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A
When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
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B
Campsite Media.
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C
Welcome back to Infamous everyone. So if you're wondering when we're getting back to heavier topics, next week we're going to have something quite complex and weighty. But for this week, I'd like to start by saying if you're a certain level of online or you happen to be a woman who has paid attention to her aging face recently, you may have seen some conversation around rich face. That is the face that rich people almost universally seem to have now. Think Lauren Sanchez or Kristi Noem or even Emily Blunt in the latest Devil Wears Prada. As Amy o', Dell, who's been on our podcast talking about Anna Wintour and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of whom she wrote unauthorized biographies about, opined in the New York Times quote, a rich face is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions, and plumped with filler or implants or a person's own grafted fat. End quote. I would describe it personally as sculpted to appear youthful, with dollops of fat plopped just so on the lips and cheekbones frozen at the forehead. The hollows of the under eye filled in so much they look like little couch cushions for the eyeballs. It's Kris Jenner after her much talked about facelift on which she spent a reported six figures. It's Kylie Jenner, who at 28 looks uncannily similar to her 45 year old half sister Kim Kardashian. The rich face is the evolution of pillow face, the doughy look of too much filler, and Instagram face, which is the lifted cat eye, plump lip look that every influencer seems to have and arguably one family gave us all of the above. The Kardashians. Now, you know we've done a lot on the Kardashians in the past, but we haven't talked about them for a while and there's been some news. It was recently announced that writer Jonathan Van Meter has a new authorized biography of Kim Kardashian coming out titled Citizen Kim, the Woman who Created the Future, and that will be coming out later this year. But there's a new book out Right now, that sums up the family, their impact on culture and how we now all live in their content creator world. It's written by M.J. corey, a writer and therapist behind the popular Instagram account Kardashian Colloquium, and it's called Deconstructing the Kardashians A New Media Manifesto. Mj, welcome to the show.
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D
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to get into all of this.
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C
You're a therapist?
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D
Yes.
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C
Why did you take this on?
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D
I am a psychotherapist by trade. I started this project back in 2018 when I was in school training to become a therapist. I was in my final years and getting my hours and I didn't expect to get into this. I actually didn't keep up with the Kardashians. I was one of those people that kind of dismissed reality TV as junk food for the brain. And I'd always seen the Kardashians in media, of course, but I just didn't care to keep up. And a friend put on the TV show and I was really struck by how it collapse this hyper polished structured narrative storytelling with these really real moments of feeling and what felt to be genuine expression. This specific episode was the Bora Bora episode where Kim is being a diva all over the resort and her brother Rob isn't having it. And he tells her, dad raised you better than that.
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A
Mom raised you better than that. Bruce raised you better than that.
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D
And when he said, dad raised you better than that, he was invoking their late father, Robert Kardashian Sr. And Kim looked genuinely embarrassed. She kind of got a little squirmy and glanced over at Kris Humphries, her fiance at the time. And that's what struck me. It was this uncanny Valley feeling. I called my sister, who was a media studies major at Smith College, and I was describing to her this feeling. I was like, the show is kind of layered. It's actually pretty interesting. And she said, yes, you should be reading French theory because she was studying it at school. I started to document it on Instagram and it was just a really great outlet to my therapy studies and training.
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E
But how does the therapy interact with that? Is it the kind of thing where it's completely separate, or are you able to say, okay, divorced mom, who I am treating. I can tell that the way that you're constructing an image online is very influenced by all these tropes that I'm seeing in reality tv.
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D
And Kim now and then I would see the impact of pop culture or these Images in people's lives. I had some patients in my early, early training years talk about how Kim, in her early, early years actually helped them with body image. Because when the Kardashians hit the scene, they obviously were breaking a lot of norms. But I will say people sometimes think I psychoanalyze the Kardashians and really, if anything, I think postmodern theory and looking at them through this media theory, posthonored lens can hold a mirror to the rest of us. I also think maybe there is a part of me that's a little fascinated by what it must feel like to become the media apparatus that you were once using to output imagery and stories, which the Kardashians, I feel, and maybe there's a bit of a psychotherapist fascination with that phenomenology.
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C
What do you mean? They've become the apparatus that they're putting their stuff out on.
