The Dish on Gossip w/ Jess Cagle

the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve in orgasm. Cis I deserved? Welcome to Go Ask Allie. I'm Ellie Wentworth and this season I'm digging into everything I can get my hands on, peeling back the layers and quite frankly, getting dirty. Today's topic is gossip, digging into the history of gossip. Is it good? Is it bad? Has social media changed it? What does gossip really mean?

And how does it affect us? But before we go there, one of our listeners, Claudia, has emailed me a question about parenting her ten year old son. Okay, here we go. I don't want the choices we make now, meaning her and her husband, determine how we will relate to one another post pandemic. I find that I'm harder on him, my son. I scold him more often, and to an extent,

I may be driving a wedge between us. My fear is that I'm shifting my parenting style during the pandemic, and that once this is behind us, he's going to be used to seeing me as a parent who gives in more freely and willingly. M What to do, Oh, Claudia, that is such a good question, and I think so

many people are dealing with this, including myself. Um. I think the biggest piece of advice I can give you is when you find yourself being too hard on him and yourself, just take a breath, take a d deep breath. That always gives us a moment to de escalate our anger, to check in with ourselves. And I mean, we're in a global pandemic, whatever the hell that means, and we have to be a little bit easier on ourselves and on our children. So for me, with my teenage girls, yes,

they've seen movies that are probably not appropriate for them. Um, I let them on FaceTime till late at night. Their bed times have shifted, sometimes much later than usual. And I do it because I think that there is such an undercurrent of anxiety and stress and loneliness with our children that I think anyway we can give them comfort, whether that be in the form of connecting with friends on social media or maybe needing to unplug by gaming

or watching movies, it's okay. Um. I think it's all about self care and care for our children, and if these things bring them comfort, then I say let it be. So take a breath, and maybe even trying a little

gaming with him. All Right. Before I started this podcast, you know, I was thinking about just gossip in general, and how much I enjoy it at times, I enjoy hearing it at times, how I get sort of excited about a tidbit, and how in times it has been kind of the worst thing, whether I've been the butt of gossip or I have gossiped about somebody else and

felt bad about it. And about two years ago I went on a gossip cleanse, which means I didn't gossip for about three months, and it was actually really hard, and I realized how much gossip is used as currency in our day to day lives. It was definitely a challenge, and so I wanted to dig into the kind of roots of gossip and what kind of gossip does good and what kind of gossip is incredibly destructive not only

to ourselves but to our society. And there is no better person to talk to me about gossip and gossip with me than my friend Jess Caigel. Jess Caigel. He's a former editor in chief of People Magazine and editorial director of Entertainment Weekly. He is now the chief entertainment anchor and host of The Jess Caigel Show at Daily Entertainment news and talk program on sirius XM. He's also got his own podcast, the Jess Kegel Podcast on Sirius.

He's appeared as a CBS News contributor and critic and co host of ABC's Oscar Red Carpet pre show Listen. Nobody knows gossip more than Jess. Hi, Jess Caigel, Hi, how are you well? I'm excited to be here. I listen to your podcast all the time. Very informative, is very funny, You're very sweet. I'm fascinated by gossip. So I wanted to talk to you because you and I

gossip all the time together. But besides that, you have actually as an editor of people, and so much of what you do is deciphering what's gossip, what's not, what's purely entertainment news, and what is kind of salacious stories. So I wanted to start by talking about the roots of gossip, because originally gossip was not a negative thing.

Gossip was actually something that women did while they were dealing with childbirth because back in the day childbirth, there was like twenty people in the room as opposed to now where it's just a person giving you drugs and a husband. Written when they were you know, holding hands and getting hot towels and everything, used to gossip as a way to sort of make the time go faster. And then it had a better positive spin because gossip became something that a close friend or sibling had with you,

meaning that they could tell you anything. So it was gossip was more about intimacy, and then it went to actually insulting. Yeah, it started. I mean the word gossip comes from an Old English word for godfather or godmother, and so it really it's all about the intimacy. And there was a somewhat sexist evolution because it came to mean the women who helped her childbirth, and it came to mean idle chatter, always with the assumption that women gossip more than men, and it was really a sharing

of information. In fact, behavioral scientists will tell you men and women gossip exactly the same amount. You could probably make sweeping generalizations that men and women gossip about different things. But if you define gossip as talk about out other people, we all do it. We all do it constantly. Most of the time it's benign or neutral. And then there's also negative gossip, and we can get into that as well.

