Meet the Met

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 5th, 2026, Cinco de Mayo. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. Hi, John. And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana. Hi, John. So we're in some weird mid-frozen moment where we're waiting to see when or how the war with Iran will restart since it seems inevitable that it will restart, even though this morning Pete Hegseth said that the ceasefire is holding, even though we've shot down Iranian boats and they've been firing on ships and the UAE, they fired on the UAE and the UAE fired back. But apparently the ceasefire is holding, thus giving new definition to the word ceasefire, which is a time in a war when people continued to fire. So now that we've redefined ceasefire, we are not yet back in the full blush of the war. And I don't even think we need to talk about this because until we get some window on what it will mean for us to be back in full hostilities, we're just like, we're flying blind. So I thought maybe I would call an audible and go cultural and talk about the images that we saw last night on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the annual Met Gala fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, long sponsored by Condé Nast and run by Vogue and Anna Winter. A weird moment for this to be happening with the release of the new sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, the novel and movie about the evils but actually magnificence of Anna Wintour and Vogue, now paid for by Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez, who apparently ponied up $10 million to serve as the sponsors of the Met Gala. So why am I bringing this up? Well, first, I just want to report that I had to get across town in New York at 5 o'clock yesterday, and I live on 86th Street and there is a transverse through Central Park at 86th Street. And all of Fifth Avenue is closed down, including the transverse at 86th Street to help with the crowd control at the Met Gala. So I was enraged, furious. I had to walk through the park to get home. I was late. I was very upset because, like, why are New York streets being closed down at rush hour to help Vogue, Jeff Bezos, and, you know, a hundred celebrities in ridiculous dresses. Why is that being prioritized over the sort of good working order of hardworking New Yorkers such as myself who need to, like, get across town to make dinner for their families? Okay, so I was already negatively disposed. I'm granting you that. But then the photos started coming out. And I know that the world of fashion is divided between efforts at extreme examples of physical beauty being paraded in the most exquisite way. And now deliberate outrageous shocks to the eyes of ways of making you like gasp and horror at the sheer ugliness of what is being presented before you in order to shock you into some consciousness about something or other. but there was almost no none of the beauty as far as I can tell and all of the shock that that's now maybe maybe I haven't been paying enough attention and that has been the balance 80-20 for years but I thought it was culturally it's culturally significant that the world of the beautiful people is now the world of the deliberately ugly people and I don't know what that means so i thought maybe we could have a conversation about that eliana do you am i wrong that this was a transition into a higher level of gross apparel do you think i'm not sure um there was a certain aspect of like uh grotesquerie and extremism. And then there were also people who looked like gorgeous and normal, like Blake Lively looked totally normal wearing a Versace dress and a few others who looked beautiful. Kylie Jenner and the sister Kendall looked totally bizarre wearing like, you know, the forms of naked bodies. So overall, I think I agree with you. Kim Kardashian looked like a bizarre alien with cone boobs and Lauren Sanchez had her assets totally on display once again. So yeah, overall, I think I agree with you. Look, I've spent decades arguing that ideas matter. and I really believe that sleep does too. I suffer from sleep apnea and dealing with my sleep apnea has been one of the signal issues of my life. If you or someone you love suffers from mild sleep apnea or snoring, there's an FDA approved daytime therapy called Excite OSA available through Goodnight RX and you need to hear about this. 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So, like, I always thought, you know, when I got into my 20s or so, and I knew adults that kept going to Halloween parties dressed up, and I was like, I don't, this seems like a pain and embarrassing and silly, and I don't get it, and I don't. so to me it's all unbelievably childish that real grown-ups who are actually wealthy who have some of whom i presume have jobs are putting on these elaborate costumes like the bad bunny thing where he wore all the prosthetic age makeup like that's kind of you know bad bunny Bad Bunny, who was 32 years old, tried to make himself look like he was 75 and he was in a black outfit, white hair, white beard, was walking with a cane. Yeah. That was Bad Bunny's outfit. It's like everyone wants to play dress up. And I find that I really like I cringe for them. But the other thing is that I'm fascinated because I scrolled through as many of these photos as I could. I'm fascinated by who, I mean, I know some of the names, obviously, but then there's this enormous cast of like quasi, I don't know who I'm looking at. It's like, I don't know what a celebrity is now. It's like this liminal space between like AI slop. There's a celebrity name somewhere mixed in and like a video game. Like I could suss out who like people who were related to famous people because they would have like a like a video game first name like Infinity or something. And then it would be like, you know, Infinity. Infinity. Infinity Gyllenhaal or something. Who, Chase Infinity? Chase Infinity. I don't know. I was the star of One Battle After Another, the Oscar winning movie. So just. No idea. She was. She's the lead actress in. i'm not denying it i don't know who i'm looking at what i'm telling you okay yes i understand that i don't know okay but chase infinity is would be somebody who