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D
They're this big family, this modern family. They're in la, the heart of American entertainment. And they were ambitious women, so they, I think, made kind of choices that were authentic to them. And there's a oral history of Keeping up with the Kardashians that came out in the LA Times during the hiatus between Keeping up with the Kardashians and the drop of the Hulu Show. And Elliot Goldberg, who was a producer that was signing the family at the time all those years ago, said he had a story of Kris Jenner pulling him aside and saying, if you sign us, things will happen. Shit just happens to us. So I believe they chase big things and things did happen to them, so there was some authenticity to their lives. But what makes them so successful is they learned how to strike the right balance, shape the right formula to make it matter to the rest of us. And over time, that became a synergy of more of a media machine. People often say the Kardashians on Hulu feels really hyper curated, too polished, not relatable. But I think on some level they feel they're really showing us their lives as they are now. Because the Kardashians is a reality show about reality stars who have achieved the pinnacle of what you can in America using reality based content. So they have become the media machine.
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E
Although you could say, like, we never see the nannies, we don't see the chefs, we don't know. I mean, they're basically running movie studios from these hilltop compounds that they live in. I would wager that at least half, if not three quarters of their homes are devoted to creating media setups, right?
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D
Yes.
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E
Yet we don't really see all the assistants and the whiteboards and the. Okay, you know, if Courtney says this, you should say that the next day.
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D
The real behind the scenes storytelling and planning, the real labor going into the productions, we are not seeing. But the point is their lifestyles. The TV show is basically season long behind the scenes of how one image came out. Like the Marilyn Monroe dress. That whole season of the Kardashians is basically telling how that came to be in their polished way, it's true. But I believe that that is that central to their lives is everything going into the production of one image, one
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E
moment, right at the same time. I mean, we started off by saying, you know, there's this concept of rich face. People have been writing a lot of editorials about this saying, right now the rich look different than you and me. You know, part of the point of plastic surgery has become to say to other people, I have this and you can't afford it. Right. It's like a Birkin bag effect. You know, one of the things that I think both Natalie and I have talked about, because we've both interviewed Kim and person, and Natalie has also interviewed Kylie and Chris. And Chris, that's right. They look very different in person and not great. They don't look great. Like their faces are really constructed and their bodies are constructed to look good on camera. Everything's a little bit out of proportion for a normal person.
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D
It is quite hyperreal. I got to see the debut of Kris Jenner's face in person when I was in the courtroom to see Kim testify in Paris at the Paris robbery trial. I was taken aback by how sharp Chris's jaw was for a woman of her age and for a facelift and the standards of facelifts, as I once understood them to be, it was a new level. And what I also found interesting was that that was a very meticulously planned narrative, clearly from the Kardashians. Kim was inside the courtroom declaring to this, you know, really on theme setting, I would like to be a lawyer. That's why I'm here. That's my plan, my dream. And outside the courtroom, the All's Fair trailer had dropped, where Kim is playing a lawyer that day. So there was a lot of mindfulness and intentionality in the timing of all of that. But what the algorithm hooked onto and the discourse was that week was Kris Jenner's new face. And I think it's interesting, this, this idea of rich face, because when the Kardashians were so central to culture during the Instagram era. They were the poster girls for Instagram face. This idea of a very formulaic face that referenced, you know, numerous ethnicities and was this sort of globalized face, this coded face that also stuck on the grids. And I write in my book, in the Kim 2.0 chapter that focuses on Kylie's lips, that the Kardashians hit the scene, joined the feeds, got on Instagram at the time that there was opening of regulations around fillers and injectables. And it kind of sold this idea that because of this advent of fillers, a globalized formulaic face, perfect for the feeds, perfect for influencer culture, was democratized for everyone else. It was a step up from cosmetics, but it could still allow people to have a plastic surgery experience using fillers faster. And now this new craze of surgery, things have accelerated. Like plastic surgery, you could argue is sort of a medium or a tool for communication of some sort of idea.
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C
I mean, you can see it around you with the proliferation of med spas, you know, like this was not a thing that you used to openly talk about or openly see. But I live in la. People walk around with fresh injection sites around their lips and it is just totally normal to be talking about where you go for Botox, when you're going and all of that. And yes, I think what's interesting to me is how this pertains to what the next thing aesthetics are aspiring to. Because I think what is considered beautiful is usually the thing that is kind of unattainable in a way. Like, yes, maybe a lot of people could get filler, but it was still expensive. And now I think with Ozempic, the new thing is not just skinny, it's like skinny and shredded. You know, it's like the women who are like teeny, teeny weeny, but also have a six pack and ripped, very thin little muscles.