But the idea that we talk about other people stems from a need from our ancestors to convey information about the rest of the group. We as human beings live in these very large social structures. We can't know everyone ourselves, we can't always go to the source, and so we rely on gossip to survive. We rely on other people to tell us who's a cheater, who's good, who behaves this way, who behaves that way, And it's a survival mechanism, right,

and it's generally basically good. It serves a good purpose. Basically, what you're saying is that it can be used as a teaching tools for positive like see that guy who

cheat and his wife, Look what happened to him? I was reading, which I thought was so fascinating that for a while, men were really threatened by the fact that women were in these little gossip groups because they felt like they were gonna create these acts of freedom, and they wanted to shut them down, you know, because you know, obviously talk is power, and groups of women talking and so this kind of female friendship and gossip ended up

being witch hunts, like literally women were burned at the stakes, and they had this really medieval looking thing called the gossip bridle, which was like this metal, hannibal electric thing they would put over women's mouths if they thought they were gossiping too much, which, by the way, if they existed today, Georgia would have fought DN. Have you ever gotten in trouble gossiping? Like, has it ever you gossiped about somebody and it's gotten back to you. It's bad,

it's humiliated, it's really bad. I remember a bill allon years ago. I was a kid, but I was having a conversation with a boss, and I opened this conversation like it was really bad, and so I thought that this was horrifying but also delightful, and I told people, Well, eventually the boss got in trouble and I was then approached to talk to HR and I said, you know, I feel really complicit in this, and so I feel

awkward talking to HR. And she was like, well, you didn't have a problem talking to everybody else about it. Oh my god. So yeah, I had to come clean. I learned a terrible lesson. You don't talk about your colleagues. When I was twenty two years old, I got in trouble. Ultimately I did do the right thing, and ultimately the boss was held accountable. That was gossip as a learning tool for you. Well, yeah, it was also really nasty, negative gossip that I engaged in, and I learned not

to do that at work. I think for a long time I looked at gossip is currency, like you were socially anxious, and you were at some kind of social soare you could use gossip as something to kind of create an intimate bond with somebody else, you know, kind of say like oh did you know that? Blah blah blah. And I remember when I was on a Living Color Kim Wayne's used to do the sketch where she played the woman that sits on the stoop in the city, and she'd always say, well, I'm not one to gossip,

so you didn't hear it from me. But then she would go on and talk about everybody. So anyway, I realized that it actually wasn't currency and it did not create real intimate bonds at all, because if I said something, it would get back to me, and I had sort of similar experiences like you did, so you know, it came back to thought me in the face, and I learned, Wow,

it's not about creating a bond, it's actually hurtful. We often think of gossip as only the negative gossip with in reality, gossip is any kind of talk about other people and it is n see like if I hear that so and so is about to become the president of NBC, well that's good gossip. To know. It's not harmful. It's we're trading information that if you work in the entertainment industry, that would be good information to have negative gossip.

On the other hand, it besides being destructive, besides destroying reputations, when you're talking to someone and you are describing someone else as a cheater, you're describing someone else as a slimeball. Those words that you're using. The person listening actually ascribes those qualities to you, so it's not good for you either. However, engaging in gossip and trading information, our bodies react positively

to that. If we're trading information about other people in the group, biologically, our heart rate slows down, we become calmer. We are very evolutionaryly designed to gossip. You just have to be careful about what you do, why you gossip about I did actually read somewhere that it actually does help calm the body, which I'm shocked because it actually

makes me rev up. Because think about it, when you have such a salacious piece of gossip on somebody, and I'm being completely honest, there is something very titillating and exciting about calling somebody that will appreciatesipy. It just did well. You get repped up. But then when you actually share the gossip, your body calms down. There must be some kind of activity in the pre funnel cortex of our brains.