would be at the have been at the met gala since the beginning of the met gala she or first of all a she's beautiful b she like as i say was uh decorated actress in the biggest movie of last year but i take your point that name my point is there are names like you know and i'm making this up uh uh laser beam fonda yes and i'm like okay that's obviously some fonda kid right okay so so aside from the curmudgeonly i don't know these kids these days and i don't know who anybody is anymore i just want to tell abe that just so he knows the last night uh asap rocky is not uh rocky's kid not related to rocky balboa Right, yeah. He's made it on his own. But you raise a larger point that I, what struck me about what we were watching and seeing. So just going back 20 years, the Devil Wears Prada, as I mentioned, the movie version of the novel written in 2003 comes out in 2006. And the main event in the Devil Wears Prada is the Met Gala. And the Met Gala became this historic kind of social event in America because of the sponsorship of Condé Nast and Vogue and Anna Wintour as a form of a public display of what used to happen or would only happen at fashion shows in New York and in Milan and in Paris when designers were parading their wares for the following season or just trying to get attention for their names or things like that. The Met Gala massified this a little bit by becoming a, it's a fundraising event, but there's this red carpet outside the, you know, one of the most historic buildings in America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And so you had these hundreds of photographs of women primarily dressed in remarkable clothing. and so it was kind of like a big deal in the world of vapid big deals. In the world of Condé Nast, the glossy magazines, the world of fashion that a lot of people care about and all of that. So flash forward 20 years, Condé Nast barely exists. Vogue is a shadow, former shadow of itself. The Devil Wears Prada 2 has come out and it's a movie about how Vogue doesn't matter anymore and nothing matters And the only question is which billionaire is going to keep you in business and which billionaire is going to give the job of running your magazine to his girlfriend. And this just as that movie, which is a big hit, smacks of the desperation of the change in our social standards and media power and all of that. And that's the subject of the movie, which is not good. as I detail in Eliana's own publication, The Free Beacon in a review this week, there was a whiff of desperation to me in the attire that we saw on the non-beautiful Blake Lively, Sarah Pidgeon, who played Carolyn Bessette in the recent TV movie, who was absolutely stunningly beautiful and beautiful to look at and all of that. But all of the freak shows, and there were dozens and dozens and dozens of them, and it had this quality of, please look at me. I don't care that I am making myself into a grotesque horror show. If you'll just look at me for five seconds, because I feel like I am disappearing. I'm a celebrity celebrity has been discounted there are too many celebrities which is sort of Abe's point there are influencers and there are reality tv show stars and there are people you do and there are children of famous people and celebrity has now become wildly elastic and people who no one even knows what they look like or we don't know what they look like have a hundred million like I don't know what Mr. Beast looks like but he's as famous a person as exists on this planet practically. I don't even know if he was there. But I was struck by the fact that Lena Dunham was there. Lena Dunham, the star of Girls, out now with a memoir of her life called Fame Sick. And Lena Dunham was literally looked like a kind of exploded blood vessel. You know, at the moment that the blood vessel explodes and somehow someone got caught a picture of it on a very high-speed camera. She was in this red, feathery thing where you barely could see her head popping out of it. And it had this quality, which girls had, which a lot of celebrity culture has now, which is just, if you don't look at me for five seconds, I am going to vanish into the ether, never to be seen or heard from again. And there is something pathetic about that. And it's not transgressive. It's not, I'm thumbing my nose at your standards of aestheticism. It is, I'll be a performing monkey for you in whatever way possible if you'll just take my picture and put it in the carousel of photos that somebody posts on Instagram of the looks at the Met Gala. And that is a, I mean, in some ways it's a horrible thing to participate in. And yet there's something bizarrely healthy about the fact that the kind of celebrity culture that governed America for like 50 years has died. And that the celebrities are now whoring after you rather than everybody else whoring after them. Does that make any sense? Maybe. I mean, but I'm not sure. Or people aren't still whoring after them? But I mean, anyone with an iPhone is now like a possible capture of the image. So it's not like, oh my God, if I don't get photographed by Annie Leibovitz, I don't exist. Now it's like if I'm not on 100,000 Instagram feeds by somebody who is just standing on a street corner watching me, I don't exist. So it's like the gatekeeping has dropped and it's now just all about numbers. Celebrity, there was a time that's not like it was better or worse when celebrity was husbanded and celebrities disappeared for long periods of time. You couldn't see them. They made a movie every two years and then they came out and they were interviewed a couple of times. And the scarcity is what made them valuable like a diamond. But when you can start lab growing diamonds, when they don't come out of a mine in Mali and they're lab grown and then every single person on earth can have a diamond that is indistinguishable from something dug out of a mine by a slave. The diamond is devalued. Like it's just not as important anymore. So Chase Infinity, there's a great leveling. So Chase Infinity is no different from Blake Lively who is no different from Lena Dunham who is no different from whatever. she's prettier and lita donham is uglier and lita donham is emphasizing her ugliness as a as a way of finding her place