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E
Yeah, you see the, I mean, look, you see the people on the Met Gala carpet and whether they're a 22 year old model or Madonna, almost all of the women had the same kind of plastic surgery. You know, maybe some had facelifts, maybe some didn't, but the same look generally. And their bodies were incredibly skinny. Skinny like the Margaret Qualley and the substance look, you know, where it's just only through real deprivation or the one in a hundred who has those genetics or a lot of Ozempic can you get that. And yet the arms are completely worked out. Like serious weightlifting has happened. I don't even think in the 80s, which was like maybe the last time we saw these super worked out female bodies that you saw things like that.
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D
Yeah, that's kind of like the Chloe archetype of the family. There's a revenge body, you work the body, all American grit, Protestant work ethic. Kim also advocates for that, but I guess that's the Kim and Chloe's part of the family.
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E
When I interviewed Kim, I do have to say we went to some sort of steakhouse in Santa Monica at which she had, you know, half a piece of steak and she had some salad and she had just had a baby and she said, I know I can get back to my pre baby body because I know my ethic around working out. Now. I think you could argue that there's a lot more than ethic that's happened since she had that baby, particularly since she had other babies with surrogates so she didn't go through that again.
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B
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C
When you talked about first watching Keeping up with the Kardashians, you talked about how there's this combination of both really polished and then what seems like genuine life or genuine Emotions. And I think there's that with their cosmetic surgery and procedures too. I think I've talked about this on the podcast, but after I interviewed Kim, this is. This would have been 2016, 2017, when she was launching her relatively short lived makeup brand. I went to an event with both Kim and Madonna, and Kim was on stage with Madonna again, another, you know, woman who alters her appearance. And Kim was kind of joking about how, like, people come to her for plastic surgery wrecks, you know, and she gives them recommendations of like, tweak this, do that, do that. But then I obviously also think about the famous scene in Keeping up with Kardashians early on where they had scans to prove that Kim's butt wasn't fake. They had X rays. Do you remember that?
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D
Who the hell of a normal person gets butt implants? I mean, if you want to prove them wrong, get like an X ray
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E
and an X ray of your ass to show there's no silicone in there.
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C
It's like, okay, but the procedure that she would have allegedly had done, a bbl, would not show up on an X ray. It's like they're both at once open about it and then not especially when it pertains to, as you said, looks that might come from different ethnicities.
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D
Yeah, that is a very Kardashian strategy that I think a lot of other celebrities are adopting, which is a sort of misdirection. So. And in the case of the Kardashians, that episode is so cartoonish. It's such a caricature to get an X ray. And it's so invasive and it's so visual. But they will give us a little bit while doing so much more, doing something different. Chloe has owned that she's had a nose job. Kylie has owned that she's had breast implants. But we know there's more going on and the idea is to kind of satiate the public with one thing while then giving themselves the allowance to do all the other things. There's this idea of you can have lips like mine. I'm Kylie, buy my lip kit. And actually, we all know it's filler. I also think what really plastic surgery involves brutal recovery. It involves submission to the vision of a surgeon being cut open and cut up and then undergoing a long and sort of unpredictable process of recovery and healing. And I think that is some of the most interesting Kardashian stories that we are never seeing. Every feasible imaginable photo of the Kardashians, paparazzi photos, the photos they Editorial photos, everything. We even have seen a mug shot of Chloe. But we'll never see their before pictures that you have to take when you go to the surgeon's office, you know, so that's really interesting to me also,
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E
like, when do they recover from these things? We have a sense that they're disclosing all the time. The way that they ran their lives and reality shows from day one was, it's us all the time. You can wake up and we will be your friends, just like your Barbies. You can dress us up, we're gonna go in the Barbie house and the dream car, and you can play with us, you know, every single day. But the is that there's so much that's changed about the way they look. And by the way, not changed. Cause they would have wrinkles and things would be dropping. And I do wonder if they would be able to maintain their place in pop culture. Like, if Kim was really, whatever she is, early 40s, 45. 45. Okay. Which we all know, for those of us who have been there, is sort of where things start to shift a bit. If she looked like a real 45 year old, would she be able to maintain her place as, you know, the diva mother of all influencers? Or would it be a little more like, okay, she's so over she. So in the past, if she didn't post photos of herself in bikinis and crazy glamour shots, semi undressed all the time, whether she's doing those in one big bulk photo shoot and she's putting the photos out day after day, that's what she's supplying. She's applying a picture of herself, as you said, uncanny. A younger Kim in the time travel machine.