There has to be absolutely listening to particularly negative gossip, you're talking about someone who is engaged in really aberrant behavior. It actually stimulates the part of our brains that is designed to de die for complex human behavior. It literally does excite part of our brands. Right, Why do you think we like it so much? Why do we do it so much now? I'm not talking about back when I was birth in babies and I have all my cousins in the room. But now we still trade on it,

we still love it. I mean, listen, sometimes I hear stuff I can't wait to call you and tell you. I think it's because that's what our ancestors did. It is literally in our DNA, and it's still just as necessary today as ever, when we have many, many different venues of getting gossip. I can, you know, get a phone call from you and hear something about someone in our group or a celebrity or whoever. But also we

depend on gossip to survive. Look, there's a reason that Rotten Tomatoes and yell are such successful platforms because those are literally all of us sharing information with ourselves. There's something about that that it's necessary for society to survive. Imagine if we all lived in a tunnel, we didn't know anything about our neighbors, Right, that's actually a dangerous place to be. Yeah, we've been talking about more how gossip affect us personally and what we do in our groups.

So now let's we open it up to there's still a rabid appetite for gossip about people we don't even know. Yeah, and so I want to take us into the world of celebrity, which is a place where you swim, because I'm fascinated by and you have, I know a lot of knowledge about this. How very early on, in like nineteen eleven, that's when this new slew of fawning magazines like Photoplay and screen Land, and these were all created only to be publicity machines for early stars, right like

look up, pretty, look at this. But they have changed since then. And there is this young New York newspaper man named Winchell. He apparently was the one that brought gossip into mainstream media. So he was the one that sort of crossed that line of taboo and started getting all the dirt on the rich and famous and the powerful, and people ate it up. And a lot of people that study gossips say, well, that was the great leveler gossip about the rich and famous. It was a way

for society to go, oh, see, they have problems. You know, it doesn't matter class, race, or gender. We all face suicides and affairs and this, that and the other. But in the world of celebrity, that turned, right, It absolutely turned But it turned really early on, as soon as America established, you know, its own gods and goddesses, its own royalty, which were movie stars originally. Because we don't have a royal family, we created our own and there's

some need to do that. I mean, human beings are designed to live in groups. We look for social hierarchy. Then along came Hollywood, and then along came the media. And when we know intimate details about another human being, it doesn't matter how we know that. It doesn't matter if we know that from TV and magazines. It doesn't matter if we know that because this person is our neighbor and we look at them over the fence. Our brains are telling us that that person is socially important

to us. So I know Mariska harget Day through you right, forget the fact that she's a celebrity. I'm interested in her because I know her, I know who she's married to, I've met her kids. She's important to me. She's also having a tour at affair is she. Let's get into that gossip. But I also know intimate things about Jennifer Aniston who I don't know right I know who she married to, I know who she slept with. I know what water she drinks, I know her eating habits. You

know who she slept with. We all know who she slept with. Just pick up a magazine, you know what I mean. We know surprisingly intimate details about her just because she's famous and we know who she was married to. That's one of the reasons that we gossip about celebrities. Our brains are telling us that they're important to us just because we know intimate details about them. So you don't think it's the other way around. You don't think it is. If I know negative stuff about Nicole Kidman,

it humanizes her. It knocks her off her pedestal a little bit. It does that too. There are many reasons we look at celebrities with Sometimes we aspire to be like a celebrity. We all got the Jennifer Aniston haircutt back when I had hair. We all got that because we wanted to be like Jennifer Andiston. But at the same time, we envy people with status and we want to bring them down. You know, there's a there's a reason that we are fascinated by celebrity death because of

course death is the great leveler. Also divorces the great leveler, or you know, an addiction is the great leveler. We revel in the fact that they're not better than us sometimes. You know, I think about gossip pre social media, and I think about you know, when gossip came out and ultimately broke the story of Ingrid Bergman's illegitimate child with director Robert to Russell Leany, and then Ingrid Bergman didn't work for ten years, or for example, how did this work?

