In her new biography of Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Odell calls Goop “a powerful platform for spreading health misinformation.” So many topics Goop has covered favorably—yoni eggs, coffee enemas, celery juice—have been scrutinized on our podcast.
Rolling off her successful biography of Anna Wintour, Odell decided to train her sight on the “It girl” of the nineties who pivoted to a lucrative but contentious wellness business that laid the groundwork for the influencer aesthetic. She joins Derek to discuss her new book. But first, we discuss our thoughts on Odell’s subject.
Show Notes
Gwyneth: The Biography
BackRow by Amy Odell
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspirituality 269, the book of Gwyneth.
In her new biography of Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Odell calls Goop a powerful platform for spreading health misinformation.
So many topics Goop has covered favorably, yoni eggs, coffee enemas, celery juice, have been scrutinized on our podcast.
Rolling off her successful biography of Anna Wintour, Odell decided to train her sights on the it girl of the 90s who pivoted to a lucrative but contentious wellness business that laid the groundwork for the influencer aesthetic.
She joins Derek to discuss her new book.
But first, we'll discuss our thoughts on Odell's subject.
So we're going to run your interview in a few minutes, Derek.
I really enjoyed listening to it and I enjoyed reading the book.
So thanks, Amy.
To me, Matthew, Gwyneth Paltrow's hugely successful second act with Goop is very much in the wheelhouse of what we study.
She's like the icon of charismatic influence, spiritualized pseudoscience, and the commercialized cult of personality going mainstream.
She's also this wily early adopter of the internet who instinctively charted a course, which many others have since followed, from elite entertainment celebrity to personal branding, social media style mega-influence before that was really a thing, and direct marketing, which is where there's so much money to be made.
All true.
And to me, I would also add that it's the confusing class war signifiers that are at the heart of her story.
A lot of it is about creating a language of virtuous hyper-consumerism for the liberal mainstream.
So I'll say more about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's aspirational to use the euphemism, right?
Yeah.
Where many of the other figures that we cover utilize the halo created by claims of initiation into ancient traditions or personal spiritual revelation, being visited by angels, channeling the messages of benevolent aliens.
It is for Gwyneth the skinny blonde beauty, acting career, intuitive yet well-bred fashion sense, and that ultra-luxurious lifestyle that generate her charismatic authority.
Yeah, I would add to, I would say, her projection of near-perfect emotional detachment from the gravity of the world and the people around her too.
Projection, that's important.
As you'll hear with Amy, she does take this shit seriously, but she doesn't put it out that she's taking it seriously, which is sort of the paradox of her.
Yeah.
Correct.
Yeah.
And I know you're going to have more to say about that, Matthew.
You know, I haven't dug into it extensively, but I do notice that there is some of that sort of by now classic corporate greenwashing that she engages in, right?
Which, you know, I'm sure there's some sincerity to it in terms of like partnering with brands who are doing sustainable sort of business models, right?
And then also speaking out about climate change, but also politically campaigning for GMO labeling, for example.
So it's a very mixed bag.
Well, also it means that things that you tagged earlier that, you know, most of the people we study rely on stories of personal spiritual enlightenment or being visited by angels.
All of that stuff can be sublimated into a kind of secular performance of perfect corporate leadership in some way.
So I think the themes are all there, or not the themes, but the feeling is all there and the discourse is different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that sort of performance of saving the world to some extent is an influence that extends mostly to women with significant disposable income who exist within a culture obsessed with beauty and success and the performance of a balanced spirituality as an expression of inner and outer wellness and purity,
which, as it turns out, is a customer demographic that took the company's valuation really sky high by 2018 after starting off just 10 years previous as a weekly email about cooking and clothing and travel.
And during their spectacular rise to those heights, it turns out that anytime a product for sale on the website was not doing good sales, there seem to have been two foolproof remedies.
You either do a photo shoot with Gwyneth wearing or holding the item or get an article written about her amazing experience with it.
And then bonus points, if it flies in the face of the medical establishment, and if you can somehow link it to Gwyneth's vagina, it turns out the web traffic plus sales would go through the roof.
And this is some kind of fighting of the patriarchy, I guess, Goop style.
Yeah.
So I have some general comments about Goop as a cultural influence that reading Odell's book brought up, but I wanted to say something about the general project of the book first, because I think it's great that we have this document.
I think Paltrow is a towering figure of the age and very, I think, eerie for people of our age because we're kind of all in this group together.
And so I think I've lived my life in some way parallel to hers and it looks totally different.
I'm glad there are journalists like Odell that are able to do this kind of work because I certainly couldn't interview 220 people and try to piece together a life like this, all while knowing that I might never get to interview the person themselves.
Like there's something eerie about that, but it's also fitting for a celebrity subject who ultimately is defined by a kind of unapproachability.
Yeah.
And 220 people over the course of three years on the project.
Yeah.
I mean, I've done interview work that's similar to that over three years, but not around like somebody who's still alive and somebody who I could well talk to, but I can't.
And they're going to always sort of remain this kind of black hole, right?
Yeah.
Well, Amy did not talk to Gwyneth or anyone from Goop's board for the book.
So we should be clear on that.
They initially said they would, and then they kept punting and ended up not cooperating with her.
Yeah.
And lots of like NDAs and things like that involved, right?
With the staff, correct.
She apparently Gwyneth has a pretty strong NDA policy.
So it was very tough for Amy to get insider information, although she did get some.
Yeah.
So I want to flag the end of Odell's introduction because this really stood out to me.
Quote, my hope here is to tell her story in a way that begins with her strengths, her talents, her vulnerabilities, and her desires and shows how that inner life passed through the bizarre, often corrosive influences of fame, beauty, and privilege is, you know, she goes on to say, you know, becomes her.
