bank, which is also part of the challenge.

It's like, give to the food bank, right?

So she really is sort of following the assignment, but she is so deeply the worst messenger that the internet explodes at Gwyneth Paltrow and sort of paradoxically obscures the entire effort from the food bank, right?

Right.

The Guardian did a fantastic piece about how Gwyneth's groceries stack up to what food stamp recipients actually do buy and why they buy those things.

47 million Americans were on Snap, and 22% had zero gross income.

So for 22% of Snap recipients, that average $29 is what they have, period.

And they, in this piece, talk to staffers from food banks who talk about like, yeah, actually, like foods that we think of as being sort of less nutrient dense are the foods that you can afford when you're on Snap.

You're just trying to straight up make sure you have enough meals for the week, right?

And they include this really

fantastic, illuminating quote, I think.

Though the food stamp stamp challenge shines a light on the tight food budget of SNAP recipients, it also opens the door to criticism in terms of what they buy.

Yeah.

Similar to the criticism Paltrow has received for her choice of limes, kale, and avocado, poorer Americans are often judged for purchasing unhealthy processed food.

Right.

So again, like by her participation in this thing, it has actually ramped up the thing that they're trying to ramp down.

What's also interesting because if she had done it, that also sends a really bad message.

Yes, absolutely.

If she's like, oh, it's day eight and I got a buck 23 left, then it's like, oh, well, then what are people on Food Stamps always complaining about?

What is even weirder than that is Gwyneth Paltrow's take-home point that she talks about in her blog post

post.

It's worse in context.

It's just weird.

Half of the blog post is about how she's now madder than ever that women don't receive equal pay.

Wait, what?

Right.

That she's like, women are the ones who have to take care of our kids and we're doing that on less pay and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, but SNAP is an income-limited program.

You have to have low income to access SNAP.

What do you mean?

This is confusing, right?

And it felt like a really weird way to like turn this into a classically like white lady, class privileged, deeply white feminist argument, right?

Which is like, women's equal pay, rather than being like, hey, so food stamps are fucking broken from jump jump.

And like people need to be receiving at least twice this much.

And we got to remove restrictions from food stamps for things like medication and tampons and diapers and other shit that people need.

Yeah, it should just be cash.

There shouldn't be food stamps.

It should just be fucking cash.

Right.

She could have gone in deeper on this issue of like.

What does it mean for people to be on food stamps?

What does it mean for this program to be run this way?

And instead, she takes this weird, sharp turn into like, and that's why we need equal pay yeah which she's also correct about that would be great it would be good but that's not the conclusion of this particular exercise ma'am it would have been interesting if she had actually like sat down with somebody who lives on food stamps yes the mental toll that it takes on you is so different when it's for a longer term yeah the idea of like i lived on 29 bucks for a week like fine i went palter has been hungry for her entire adult life so she probably could have done this and just like not fucking eaten for three days which is like what half the diets she recommends are right Sure, but her shit is like, you don't eat for three days, but somehow it costs you $1,000.

Yeah, I know.

It's the most expensive way not to eat.

So I'm not sure that she could not eat on a budget.

She would still need like the celery juice or whatever.

And this would get her two celery juices.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

So as I did the research on sort of goop broadly, there were some sort of theories about the appeal of goop.

There was the one that we talked about earlier, that they're sort of like selling a celebrity lifestyle that's going to be expensive.

It's going to be very woo.

It's going to be exclusive.

That's what people want is sort of the thinking.

There is another theory that goop is reaching and either offering alternatives to or taking advantage of people who have been failed by medical systems, right?

There's another theory that is sort of that goop is selling self-care to women who've been taught to put themselves on the back burner.

That they're saying, no, no, no, no, put yourself first.

Right.

No.

Mike, that is my reaction as well.

I call fucking bullshit.

Yeah, that seems steal, Manny.

So in act three, our final act, we're going to dig in on the company's signature event, which is called In Goop Health.

In Goop Health, okay.