in this world but you know it's just meaningless i mean maybe it always i thought the moment a moment that highlighted this was saturday night live this week because olivia rodrigo was uh you know was the host of musical guests and she gave a a shout to Jake Paul because they were both in a Disney TV show They're both Disney children, Disney actors, Disney child actors. And now you don't know. I didn't even know that. I didn't know that Olivia Rodrigo and Jake Paul. I certainly didn't know that about Jake Paul. Do you need to tell Abe who Jake Paul is? No, okay. You know who Jake Paul is. I know he fought in a match like a year or so ago. Yeah, he's like a – I can picture him. Yeah, basically he's somebody who got into an ultimate fighting fight with somebody. I'm an Abe level of cultural knowledge. Abe, I'm looking through these pictures. I think the names you were grasping for were Sunday Rose Kidman Urban and Lily Rose Depp. Now, Lily Rose Depp, again, also a movie star. So Sunday Rose Kidman, Urban, I don't know, she's just somebody's daughter. And that, of course, is also a famous quality of socially prominent moments like debutante's balls or something like that. So a famous person's kid sort of should be at the Met Ball. I mean, Met Gala, whatever. Like, that's understandable. um lily rose depp is one of the stars of nosferatu and she is johnny depp's daughter but that is also the world the nepo baby world of show business which is now much more intense than it used to be is nonetheless you know sure johnny depp's daughter is going to be worth taking a look-see at right and and nicole kidman's daughter is going to be of interest uh in in her appearance and all of that. But again, getting back to the freak show aspect, Lena Dunham, Sam Smith, the singer who came dressed like a kind of crow, you know, he's gay, trans, non-binary, something, I mean, he's like everything, Sam Smith. But he literally looked like a crow with a big thing sticking out of his head. A big deal was made out of this kind of tragic figure the first black transgender cerebral palsy victim model to be signed by Wilhelmina. So. Real sign of the times. Yeah. So my point is, does this, none of this matters, right? I mean, we're at war. You know, anti-Semitism is like is on the rise. Horrible things are happening everywhere. Somebody there was another weird assassination attempt yesterday. We haven't even brought up, you know, outside the White House grounds, somebody apparently targeting J.D. Vance, who, of course, got, you know, within 2000 miles of J.D. Vance. So it was only an intent. But there is something about the cultural decline of the institutions here that this is what the Met Gala is now. It is an event thrown by a billionaire, not by a magazine, that his second wife would like prominent exposure in. So she buys her way into owning it. And then all these people show up looking disgusting and knowingly looking disgusting. It's not like this is the new standard of beauty. It's like I am leaning in to being repellent. I'm going to talk to you about Brooklyn Bedding. You've heard me talk about this before. I got a free mattress from Brooklyn Bedding to test it. 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John, I'm thinking back, and this relates to this point, I'm thinking back to your point about what celebrity was and maybe this is a healthier version of it. And I have very complicated feelings about it because I think celebrity in general is an unhealthy thing. I mean, there was a time going way back in human history when there was no such thing as celebrity, right? There was status, which was tied to genuine value. You know, what could you do in your immediate community, you know, that aided survival of the Klan or whatever, right? And then celebrity became sort of like a different thing, a sort of one layer removed from reality. And I think that's the sort of unhealthy part about it. But the democratizing of it, which you're talking about now, also means that so many other people, everyone is chasing it now, especially a certain generation in a certain economy. I'm reminded of that piece in the New Atlantis about Diner Corps, and I forget the writer's name. Do you recall that? Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll look it up. That wonderful piece about how there are all these Gen Z kids who are out there all over the country in all sorts of pockets you wouldn't expect who are downwardly mobile, stagnating economically, largely living with their parents. and they don't see any prospects for success in the real world and they are chasing online celebrity they are chasing sort of influencer uh status um that's not healthy i mean that's so everything is a as we know is a trade-off um so okay so the author of that piece which It's called American Diner Gothic is Robert Mariani in the Atlantic. So go. So look it up to your great profit. Well, so according to history, the first celebrities emerge in the late 18th century. That is to say, people who were famous for being famous, who were not royals, were soldiers. Right. So you have figures like Bo Brummel, Casanova, Byron, who was probably the first international celebrity, but he, of course, was a great poet. So it was all sort of tied. He was an accomplished person. But celebrity, as we understand it, is a creation of the modern media age of radio and television and motion pictures and things like that. so that it was said in like 1915 that the most famous person in the world was Charlie Chaplin, because his image, the image of the tramp, you know, in the faded tuxedo with the mustache and the cane, that that image was recognizable to more people on earth than any image had ever been. And so he was the first celebrity. That's like 110 years ago. So we're talking about a century of this world of a new kind of fame that transcends borders, boundaries. Recordings make people internationally famous. Michael Jackson was the most famous person, so famous that even now, you know, 18 years after his death, you make a movie about him, and despite his horrible, monstrous life story, that movie's going to make a billion dollars because people still resonate to him. But in the last 20 years, there has been this explosion of celebrity