Rock Hudson is a homosexual? But that didn't really come out in any big public way. That was a nice piece of gossip that Hollywood was able to keep under wraps to protect kind of their own. Social media really did change all of that, and also different standards of the media. I mean, there used to be very clear distinction between legitimate news and tabloid news, and and the

average person really knew the difference. There was something about the establishment papers like the New York Times that were very different than the national Enquirer, and everyone knew the difference. Something happened. It was more probably in the eighties. It was actually a turning point when I believe the National Enquirer detailed thing about Nancy Reagan's affair with Frank Sinatra,

which probably wasn't true. They were friends, but there was a lot of speculation around it because of a Kitty Kelly book that came out about Nancy Reagan. You probably know more about this than I do. But then the New York Times picked that up, and it probably wasn't the first time that that had ever happened, but it was a turning point where something that was in the tabloids then became mainstream news, and it was about a

very important political figure. The National Choir actually broke a few things politically, which then it becomes a gray area what's true and what's not true. There's a lot more to come after this short break. Welcome back. I want to talk about when you were editor of People magazine. There must have been such an influx of stories and information, and how did you decide did you have to fact

checked everything? Especially as the Internet took off. The way that People distinguished itself was you know, there was so much competition for eyeballs and clicks and readers and for print and online that we really dug into People's the

place you can trust. So a lot of times People was accused of being too celebrity friendly and carrying water for celebrities and all of at and it was celebrity friendly because a big part of our business was we wanted celebrities to give us their baby photos, we wanted celebrities to give us their wedding pictures. We wanted to be the one celebrity magazine that celebrities would actually talk

to and do interviews for. That doesn't mean we didn't piss them off all the time, because if they got divorced, of course we would cover it, or if they got caught doing something bad, we would cover it. However, that idea that you wanted to be the paper of record for celebrity news, and so for example, if there was a pregnancy that everybody was discussing, we wouldn't publish it

until the woman herself confirmed it. Right. So you hear people say a lot, oh, if there's a salacious piece of news about a celebrity, I immediately go to People dot com to see if it's there, because people won't publish it unless we are really sure that it's true, and said, there must have been a lot of story as you turned down, Well, there's a lot of stories we waited on. Everybody knew Beyonce, for example, was pregnant for a long time. We waited until she confirmed it.

She confirted by standing on stage and showing her baby, but then we would do it. And so there were a lot of things that we waited on. I would say Caitlin Jenner was a big one. Every single week in the National Enquirer, every single hour on the internet, there were photos saying that you know, then she was known as Bruce Jenner, but all these photo saying Bruce Jenner has removed, or Adam's apple, Bruce Jenner has is transitioning. And so we waited on that for the longest time

until Caitlin actually confirmed it herself. So there's sometimes when we wait because we're not sure, and there's sometimes we wait out of respect for another human being. It must have been very curious for you. Did you find that you could really get a sense of people's appetite based on what kind of celebrity stories they wanted to read, or you must have gotten a sense of what the public loved based on who did well in a cover

and who didn't. One of the big shifts that happened culturally, you know, I would say from the early two thousands or even back in the nineties when I worked at the Entertainment Weekly, that movie stars really were movie stars. I mean, you could put Julia Roberts on a magazine cover and really not even have a story, but it would sell because people flocked to Julia Roberts. And then

things really changed. But it had a lot to do with the constant flow of information because of the Internet, but it also had to do with social media, and people really became much more interested in reality stars. And again, we know so much more intimate information about reality stars that we are therefore more interested in them. It goes back to our brains really being tickled by people that

we know a lot of information about. So the Kardashians, of course, became so much more interesting to people than any movie star that they didn't know a lot about what we discovered going into I would say two thousand, fourteen, fifteen sixteen. By then it was Chip and Joanna Gaines. People really loved them, you know, the Magnolia people, the

Megan Markel and Prince Harry. The royals were always fascinating for many many reasons, but because Megan and Harry shared so much information about themselves, they became the most interesting. So sharing information about yourself is not necessarily giving away

the milk for free, it's actually tickling the public. Celebrities that are really good at social media and using their Instagram and sharing just enough to tickle the public's interest without totally pouring themselves out are the most effective celebrities

of marketing themselves out there. If there were two magazine covers, not People magazine, any cover, and one was a positive cover about a wedding and happiness and love and and the other cover was a you know, a fair he tried to hire someone to kill the wife, which would sell more. I think it really depends on your audience generally, based on the universe of magazines that I would always keep very close track of the positive story would well,