It is a summit.

It's an in-person event that they sort of travel around the country slash world.

It's one of the few places where actual goop followers physically show up and there's some reporting about who those folks are and why they're in it and all that kind of stuff.

Oh, it's the gathering of the juggalos.

They're like the skincare products.

The gathering of the goopalos.

It's the goopalos.

Yeah.

So the first in-goop health summit happens in LA in 2017.

It is very lavish and it's focused on absolutely everything you think it's focused on.

Okay.

Tickets cost between $500 and $1,500.

At a later New York summit, the highest priced tier is actually the first one to sell out, which feels telling.

Yeah, wow.

Summits that happened later had ticket prices that varied really widely.

So the high-end at one point goes up to $4,500 for a ticket.

Jesus Christ.

The other thing to know about the InGoop Health Summit is that the crowd is really clear, right?

USA Today sends a reporter who describes the crowd as, quote, predominantly white, affluent women dressed in athleisure, right?

It's everything you think it's going to be.

Wait, why the athleisure, though?

Athleisure or wide leg linen pants.

Like gauzy and ethereal, or I might work out, but I am not going to.

A whole lot of the press coverage of In Goop Health is just

listing things that are happening.

They're doing aura photography and sound baths and blah blah blah.

Like they just

like every piece is like 100 to 200 words of just like, here's a list of some stuff.

It just sounds like a huge waste of like more than I spent on my first car.

Would you like to hear a list of some stuff that they have at the Goop Summit?

Please.

Please.

Oh, here's actually, let me send you a quote from one of them.

So one of the things that the Goop Summit has, in addition to aura photography, Jade Eggs, all that kind of stuff, they have a flavored oxygen bar.

I remember that like mini trend lit.

They were like, they're going to have bars.

They're going to have oxygen bars.

We're all going to be going to oxygen bars.

No, we're not.

No, we're not.

Not now.

We all have watched 1,500 news stories about it, but nobody ever actually went to one.

All right, so I sent you that quote.

Wait, I'm still on Gwyneth Paltrea's Twitter feed.

I have to click away.

It's mesmerizing to me.

It says, my experience involved waiting 45 minutes in line to breathe in flavored oxygen for 10 minutes.

Breathing in highly concentrated oxygen is purported to have a number of health benefits, such as detoxifying blood, increasing circulation, strengthening the immune system, heightening concentration, improving relaxation, and relieving headaches.

I didn't notice any immediate effects, but I did enjoy the smell.

I mean, yeah, that kind of just seems fine.

It's like, yeah, it's bullshit, but absolutely.

You know?

Hilariously, they go through in detail what is in the food court.

Okay.

There is a booth for bulletproof coffee.

Of course.

They have a million kinds of sort of branded samples.

They have probiotic drinks.

There are fresh fruits and vegetables everywhere, but the things that the attendees really gravitate toward are these sort of branded potions and elixirs that are making sort of claims about things, right?

Yeah, of course.

Hilariously, one of the things in the food court is a place called Chloe Ice Cream, which has a kale, cookies, and cream flavor.

That sounds grassy.

But then People magazine also covers it, and they're like, it was good.

And then they include an affiliate link.

Nice.

Which is also like, that is a big dividing line in the press around goop is like, who includes affiliate links to a bunch of goopy shit.

Man, it's funny to think back on the time when it was like you just had to put kale in fucking everything.

People thought kale was this, like, magical vitamin.

Absolutely.

Kale and bacon were happening at the same time.

Oh, my Jesus God, the bacon days.

They have swag bags, as you can imagine, that have like a bunch of like, you know, a specific brand of a collagen supplement, a particular kind of fancy hair.

hair towel.

Sure.

These nail polishes, this like protein bars made by Gwyneth Paltrow's personal trainer.

Oh my god, you know what it is?

Something just clicked in my brain.

Tell me.

It's fucking as seen on TV.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

Remember, like as seen on TV, they would just have these like random fucking products and it's like, are you tired of juicing your lemons with a lemon juicer?