And I think it's really a good and deft move because for a book that's sure to get a lot of hostile scrutiny from the Goop legal team, I think it's a perfect framing.
Paltrow had to have known that a biography was coming at some point and that any investigation of her life is going to turn up like unsavory scenes and attitudes.
But what Odell suggests here is that there's something authentic and innocent to Paltrow beneath the corrupting influences of the world.
And I wonder if this is the most likely way in which somebody like this could bear having flaws exposed.
Yeah, I mean, you raise a good point, Matthew.
I tend to lean in the direction of wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially true believers in misguided propositions.
And I also get the concept of approaching people with generosity if you're trying to have them hear criticism, which I don't know if that's what you're implying, but that's what it makes me think of.
Or respond to it.
Yeah, yeah.
But at the same time, I mean, Gwyneth has repeatedly doubled down on disseminating dangerous pseudoscience when it's pointed out to her by experts in the field.
And underneath that, she's also a proponent of the classic wellness worldview around toxic chemicals and the need to cleanse and mistrust of medical science.
So in a way, the beauty and the sincerity, the authenticity, the good intentions, I tend to see as distracting from the deeper harm that's being caused.
One thing that jumped out at me after I finished talking to Amy, and we kind of touched this point, but it really became clear to me around what you just flagged with expertise, Julian.
Gwyneth was born into Hollywood royalty.
You know, her mother was one of the most and still a well-regarded actor.
Her father was a well-known producer.
Her uncle, her godfather is Steven Spielberg.
She was born into being on movie sets and going to this renowned theater in upstate New York.
And as a child, putting on costumes, getting small parts.
Acting is in her DNA in that sense, both genetically, literally, but also in terms of her experiences.
And what really jumps out at me is we talk often on the podcast about, like, for example, doctors who are experts in one field and then they think they can then talk about other fields.
And it really became clear to me because Amy writes how Gwyneth very rarely, when acting, does double takes.
Like she usually nails it on the first take or a little instruction and she gets it on the second.
It is natural to her.
It seems to me that she took that natural feeling that she had about her career and her passion, and she thought she could just apply it to wellness.
And that comes out in medicine general, and that comes out throughout the book.
But it really, that jumping of domains was really clarified after I talked to Amy.
Yeah.
And those opening chapters, it's such a compelling story.
And what we see is a portrait of this child who clearly, everything around her is saying you're destined for greatness.
You're destined for greatness.
You're a chosen one.
You're a natural.
You're as good as your mother already as a teenager.
And she's one of the greatest actors of her generation.
You understand things really, really quickly and you get them right on your first try, right?
Yeah, I think maybe parallel reading for Odell's biography might be The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.
Same thought.
Yeah, because with this picture of Paltrow growing up as she does, there are these very striking passages out of Odell's biography around how Goop emerges from the emptiness of this attentional sort of overflow, this celebrity that's created, generated as kind of like the basis of her life.
She describes, so Paltrow describes becoming nauseated by her own persona, even while she's relentlessly pursuing attention.
So quoted in an interview in 2000, Paltrow says, I'm sick of this Gwyneth Paltrow person I see everywhere.
I hate her.
I wish she would go away, but there's nothing I can do about it.
And then there's this passage where we hear that her father, Bruce, even points out this growing gap between her public perception and her true self.
You pinged this in the interview, Derek, a little bit.
And so she starts Goop to, quote, nourish what is real in her words and present a more authentic version of herself, you know, that's interested in travel and cooking and health and family, rather than the well-born mannerly roles that had made her famous.
And the idea is that the newsletter and cookbook ventures will give her more control over her public persona and her work than her movies.
So this is a picture of someone who has become aware of their existence as being locked into a public performance.
They are disquieted by not knowing who they are supposed to be.
And in a quest for authenticity, they surround themselves with products that define a lifestyle or a life.
And I really have to wonder if it means that Paltrow didn't actually have to sort out that identity question after all, that the products could speak for her, that the sweaters, the incense boxes, the vagina rocks, like, I guess some people will build a wellness empire instead of going to therapy.
But then what's left for the rest of us is that we are inundated by these images of someone else's contrived world, their contrived authenticity.
Yeah.
And one of the places that contrived authenticity intersects with her commercial model is contrived controversy.
She gave an interview to Taffy Brodesser-Ackner for New York Times magazine that was titled, How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Peltrow's Company Worth $250 million.
And that article noted something that Amy Odell does in the book as well, that Goop's exposure and growth was only accelerated by the combination of deliberately controversial marketing choices and then the ensuing criticism from medical professionals like Friend of the Pod, Dr. Jen Gunther.
It would be easy to take from that conclusion that it is better not to publicly criticize the company, but I think that's wrong.
I think it's crucial to criticize it so that those who might otherwise be persuaded to follow Gwyneth and her quack experts' advice, because she does platform a lot of quack experts, the people who are reachable, try and show them why they shouldn't follow that kind of advice.
But at the same time, there is something to reflect on here about the power of contrarian positioning and why it's so effective for wellness marketing.
And I would say Gwyneth is sort of the prototype for that.
So the other main observation that I have that I just found myself thinking a lot about as I went through Odell's book is the minimalist aesthetics of Goop.
And I was just in a reverie about the function that it performs in this insanely consumerist world, because I think this is a franchise that really wants to present itself as the opposite of the, or as offering the opposite of the conspicuous consumption of Trump.
It's not covering every wall sconce and gold leaf, but it only really pulls that off at an aesthetic level because it probably costs just as much, right?
The lifestyle is just as unreal and frivolous.
It's just as insulting to actual working people.
It's just as insulting to any notion of environmental concern.
And as I was thinking about this, I was wondering whether the minimalism really allows well-heeled people who are educated enough to ostensibly be concerned about all of the things I just mentioned, pretend that they're not really at the heart of any systemic problem with how much they consume.