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D
Exactly. I believe the Kardashians have achieved kind of what they came here to do. They're part of the establishment now. And the maintenance of that image of Kim, I think is essential. I also think there's something that I find fascinating to imagine the Kardashian calendar like it does. You do have to plot in what the time of recovery will be. I already think about that in terms of their storytelling and the way they kind of plan out the events. Like the Maryland dress, again, is a good example. So much went into the planning of that moment. It was probably a year or two ahead. And so then factoring in what we can presume as plastic surgery, recovery, some of these surgeries that we can assume or wonder that they're doing, there are long recovery times. They're really invasive surgeries.
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E
How does she get that little Waist when she goes to the Met gala. I mean, we don't think she actually got her rib taken out. Right. Most likely that's an urban myth.
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D
Oh, I think so. I do. I do. Same with Kylie, actually. And there's, like, two surgeons that do it, apparently in America or something.
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E
Well, that sort of goes back. Yeah. To what I was saying in terms of, like, they look weird when you see them in person. You're not like, wow, there's that amazing goddess. You're sort of like, wow, there's plastic surgery, cyborg. We crossed over to a place where the digital selves are really so much more dominant, not only in terms of the way that we can get status and interact with other people who, you know, we call our friends on Instagram, but also in terms of making money. Like, how would you really be a force online, be a content creator at this point? If you're a woman, if you don't look a certain way? I mean, I have to say, I once had a conversation with a woman who was. She was a door girl at Nels, and she was a big promoter, you know, in the 80s and 90s. And she's really beautiful, and she's, you know, in her late 50s now. And she said to me, look, if you want to continue to be in the mix, you got to do something. And she meant, like, being with music industry people, not stuff that I would actually do, but that always stuck with me, and I think we're in a place where that may just be the price of admission.
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D
Yeah. In my experience, when I saw Kim and Chris in person, what I found myself whispering over to my partner who was there with me. I was like, this isn't even glamour. This is power. Yes. I think there's a cyborg element, not only to the symmetry of their faces and their bodies, but the precision of their presence. A lot of people do share with me when they've had an experience with the Kardashians in person, they always say, kim was so nice and professional. She was on time, she was so sweet, and she was so pretty in person. And it's almost like there's a packaging of the human experience with them that they seem to have perfected as well. So it's how they look, but it's also their essence. What was it like for you guys?
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C
So 10 years ago, I wrote a cover story for Forbes about Kim Kardashian, and, you know, it was exactly that for me. We did the photo shoot before the interview, and I walked in, and she was there in her Robe. She was getting her makeup done and I was like, I'm Natalie. I'm the journalist doing the interview. And she', like, oh, so nice to meet you. You know, somebody tells me that you're from Dubai, which is where I grew up. She's like, I love Dubai. I've been there so many. It's so beautiful. And then she goes, oh, you know, like, I hear you're, you're, you're half Lebanese. One of my best friends is Lebanese. I love Lebanese people. Whatever. You know, she's connecting with me on this. And it, it was so interesting because, like, I don't think that she actually to sound so cynical, but, like, I don't think that she actually cares about me. But what she's trying to do there is build a rapport with me so that she can connect with me on a human level. And what I thought at that moment was I was like, huh, you and your publicist have done your homework. Your publicist went and looked up who I was and put the dossier together and gave it to you. And you memorize the talking points and you're connecting with me and we're going to connect on a human level.
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D
There's common patterns with some of the most classic American icons. These people like jfk, they understood they had to have a kind of individualized relationships with journalists. And of course, JFK famously learned to look right at the camera so that he was projecting his eye contact into people's living rooms. At the rise of tv, Jack Yeo famously selected a journalist that had been friendly towards JFK in the aftermath of his assassination to instill the Camelot myth and then disseminate that through the piece to the point where when that journalist edited it out of the piece about JFK's assassination, she insisted that they couldn't go to press unless they kept it in. So there's just. It requires a real sensitivity to the machinations of media to get your message out there and start to scale the way the Kardashians did.
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E
Yeah, no, she was so. She was so friendly to me too. I interviewed her for the COVID of Rolling Stone, and Kanye didn't want her to do it was like, I don't think you should be on the COVID of Rolling Stone.
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C
Interesting. Wait, why not?