And they'd have some like dumb thing that you had to plug in.

It was like a fancy lemon juicer-y thing.

It was like weird little gadgets and things that solved like extremely minor problems.

Yeah.

Like maybe the towel you use to dry your hair is fine.

Yeah.

I mean, the in goop health summit is like the internet comes to life and everything you have imagined about goop is actually happening all around you is really what it sounds like to me.

They also have panels.

The early summits are mostly celebrity.

Drew Barrymore was there, Chelsea Handler, Meg Ryan, Laura Linney, and Bryce Dallas Howard.

Okay.

And Bryce Dallas Howard

moderated a panel set to address, quote, the hard problem of consciousness.

Oh my fucking God.

The real problems with the goop summit seem to lie with what is happening on stage.

So like the main, the main thing.

The main fucking event, right?

So like most of what is happening is the problem.

There's an LA Times reporter who goes to a goop summit and tweets out like live tweets what she's seeing.

She goes to a session on gut health that is led by Dr.

Michael Gundry,

who gives some truly bananas advice from the stage.

He says, quote, don't eat.

I can't stress that enough.

We have the ability to store fat.

Finally, we've cracked it.

The secret to weight loss.

Don't eat.

Stop it.

He says that for six months a year, he foregoes both breakfast and lunch.

and just has one meal a day.

So he's an OMAD dude, a one meal a day guy.

Then we moved into a panel called The Tools.

In that panel, there are two psychotherapists, according to People magazine, who, quote, provided on-demand therapy to audience members

in front of the crowd.

Oh,

that's just like carnival shit.

Yeah.

So here is what USA Today has to say about these two psychotherapists.

We're going to talk about them.

One is someone whose last name is Michaels.

It says, it's a remarkably raw, honest 30 minutes and closes with a talk about positive entitlement.

60 to 80% of the women in my practice don't feel that basic sense of entitlement that I deserve this, says Michaels.

At their prompting, the room of women shout, I'm an animal.

The hour ends with Paltra opening up about her struggle with perfectionism.

The doctors coin our fear the shadow.

It's whatever you wish you weren't, says Michaels, no matter how much success you have.

I know what you're going to to say about this.

What do you think I'm going to say about this?

Well, it's like a bunch of people with like not the biggest problems.

Yeah.

You have a job that pays well, and you've got a family and all this stuff, and everything's going well, and yet there's still something missing, which honestly, like on an individual level, I know people that are going through this.

I would never in any way mock this.

Yeah.

But also, it's like Gwyneth Paltrow has a platform and

you can talk about anything at these things.

And it's it's like self-help Tony Robbins stuff, ultimately, at the end of the day.

I mean, I think here's what I would say.

Well, what you're going to say is smarter than me, but that's what I think after reading the paragraph.

No, you're right.

You're totally on the right track with how I feel about this.

Absolutely.

And also, I think context matters a great deal here, right?

In order to understand why this is so troubling, you've got to kind of know where self-care comes from.

So this is all sourced from a fantastic slate piece by Aisha Harris.

Harris uses this slate piece to lay out a broad history of self-care in the 20th century, which started as a medical concept designed as a way for patients with pretty profound needs to treat themselves, right?

Prior to the 60s, self-care is talked about as a tactic for elders, for people with pretty profound mental illnesses, right?

We're talking about people with very specific needs.

Their healthcare providers are talking to them about how they can take care of those deep needs, both for themselves and through their medical treatment, right?

Then it starts to catch on as a way for people in particularly intense interpersonal jobs to manage their own stress.

So it becomes a big point of concern amongst grief counselors and social workers and EMTs and therapists and people who have jobs that are emotionally weighty.

But where it really takes off as a concept is when it is picked up by the Black Panthers.

Oh.

Still Processing, a great podcast, has a great episode about that.

There's also some more detailed history on this in a book by Alondra Nelson called Body and Soul.

