Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I-M-I, or in case you missed it,

Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And today on the show, we are joined by author and content creator Alyssa Grenfell.

Welcome, Alyssa.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Alyssa is joining us today because she is ex-Morman.

She grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now she shares her perspective on YouTube about sort of the current Mormons going on as someone who left the religion,

which I imagine has gotten pretty busy because it seems like Mormonism is becoming more and more trendy.

This is like, as far as I'm concerned to scoop, we need your reaction to some news that broke last week, which is the cast announcement for Hulu's Secret Lives of Mormon Wives spin-off, which is Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Orange County. I don't think I knew this was happening. I'm like, Cynthia Revell. I'm like, I didn't know this was happening. I didn't know that that was happening. But what is your immediate reaction to this announcement? I'll go through some of the cast in a second, but just what are your big thoughts? I didn't even know it was franchising. So I knew that they were doing something in California. I had actually thought that they were moving the whole cast from Utah to California.

So that was kind of what was especially, I had seen like Layla was posting like, looked at houses today. Like, I was like, okay, what's, what's going to be, what's the new plan here? And then

when they did finally release the

cast list i was scrolling through it and i actually thought it was like a delayed april fools joke

because it's like i don't know all of the women but i at least know i've heard of bobby and i was

like i'm almost i would bet money she's not mormon of course googled it. She's not. So yeah, I thought I was being punked, I guess. That is the wildest part about this announcement. So it is a bunch of names, one of whom is Bobby Altof, who people will probably know from TikTok. She's a podcast. Her whole thing is doing like very sort of dry humor, really deadpan. There's another internet creator who's on it named

Aspen Ovard, also not Mormon. Actually, shout out to Cosmo who did like the Lord's work,

no pun intended, and just went through each woman and was like, are these people Mormon or not?

Which I'll say, I did my own research because that's, you know, here we are in the internet, doing our own research.

It actually doesn't fully align with some of the articles.

Interesting.

Aspen, for example, is a baptized member of the church.

Okay, I know there's been.

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