I also wonder whether minimalism provides consolation for being like a deracinated globalist, like somebody who can go anywhere at any time.
And so everything therefore has this vaguely Orientalist or Euro vibe to it.
And that can stand in for culture or for being from somewhere.
And I wonder if that gives a certain amount of peace.
Yeah.
And super wealthy minimalism is always deceptive, right?
Because it's like the sweater that looks like it's been lived in for 20 years, but it costs, you know, $700 or something.
So the aesthetic of minimalism can create the vibe, I think, too, of being the inheritors of a hippie counterculture, back to nature simplicity and the illusion of stepping outside of American consumerism of the sort that Donald Trump probably represents.
I'm super curious about the Venn diagram between Goop subscribers and customers and Maha.
Because as I said earlier, you've got like concerns about the environment and speaking out about climate change, but at the same time, you've got being involved in campaigns to make sure that genetically modified foods are labeled correctly, which is this sort of wellness pseudoscience gateway.
This project of purifying our lives and our bodies, I think, can become the stand-in for actual political or environmental action.
Well, I agree with you on many of those points, but I also want to say that everything in the Goop catalog also just mimics the sterile clinical spaces that I think Paltrow would say she's rejecting.
Like I lived in back-to-the-land places, and this is not the vibe.
Like reclaimed farmhouses are not fucking clean.
Gardening is not clean.
Paltrow doesn't set up her own tent when she's glamping.
She doesn't haul her own firewood.
Like she's really in the Martha Stewart, Marie Kondo competition market in permanently curated, mostly urban spaces, really far away from undeveloped land.
And I think Baudrillard would really love this because it's like restoration hardware.
Like you manufacture the aesthetics of a simpler, more grounded age, and then you put the products into a box store on the strip wall.
I remember going to Boston after a section of South You was gentrified, and the developer bought a beloved old Italian cafe.
They knocked it down for his block of condo developments, but then they rebuilt the cafe with plywood-based counters and this cheap drywall.
But then they hot glued the old moldings from the tear-down cafe to make it look both clean, but also authentic.
Like you had the original thing there, but as a facsimile on top of this thing that had replaced the real world.
They laid a map of the real world on top of the world itself.
Yeah.
Terrible.
Right.
So I want to close here before we get to the interview by going back to that New York Times magazine piece, which Odell does reference quite a bit in the book.
And in it, Taffy Brodesser-Ackner describes having dinner at Paltrow's stunningly beautiful home, where the then 45-year-old paragon of healthy living drank whiskey on the rocks while cooking clean food and then smoked cigarettes with her after dinner.
So she kind of told on her in that article.
And at that time, the $5 billion media behemoth Condi Nast had just ended their involvement in the quarterly Goop magazine that was set to be a collaboration between Gwyneth and Vogue legend Anna Wintur, who Amy Odell did a biography of before this one, due to concerns about fact-checking and selling products directly through the publication.
And then true to form in that interview, Paltrow enacts the Galileo fallacy, which is a way of countering accusations of pseudoscience by reminding the critic that the church persecuted Galileo too.
And this, of course, gets the comparison completely upside down because Galileo was actually arguing from evidence and the church was arguing from dogmatic faith.
In this case, though, Gwyneth pulls up the Wikipedia page on Ignaz Sammelweiss on her MacBook, and we've covered him many times before.
And she talks about how he was committed to a mental asylum where he died after having been rejected and derided for suggesting that hand washing by medical professionals could save the lives of women giving birth.
And then Gwyneth tells the interviewer that this gives her chills, to which the interviewer asks, well, where does this end for you?
And Gwyneth laughs and says, when they put me in the asylum.
So she's identified with this contrarian, ahead-of-the-curve alternative way of thinking about facts and evidence.
Now, that same article describes the writer attending the pricey InGoop Health Summit in Goop, as in In Good, as a play on words, in Goop Health Summit in LA that year, which sold out with tickets ranging from $500 to $4,500.
And the speakers and panelists included other celebrity women who swear by or who sell wellness products themselves.
So we're talking about panels featuring Cameron Diaz and Miranda Kerr, Drew Barrymore, and Chelsea Handler, just, you know, everyday folks, as well as personal growth influencers like Gabby Bernstein and then mainstay goop expert fringe doctors who sell bogus supplements and cleansing products.
And there are plenty of these, but the main offenders are Stephen Gundry and Alejandro Younger.
And here, says the author, as she describes being at the conference in between acro yoga and Reiki healing and a manifestation workshop.
She was told by a medical medium that her dead grandmother was standing beside her and saying she had thyroid disease.
She had a problem with her jaw that she was completely unaware of, supposedly fixed by a guy who stuck his fingers in her ears.
And then she dropped her pants for a B12 shot.
And then she had an Akashic Records healer tell her she had flat feet because in a past life, her feet had been chopped off.
And so ever since, she's longed to have full contact with the ground.
So it's all well and good, I guess, but nothing about Goop is really about keeping your feet on the ground now, is it?
No, and also coming full circle, it's not as if the naturalistic wellness world saved her from the constant self-project of Hollywood.
But I wonder if it's actually worse because at least as an actor, if you have a real script to work with and real people to play off of, you can make real spontaneous choices.
Thank you.
Amy Odell is a journalist and media consultant based in New York City.
The former editor of Cosmopolitan, she left full-time work in 2018 to pursue independent journalism and biography writing.
Her second book, Anna, the Biography, was a New York Times bestseller.
Her latest work, Gwyneth, is out now.
Are you familiar with the book Seller Rat by Hannah Selinger?
No, should I be?
It's a fascinating book.
It's someone who worked in hospitality for a long time and then became a food and lifestyle writer and won a James Beard Award.
