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I don't know who my friends are.

So if you caught this past week's episode, you'll know that I wrote an article

about Crystal Williams and Lindsay Simpsick of the Almost 30 Podcast

because they did a fawning interview with Zach Bush.

And I mentioned that this necessitated that I look at their website and their materials a little bit.

And in the ticker, I said, I hated everything about this site.

I said that it was slick, presumptuous, that it was empty and grandiose, that it hit all of those notes at once.

I talked about how it was difficult to feel like I was supposed to admire the pictures of them

laughing on the beach, but I just had this sense of unearned privilege and tyrannical happiness.

I called it New Age Stepford stuff. I made a joke that looking at it was like getting punched in

the face by Gwyneth Paltrow wearing a boxing glove full of popery.

And I stand by all of that, but this episode is about something less sensational that struck me

about this episode, the site, and everything around it. Something less funny, but also more

disquieting to me. So in addition to the standard wellness pornography tropes that are obvious

on the first glance at the Almost 30 brand, the thing that stood out to me most was that it was

based upon the monetization of their friendship. On their site, they described themselves as two

...