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E
Because, I don't know, maybe he thought it was inappropriate. Maybe he felt competitive. You know, he had had some sort of issue with Rolling Stone. He was on the COVID with a crown of thorns, and there had been some problem with the piece and they'd had Some debate over it. So maybe he didn't trust Rolling Stone and she was the one who sort of overruled him and said, like, okay, let me just talk to the reporter and we'll see how it goes. So, I mean, the reason we mentioned the Jonathan Van Meter biography that's gonna come out in the fall is that this is an Access biography and Jonathan Van Meter is writer, has been a writer for Vogue for many, many, many years. You know, wrote about Hillary Clinton. Like, he knows how to do a grand Dame biography. He also really likes her, but he is also a real writer. And it is not an approved. You know, this is not. She has final cut. This is a real writer looking at her life with access to her and asking her real questions. What I think is fascinating about that is I actually think at this point, Kim doesn't have anything to hide. We already know, you know, she makes really lucrative brand deals. You know, she doesn't have a great relationship with Caitlyn. Like, what's she afraid of? Maybe she's afraid that people talk about that she is dropping studying for the bar. She's not gonna be a lawyer. She might be afraid of that.
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D
I think she'll finish it, though. I think she'll get the job done. It might take her a while, but that's.
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E
I think it's taken many, many, many. And it was just reported that she's not taking the bar this year.
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D
So.
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E
But yeah, maybe, like JFK Jr. Maybe she'll get there eventually.
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D
Yes, exactly.
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E
What do you think about Bianca? Because Bianca, Kanye's current wife, you know, she is totally down with all of your media theory. Right. I think if you posed a lot of this to Kim in the ways that you're talking about it with, like, you know, French theory, she might be like, that's a little much for me. This has always been Kanye's thing. But Bianca, architect, has 100% clarity on what she is doing when she is taking her clothes off. And she's sort of maybe the Yoko Ono of this situation with Kanye. How do you see her?
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D
When I was writing the book, what I kind of found myself just naturally writing was I was looking a bit at the villain era that Kanye was embracing in the aftermath of his. His divorce with Kim. And it felt like in that moment, they were doing this art experiment or this art, performance art, where he. Bianca was naked. She was nude. Kim and Kanye, the Kim, yay myth is famously about Kanye dressing Kim and Kim being this mannequin on which Yeezy was dressed. And there was like an ever, you know, changing high fashion, like paper doll dresses, you know, onto Kim. So Kim was all about being dressed. And that's still Kim's story. After Kanye, she's this mannequin that works with artists and creatives. Bianca was kind of stripped down to the canvas, and that was its own spectacle. I think it also helped Kanye's post Kim Ye villain era. Then there was discourse for a while of he's being so abusive to Kim on Twitter and Instagram, and now he's got this wife that he keeps nude everywhere and takes her around and it's a humiliation ritual. That was a big thing on TikTok. I remember at the time. And what I'm finding interesting is we never heard from her. We only saw her. She was seen but not heard for so long. But now she's doing these appearances at universities. She's dressed now, and we're seeing that she has, yes, a distinct education and vision and her own voice. The first time I ever heard her speak was a video of her. She was visiting a university. She was in an architecture class, I think. And she was talking about something that was very media ish, about the vibrations on cave walls. And it was really insightful. We were looking at cave systems and how we could incorporate walls in the
- [27:57]
C
homes to actually encapsulate objects.
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D
My name is Bianca Censori. At Yeezy, we were able to develop the donda language and aesthetic with Kanye. And primitive futurism is the ethos behind our collective. And it did show that there's some sort of collaboration creatively happening between them. But I think the timing of debuting Bianca in this new way is somehow intentional.
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C
But talk about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Like, isn't she just a copy of Kim?
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D
Aesthetically, yes, aesthetically. In the aftermath of Kimye, there were a few Kim copies, and some people took that as his sort of F you to Kim, citing a lyric from a Kanye song, something like, I can make a thousand U's or something. Some people took it to mean, he's not over Kim. He's looking for another Kim, and he'll never find that. But it is quite interesting that the Kardashians are famous for Kardashian face. Instagram, face. This, like, memetic impact they had on the feeds of a bunch of faces and styles from Fast Fashion that made the Kardashians feel as if they were everywhere during that era. And the fact that there is still a continuation of Kim 2.0s that we see on Kanye's arm is quite interesting. But that's why it's interesting to now hear Bianca's voice and hear her speaking for herself.