that's good to know. It also depends on you know, just because the story is positive doesn't mean it's not interesting. That a positive story would just because people feel better about buying it and The other thing to factor in there is if you're running a magazine, how do the advertisers feel about it? I think people revel in dark gossip too. I mean you think of why crime stories go on and on. You think about how the gossip

of people you don't know who. Maybe the guy murdered his wife and everybody hasn't oh, I think he did it. My biggest thing now is like every drama now has a naked missing teenage girl. But so any local crime or anything, any dark sort of undercurrent gossip is also seems to be like wildfire too, just as much as a positive birth and death of the two, you know, major human events, and so when we know something about the way someone died, that's very interesting to us. People

who die are very interesting to us. True crime actually beats just about any celebrity news. Really. I would say a great true crime story on a magazine cover or even on you know, your internet website, that's going to get more clicks than you know, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez getting back together again. It's all about speculating the outcome. Then it's all about our opinion of what happened with

the crime. It's it's I hate to say it, especially with true crime, because you know, people get hurt, but it's entertainment because we imagine ourselves in that situation. So as we read that story, you know, what would it feel to go through that? What would I do in that situation. It's also we're fascinated by aberrant human behavior. We are wired genetically evolutionarily to look out for that, and so when we hear about the guy that killed his wife and kids, that is horrifying to us, it's

also really interesting to us. There's part of us that feels like we need to know about this because this could happen to me, This could happen to someone who's important to me. Yeah, we're gonna take a short break

and we'll be right back, and we're back. I remember sort of time I dealt with godsip in any mainstream way, because the gossip I had always been I meshed in before when I was younger, was just localized gossip, meaning people I knew, And it wasn't until I married George Stephanopolis that I first was confronted with that kind of mainstream gossip. And The New York Post wrote a story that George and I were getting divorced. I've never been sort of accused of something so wrong. Also, I was

never sort of in the public eye. Nobody would have cared, you know, who I was dating or what was going on. There's been no interest. Did George not tell you that you were getting divorced? Was that the problem? He didn't? I mean, I got I got a letter from my lawyer, but I didn't think to open it. I thought it was just more criminal stuff that I had to pay. No. I was shocked. I was like, wow, you you really can write whatever you want, whether it's true or not.

And you know, I didn't deal with it well. But my point was I didn't really understand that side of gossip until I was the subject of it. It was kind of painful and shocking, and it made me after that look at tabloids and stuff with a different eye. Whereas before I used to love to believe them, like I bet there are aliens inside Lollyparton's uterus, But now I became much more skeptical and much more like, oh they lie. But we had touched upon the Internet and

how the Internet has completely changed gossip. But I mean, gossip found another place to roost when when politics and social media came into play. So you know Matt Drudge, he started spreading rumors about President Clinton's extra marital affair airs and soon that became mainstream news. So I think gossip is now weaponized politically because you can put stuff out there that's a total eye and pure gossip and people are going to believe it or it's gonna get

sort of embedded in their brain. And it's to me scary. I mean, that's sort of how fake news is created. The biggest dangers to our civilization is that the facebooks and twitters of the world really are doing nothing to keep it in chat and I don't know what they could do, and certainly if they did, it would probably find other places to live and be shared and thrive

and you know, spread like cancer. There's an interesting scene in notting Hill, Remember when Joey Roberts goes to the door and all the photographers are there and she's upset, and Hugh Grant says, it'll just be trashed tomorrow. People throw those papers away, and she says, no, those newspaper clippings are filed away, and then it comes up every time. You will never be able to escape any scurrilous rumor, even if it's completely made up, it sticks to people,

and that is really to me, that's really sad. As a magazine editor, watching people get saddled with these things that were absolutely untrue was incredibly disturbing to me, and it made me not want to be part of that problem. But you can say anything now, I mean Trump was a master of it. He would define someone as a certain way or say something that was absolutely untrue, but half the country would believe it. I have all kinds of issues with social media. I think there's great things

about it. I think there's horrible things about it. But I do worry that gossip in social media. I mean, it's kind of like a wildfire that gets out of control, and it gets so out of control you don't know what's true or not anymore. You could just call somebody a pedophile and there's no accountability, you know. And this is and I'm just talking about gossip, which you know, I think leads to a lot of fake news, but even just gossip for gossip's sake destroys lives. And you know,

