Aug 26, 2022
Content Consumed: Zuck on Rogan, Olivia vs. Shia, and why gossip is good
Friday, babyyyy!
Welcome to today’s edition of Content Consumed, where we’re chatting about…
🤖 Zuck on the Rogan podcast (I’m sorry!)
🤭 Olivia Wilde drowning in new Don’t Worry Darling drama
☕️ Why gossip is good for us
🏎 Revisiting Pierre Gasly’s Player Tribune
Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan
Nope! I won’t listen to it! Can’t stand either of them! But I will read every article summarizing what they chitchatted about.
Here’s what you wanna know:
- POLITICAL: Zuck said the company spends $5 billion per year “defending against bad actors and nation-states.” Meta also made the decision to limit the reach of an article about Hunter Biden that came out in the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election, due to FBI warnings about Russian propaganda — something Republicans are not happy about this morning.
- WIVES: Zuck keeps getting interrupted by his wife when he works from home. “I’ll be like in zone kind of flow concentration working on something and you know, my wife will like ask me some, some like basic question and I’ll just be like, ‘Oh man,’ it’s like, ‘I just like lost my flow’,” he told Rogan, who had similar complaints about his wife.
- SOCIAL MEDIA: Zuck believes Twitter to be “upsetting” and Instagram “a positive space”. An interesting comment in the war between platforms, especially given the recent criticism of Instagram’s algorithm, navigation, and copycatting.
- TECH: The new Meta headset will include eye- and face-tracking so that people’s VR avatars can accurately mimic their facial expressions and users can feel as if their avatar is looking directly at another person’s avatar in VR social apps. Freaky-deeky!
Olivia Wilde exposed by… Shia LaBeouf?
I’m so sorry. I know I talk about the Don’t Worry Darling drama a lot. But my god, there’s just a constant barrage of it and it’s a fascinating look into how films are made and the relationships behind the camera.
Variety just CORRECTED their profile on Olivia Wilde with new information from sexual abuser and “fired” lead of Don’t Worry Darling, Shia LaBeouf.
After Shia said he wanted to quit the project, Olivia sent him a video from her car begging him to come back. This isn’t tabloid fodder. Variety has the video, sent to them by Shia to ~clear his name~ after Olivia claimed he was fired for on-set behavior.
It’s becoming pretty damn clear why Florence Pugh wants nothing to do with this project anymore! Olivia privately begged for Shia to come back by saying that Pugh was the one who needed a “wake-up call” and to “commit”—even diminutively calling her “Miss Flo” to Shia.
This is a far cry from self-proclaimed feminist Olivia’s comments previously in the article: “I knew I was going to be asking Florence to be in very vulnerable situations, and my priority was making her feel safe and making her feel supported.”
Then why’d you try to force her to do sex scenes with a known sexual abuser?
It’s enraging, honestly. Justice for Florence Pugh!
Late edit: The video came out. It’s bad.
Gossip is good, actually
Frivolous, pointless, and absolutely immoral? Nah. Gossip is essential.
While the word is “often synonymous with bitchiness, meanness, and being two-faced”, a Refinery29 author writes, our conversations about other people are motivated by a genuine interest in other people’s lives and stories — not cruelty.
For me, it’s about bonding. I connected with other third-graders in elementary school by speculating about teachers’ lives outside of school. I did the same in college with fellow students about our professors, roommates, hook-ups, and others.
And celebrity gossip… my god, I could just do that for hours. (See: the story above this.)
Worth noting: gossip as a concept is extremely patriarchial in its historical and modern context, despite the fact that men typically gossip just as much as women.
Revisited: Pierre Gasly’s Player Tribune
The day before quali at Spa, F1’s Belgian Grand Prix, it feels fitting to revisit Pierre Gasly’s deeply emotional Players’ Tribune piece from 2021. He wrote it less than two years after the death of his best friend and fellow driver Anthoine Hubert at Spa’s 2019 race, and the wounds are still very raw.
It’s the disbelief he still has — “He was so calculated. He never took any silly risks. How could that happen to him? Why? He wasn’t supposed to go. He had too much to do.” — that hurts to read. They had shared the same path since age 8, with Pierre getting to F1 first and fully convinced Anthoine would graduate from F2 quickly behind him.
The most difficult part for me, and other F1 fans, to fathom, is how Pierre can race again. Especially on the same track. How can any of the drivers race again after one of their own tragically dies mid-race? The mental fortitude, the passion for sport, it takes to do this… it’s something the vast majority of us don’t have.
And that’s it for today! I love you. Truly. Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on Monday with more content!
Saludos,
Casey
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