The Black Panther Party established service programs designed to provide for black communities where the government and nonprofits didn't.

So here is a quote that I'm going to send you from that slate piece by Aisha Harris.

Boop.

It says, those programs were established both to make up for the dire lack of adequate social service programs after the waning of the war on poverty, as well as to provide a coping mechanism against the harassment and surveillance that black people suffered at the hands of police and the federal government.

These nationwide clinics recruited nurses, doctors, and students to test for illness and disease rampant within the black community, including lead poisoning and sickle cell anemia, as well as to provide basic preventive care.

For black people, and especially black women, this kind of self-care was brought to fill a desperate need.

The survival programs of the Panthers were about just that, survival.

So we've got this concept that is used overwhelmingly sort of medically, right?

Up to this point.

From here, second wave feminist movements pick up the concept of self-care and sort of go, oh, doctors aren't really looking out for ladies at this point, so we got to look out for ourselves.

In the 80s and 90s, it really starts to drift into the mainstream and starts to become sort of monetized, right?

That's when we start getting getting workout videos.

That's when people start talking about wellness more broadly.

And that's when all of this stuff starts to make money for people.

And it drifts from being a practice of people on the margins who've been forced into this practice to a pretty capitalist venture that is seen as being more for wealthy people and frankly for whiter people, right?

Right.

So, given that history, to then gather together a room full of very wealthy white women and tell them, you need to put yourself first.

Many of you might be employers.

We don't need to talk about how you're treating your employees.

All of you are white women.

We don't need to talk about race.

All of you are wealthy.

We don't need to talk about class.

The most important thing in your life needs to be you and your own peace of mind.

I've always been fascinated by the ways women are kind of the middle managers of like the American hierarchy of oppression.

Like women do face real oppression, like very well-documented discrimination.

No question.

But also because women comprise such a large percentage of the population, there's also these really important stratifications within women.

Absolutely.

And a lot of this like self-care stuff seems like it wants to highlight the challenges that women face while also ignoring the challenges that other people face and also the challenges that like white wealthy women can impose upon other people.

Yeah.

And I think when your primary directive is to focus on yourself and put yourself first, and you are a person with substantial power and privilege, that can lead to some yikes places, right?

And then when other people come to you and say, hey, I have a need of you.

Hey, I need to set this boundary with you.

Hey, this thing that you're doing isn't really working for me.

You go, uh-uh, my job is to put myself first.

Right.

And this is toxic energy, or this is bad news, or this is like, I'm not taking it.

Right.

It feels both like not necessarily a terrible thing, but when it is depoliticized this way and when there's no caveats and no structure around that conversation, it lets people just free associate into like, here's what I think it is to be a toxic person.

Yeah.

That feels really icky and challenging and straight up counterproductive.

I also, I feel like it's, it's such a dilemma for like people like Gwyneth Paltrow because skincare is nice.

Sure.

Like a lot of these products are nice.

On some level, it's like you don't want everything to be like a fucking lecture about like

all the

natural problems.

Totally.

In America, you're like, man, I just want to go to a conference center and like drink some probiotic bullshit and like have a smoothie.

Absolutely.

People are allowed to like be into dumb bullshit.

Yes.

You know my main thing.

I mean, absolutely.

Listen, on almost every Zoom that we have, you're like, tell me about your eye makeup.

And I'm like, oh my God, thank you.

This is the palette that I'm using.

Right.

Like, definitely, definitely I am into ridiculous shit.

And definitely, definitely, people should be able to be into ridiculous shit.

But there is also a point at which that tips into encouraging other bad behavior.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think it's not terrible to ask.

goop and to ask wellness influencers writ large to put up some fucking bumper lanes, right?

Like if you're bowling, keep folks from tipping into the gutter.

Right.

I mean, to me, I feel like this is the entire duality and also something that we keep coming up against on this show is that at the most surface layer, like, yeah, it's totally harmless, frivolous stuff, but it never stays at the frivolous stuff.