I want to open by reading something from her in a restaurant she used to work at called BLT.
It was kind of a posh restaurant in Manhattan and get your reaction to start just to see if this is a fair assessment of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Okay.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé, seated at the best banquet on a Tuesday night, ordered a bottle of 1996 Latour, a $600 wine to go with a $300 Wagyu steak.
Gwyneth paid with an American Express black card, a heavy titanium square that bore her name.
And then she tipped 10%, the icy little troll that she was.
But I like the story anyway.
This miserly star who couldn't even bring herself to do the decent and just thing.
Obviously, this is someone writing from a snapshot of just meeting a celebrity in this situation.
If all you knew about her was that paragraph that she wrote, how would you feel about that?
Is that a fair assessment?
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that many people who worked for her at Goop told me she's cheap.
Maybe it's that.
I mean, like when she was running, well, she's still running Goop, but I just heard from people who were working on the editorial staff at Goop who said they had no freelance budget.
And in general, I think that the vibe there, and I don't know exactly what it's like now or if it's different because they did cut a lot of content creation.
I do know that the workload was very intense, in part because they didn't have the budget or didn't want to spend the budget on getting more just human resources in there to do all the work that the company wanted to do.
Or fact checkers, but we'll get to that because we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Goop.
Obviously, with this podcast and health misinformation, that's really relevant.
Big picture, you wrote a very successful biography of Anna Wintor, and then you decided your next figure was going to be Gwyneth Paltrow.
Why was that?
She's someone who's been in the public eye for 30 years.
Love her or hate her.
And she's someone who has been written about seemingly countless times.
There have been so many magazine profiles, so many of them called the real Gwyneth.
What I learned in doing this research, and I interviewed more than 220 people and spent about three years reporting and writing, what I learned is that those profiles really barely scratch the surface of who she really is.
And she's someone who has impacted a number of industries, fashion, beauty, and entertainment, and I think most significantly wellness, which I don't know what figure you use to measure the wellness industry, but if we go by the Global Wellness Institute, they have it at $6.3 trillion.
And when she started Goop in 2008, the measure that the Global Wellness Institute had was much, much smaller.
I want to say it was like under a billion.
And it wasn't even a measure of the wellness industry.
It was a measure of the global spa economy.
And I just think Goop is so responsible for creating a template for what wellness companies could look like and kind of was really influential in the explosion of this industry.
I don't use that number.
I've been working on a long investigation with a major media outlet that should be coming out soon.
But we decided to use a much less industry oriented because the Global Wellness Institute wants to make it seem as large as possible.
What number?
What number do you use?
Because yeah, I was noodling around on this.
500 billion.
500 billion.
McKinsey.
Well, no, actually, that, I'm sorry, that was up.
Now it's closer to 2 trillion.
2 trillion, yeah.
Very significant, though.
We're using McKinsey's numbers, which tend to be a little bit less opportunistic, I would say.
But they did, we started the project last year at 500 billion.
And then in that time in May, they released a new report that's saying it's inching to true truly.
Yeah.
So then the pharmaceutical industry, I don't know what number you use for that, but I've seen it at 1.6 or 1.7 trillion.
That is the number.
Yes, correct.
So the wellness industry still is outpacing pharmaceuticals.
Absolutely.
And in your epilogue, you write big wellness, which is a term that critics have started to adopt, rightfully so for that reason.
Exactly.
We really need to start thinking of it in that way because I think that people think of it as kind of like, you know, little workshops and yoga studios.
And no, it's a massive, massive, massive industry that's growing because it's not subject, probably in part, you know, the reason for its growth is that it's not subject to the same regulations as the healthcare industry.
For now, anyway.
That's something I always think about because wellness influencers will say, we need, or think of Maha right now.
We need to better study these drugs, even though they've been studied endlessly.
If you turned that around and said, okay, well, Callie means you're selling over 100 different supplements companies on your website, Trumed.
Should all of those have to be regulated as well?
And the answer is always no, of course not.
Right.
Right.
I do want to focus mostly on health here, but I did want to go into the background a little.
And you actually kind of flagged it because when you said Gwyneth is notoriously, supposedly cheap, you look at her family history.
You write about her father always flying first class, but her mother would only fly coach, even though they had the means to fly first class all the time at that time.
Did anything surprise you about her family history while you were researching for the book?
Oh my goodness, yes.
I mean, she's someone who like you think you know their life story, but then you dig in and you realize you only know a little bit.
So her godfather is Steven Spielberg.
Her father was Bruce Peltrow, who was a successful producer, director, writer.
His biggest hit was St. Elsewhere, the TV show about a Boston hospital that was popular in the 80s.
That was a really good show and it was like well regarded.
It was not the most watched show.
And her mother, Blythe Danner, is regarded as one of the great American actors.
And she grew up from the time she was an infant.
She was on movie sets and she went to elementary school in Los Angeles.
Her family was living there.
Her mother, who's from Pennsylvania, decided she wanted Gwyneth and her brother Jake to have an East Coast education.
So they uproot and they moved to New York City.
And Gwyneth enrolled at Spence from the seventh grade on.
That kind of gave her an entree into New York society.
So she's interesting and unique as an entertainer and an actor because a lot of actors have bootstrappy stories.
I mean, there's a lot of an epitome like Gwyneth too, but she has a foothold in New York society in addition to Hollywood.
I think that's pretty unique.
She grew up going to Williamstown Theater Festival with her family.
So her mother would be in these productions with other movie stars, like the best actors would go to this festival every summer and they would do plays by Chekhov, Shakespeare.
So kind of the best playwriting ever is what they would perform.
And Gwyneth would get slotted into little parts beginning from the time she was a child.
She really wanted to be an actor.
Her parents Would not let her go and be a child star, but she could slot into these productions.