for me, it's terrifying. And I think social media is just gas on the fire. So I do worry about that. And unfortunately, we as human beings really like to hear what we want to hear. So, for example, I mean, Fox News is the perfect example of that. They tell people what they want to hear, and they reinforce that often with scurreless facts. Right, although you know they say that MSNBC and other cable outlets do exactly the same thing, You're right, and they they actually do. Here's what I

wish would happen. Every newspaper in the country would get rid of their editorial page. Uh. I don't think that opinion has a place in news because it ends up tainting all of the great reporting. All the great reporters at the Wall Street Journal, for example, to me, are tainted by the editorial page. I don't trust the management

of the paper. People on the other side of the aisle would say the exact same thing about the New York Times, because there are just so many angry polemicists on the left writing editorials for the New York Times. It really does make you think everybody at that organization is giving you information through a certain lens, when in reality they're not. I mean, every single journalist in the world has their own political religious beliefs. But a real

journalist they're gonna put that aside. They're gonna honor their duty to give you the news as objectively as they possibly can. But so putting news aside and putting you know, whatever political party you are involved aside, one could say that gossip, not political gossip, human gossip, is actually the one thing that everyone can share. You know that if j Lo and Ben Affleck are hooking up, I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat or an

independent or a fascist. That is interesting to everybody. Absolutely, And that's what it's valuable about gossip. Yeah, Behavioral scientists who have really studied our interaction with gossip will tell you that most of what we gossip about is really neutral or even benign. And so if you're a family thanksgiving with your crazy uncle, what do you want to talk about politics? Or do you want to talk about Ben and j Loo hooking out? Or how did Scarlett

Johanson keeper pregnancy a secret for so long? These are things that you can all talk about. They're not necessarily negative, but they're a way for us to bond with each other. I mean There was one evolutionary psychologist who said gossiping is to humans what grooming is to primates. They get information by grooming each other. They bond by grooming each other, and we do that with gossip as human beings. It doesn't matter if it's about our neighbors or it's about

you know, a celebrity. So are you saying that gossiping is the same as if I'm picking lice out of your scalp and eating it. Well, you've done both, So what do you think Are you calling me a gorilla? I think it is the big denominator. So let me ask you this, what do you like to gossip about

the things that I will gossip most about her? When somebody does something completely aver like, you know, you read this stuff about Army Hammer, for example, who I know a little bit always seem like a very nice guy. But you read the stuff about it, and you then you start trying to pick it apart. And I can try to pick that apart with absolutely no extra information, like, Okay, why would he send somebody a tad saying I'm gonna eat you? Like? What what is that about? I don't

think he's actually cannibal? So why does he do that? What is it in his background? I want to know more about his parents, Where did he come from, what's he gonna do. What's the problem. Is he gonna go to rehab? When somebody does something, I like to dissect where did this come from? I want to know what's true and what's not in all the gossip and the reporting. But I also want to know what is it in

their background that brought them to this point. But at the end of the day, now, for somebody who doesn't know Army Hammer, all I can think of is he's a cannibal. If I ever need him, I'm gonna be scared. He's gonna take the white out of my left breath.

Whether it's true or not, I kind of think too main back what I said about Rock Hudson, there was a time pre Internet and everything where you know, politically there were gay men in the White House, where in Hollywood they were gay men and women and people with all kinds of gossip worthy stuff that was kept under wraps. And now it's impossible it's made up or not made up. There's no protecting gossip. But there's also you know the fact that the media became more independent from the White House.

But the fact that it became more independent from Hollywood was really a good thing. It was a good thing that, you know, the media didn't exist just to issue press releases. Was it really all that healthy that the media kept John F. Kennedy's affairs to itself and can helped him keep them secret? I don't know, because in fact, John F. Kennedy was probably putting national security in danger with all of these affairs, and and one kind of connected him to the mob and all of those things. Would it

have been good to know about that? And would it have been even better for him to be afraid of that getting out and therefore checked his behavior, Which is one of the values of gossip and why it is a human behavior that has lasted so long ever since our you know, fur covered ancestors, because fear of being found out that you did something wrong actually keeps people in check morally, don't you think too. I mean, while we're dissecting the Kennedy's things like Marilyn Monrose death, I