untied, which I guess is sort of what you're saying, untied to very nearly anything. The reality TV show celebrity who is known for being on a TV show as playing themselves in some extreme fashion, or the influencer, the Instagram TikTok influencer, who is literally known for nothing. But fair is fair, like mostly for being pretty, particularly if you're a woman, pretty with like old-fashioned, pre-feminist stuff like Olivia J. Giannulli and people like that who have 5 million followers because they're really, really good-looking and very curvy and they wear clothing and then they men can ogle them and women can like look and see what they should dress like that's not that's like literally fashion magazines from the 40s and 50s only they're these are moving pictures on little films so um but you know but they're famous for nothing except being themselves but we don't even know who they are because they barely speak or if they speak they basically are just reading off a commercial and maybe this is a good thing because it devalues celebrity and celebrity is a bad metric by which to have a society judge what is and what is not important i don't know no okay just i'm just thinking as you're saying this like doesn't celebrity involve people knowing who you are? And maybe I'm weird and I'm not representative. I'm actually certain that's the case, but I wonder how widespread I am. When I go through these pictures from the Mac Gala, I don't know who literally any of these people are. I could walk by them on the street. I wouldn't know who they are or what they do or what they represent or that they're famous. And so I wonder to a certain extent if there is actually a disappearance of celebrity. Right. And there's also the opposite. Because there has been a great flattening. Anybody can become this. Just like we're here doing a podcast. becoming you know news people um but i mean literally it is shocking i don't know who any of these people who went to the met gala are except for lauren sanchez bezos and her you know twin pillars that that accompanied her they're the most famous attendees and blake lively because she was on gossip girl when i was in high school well not just that blake lively had a big blake yesterday was a big day for Blake Lively because her psychotic lawsuit, the psychotic lawsuit, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iran-Iraq war of celebrity lawsuits where two people who starred in a hugely successful movie together decided to destroy each other's careers and settled yesterday for that. Again, in a weird way where no one who Justin Baldoni was when the movie started and he wrote and directed and starred in this movie and he was like on track that made a 500 million dollars and was on track to becoming a huge celebrity and then he and she like ended up having a psychotic break common psychotic break and turning that into a gigantic story that even now nobody can possibly follow again on snl there was a sketch on weekend update this weekend about a fight between two podcasters who are way more successful than we are. Alex Earl and Alex Cooper. Alex Earl and Alex Cooper. Yeah. And nobody knows what this fight is. It's Alex Cooper's company. And Alex Cooper's company apparently let Alex Earl go. She had a show on their network and let it go. And nobody knows why they're fighting. And this whole sketch, which is very funny, is the two of them who are physically in the sketch indistinguishable from one another they look exactly the same they have the they talk exactly the same up talk they have the same weird and and they have the same name and you and you don't know what they're talking about as they're fighting and so that's part of the flattening effect that you're talking about and as i say maybe this is all to the good because we you can now become famous somehow. And it's very much driven by market forces because Instagram, these are all viral things that happen to people. So it's the market deciding. So if you're like a market fundamentalist, boy, this is great. It's actually really happening. Nobody is making it happen. It happens and then people exploit it and they can use it. But we do live in a world in which we elect 536 or 537 national political figures in the United States and 50 governors. So let's say 587 national political figures who are chosen by the people in the numbers of hundreds of thousands to millions to hundreds of millions. And 90% of them are less famous than Alex Earle and Alex Cooper. Is that a good society to live in? Like, shouldn't we know more about our politicians? Not to bring up, not to make this an SNL program, but there was a sketch years ago that is exactly what you're talking about. There was a sketch on when Game of Thrones was, you know, hit its peak, which was massively popular for a show in the streaming age numbers-wise, you know, on a premiere channel like HBO. And so they had this sketch where they had, you know, they would ask them questions, these Game of Thrones superfans. They came dressed up, you know, and whatever. And it was like, you know, who is this actor? what's the name of this kind of dragon all these like absurd questions and then there's like for the final jeopardy style question to the guy was who is your congressman yeah and he froze completely like he had no idea what to do and i think they even brought nicholas walder what's his name the the kingslayer the actor who played the kingslayer on to ask the question so the guy was all excited and he was like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna kill this one i'm gonna knock over the fence and it was like, who is your congressman? But that is the kind of thing that I think that we don't need our congressman to be famous. I think the problem is that we also don't need Alex Earle and Alex Cooper to be famous to be as famous as they are right I mean But there no need In other words they as famous as they are in a kind of naturally occurring they grow like weeds It's naturally occurring, right? The world of, again, in the United States, these 587 elected officials by district, by state, by, you know, by the country or something like that. So Trump is the most famous person in the world. There's no question about that. But that's where you