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C
Well, and she did this Vanity Fair profile called Bianca Censori uncensored. For the first time, Kanye West's wife is speaking for herself.
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D
Bianca told me that she has never appeared nude when she didn't want to appear nude. She considers her nudity her art.
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E
One thing I thought was incredible was that the reporter went to Korea to interview Kanye, and then Kanye has said a lot of things I do not agree with, obviously, and horrible anti Semitic rants. But the reporter goes to meet Kanye and thinks it's gonna be like meeting Oz, right? It's gonna be this incredible moment, and she's gonna learn so much about creativity, and he's maybe gonna say crazy things, but, you know, this is gonna be a meeting with a master. And she's just like, oh, he's very small. He's very quiet. Which people have told me over the years. And he doesn't really have much, which almost makes this, like, a little creepier that he has also captured us with his mental illness for 10 to 15 years.
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D
The Kimye myth was such a creative spectacle, and it did its job as well. Like it elevated Kim. There was a lot of curiosity about who Kanye would actually settle with next because Bianca's been quiet for so long, long. And now she's kind of stepping out in this new way. People do want to listen. They want to hear her, and she can't do exactly what Kim did. Kim and Kanye made something about industry and the industrialization of their storytelling and a lot around fashion. It will have to be something different. And I think that's where they're going to make more of a thing out of Bianca's education, her expertise, and the singularity, maybe of her voice. Whereas Kim is an every woman. She's a shapeshifter.
- [30:56]
C
Something that's always rubbed me a little bit the wrong way about how people talk about Kim and Kanye, or kind of the myth of them, is that it was all Kanye's genius, quote unquote, and that he, like, elevated Kim in this way that has always rubbed me a little bit the wrong way because I, you know, as an outsider to their relationship, have always felt that Kim actually gave a lot to Kanye. I mean, Kim is, in my perspective, a fantastic businesswoman. I think that's undeniable at this point. I don't know that Kanye would have been able to turn Yeezy into what it was had he not had the stability and business sense of a smart person like Kim because he'd never been able to do it before. And Kanye, at least in my recollection, famously volatile relationship with money. I think there's like many reports of him being in debt prior to being with Kim. Since the divorce, she's talked about some of that instability. I mean, she went on Call her daddy and said that at one point during a mental health episode, Kanye gave away. There are five Lamborghinis. So I think maybe they played this idea of. It's like Kanye's the genius and he's coming in and I'm listening. But also like, I think she gave him a lot behind the scenes.
- [32:07]
D
Yeah, there's like a topping from the bottom kind of dynamic that I think women often are kind of positioned to have to figure out how to do. And she was, as I write in my book, she was a very willing mannequin. And I think she was a power
- [32:18]
C
bottom, is what you're saying.
- [32:19]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe. Honestly, yes. Because the thing is, back when they got engaged, Kanye was actually floating this idea of a Donda enterprise. And the Donda vision he had back then was this multi genre, multi industry world of industry, from graphic design to fashion to music to finance. And he was seeking VC funding for it, if I remember right. And there was a theory that he actually proposed to Kim in San Francisco to court VCs. And Kim has kind of actualized the Donda vision. In truth, Kim is doing everything all at once. She's doing TV and movies, she's producing, she's acting, she's trying to do this law thing. She did private equity for a minute. So this everything all at once sort of vision he had for dominating culture even more. Beyond just the centrality, a virality, Kim is playing out more, I'd say. I think they were. They knew what they were doing together. They were really better together during that time. And then Kim knew the right moment to exit too.
- [33:26]
B
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- [33:45]
A
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- [34:19]
B
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- [34:26]
A
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- [34:59]
C
So what about now? I mean, is it Kim and Chris as the masterminds of culture and of the Kardashian Jenner empire, or is it Kim and Kylie? Because I think it's pretty clear that over the last 10 years or so, I mean, it's Kylie who's been the most ascendant member of the Kardashian Jenners. She's the one who's gained the most amount of fame, I would argue.