mean like unsolved cultural mysteries are also fodder for gossip forever. Yeah, And unsolved mystery particularly around the death, particularly around the death of a famous person. Well, I mean, look the assassination of Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe of it. Yeah, those are the main ones. Yeah, okay, so that's what you like to gossip about. I think it's important to note because it was brought up earlier that Jess Cagel, Well, it's Notting Hill. It's his favorite movie. I don't have a

conversation without it. I actually wanted to see if we could get through the podcast without you referring to it, but you did. I thought it super relevant to our confesstation. It is very relevant. But it is your favorite movie, and it is referred to many, many times. What's your favorite line from Notting Hill? It's everybody's favorite line. I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy, etcetera, etcetera.

Then there's the other great line, nice try, when Judy Roberts tries to get the cookie by telling how terrible her life is and they all laugh at her. The movie star and nothing's better than her face at the press conference when he asks the question how long will you be staying indefinitely? We could? We could talk about it for yeah, we could. Okay, Now it's my turn for the hot seat what do you gossip about? Well, I'm trying to think because, like, celebrity gossip isn't that

interesting to me, because first of all, it's everywhere. I think I fall more into the gossiping about people we know, because again, there is some kind of a moral lesson in it, whether it's good or bad. So that kind of stuff is more Oh my god, do you know this happened or that happened. You know. One of the lessons I've learned early on is that gossiping in a way that would blow up a family or that you know, that's not good, that's hurtful. My teenage daughter, Elliott has

scolded me in gossiping about kids. She's like, grown ups should not gossip about children. And I'll tell you a tale. So Elliott was in middle school or high school and another parent made up something about her which is completely untrue, and so made up this gossip and was basically telling Elliott's friends about it, and I lost my mind because that's when it really hit me that no adult person

should gossip about children. And I got really upset and I wrote a very angry email to the mother about how she shouldn't be doing that to which she answered she was going to call the school and tell them I was bullying her. You can do that, but then tell them why I'm bullying. You know. It just became like a crazy thing. But that was a situation where I felt I needed to step up as a parent and go, this is not okay. So kids are off limits.

I don't like to gossip about affairs and stuff like that, although people getting divorced is a big one I think for married people in my age bracket, because that again is like, oh my god, why are they getting divorced? Could this happen to us? Are we having those problems? Again, it goes back to the way we're wired. It goes back to where d n A. You are tickled by, uh, you know, an event or or people or behavior that could affect you. Right, is this Could this happen to me?

Are we okay? Are we? And again that's probably healthy. I'm tickled by really as behavior because whether it's Donald Trump, or whether it's reporting on a movie star, or whether it's someone in my neighborhood, I need to know why they're doing that. There's something in me that needs to know why is that happening? If I said to you, Hey, there's this guy in town and he was taken to the emvergency room because he had a toaster up his ask it would be all over that. We can talk

about that for six hours. Whether it's true or not, it's just what does that mean? Why did he do it? How big was the toaster? Is an enormous part of that. Was there toast in? It wasn't plugged in? Did he inserted himself or did someone else do it? Oh God, I wish that was true. That's those are just sort of human interest gossip, which you know, I think I can say the majority of people, that's the kind of gossip they really love because it makes you kind of

dissected in another way. Jess giggle. As soon as we sign off, I have something to tell you. Thank you for being here, Thank you for talking about gossip. I love your podcast, I love you, thanks for having me on it. I think gossip is here to stay. I think, unfortunately because of social media, God knows where it's going to go. It's gonna get worse and earlier I talked about my gossip cleans. I don't think you have to go to that extreme. I think there's always going to

be an appetite for gossip. I think what we have to ask ourselves is when we use gossip as a tool that could potentially hurt people' tis a bad thing. And I think when gossip is just innocuous celebrity stuff, I think it's actually okay. But there is kind of a moral checkpoint one has to go through when deciding if it's something that is worth perpetuating. And I will leave you with this, though Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott are pregnant with their second child. Do with it what

you will. Thank you for listening to Go Ask Gali. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth and on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now. If you'd like to ask me a question or suggested guests or a topic to dig into, I would love to hear from you, and there's a bunch of ways

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