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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.

For more episodes of Like Me click here, and remember to follow @likemepod on Instagram for behind-the-scenes and clips.

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.

For a certain generation of creators, there’s a shared experience that’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there: one minute you’re building something that feels electric, collaborative, and weirdly important…and the next, you’re staring at your phone like, “Wait. Where did I go?”

In this episode, I talk to Rachel Sobel — founder of @whineandcheezits — about that exact pipeline: the early days of Instagram when growth came from group chats and generosity (actual generosity), the moment everything changed (algorithm? burnout? capitalism? yes to all), and the disorienting comedown that followed.

We get into what it felt like to go from this is the most fun I’ve ever had to this is somehow more stressful than my corporate job — and why so many of us walked away (whether logistically, financially, emotionally, or a mix) at almost exactly the same time.

But this conversation isn’t just a postmortem. It’s also about what came after: writing through miscarriage, divorce, illness; building real communities out of what started as memes; and realizing that the whole chaotic, unregulated, occasionally humiliating experience actually did its job.

Because the truth is that the thing we built didn’t last in the form we wanted. But it did get us somewhere. Not perfect, not polished — but real, sustainable, and (ugh) apparently exactly where we were trying to go all along.

Also discussed:

1. The lost art of meme credit enforcement squads
2. Why no one is gaining followers anymore (??)
3. The emotional journey from aspirational brand deals to Metamucil
4. Why your kids will never understand what MapQuest did to us
5. And the deeply unsettling realization that we are now the “back in my day” people

Find Rachel on Instagram at @whineandcheezits.

When she was 18 years old, Cassidy Gard became a reader of my blog, Ramshackle Glam. Nearly twenty years later, we're peers -- and both writing about burnout, motherhood, and what happens when the life you built stops making sense. In her twenties, Cassidy was chasing the dream: red carpets, national TV, access, visibility — the version of success we were all taught to want. By 30, everything cracked: grief, isolation, panic attacks. From there, her life took a turn she never could have planned — including a solo road trip to Montana, buying a cabin on six acres, and completely rethinking what success actually means. In this episode, we talk about: The early internet era (NonSociety, blogging, YouTube) and how we learned to “be a brand” before it had a name Why burnout isn’t about overwork — it’s about misalignment The difference between being ambitious and being in survival mode Postpartum rage, resentment, and the invisible labor no one prepares you for Sobriety, relationships, and how your environment shapes your life Why reinvention often feels like failure before it feels like freedom This is not a tidy transformation story. It’s a conversation about what breaks — and what gets rebuilt.

What happens when the influencer economy grows up — and starts raising children inside it?

In this episode of Like Me, Jordan Reid sits down with journalist and author Fortesa Latifi to discuss her new book, Like, Follow, Subscribe — a deeply reported look at family vloggers, mom influencers, and the children whose lives are documented, monetized, and consumed online.

Together, they explore:

1. The shift from early mom blogging to child-centered influencer content
2. The blurry line between sharing and exploitation
3. Why authenticity online may be impossible
4. The role of class, labor, and economics in shaping who can “opt out”
5. The psychological impact of growing up as content
6. And why this conversation is far more complicated than “good vs bad parenting”

This episode also gets personal, as Jordan reflects on her own experience as part of the first generation of lifestyle bloggers — and what it means to look back at that era through a very different lens.

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Claire Zulkey has been writing online for more than two decades, which means she’s lived through blogs, social media, newsletters, and every version of the internet in between. In this episode, we talk about what happens when the part of your life that used to give you endless material — work, parenting, relationships, ambition — starts to feel less like inspiration and more like logistics. We talk about burnout, perimenopause, aging parents, teenagers, creative dry spells, and the weird guilt of not having something new to say when your job is to keep saying things.

It’s a conversation about the stage of life where you don’t necessarily want attention anymore — but you’re still here anyway.

Today’s guest is J. Kenji López-Alt — and this one is especially fun for me, because we went to high school together.

I knew Kenji before he was a New York Times bestselling author, before The Food Lab became a kind of home-cook bible, before his name turned into a citation people use to win arguments on the internet. And the funny thing is: I “rediscovered” him the way you rediscover anyone from your past now — online. Around 2009, I got hooked on these incredibly obsessive, weirdly readable deep dives on Serious Eats about things like In-N-Out burgers and hard-boiling eggs, and I remember thinking…that is a very specific name. That has to be the Kenji I knew.

What I love about this conversation is that it’s not really about food — it’s about what happens when your opinions become canon, when strangers feel entitled not just to your expertise but to your life, and how you draw a line between being open and being available, especially when it comes to topics like, say, divorce. And sobriety.

We talk about the culture of internet rage, why “best” is a dangerous word, and the very specific kind of success that looks less like a yacht and more like…being able to buy the good cheese without thinking twice. I didn’t expect this one to go in the direction it did. I loved it so much.