get this bizarre phenomenon in which the members of Congress that we know the best are the ones who combine having – sitting in an elective office with Instagram or TikTok. Like that's who Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. That's who Marjorie Taylor Greene is. That's who Lauren Boebert is. That's who, you know, that's who Momdani is. That's who everybody who is under the age of 40 or 50 believes that is the sort of the secret sauce to becoming politically prominent. I read somewhere somebody saying that what it now means to be a candidate for office. When I became a person who understood this stuff, one of the first people I met and knew well were media consultants who made television commercials, who were always the most entertaining, most enjoyable people to know in politics. because they were smart, because they were clever, because they were like ad men. And they knew everything about everything in the sense that they knew what was a negative appeal, what was a positive appeal, how to push things, what was good or bad about their candidates. They were very candid if you knew them about what was good and bad about the people who they were working for. And they were really fun, right? And so they made the content that made the politician pop using television and radio ads. And now, basically, this is constant streaming of daily activity. That is what makes a candidate a candidate in 2026. How many TikToks are you making? How much do you put up on Instagram? I heard this story about there's a race in New York, a Democratic primary between an upstart and a sitting congressman, and the sitting congressman said, I need 65-year-old people to vote for me in order for me to beat back this guy who was like on my tail. I'm not going to reach them through TikTok, but I might reach them through Facebook. So I'm going to make things for Facebook, but not, well, he's trying to make things for TikTok. I'm trying to make things for Facebook, but it's all content. It's all little bits of content, constant little bits of content. And what is Trump? Trump is content. Trump is memes from the White House, true social posts, moments of outrage, weird things he does at four o'clock in the morning, all of that, constantly feeding the beast. So he is the example, perfect example of how you use this to gain political power but if mr beast is more famous than every congressman in the world and i don't even know what mr beast ever did he had a youtube show where he gave things away my kids talk my kids talk about mr beast well there's there there's mr beast food i know mr beast candy bars at the supermarket my kid my kid my kid just just sampled one beat uh i'm gonna i'm gonna screw up the names then they'll be mad at me so but there's like feasties feasties is that what it is there there mr beast has 1200 employees again i don't this is a successful going business that he's created out of nothing i don't have any problem with that i'm just saying like the celebrity the flattening of celebrity has is it a bad thing? You know, I just hit a milestone birthday. I'm 65 years old. Why am I telling you this? Because sleep is more important to me than ever as it becomes more and more difficult to get a good night's sleep. 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You know, he sort of puts a lot into his thing, into his show. But, you know, I don't know. People who mug for the camera. And there's a very thin line between, to my mind, a lot of influencers and OnlyFans stars. there's something pornographic about all of it and no I don't know maybe that's but maybe that's an exposure of an uncomfortable reality about show business that has always been the case right the great joke in the 19th century early 20th century was when the circus came to town or when a traveling troop came to town to do, you know, their version of whatever melodrama was on tour in America, or even Hamlet or something like that, boarding houses would say no dogs or actors because these troops were often made up of people who would like literally prostitute themselves on the side as they came through town to make a little extra money. And, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, famous celebrities, as Hollywood liberates itself from, you know, the shackles of puritanical production codes and things like that. What happens to women in Hollywood in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? They sell their bodies. They, you know, they partially get famous or get whatever because they go nude. and they draw people to movie theaters to get a glimpse of them nude. Now that's nothing because you could just Google something and see somebody nude. You mentioned OnlyFans. I read something yesterday where the star of American Pie, Shannon Elizabeth, this is, when was American Pie? 20 years ago? Longer? Shannon Elizabeth is now in her 50s. She started an OnlyFans and made a million dollars the first week. So an OnlyFans, if you don't know what that is, it's a subscription site where you subscribe to an individual performer's feed and they do sexual stuff for your perusal. It's amateur pornography. Right. Right. But but often with either with porn stars, I guess, but then with like, as I say, the temptation to go on OnlyFans if you're Shannon Elizabeth and you're like hard up and you stop getting acting work and you like are living, you know, in a one bedroom apartment in Tucson is. hey all you got to do is just you know set up a camera and go naked for a couple of minutes and who knows what you'll get out of it um that's a real seduction but it's almost like a reversion to that 19th century boarding house thing where it's like we can't have actors here because they'll you know because they'll they'll they'll set up shop as a as a whorehouse they'll turn they'll turn my boarding house into a whorehouse it's interesting you say that because and maybe this is obvious but influencing is also about it really about the transformation of advertising from something that was consumed on television and it was very clear what it was you know a 30 second advertisement for Maybelline or CoverGirl or a 60 second advertisement for, you know, clothing brand to something much more blurry where people show you their