So that's kind of how she got her start acting.
You mentioned Spence.
One thing that I found interesting was you can sort of see the path to wellness from a very early age.
And that is in her disdain for fat people.
Her nightmare in her high school yearbook that she wrote was obesity.
And that's kind of seems to be a through line throughout her life.
Yeah.
So actually, the yearbook editors came up with that.
And I remember asking my sources, you know, like, how would they know that that was her biggest fear?
And I guess it was obvious.
At least that's what I was told.
And then, of course, she goes on to do Shallow Hell after winning her Oscar.
And she apparently really believed that that was going to draw attention to fat shaming and do something positive.
But obviously it missed the mark.
I mean, it did draw attention to fat shaming, but not in the way that she expected.
Yeah.
I think that that ties back to control, a self-control mentality that she has.
She's a very controlled person, even though people told me she's, she's always been thin and seems to be just naturally thin.
You go through the first half of the book, really, her acting career.
And for someone like myself who has been critical of Goop for a long time, I've still appreciated her as an actress.
In fact, I was surprised that you wrote about so many of her movies, but you didn't touch upon my favorite one that she was in, The Anniversary Party.
Oh, that was your favorite one.
I couldn't fit them all in.
I really couldn't fit them all in.
I know.
Someone said contagion.
I'm sorry.
But that movie actually kind of leads to my next question because that was a very tongue-in-cheek movie where these actors and actresses know that they are.
It's self-referential, and yet it's supposed to express some humility.
How much they actually do so is up for debate.
But within that, it really encompassed what I feel like Gwyneth represents, which is this very Gen X attitude, which is when you write about her winning awards, she winks it off to her friends as if it's all a joke, but yet she wants validation all of the time.
And that seems to be another through line throughout her career.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think she's someone who has said so many times that she doesn't care about what people say.
She just doesn't care.
She doesn't care.
They can say whatever they want.
I would say the picture is more nuanced and complex.
I did not get the sense that she doesn't care.
Oh, well, it was just the, it was, there was one moment where it was one of the first awards she was at in the 90s, and you write that she had winked it to her friends.
And I kind of took that to be like, oh, here it is again.
But that just, it just reminds me of so many people of my generation.
She's three years older than me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I see what you're saying.
I think that that, I think that she, she acts like she doesn't care about all of this stuff, but I think that she really does, you know, and people that really knew her well over the course of her life said like, yeah, she wanted to win the Oscar.
But also you can't really come out.
I mean, you can, but particularly in the 90s and the 2000s, women really were not treated well by the press.
I think we can say that, right?
Yes.
Oh, absolutely.
I can imagine that you wouldn't want to be the one who comes out and says, I really want to win that Oscar.
And then what if you don't?
You know, she starts, you write, unconsciously collecting ideas for Goop while filming the talented Mr. Ripley in Italy.
And then, of course, the pivotal moment is Bruce's death in 2001, 2002, around where she really starts, even when he was still alive, but going through cancer, she starts really thinking about how to help him through diet and different means.
Can you talk a little bit about how these things informed what would become Goop eventually?
So in the 90s, around the time she was filming The Talented Mr. Ripley, her father, Bruce, gets diagnosed with throat cancer.
Her father was the love of her life.
So obviously that's a huge blow, terrifying news to get.
And he had radiation, he had surgery, and they were supposed to make a film together, duets, which they did end up making.
But, you know, that was kind of on the line.
And Bruce really wanted to work with his daughter on this movie.
So he gets this diagnosis and they think they're about to go off and shoot this movie.
She's, she's in Italy, kind of stuck there because you can't just leave a movie set.
She goes home for his surgery and then goes back.
And it's just very hard for her, understandably.
He never really recovered fully from the treatment.
I guess there was a point at which he was being fed through a tube in his stomach and she's injecting something into that tube and she wonders what's in it.
And then she starts researching what is in our food and how could it be making us sick.
You know, I can understand my father died when I was 27.
Gwyneth was 30 when her father died.
And no two situations like that are alike, but I know what it feels like to have the wind knocked out of you like that and to be looking for an answer for the inexplainable and to be in this nightmare and thinking, you know, when am I going to wake up?
And you never do.
So I can understand why she went looking for answers.
And she just, she seems to have found them in the wellness industry and learning about things like toxins, you know, quote unquote toxins and how toxins might be present in our food and in our environments and how she can get toxins out of her life.
Yeah, I think that's when it really all started for her.
I really get a sense of the love between both later in life, her and Blaith, but also you really bring out how close she was with her father.
He actually sort of, I don't know, to the depth of it, but cut her off for a while because she didn't finish college and she wanted to do the acting.
He's like, okay, you're going to figure this out and wouldn't pay her bills.
And she had to struggle for a bit.
He also, there's a moment you write about where he was like, you have this asshole in you that you need to work out.
She took that, especially after his death, to mean self-work.
That is something that is just very pervasive in the wellness industry, this idea of self-work.
Can you explain a little how Gwyneth took that?
Yeah.
So after she won her Oscar, which was 1999, and she was 26 years old, her father sat her down and said, you're becoming kind of an asshole.
And I think that means that her ego was enormous and she was showing it.
And I heard stories about, for instance, when she was promoting talented Mr. Ripley, it was obvious to people around her that she was kind of, I don't know, that she was inhabiting that her movie starness, I guess I can say, like she would be flying around with her entourage and, you know, maybe she had four tickets to a movie premiere and five friends and only four could go.
And then she would play them off one another to see like, who's going to come with me?
So behavior like that.
Yeah.
So he told her she was becoming an asshole.
And the way she describes it, she took that really to heart.
And it seems like the self-improvement endeavors really picked up in earnest around that time, but it also had a physical component to it, which was like finding Tracy Anderson and wanting to lose baby weight.
