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Clusions apply. 18 plus scummelware.com. Welcome back to Gabbing with Gibb. I'm your host, Gipson Johns. And today on the show, we have a really interesting conversation with Bridget Reid. Bridget is a New York magazine writer who also just published a book called Little Bosses Everywhere, how the pyramid scheme is shaped America. Bridget is also a lifelong friend of mine. She is really good friends with my older brother. I've known her for forever.

And she's been on the show before.

Bridget has covered a lot of different topics throughout her career. And she wrote this incredible kind of cast profile of Vandemab Rules for Vogue back in 2018. If you listen to her episode of Gabman with Gip from last year, you'll hear all about it because we talked in

depth about that and sort of the status of random pump rules back then. And, you know, it was sort of

this landmark piece for Bravo because up until then, the network hadn't gotten that much sort

of like high brow coverage and sort of profiles like that in publications like Vogue. And now, you know, we see people featured

in the New York Times and Vogue and different kind of really highbrow outlets like that all the time.

Back then it wasn't really happening. And so I remember Bridges piece came out. And then the next year was

the first BravoCon and we sort of buddied around together during that BravoCon. And,

you know, that was just a really important piece for the network. And anyway, so all is that to say is that Bridget very much knows what she's talking about, particularly when it comes to this Vanderpump Valley world. And so I wanted to have her on to, you know, do some promo for the book. And we talked a little bit about her book and the concept of MLMs as they intersect with pop culture and with Bravo, which I didn't really know much about, to be honest.

And also when I went to a book launch event for Bridget last week, you know, I got to thinking

about sort of whether there were any similarities between MLM and sort of the culture around that

and reality TV at all. And, you know, I need to be clear that I'm not equating being a reality star with being part of an MLM that's very different. But, but, you know, part of Bridget's book is arguing that MLMs and sort of the structure and the strategy behind them and how they sort of wrote people into them.

She argues partially that that helps explain sort of like the current political, you know,

climate in America too and sort of the rise of Donald Trump as well.

And so like part of her thesis is just sort of like connecting all of that, all of this stuff.

And it's really kind of well put together and anyway I was

curious if any of that could connect to bravo or reality TV just like kind of kind of overall

culturally or sort of you know getting into the ground floor kind of thing so um we had a really

interesting conversation and sort of the first 15 minutes or so is all about that and then we jumped

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