What happens almost immediately is it becomes this ideology, right?

It becomes a way of looking at the world, right?

Like they're doing panels on like how to achieve the light of consciousness, right?

It's not just this health stuff because you can't sell health stuff by leaving it there.

You have to take everything to the next level up.

This is how marketing works, right?

This is how they marketed cigarettes for years.

It's not, you know, you don't smoke because it's like a burning stick that you're addicted to.

You smoke because the Marlboro man symbolizes all this like rugged individualism and like masculinity and all this kind of stuff.

What they're essentially doing here is they're doing a form of marketing where they're selling you this identity of someone who's like taking control of your life and pushing back against the oppression and you're leaning in or whatever.

Yes.

But what they're really doing is like they're telling you all of this stuff so that they can sell you skincare.

Michael, it's about to get a little darker.

Okay.

Here is a place where Goop did not put up bumper lanes and in fact I think carved out another gutter in like the middle of the bowling lane

is that they also had a panelist whose name is Dr.

Kelly Brogan.

Is that a name you're familiar with?

I don't think so.

Dr.

Brogan has famously claimed that vaccines are ineffective.

Oh, God, of course.

And so are HIV medications.

Oh, fuck off.

And that AIDS-related deaths are actually probably caused by drug toxicity from AIDS treatments and not from the virus itself.

That's really bad.

She also wrote a blog post in 2014.

It's since been deleted

saying that sort of these ideas that HIV leads to AIDS and that cholesterol contributes to heart disease are quote, memes we hold on to societally as truths.

Okay.

So she's like, that's not really real.

That's just like a thing that you heard.

So now you believe it and blah, blah, blah, which is like technically true, but that also doesn't mean that it's untrue.

Yeah.

First of all, I believe all all the memes that I see.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Mike is a big believer in salt bay.

The thing to know here is that Dr.

Brogan is not the only anti-vax speaker at this conference.

She's the most extreme, but she is far from the only one.

There are sort of repeated reports of like anti-vax people talking about anti-vax shit at in goop health summits.

And journalists start asking Gwyneth Paltrow, like, do you believe this shit?

What's going on here?

Why are you giving this a platform?

She tells this to USA Today.

I realize I edit this show, but is it too late for me to take back the nice stuff I said about Gwyneth earlier?

Is that possible?

Okay.

She says, women are not lemmings.

Just because we're raising a question doesn't mean we're expecting somebody to follow our advice.

We believe women are intuitive enough and intelligent enough to hear both sides of a lot of things and make a decision for themselves that's resonant for them.

Gwyneth.

Like, this is very classic misinformation and disinformation playbook shit.

You're giving people information, but like, oh, we don't expect them to act on it.

But like, if someone tells you vaccines are harming your children, what do you fucking expect people to do?

People care about the health of their children.

So it's like you can't throw bombs into the middle of people's brains like this.

And then we're like, oh, it's not really a bomb.

Literally, one of the anti-vax speakers is a pediatrician who's like, I saw too many patients with these experiences.

And then I saw it happen in my own son.

And I'm like, this is a bad influence.

Really irresponsible.

Deeply irresponsible.

And then to say, we're just offering people up with options and like women can make up their own minds.

And we're smart.

And people don't give us enough credit for being so smart.

You gotta have a line.

The fuck you, Gwyneth, line.

And like the anti-vax stuff is just like, fuck you, Gwyneth, this isn't cool.

I mean, I think there is a through line throughout Goop's work that is a deep resistance to accountability, right?

So that's why it felt so important to me to do this episode in a way that sort of takes Goop at face value.

Because when you do that, when you strip away eye rolling and all of that kind of stuff, what you see is a pretty cutthroat business model that is kind of gross.

Yeah, I think you're right that it's time it's time to just ask questions about whether Gwyneth is like fully aware what she is doing and whether there's like real cynicism behind this.

Yeah, we're just asking questions.

Yeah, we're just asking questions of Goop.

We have some questions.