So it all seemed to kind of coalesce, I guess.
You're running down my list here because Tracy Anderson was next.
She became her guru trainer at the time.
She was also working with Madonna, which apparently didn't last very long.
But it was, it seems like a reciprocal relationship because Gwyneth told her that the food that Tracy was eating is toxic.
So it seems like at this time, she's getting into yoga and physical fitness, but at the same time, she's starting to check everyone else's eating habits.
Yeah, she started doing yoga in the 90s and she would talk about that a lot.
And there was a famous quote, actually Vulture did the most amazing item about this.
She would tell this story, I guess, in interviews repeatedly, where she's in a yoga studio, like, I don't know, in the 2010s, she says, or a thought goes through her mind, like, bitch, you're here because I did yoga in the 90s.
Like, she's the first person ever in the world to have done yoga, which she's not, but she was doing it for a long time.
Yeah.
And then she found Tracy Anderson when she wanted to lose baby weight and she had to get in shape for Iron Man.
Now, with Goop's launch in September of 2008, you write, Goop was a window into a certain elitism and people couldn't look away.
Why do you think people couldn't look away?
Gwyneth started Goop to share her recommendations.
That's really genuinely why many people told me she started this whole endeavor.
She really thought that she had good information on decorating a home, on renovating a home, on if you travel, where you should stay, where you should travel, where you should eat.
She genuinely thought she had great information to share.
People couldn't look away because, you know, Vogue and Al and Harper's Bazaar had been recommending equally fancy things for decades, right?
But Gwyneth provided the actual direct connection to someone who really lived like that.
Plus, these Hollywood stars, it's like, We didn't really have social media, you know, like you didn't feel connected to these people.
So it was kind of a fascinating window into the life of like the biggest movie star in the world or someone who was once the biggest movie star in the world, who's married to one of the biggest rock stars in the world.
So it was kind of like lifestyles of the rich and famous, just seeing how the other half lives.
think that was really the magic of it.
you you you you One of the interesting through lines that I found in her, we'll call them two careers, even though she's done a lot more, is her willingness to chalk up all press as good press, basically.
That old idea that if they're talking about you, you're, you know, you're going to pull people over.
When she's in the 90s, she is one of the biggest actresses or the biggest in the world.
Her star only seemed to continue to rise with that negative publicity.
Something changes with Goop in terms of the content that is presented.
And we'll get to this when we talk about her work with Anna Wintour later on in Self Magazine, is pseudoscience.
Is she sort of feels that, well, if people are talking about this yoni egg or that my relationship with medical medium, it's all good because it's only going to help my star rise or group's star rise even more.
But it seems like that attitude persists.
But it's to me, there's a difference between the acting world and science, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.
So I think something to understand about a movie star doing this is that kind of what I was saying before about her being an asshole, like when you're a movie star, nobody tells you you're wrong.
Quite often, you know, the opposite.
People are telling you you're amazing and you're so great.
And when you're on a movie set, it's even more exaggerated because the crew wants to get the very best out of you when you're in front of the camera.
And, you know, maybe millions and millions of dollars have been spent on you being in front of the camera for five minutes and nailing it and feeling your very best.
These people get treated in this very bizarre way.
I mean, they really live in a bubble where they can do no wrong and they're constantly praised.
So I think that when you're living in that bubble and you feel like you can do no wrong and everybody loves you, why would you think that you're wrong?
Why would you really second guess yourself when nobody else does?
So I think that that's part of the mentality that she has that enables her to publish this stuff and just keep going and going and going.
It does seem to me though with Goop, like she did build the business through controversy after controversy with those controversies, even though there were very, very well-intentioned experts and news outlets saying, you know, this is not good for you or this article is wrong.
That would still send traffic to Goop and those people might buy a wellness product or they might just buy a sweater.
So I think that once they saw that that could be a strategy for building the site, they kept doing it.
Like with Anthony William, the medical medium, one person told me that when they needed traffic, they would call him and they would do a story with him.
Now, she took over as CEO of Goop in 2016.
So as you write, the first couple of years, she never had an intention of monetizing it.
And that was a slow build to actually start to realize that potential.
The company had just tripled its revenue up to $20 million in 2016.
Yet you write in the nine years since she's never been able to keep that profit sustainable.
It's been up and down, but she's never had a fully profitable year.
I found your reasoning very interesting.
And I want you to unpack this a little bit because you write that she wants to be a leader in everything.
So it seems like she's very pulled to try this conference or this cruise or this clothing line.
And instead of focusing on one thing, which is what you really need for product market fit, if you want to basically take Silicon Valley money and then sell the company, she seems to be not disciplined in that sense.
I think that's right.
I think that's true.
So people told me that they thought that she would have had more success with Goop if she had just proved success in one area first versus doing all those things that you just said.
Like beauty products.
Obviously, tons of celebrities have beauty product lines and there are much bigger success stories than Goop.
Haley, Haley Bieber with Rode is one example.
That company was just acquired in a billion dollar deal with ELF Cosmetics.
And that was a very disciplined product line.
You know, I think a lot of people know Rode from lip gloss and a phone case.
And I think that shows you the discipline that they've had.
You know, they don't sell that many products either.
You know, they have a limited range of beauty products that do well that people like.
And Haley Bieber, from what I understand, is all in promoting those products.
So Gwyneth with Goop, she wanted to do the clean beauty products, which they did.
But then she also wanted to do a fashion line and she wanted to do live events and they have a publishing imprint, which is its own problem for wellness purposes, obviously.
Yeah, they did supplements.
They did so many different things.
To their credit, a lot of media companies would have liked to have the opportunities to do all the things that they do.
And I know because I was working at media companies in the 2010s when Goop was expanding like this.
