Hi everybody, welcome back to the year in five podcasts. I'm Kate Kennedy, your host.

I've had this podcast for over five years and one of the goals over the years has been to talk about influencers as a form of modern celebrity.

You know, I love to talk about bloggers and tiktokers and all things to do with the influencer economy.

I think three or four years ago I started a series called Under the Influencer where I wanted to interview bloggers, business owners, various functions that involve influencing because I think it's a really fascinating industry and kind of lived the hood.

And the past year or two, I haven't done as many because I found that bloggers have a lot of anxiety about podcasts and I've had more bloggers ghost on me than even was worth the effort.

And back when I was doing more of those interviews, this person was requested all the time.

The point where I looked back in our DM history and we almost did it in 2019, but per my luck, I couldn't ever get her to respond or nail down a date.

Name is Caroline Callaway and she is definitely one of the most gossiped about influencers on the internet, I think.

Just in terms of the level of volume of of snark of always trying to like figure out who she is and what she's about.

And of kind of the constant feeding the public of content that is snark worthy to the point where the Caroline Callaway internet lore is a tangled web on the web that feels so hard to disentangle.

At this point when you're a little late to the game and trying to figure out who she is and what she's done.

And the way this all happened and I got her on the podcast this week is because on last week's podcast, I was interviewing Stephanie McNeill who used to be a writer at Buzzfeed now as an editor at clamor.

I to prep for the interview with Stephanie, I went back to the first episode we did in 2020 to be like, oh, what were we talking about? What was the hot influencer, Gus.

A big point of conversation was Caroline Callaway and I realized I didn't really follow her thought about her in a minute and seen what she was up to.

And I went to her Instagram and realized that the book she had announced early 2020 called scammer about the period of her life predominantly 2019 when she got labeled as a scammer due to a few internet scandals will go through.

She announced and took pre-orders for this book called scammer. It never came out. It kept getting pushed and pushed and pushed. She took money for it.

And even when she announced it was coming out this year going through her Instagram, the day kept changing the reasons why kept changing.

And then I went to the pre-order site and the book is self published $65 comes with Italian marbled end papers ribbons. I don't know the whole thing.

I was kind of like, is this a bit? Is she because one of the ways she's made money in recent years is by like, you know, selling face oil called literal snake oil or sending gift cards. She calls gift cards. She kind of co-opted this scammer moniker. Anyway, so I said on the podcast, like, is this a scam?

Like, is it coming out? Like, I mean, I can't help but be interested. And I mentioned on Instagram, I tagged her and I said, feel free to come on the podcast and tell us this is real basically.

And much to my surprise, she responded and she sent me her phone number. And she seemed to come on the podcast. So while I waited to nail down a time, I kind of started to research and get back into Caroline's internet lore.

I wanted to do I wanted to do an under the influencer to kind of talking about her history and also the book, but the point when I started prepping, I hadn't read it yet.

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