- [35:20]
D
Yeah, just anecdotally being on short form video content, TikTok and stuff. And I find Kim to be the most interesting and useful prototype for my purposes. But Gen Z engages with Kylie. I should really make more Kylie videos just thinking strategically because they click, they watch. They're very interested in Kylie, I think because she was born into the fishbowl and Gen Z was born into a fishbowl. You know, they're being screen kids. But Kylie and Kim have always had their own utility to each other. When Kim married Kanye, she kind of did play wife and mother a lot for the first, I think it was a year or so. She really just played up those roles where Kylie started Kylie Cosmetics and obviously it was epically successful. And so they started to float and test Kim's idea for A cosmetics company by doing a collaboration first with Kylie Cosmetics. So they kind of have Kylie lead the charge on things sometimes and test the water. And then Kim comes in, and they even made a kind of exaggeration, caricature of that storyline. Kim, when she published Selfish, her book of selfies, she had a selfie in a mirror wearing a bikini, and she was like, this is Kylie's bikini. And Kylie's lighting. I like her bathroom lighting for my selfies more. So she defers to Kylie in this way that kind of sets up that paradigm. Yeah. I don't know what comes next. I think that they played the same book that Trump has, and so they're now part of the Trump elite. I write in my book a lot about how the famous thing of the political establishment has collapsed more and more with the entertainment establishment. But I also think that the technocratic establishment is going to collapse more with entertainment and then probably also with politics.
- [36:50]
C
Wait, what do you mean by that?
- [36:52]
D
I think that the Bezos are Kardashian. Their new relations to the public, like
- [36:57]
C
being at the Met Gala or Met Gala.
- [37:00]
D
Also, the richface thing, there's a visual sort of uniformity, of course. And I think Lauren brought this aspirational, Kardashified socialite life to Jeff. And it's really interesting to me that Jeff Bezos was famously resistant to getting along with Trump, and then it kind of changed when Lauren entered the picture.
- [37:18]
E
But wait, wait, wait. The Kardashians are not Trump friends, are they? Really?
- [37:22]
D
She's. They had a big photo op in the White House next to Trump. She was famously kind of had a neutral expression.
- [37:27]
E
Right, right. Okay. Yeah. Back in the day. Yes, that's true. Okay.
- [37:31]
D
And pictured with Ivanka, I guess I
- [37:32]
E
would say in this administration, they haven't gone in. Right.
- [37:38]
D
Not photo op. Lies. But we have to remember that Joshua Kushner is the founder of Thrive Capital, which is the main funder of Skins.
- [37:45]
C
True. Well, and what you just said about the collapsing of the technocratic. The Jeff Bezos with the Kardashians, with the politics, in a sense. We actually did an episode about this. Vanessa. I was gonna make a joke. Like, is Mark Zuckerberg gonna get Yassified? He actually kind of did. He had his, like, black T shirt and gold chain and, like, cool hair for a second. So kind of it. Maybe Warhol's melded it to one. And I don't know. I mean, I do kind of feel that we are all living in this content creator world that came to us from the Kardashians I mean, I think I've talked on the show about what I see as the trickle down content creator economy where like regardless of your job, we all feel the need to post like influencers. Now it's baked into your job that even if you work at a car dealership, you're going to do TikTok dances to advertise the latest deal. So when did this shift happen for you?
- [38:35]
E
Yeah, when did you, you accept that you were living in the Kardashians world?
- [38:41]
D
Yeah. So I joined Instagram to tell the story of this self study I was doing and Instagram remains. Maybe I'm just a millennial, but I really prefer Instagram because it's more text you to put the meme or the image and then you write about it in the caption. But a young person told me to try TikTok and I went viral really quickly and so of course that feels good. I was always a writer. I went to Columbia for nonfiction writing and I kind of put it to the side to do my psychology stuff. So it felt like an opportunity to promote myself as a writer and generate interest in my work. It's kind of gotten a little bit unwieldy. Like I have to learn how to be strategic and I have to kind of remind people like there's a whole book to read. I like, you know, worked 14 hour days for two years to get it out there and it's a serious book.
- [39:25]
C
Mj, thank you so much for joining us.
- [39:28]
D
Us, thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun convo and
- [39:31]
C
everyone can go and find MJ's book Deconstructing the Kardashians. That is Deconstructing with Two Ks, a new media manifesto. Wherever you get your books and where can people find you online?
- [39:41]
D
If you search MJ Corey. Mj C R E Y you can find my TikTok easily. MJ Corey writes, you can find my Instagram and Kardashian Underscore Colloquium is my special Kardashian only page.
- [39:54]
E
But definitely buy the book. The number one CTA is by the book.
- [39:58]
D
It's all for the book. It's all Nathan Fielder scheme to get my book sold.
- [40:13]
A
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