But the problem when you try to do everything is it gets very, very expensive versus if you're just going to go all in on beauty, then you just need a team for that.
I did talk to outside investors because I couldn't get goops to talk to me, the board members and those people.
But outside investors said they didn't understand why Goop raised so much money.
Pitchbook has their funding amount at about $140 million, which I was told is pretty close.
Other companies that are just doing beauty, like they don't, they don't need to raise nearly that much.
You raise a fraction of that.
You just do the beauty of then.
You hope that you can sell that big like Haley Bieber did.
You mentioned it earlier about being cheap, but she seems to have required immediate responses from her employees.
And that means from waking up at whatever, 6 a.m. to going to bed at 10 p.m., whatever it is.
Did you get a sense of the sort of stresses that she put on her workers?
Yeah, she's impatient.
She wants, I mean, I think a lot of people are probably like that, right?
She's impatient.
She wants, you know, responses right away.
She's also a perfectionist.
And I got the sense that navigating that could be challenging.
Like she wanted to do all these things and she wanted to do them all perfectly.
I mean, if you look at photos of her or if you look at photos of her homes, you can see that perfectionism.
You can see that taste.
I mean, people said she has excellent taste.
I think she has excellent taste.
And I think that that taste level is also what enabled her to market the wellness content and the wellness products on Goop because she essentially managed to commodify wellness as a luxury good.
But I think that the dynamic in the office was basically this.
There are, you know, a group of executives who report to Gwyneth.
When she shines her light on them, it feels amazing.
They feel like they're her best friend, but she has favorites and those favorites can change.
So when she rescinds that attention, those people can feel very stressed out.
It just permeates the office environment.
So they're trying to do a lot of things and they're trying to navigate Gwyneth's perfectionism and also her favoritism.
Which feels kind of the opposite of wellness.
Exactly.
People did make that point to me.
Yeah, they did make that point to me.
I mean, look, I worked in media through my whole career until 2018.
Then I left to be an author and an independent journalist.
But I know how, I know how hard it is to run a media company, particularly today and all the demands that are placed on you.
And the people I spoke to said that, you know, they had worked in companies like that as well.
Like they worked at Condé Nast and all the biggest publishing companies.
They said even by that standard, this felt more intense.
Speaking of Condé Nast, that was really gripping to me because I remember vaguely Goop magazine had started and then it didn't like, it's one of those projects that didn't last.
But you write about when the Goop team is meeting with Anna Wintor and Self's editor and the editor of SELF wanted to avoid collaborating on health and wellness because none of Goop was evidence-based.
And then someone from Goop's team called them old and conservative, whereas Goop is progressive and represents a younger audience.
Is this Gwyneth alone or did she convince everyone in the leadership that, you know, science is something to be seen as a vibe, basically, because that is what eventually we land on with everything with Goop.
Oh, man, science is a vibe.
That's really dark.
Yeah.
No, people drank the Kool-Aid.
And I think this happens at a lot of companies, right?
Like Facebook.
I think people drank the Kool-Aid.
And I think when they're there, they like buy into it.
I mean, people told me when they were Publishing Anthony Williams Celery Juice, whatever, like diet and whatever.
I guess it's not a diet.
It's just like drink celery juice and you won't have any problems, basically.
When they were publishing that, they would be like, oh, let's like, let's drink celery juice.
Like, why not?
So I think there was some Kool-Aid drinking going on there, definitely.
But people made the point to me, you know, like culture is set from the top.
And Gwyneth did, you know, as I talked about in the book, like, I think that she did have this philosophy or this attitude that like medical research helps men and it can't be trusted.
And, you know, I talked to so many experts in public health and health and women's health and health misinformation.
And they were basically like, well, it's not a perfect system, but we're not going to fix it with pseudoscience, obviously.
Right.
You talked to two good friends of the pod, Dr. Jen Gunter, Dr. Andrea Love, who you quoted all over, which was fantastic.
That line did jump out because Gwyneth is right.
For a long time, evidence-based medicine definitely did not serve women very well.
And that is changing, but it's been slow.
But there are more women than men who are now enrolled in medical school in the United States.
And we see that turning.
And people like Jen Gunter are part of that turning.
One of the most interesting parts that jumped out to me about this is she very rarely responded to criticism, but something about Dr. Gunter's blog post about the Yoni eggs really got to her.
So she wrote a whole article about it.
Wouldn't name her.
That's always a technique, right?
I'm not going to, I'm not going to link to the source material because I don't want my readers to know who it is or what they say.
Yeah.
But that moment jumped out.
Yes.
So Dr. Gunter is so fantastic.
I spent a long time talking to her for the book and was so happy that I could include her and Timothy Caulfield and Andrea Love.
When Goop started selling the Yoni Egg, they put up this article.
It was a QA with a woman named Shiva Rose, who was talking all about her yoni egg and how she used it and the ritual she practiced when she used it and made a bunch of claims that Goop should not have been making about what it could do for your health.
And Dr. Gunter wrote a blog post, you know, denouncing it and saying, you know, don't use this.
This could harm you.
And here is why what Goop is saying is not right.
And it went viral.
The whole thing went massively viral, as we all know by now.
And experts in articles by legacy fact check media were refuting it and everything.
So there was a lot of content out there saying that, you know, women are not advised to use these, but these claims are not right.
Regulators were starting to look into them, considering taking some more serious action against Goop, which a lawsuit was eventually brought.
Dr. Gunter really got under Gwyneth's skin.
And the reason I was told for that is that Gwyneth is sensitive to people profiting off of her image.
And she perceived Dr. Gunter and her criticism as somehow profiting off of her image.
And, you know, Dr. Gunter said to me, I was just a chick with a WordPress trying to explain to my patients what they needed to know about this.
It was interesting.