real lives and they're doing their makeup or they're blowing out their hair and they're using products. And there's this haziness about what's advertising and what's not. And technically, they're required to disclose when they're being paid to push products. But it's the fact that, you know, a third of it isn't paid and two thirds of it is paid that makes it, you know, alluring and you're seeing more of their real lives. And it's more seductive for the viewer because it's less clear what it actually is. And I think it's clear that brands and products and corporate America has found this incredibly effective because they're doing, they're using it a ton. And also the media has found it effective for distribution of content. And that's happening a ton behind the scenes where influencers and foreign governments. You know, I think this goes much deeper with influencers and what the lack of clarity between what's an ad and what's not an ad is like what, you know, is what's confusing and what is what these influencers represent. What is real and what's not real. What's authentic and what's not authentic? But this is a very, very important point because the reason that advertising had to transform itself and change is that its tropes and its methods of selling and all of that became totally transparent to people and their ability to plant ideas in people's heads or to make people want to get things just began to evanesce over time because everybody could see the mechanics behind it and therefore it became unconvincing. So just as social media rises and you have people developing interests in different kinds of people, real people who seem to be real people leading real lives, and then maybe if you get that person who isn't, you know, don't hate me because I'm beautiful Kelly LeBrock doing a, doing a, you know, a hair ad, but as a Mormon momfluencer, who's very busy, but, you know, like is likable and you're sort of enjoying. But really has seven nannies and the husband's making $10 million a year. All you see is her making breakfast in her perfect kitchen for her seven children. Right, exactly. And then you're like, but you're like, okay, because that you don't see the mechanics of because that we are not because the country hasn't caught up with the manipulation right and it's part of the reason that we are so susceptible to foreign influence in our instagram in in our social media feeds and why america you know is so ingenuous about being fed lines of bullshit by russian disinformation bots and qatari and disinformation bots It's the exact same thing. Yeah. You're being sold something. And the line is very blurry. But it doesn't look like you're being sold it, but you are. And at some point in the future, that will all become exposed to people in some fashion without it being like, oh, here's the story that dropped the scales from my eyes. You'll be like, oh, it's somebody else trying to sell me something. Yeah. I love this point because I've thought about this a lot. Because I remember when I was a kid, ads and commercials were these very earnest seeming testaments about the product, right? You know, buy this, you won't believe how great it works, you know. And people say, oh, well, it's in me. It works really well. And then there was this sort of intermediary phase before we got to what we're talking about now where the line is completely blurred. where suddenly I noticed particularly commercials were like so wised up and hip and inside that you didn't even understand what you were watching. You know, like they, as they say, de-centered the product itself and centered a sort of joke or a character or some sort of irony in it just to get away from that sort of we're nakedly selling you something. Right. Can I tell you something funny about this, the advertising thing and the commercials is that I've been watching the NBA playoffs. And my nine-year-old turns out to be fascinated by commercials. But really not just fascinated by what they are. He wants to watch them. And I'll say like, you know, at the end of the third quarter, it's already really late. And I'll say like, all right, you can stay till the end of the third quarter. Then you got to go to bed, you know, unless it's the Knicks playing and, you know, he has a rooting interest. And, you know, and he'll always say, can I wait till can I watch the commercials after the third quarter and then go to bed? The commercial break is actually something that he's waiting for. And it's an interesting thing this way that like if you didn't grow up with ads, this idea of pitching you directly something, you know, is so different. The company pitching you directly, please buy our product, is so different from the kind of advertising you're used to because it all has to be integrated because we've tried so hard to do away with classic advertising. You know, another on the influencer thing, another one of the things that these these people do, I'm just guessing that our audience isn't like heavy into the following influencers, but is like they'll say. And here are a bunch here are a bunch of the things that I tried that I really don like and that you shouldn buy And it like adds to the authenticity Like let me list the brands that aren paying me and some of their products Or in the world of clothing, like here are things that I have that really aren't worth it. And they'll like show you the Chanel bags and the Saint Laurent bags. Like I haven't been able to match these with anything. And like, you know, it's, there are new tactics that are like really, really effective. there's also i i also want to say that there there's one of the things about the podcasters and influencers and you know tucker and people like that is that they're the edgiest kind of celebrities now because regular celebrities have long lost their ability to shock or provoke right The most provocative you can be is to have a widely listened to podcast and say the word Jew a bunch of times or, you know, whatever. And it gets this whole political discussion and debate roiling and everybody knows who you are and whatever. And the other the entertainment industry has in a way sort of run out of ways to be edgy. I mean, John mentioned Sam Smith earlier, who showed up as a giant