๐ฉโ๐ป Somebody Should Have Googled It
Hey Reader,
I love it when I get served internet gossip from podcasts I don't even follow, which is how you know a story has escaped containment. I am chronically online, y'all. Like, I consume a truly ungodly amount of media every week. And by the time I sat down to write this, the Reel that inspired this week's Production Oracle had racked up 2.8 million views... and I suspect because it's adding to the pile of raised eyebrows about podcasting's former darling. But I promise we're going to do something useful with this, because tucked inside this very messy, very public story, there is a very expensive lesson about making media that might be the best I've seen all year.
Spoiler: by the end of this you're going to understand why having an executive producer in your ecosystem is so important and you might want to come closer... ๐ฃ
Quick catch-up for anyone who hasn't been tracking celebrity level podcaster culture with me. (Congratulations, you have a life! ๐ฅ)
Alex Cooper built Call Her Daddy into one of the biggest podcasts on the planet, and then she set out to build something much bigger than a podcast: a whole media company called Unwell. (I'm sorry. ๐ They walked directly into this one.) And 2026 has been rough for them, to put it lightly.
There was the very public breakup with Alix Earle, whose Hot Mess was one of the network's marquee shows. Bloomberg reported on turnover, executive departures, and allegations about the workplace culture. Then Vanity Fair showed up in June with a deep dive built on interviews with more than 40 sources, which Cooper's and her husband Matt Kaplan's lawyers disputed. And through all of it, the company kept growing, landing its first outside investment in August at a reported $500 million valuation.
Which brings us to last week. I told you this was juicy. ๐ซ
History is just gossip
There's a podcast called Right Answers Mostly, hosted by Tess Bellomo and Claire Donald, and they've been telling stories from history and pop culture and it's been carefully crafted (like you're three cocktails deep ๐น with your smartest friends) for about five years now. Their whole premise fits in four words: "History is just gossip." It's in their social media bios, it's in their podcast description, and there are a couple hundred episodes behind it. In business we call that a tagline. Their bio even tags WME (William Morris Endeavor) as their management reps. This is not a show somebody started last Thursday.
Then Unwell launched a new show called Petticoat Revolution. According to the screenshots and statements the Right Answers Mostly hosts posted publicly, the launch caption said "history meets gossip," and the merch in the launch photos read "it's not gossip it's just history." You can see where this is going. ๐ RAM called it out, the internet did side-by-sides, and RAM says Unwell then quietly edited the caption and pulled the merch photo.
In the interests of covering my own Gossip Girl ass here, I don't know whether anybody at Unwell copied anyone, and neither does the internet. Similar ideas develop independently all the time, and nobody owns the general concept of telling history like gossip. But whether or not someone copied an entire podcast concept, tagline, and merch line is not the part of this story that has my attention.
The most generous version of this is still a problem
Let's pretend Unwell operated in absolute good faith, AKA nobody knew. That means a company with money, lawyers, producers, and a brand-new investor (whose firm was founded by a former WME co-CEO, because Hollywood is run by essentially twelve people sharing the same corner office) developed a show, wrote the launch copy, designed the merch, photographed the merch, approved all of it, and pushed it out into the world... without anybody typing "history gossip podcast" into a search bar. ๐คฏ
This is your lesson:
- Intent changes the ethics question.
- It doesn't change the process question.
- And the process question is a production problem.
Most people think production means recording the episode, editing the video, cutting the clips, making the thumbnail, and uploading everything. That's making the thing, and it matters because you cannot build a whole IP infrastructure on an idea that only lives in your head. But an executive producer is the person whose job is to zoom all the way out and ask the annoying questions before anything ships.
- What are we building, and what's it supposed to do for the business?
- What's already out there that looks like this?
- What do we want to be remembered for by the audience, and what are we accidentally borrowing or copying from somebody else?
- And at what point do we stop guessing and call a lawyer?
Your executive producer is not your attorney. Your executive producer is one of the people who knows when the attorney needs to enter the chat.
I learned this habit long before I built a studio. When I was a digital archivist at Disney Animation, nobody treated a sketch like disposable "content." Everything was an asset with a history and an owner, and knowing where things came from was part of the job. That instinct isn't big-studio paranoia. It's basic care for the things you make.
Your margin for error is smaller than theirs
Here's the part I really need you to hear, because I know your first reaction is, "Cool story, Mary, but I'm not running Unwell." Exactly. You don't have their money and neither do I.
When a company valued at $500 million+ launches the wrong creative, it has a distinct luxury that only money can buy. It can
- change the caption,
- pull the merch,
- call its attorneys,
- hire a crisis comms team,
- eat the cost, and
- go make another show.
You might have put $5,000 into your launch, or $25,000, or six months of your one wild and precious life. You might have one launch window, one contractor budget, one audience you spent five years earning, and one name. A smaller business doesn't mean smaller stakes. It means less room to absorb the mistakes.
This is the point in the episode of Gossip Girl where you learn the realities of what money can buy... and what a budget is for in regular life: "content marketing" has badly undersold what you're doing. If you're serious about using media to grow your business, you aren't filling rectangles on a content calendar. You're building a show people recognize, phrases your audience starts saying back to you, recurring segments, a searchable archive of everything you know, and a way of talking that people associate with your name. The lawyers call that intellectual property. I call it the stuff you own that feeds your business funnel. Yes, it's there to fill your course and grow your membership, but five years from now that weird little show you toiled over and spent real capital and time developing, might be the most valuable thing in your business. Just ask two women whose five-year-old tagline was worth defending in front of 2.8 million people and counting.
So treat it that way NOW. Yes, when you're still a "nobody" and your audience consists of 10 regular consumers, one of which might be your mom. (We love you, Mom! ๐) You don't wait to protect your IP only after it gets big, not after somebody copies you, and definitely not after you wander into somebody else's territory with a box of freshly printed merch.
You don't need a $500 million valuation before you start acting like what you're building matters. By the time the stakes get that big, you'd better have already learned how.
Right Answers Mostly says history is just gossip. This week's gossip says your cute little podcast might be one of the most valuable things you own. Maybe treat it like it is.
๐ซ It's weird until it works.
xoxo,
Gossip Girl
๐ฅ Look Around Before You Launch
This week's Gossip Girl episode is brought to you by the muscle we build inside the Creator Economy Dojo. We just had our live Sasquatch Summit and in next week's email I'll have post-event goodies to share with you so that you can plan to join us next year!
Before you hit record, before you name the show, and definitely before you print the merch, we ask the annoying questions together: what's already out there, what you can be known for, and what's worth protecting.
It's fractional talent management for creators building toward bigger opportunities... which is a fancy way of saying you get the strategy, accountability, media assets, and industry prep of a talent manager without hiring a full-time manager.
The Dojo is now out of founding membership stage and the standing rate is $497/mo. You can see all the updates here.โ
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