I did speak to, you know, for the most part, these gurus that Goop likes to feature and these quote-unquote experts, for the most part, they don't talk to you.
But I did speak to Stephen Gundry, who was one of the authors or people who signed this letter.
And I said, why did you sign this?
He said, Goop asked me to.
And I thought that Dr. Gunter was profane.
And I had never seen a doctor write like that.
So I thought I would sign the letter.
Which jumped out at me again, you're talking about this situation where, you know, with health and women not being served, it seemed very tone-policing to me.
I'm friends with Andrea Love, especially.
We talk pretty regularly and we're both from the East Coast.
Like we use a lot of curse words in our everyday language.
And the number of comments she gets from people being like, this is very professional.
Communication hits people differently.
So I thought that that, I thought Gundry's deflection on that, because he has been targeted for selling supplements long before that incident.
So that was very telling to me.
Yeah, but he was one of the few people who had the guts to get on the phone with me.
You know, I tried Dr. Sudegi.
I tried Anthony William, Younger, Dr. Younger.
They wouldn't do it.
Right.
How about Will Cole?
Oh, Will Cole, no.
He's, well, that's actually a good segue to start to wind down here because Will Cole has really jumped aboard the Maha train.
I've covered him a lot more in the last year than before because of how hard he's been standing for RFK Jr.
And you write a bit about Maha in the epilogue.
There is no direct link between Gwyneth and Maha, but it really does feel like you are completely right.
There are so many people doing yoga for generations before her that she's not the reason that that front desk person was working at that yoga studio.
But with Maha specifically and toxins everywhere, Gwyneth really does seem to be sort of a trailblazer to help mainstream these ideas.
In fact, right before we hopped on, the Wall Street Journal reported that Heidi Klum is about to do a toxin and parasite cleanse after her movie because she wants to see what comes out.
And I can't help but think of Goop in my mind when I'm reading these things.
Yeah, that's in the Wall Street Journal.
I missed that before he got on the call.
Yeah, I think this is what's interesting about Gwyneth because I think I would argue the link is definitely there, but she's not come out and said, you know, she's a full Maha mom or anything like that.
And when people ask her about RFK Jr. in interviews, which they do for a reason, she tends to say things like, I think he's interesting or I think he has some interesting ideas.
It's never like, you know, vaccines are important and I don't support his anti-vax, whatever.
But I think that what Gwyneth did with Goop is really significant because she gave wellness a rhetoric talking about things like parasites and toxins and so-called clean living, clean eating and clean beauty.
And she also gave it an aesthetic, that gorgeous, aspirational, luxurious aesthetic that people will pay money to be a part of.
In doing those two things, I think that she and Goop really helped begin to seed this distrust of institutions, of medical industries, of established science, of credited, credentialed experts who know what they're talking about and promoted people like the medical medium who have no medical training, who make things up, right?
I don't even know.
I remember talking to Andrea Love about that, about him, and she was just like, I'm really at a loss and he's just really dangerous.
So I do think that that goes back to Goop.
I really, really do.
And I suppose, you know, as you said, like there could be some debate around that, but I really do think that she was very influential in that.
Oh, I think so as well.
I meant the direct link, meaning she is an Omaha mom.
Like I haven't seen her stand for RFK and come out and be like, I embrace this movement.
It just feels like she's underneath a lot of it.
Yeah, I think so, because when she's asked about it, you know, she doesn't say, I mean, in one of the interviews I did about the book, someone was like, I don't understand why she doesn't just denounce him.
Right.
And that's an interesting question.
Right.
You know, why?
I mean, I know they both like raw dairy products.
Right.
She likes some of his other ideas.
I can't remember precisely off the top of my head, but I know that they both like their raw dairy products.
Well, maybe she might feel slighted.
I don't know, just guessing, but like seeing someone who actually gets it up to the upper echelons of power and all the attention is on him now with this.
And she's like, I've been drinking this for decades.
Yeah, maybe, but I would assume that if she believes in this stuff, and I do think that she believes in this stuff, like maybe she's happy about it.
But I don't know.
I mean, people did tell me that she's not anti-vax, but I know that she's platformed people with anti-vax, you know, people who have written sort of anti-vax things or, you know, whatever it may be.
Last question, the most interesting tension that I've found, and I've found this often in wellness, is here you have someone.
We've talked about, you know, the ideas.
They don't stand up to fact checking or reality in some situations.
She's running a company that has $140 million in funding, which those investors are going to want an exit or a sale or something, you know, at some point.
There's so much focus on making money.
And yet it seems like her following just doesn't care about that.
They're caught up in the affect, the look, the idea of cleansing, of being filled with parasites that this thing will get out.
And you write that her greatest cultural impact here this quote, showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us.
How did that line come into your head?
I don't remember.
I don't remember.
How did, I mean, the epilogue, I do remember that I turned in the book and my editor said, this isn't a real epilogue, go do it again.
And then I did.
And I tried to think of it, I guess, in terms of an opinion piece, which I write often when I'm not writing books.
I sometimes contribute to the Times opinion page.
And so I just thought of it like an opinion piece.
Like, what is the, what do I want people to take away having read all of this?
I think that that's her impact.
I really do.
I think that's what she's going to be remembered for.
I probably spent a long time thinking, like, what is she going to be remembered for?
You know, and obviously she has many more years left in her and a lot more career ahead of her.
I don't even know if she's going to continue with Goop.
I mean, she's doing this movie with Timothy Chalamet that's coming out at the end of the year.
I hear that it's not as fun for her anymore at Goop.
They've had to cut back a lot of what they were doing.
Now they're focusing on fashion, beauty, and food.
So not really so much wellness.
But I just really think that her impact and like the way she's going to be remembered and the way her obituary is going to read is that like this is this is her impact is basically creating an archetype for the modern wellness industry.