crow. But Sam Smith, just a few years ago, was performing at the Grammys and he wore because he's non-binary or whatever. They are non-binary. I don't know exactly. He dressed as Satan, you know, horns and tail and all. And it was basically done as a response to conservative commentators. So we had a Grammys performance that was aimed specifically at conservative, you know, Christian conservative commentators. It was an entirely political thing. But what I noticed about it, in addition to all that, was that there was nothing actually edgy about it. TMZ asked one of the leaders of the Church of Satan for a comment on the Sam Smith Satanist performance at the Grammys. And he said something like, eh, it's okay. like it wasn't the church of satan wasn't very impressed with this you know with the satanist performance and part of that is that everything sort of folded into this uh you know this this in politics this monocultural you know scene where you certain things were things you could say but the only things you could say to deliberately upset people were the things you could say to deliberately upset conservatives stuffy conservatives and so like dressing like a devil. It's like Alice Cooper was way edgier than this guy. And that was a long time ago. Dave, David Bowie was way edgier than Sam Smith or, you know, people like that he's performing with. And it just gives you like edge is a muscle and it atrophies if you don't use it. And our entertainment industry is very used to just, you know, claptor and pleasing a certain audience. And they don't want to actually be edgy. So they keep reaching back to these things that nobody's moved by. I mean, look, what is edgy now? Honestly, a trad wife is edgy. You know, I read somewhere that in this list of the 50 greatest guitarists of all time, Eric Clapton in Rolling Stone, Eric Clapton, widely considered one of the five or 10 greatest rock guitarists who ever lived, had dropped to 35. And in the little paragraph describing why he had dropped to 35, it mentioned that he didn't get vaccinated during COVID. This is an effort to measure who is the better guitarist. And in the world of edgy traducing and transgression, he needed to be punished by rolling stone because four years ago he didn't take a vaccine that he probably didn't need as it happens is it kind of like the pulitzers john i can't even go to the pull the best thing about the pulitzers if you guys want to go look at the list of the pulitzers there was one yesterday is that it was literally like this pulitzer for public service about Trump and his evil doge Pulitzer for national reporting about Trump and his evil effort to shut the government down Trump's authoritarianism Trump on ice Trump's you know Trump's building of the ballroom it was like one it was like it was like listening to it was like local reporting a wonderful reporting on the shooter we didn't mention was trans in Minneapolis. Yeah, exactly. Right. And anyway, but it was, it was funny because it was like, you know, Trump is so in their heads that there is nothing. All you had to do was a verb, a noun, you know, a verb, a verb, an adverb in Trump. Pulitzer. And so like there wasn't even an effort to sort of dilute this with like a really great story about a meatpacking plant where they found salmonella or whatever it is that they usually do. It's funny. And it's also like congratulations on everybody who is now winning Pulitzers. Oh, then there was the obligatory photography award for Sick Child in Gaza that the Israelis tortured. And he also had other ailments that we didn't mention. Great job. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the transgression is everyone singing from exactly the same liberal hymnal is sort of supposed to be transgressive, but we know what's transgressive. Gina Carano was transgressive. Like, that's Scott Atlas was transgressive. Jay Bhattacharya was transgressive. You know, that's who was transgressive, and they got punished, which is what happens when you transgress, you know, the majoritarian cultural tastemakers and leaders is that they punish you so that they make an example of you to people who won't follow you down that road. And I'm not a believer in transgression for the sake of transgression. I consider it a kind of diseased way of creating attention and things like that. But I'm also, but they, this world of people that Seth is mentioning, they still think that transgression is the way to express progressive ideas or to move the debate forward or to push the envelope. And it's almost the opposite. That's what I also, with the ugliness stuff, which is supposed to be transgressive. It's like you're shutting people's brains down. You're not opening them up to say, well, this could be the more beautiful way of looking at something. You are saying, I don't like you. I don't care what you think. If you like what you want to look at as a pretty dress, that doesn't matter to me. In fact, I'm going to wear an ugly dress and you're, and someone's going to praise me for having had the guts to do that. But you know, I, I'm just making a fool of myself now in terms of the advertising stuff, just to finish, get back or finish up this point. So that everything is advertising. That's the joke of, you know, the devil wears Prada too, is all about how media consolidation is destroying wonderful places like Vogue. Vogue was never wonderful. Vogue was a filler between ads for Dior bags and perfume. And whatever copy was there was garbage. It was garbage. It was decades. Sometimes the garbage was pretentious. Sometimes it was politicized. Sometimes it was cutesy. but it was nothing. You cannot name an article that was published in Vogue under the leadership of Anna Wintour for 40 years that has any cultural valence, didn't have then, hasn't had now. The only one I can name is the one about Mrs. Assad. Ah, yes. Joan Juliette Buck's profile of the beautiful Mrs. Assad. Right. But then that, of course is in spite of rather than real real because of so all vogue is is advertising and vogue and the world of art want to sell it as though it is culturally significant and that its departure or its lack of cultural relevance in 2026 is a great tragedy people on twitter journalists on twitter are writing