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Music Hello and welcome back to Good Mood Little Mood.

I am your host, Danny M. Lavery, and with me in the studio this week is Adrian Bain, the host

and creator of a race around the world based on the true adventures of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth

Bissland. She's also the creator of the popular travel podcast, Strangers Abroad, as well as

a writer, live storyteller, and solo world traveler. Adrienne, welcome to the show. Oh my God, it's a delight to be here. I'm so excited that you're here, and I was so pleased with myself when you mentioned a race around the world, and you said two reporters from the 1880s, I said, one of them's got to be Nellie Bly. 100%. And did she just have, like, amazing press? Like, why is it that she more than any... I feel like Nellie Bly is always showing up in media about that era as just, like, a shorthand for, like, new women, urbanization, reporters. But surely she... It wasn't just her and Ida B. Wells and nobody else, but I feel like they get the best press.

There's like a small percentage of them. There's another woman that the, that Elizabeth Bisland runs into named Winifred Black, who's out in San Francisco. So like, that's kind of all that came up in my own reporting and, like, research of it.

But I will say that most female writers, journalists at the time, about 2% of journalists were women.

And most of them wrote about, like, cranberry elixirs and how to sew a beautiful gown that looks like the Rockefellers. You know, it wasn't this hard-hitting,

racing upstairs to get the story kind of a MO, but Nellie Bly was cut different for sure. And she,

the moment she like, she really elbows her way into being like like, a serious reporter because she looks at all,

she hates doing, like, talking about the women's fear. She's like, this is the most boring

should I've ever seen. And I, like, don't want to talk about this. I don't care about dresses.

Like, I want to go undercover and expose corrupt politicians. So she really is one of her kind, and it's such

an inspiration for women at the time based on, like, letters that were sent to her, to the point

where other women, she becomes like kind of a, she's from Pennsylvania, she gets a job in

Pennsylvania, she moves to New York because her ambitions are too big. And by the time she is an established reporter for the New York world, owned by Joseph Plitzer, she is so popular that other women pretend to be her. And they'll just like send, send hotel bills and, like, dress charges to the

New York world. So I kind of love that there is this little stat. And, like, no one can trace

anybody down back then, you know? So, like, I just love the fact that there's this little

...