Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast were two sincere, authentic friends who are also real, genuine professors.

Talk about philosophy and the everyday.

Yikes.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

Perhaps the biggest compliment you can give a celebrity today is to say that

they're authentic. And, you know, we live in this social media-driven world where people

constantly try and present a picture-perfect view of their lives. You hear a lot about the

curated dynamic of Instagram, which used to be the very fancy and, like, nicely edited travel photos, but recently

has become a weird dump of zoomed-in photos of, like, a gas station. Regardless of the aesthetic

changes that we have witnessed recently, a through line underneath them is a craving for

celebrities and lives that seem authentic to us.

And in particular, when it comes to celebrities, we're looking for people to seem real.

So I read this article in preparation for the episode today called Buying and Selling Authenticity,

a decade of reality TV, which was in the online magazine, Dazed.

And the author talks there about how reality

TV especially promotes the value of authenticity. People like shows like Queer Eye, for example,

because they feel so genuine. But it's also ironic because reality TV shows are heavily produced

and often even scripted to a large degree.

Plus, the person on TV is being filmed and we all act differently around cameras than we do

when they're not around. So, David, I'm curious what you think about this, connection between

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