about the devil wears product too as though it is a portrait a threnity of what's happened to media and the tragedy of the decline of the old media. And it's like, if Vogue is destroyed by this, that is good. Vogue was bad. Vogue is a bad cultural influence. It causes people to care about things that they shouldn't care about as much. Like, I'm not saying that fashion doesn't matter and that you're perfectly well. You should enjoy reading a fashion magazine and enjoy reading about fashion and like that, the way I enjoy reading bad celebrity biographies. But I'm not walking around telling you that the world of the bad celebrity autobiography is something that needs to be preserved and cherished and kept alive in a time of darkness, increasing totalitarian darkness. Like, I know that what I'm doing here is indulging myself in junk because I need to clear my head with nonsense. But that is not the valence of all this. And this event is sort of part of the same thing in some fashion or other. Can I just jump back to this transgressive point again that began with Seth talking about the sort of the death of transgression or the death of the effectiveness of it? It has me thinking that Maybe there's something overlapping with the death of transgression and the rise of destruction. if you cannot be shocking on a sort of or get shocked or get that jolt on a sort of entertainment level, which I guess you could argue would be healthy in some sense because it's a sort of outlet. It's a it's a it's a pressure valve or something. Then what's what then then where does that sort of energy go? What do you do? You know, so maybe you can. riot, loot, support, violence, political violence, murder, and so on. There's sort of no room for that in the realm of play anymore. Except, which is, you know, it's part of like why so many of these destructive activist figures in our lives do seem like cosplayers, right? Um, there's, they're, they've sort of taken up the, the, the mantle, but, but brought it into the real world. You know, the process. And also there, because they're not getting, uh, thrown in jail. Right. Is the other part of that, right? Like that's part of the cosplaying part of the performative aspect of it is that all the DAs they got elected love this stuff and are not going to throw the book at them. And so there is this, like, what comes next? What do you have to do in America to earn notoriety? We saw it last, you know, Luigi Mangione and whatever. Like, this is what you are pushing people toward because they can't even, you know, they can't even rebel by, you know, taking a building at Columbia University hostage because they're not going to be charged with anything, even though they kidnapped a janitor and, you know, and beat him up. or whatever, you know, it's like you can't if you can't get in trouble for anything except extreme violence, I feel like that's at least got to be part of what we're seeing now. Right. I don't want to blame it all on the idea that, you know, whatever people are trying to shock, but there's got to be an element of what do I have to do to get noticed? Right. Right. And that's that's Lena Dunham's dress or bad bunny dressing up like he's 80 or or the actress Sarah Paulson, who hangs around with billionaires, who are some of her best friends, wearing a dollar bill, covering her eyes to make the point about how evil the top 0.1% are at the event that was being paid for by Jeff Bezos for $10 million, at which a ticket to attend cost $100,000. So what a wonderful statement of objection to the evil of our inequitous society that you show up in your $200,000 dress but with a dollar bill hiding your eyes. That's the actress Sarah Paulson. Like the levels of hypocrisy and nonsense and nourish kite there are almost impossible to get to the bottom of as I look at it. I want to make a recommendation here that's connected to this whole subject. Years ago, I think one of my best commentary recommends was a, and I've heard from many people who read it and were blown away by it as I was, There's a novel called Five Decembers, which is about a man, an American who gets trapped in Japan in hiding during World War II and survives Five Decembers in Japan, going, trying to keep himself unknown and unnoticed as the war rages, as by a writer named Jonathan Kestrel. Well, Jonathan Kestrel also writes under the name Jonathan Moore, James Kestrel, excuse me. He also writes under the name of Jonathan Moore and he writes suspense and sort of semi, I don't know what you would call it, science fiction-y, like near future dystopian books. And the best one is called The Night Market, which you can get on. It was published in 2018. And you can get it, you know, on Kindle or whatever. And it's about a cop who essentially uncovers a conspiracy. And the conspiracy involves a world in which advertisers, algorithm producers, and all of that have figured out how to transmit a signal through the computer that stimulates your dopamine systems and makes you want to buy whatever it is that is in front of you for the next five or ten minutes. and it floods your system with an incredible hunger to buy something. And it's interesting because I think we all have had this experience on Instagram or somewhere where something pops up and it's a new little mini tire inflator for your car and you watch a little video for 10 seconds, you're like, I got to have that. That's fantastic. Like that. So this book published eight years ago, and it's a conspiracy thriller about how this happened and how he figures it out and who helps him solve it. But it gets to this thing about the new world of advertising, the world of algorithm promotion, and how it looks to understand us before we understand ourselves. It's really brilliant. It's very effective, and it is very thought-provoking. That's The Night Market by Jonathan Moore. And if you read that and you enjoy it, go read his other book under his own real name, Five Decembers by James Kestrel, which really is a sort of modern, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's one of the most original American books of our time. So that's my recommendation. So we will be back tomorrow for Abe, Eliana, and Seth. I'm John Podhoretz. Keep the camel burning. Thank you.