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Jenny McCarthy became famous in an era that loved putting women into boxes: bombshell, blonde, punchline, cautionary tale. Instead, she built a decades-long career by refusing to stay in any one lane.

In this episode of Like Me, Jenny talks candidly about growing up poor, surviving the entertainment industry, breaking out of the Playboy mold, getting rejected by MTV before landing Singled Out, building businesses before celebrity entrepreneurship became standard, and why she says authenticity still matters more than trend-chasing. We also talk about Formless Beauty, aging publicly, self-deprecating humor as a survival strategy, and what happens when your personality itself becomes the product.

What if the internet didn’t ruin culture—or us?

In this episode, host Jordan Reid sits down with Magic and Loss author Virginia Heffernan to talk about the idea that might give us all hope: Maybe the internet isn’t a fall from grace. It’s just…what happened next.

They talk about what it actually felt like to be part of the first wave of influencer culture—doing every job at once (photographer, editor, talent, brand), often unpaid—and how that model borrowed heavily from reality TV, where people were expected to perform their lives in exchange for “exposure.”

They also get into why the early internet felt so electric—and why we might be confusing that feeling with youth, not technology. They unpack why we’re drawn to vulnerability online (and why content featuring scared or hurt kids performs so well), and what that says about our need for catharsis versus our appetite for real-life suffering.

And then the big one: aging.

What happens when the women who built a culture centered on visibility, youth, and self-presentation start to age inside it? What does it mean to look like yourself on camera, instead of chasing “Instagram face”? And how do you let go of the version of yourself that once worked?

Virginia reframes all of it not as loss, but as continuation.

This episode is about:

• Why nostalgia for the “old internet” might actually be nostalgia for who you once were
• The hidden labor and emotional cost of early influencer culture
• The blurred line between performance, fiction, and truth online
• Why discomfort is the default—not the exception
• And how to stop treating change like a catastrophe

If you’ve ever felt like the version of you that mattered existed in another era—this conversation will hit. Hard.

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Today’s guest is Caroline McCarthy — one of the first mainstream journalists assigned to cover social media full-time, back when Facebook looked temporary, Twitter looked unserious, and being “very online” was still considered a little embarrassing. At 22 years old, she was handed what many editors saw as a novelty beat. Instead, she ended up with a front-row seat to one of the biggest cultural and economic shifts of the century.

But what makes Caroline especially compelling is that she wasn’t just reporting on the new attention economy — she was also being shaped by it. As journalism began rewarding personality, visibility, and personal brand, Caroline herself became a recognizable internet figure during the exact years she was documenting that phenomenon.

And then, like so many people from that era, she experienced the less-flashy aftermath: what happens when public attention moves elsewhere, and you realize how much of your identity has become entangled with being seen.

This conversation is about the early internet, yes — those weird kids who built online culture before it was cool. But it’s also about something far more significant: status, friendship, aging, relevance, and the emotional consequences of losing a currency it feels shameful to admit you ever wanted.