Confessions of a Female Flounder part 2

[foreverblowingbubbless]

I've embarrassed for Meghan saying that her arranging takeaway food on a plate is the same thing as what Figs Heather Hasson has done 😬

I just saw a twitter post from her penultimate guest who confirmed the interview wasn’t in person. It was over zoom (or equivalent). Not so easy to get people to fawn over you when you can’t chit chat before the camera starts rolling 🤦🏼‍♀️

No aggressive hugging!

No way !!

Clearly I have not been paying attention ( Granny duty , holiday , gardening) and have just read that As ever is only producing limited seasonal products !?
Presumably Meghan is not looking to make serious money !

Where are they making money? If it isn't As Ever, he makes about a million a year as CHIMPO, i don't think podcasting earns millions. Where is the money coming from?

Pa ?

I don't think so. I think he helped at the beginning but not at the moment. I'm pretty sure that is part of Harry's anger, the fact he has to earn his own money.

Careful Trust Investments? Hopefully their financial advisors are better than their PR lot.

Or indeed easier to be edited,

Harry's had enough money the with careful advisors he can last a long while and the NF Spotify RH deals - if they've invested well will keep them going for a long while. I would bet a pound to a pint of oranges they aren't on their uppers yet.

Not billionaires but with freebies / borrowed or lent outfits , friends' planes and holiday destinations they can keep up a pretty swanky lifestyle for a while - I think.

I do think Charles gives him an allowance, but I bet whatever he gives him Harry believes is not enough.

I guess that explains why her podcasts are not videoed.

I can't see the podcast in the top 100 Spotify in UK or US, or the top 200 Apple.

Unless I've skipped by it.

Only episode 1 and 2 charted, it hasn't made it into the top 200 on any podcast chart since then.

Which proves the PR brings in the initial interest, but her content is drivel and doesn't maintain or build an audience. I think if they reported the viewing numbers per episode for her Netflix series, it would show exactly the same trajectory.

It was only ever about not losing anymore face than she already had done except reviews were so bad she lost even more face.

She’ll pretend play with this project for another couple of seasins, again to save face because that’s all that matters, then it will disappear without a trace.

I doubt it very much.

Can you imagine the rest of the family if he was giving Harry money - not only do we have to keep quiet when he’s lobbing stink bombs at us but you’re even paying him to enjoy it. There’d be blue murder amongst them.

I’m sure he’ll inherit from the King but that will be as far as it goes

Is Harry (and Meghan) growing their fortune? I suspect not and that there won’t be much generational wealth handed down to the children that isn’t inheritance from the King and those who came before him family wise.

Harry and Meghan have absolutely no capacity to grow their fortune and it really is as simple as that.

That’s true that they will have difficulties to grow their fortune to any significant levels. They aren’t exempt from paying tax or iht. They don’t get to live rent free so are basically living the life like the rest of us. If they want to be free loaders perhaps they should’ve stayed in the RF and continued to live off the tax payer.

They need to cut their cloth, which neither will want to do. He's used to palaces and she's desperate for the billionaire lifestyle but neither can bring in that level of wealth.

Yes, they will have to limpet on to accommodating billionaires. The only problem is that their stock is currently low and seems to be decreasing with every move they make.

Prince Andrew (yay! See, I have brought Andrew into it!) was close to the Queen and all the pomp and wotnot, so he was able to hobnob with Epstein. Epstein and others had shooting parties at Sandringham, and Andrew could stay in his Manhattan brownstone and have his wife’s (ex-wife even) debts paid off by him.

Harry has little to offer. Bit of gossip, perhaps, but no castle/palace invites. If he and M are reduced to Brooklyn Beckham… ouch. (Btw I laughed when I saw a comment speculating on the sparkling wit and intellectual repartee at H&M’s dinner party with Brooklyn and his wife…)

The flopping failure of COAFF can down to 3 reasons, imho:

1. Meghan is very unpopular in the US, the primary audience for COAFF;
2. Audiences only really engage with these kind of 'tips from an expert' podcasts if the expert featured has genuinely achieved the thing they're giving tips about. Meghan is not, in any sense of the word, a 'founder' or 'entrepreneur'. The women she's interviewing are (sort of; lots of nepotistic legs up for some of the guests featured), but she doesn't ask the sort of questions designed to elicit real insights from them. (In general, business tips type podcasts are pretty vacuous, because if you're a successful CEO, why the hell would you be wanting to give away the secrets of your success to potential competitors?)
3. Meghan is BORING. Honestly, she's dull as dishwater. And bless her, she's a trier, with her cringe-worthy attempts at humour and relatability, but she just hasn't got the it factor that successful entertainers and raconteurs have. Successful raconteurs are successful because they know the audience they're playing to and how to give the audience what it wants. Meghan hasn't a clue who her audience is and can't think about what they want because she's so cripplingly focussed on self, and forever trying to show us the 'real her'. That's why we keep on getting these tiresome re-launches and insistence that 'this time, you're going to see the real me!'. But the real Meghan is like an onion. There's lots of layers, sure, and you keep peeling them away, layer after layer, until finally you get to the centre and find....nothing.

Meghan is only EVER of interest when dispensing 'piping hot tea' about how nasty the evil colonialist Royals are. But she exhausted her mine of material long ago and now they're grey rocking her, so there are no more seams left to mine. Poor Meghan, she thought all this time that people were interested in HER. But we're not. We want the gossip. And now it's all gone.

@GiveMeSpanakopitaYou’re completely right.

it’s not just that she lacks authenticity in showing “the real her” but also that she’s desperate to show herself as perfect. She can’t make fun of herself and she won’t be honest about all the mistakes she’s made because she’s so desperately trying to protect her image and make out that everything has happened the way she intended. Christ, she can’t even admit that she f-d up the trademark for ARO, which at least could have a been a bit genuinely relatable story and salutary lesson to people (“I was so excited to launch my new idea I rushed into it a bit and didn’t think about checking the trademark issues first, bit embarrassing but you live and learn eh!”)

so all her podcast episodes are centred around meaningless platitudes and mutual self congratulation, which is very very tedious.

I wonder how long her contract with Lemonada is for? This surely can’t be the outcome they hoped for. Does anyone know how many episodes are in this series? I wonder if this will quietly sink without trace after the current series ends.

Thanks @RandyRedHumpback for that video. I hadn’t heard of Figs before so that was interesting, but mainly - wow! Talking with someone who comes across as authentic, Meghan’s conversational techniques were so exposed. What a fragile ego. I also suspect she didn’t know which David Heather was referring to at first!

To be fair to her, she has picked one of the hardest things to do in showbiz, which is, essentially, hosting a light entertainment talk show (kind of what a chat/interview podcast is).

Hosting a light entertainment talk show is the second hardest thing to do in showbiz (the first is stand up comedy, which is excruciatingly difficult to do well, because the combination of intelligence, wit, observation, insight, empathy and reciprocity you need to be a success is a very rare combination to be found all in one human). But hosting a talk show is incredibly hard too, because you need empathy, relatability, wit, flexibility, charisma and a rich seam of relevant material in your head to bring out when the conversation is flagging. You need to truly understand and READ your audience, minute to minute, second to second. It's hard to do on TV (especially live with the producer babbling in your ear) and arguably it's harder to do on audio only because you have to work so hard to make it engaging. And what's worse? You HAVE TO MAKE IT SOUND EASY AND NATURAL. Who the hell can do all that? Not me that's for sure. Very few of us can do it well.

I mean it's very easy to look at geniuses of the genre, like Ant & Dec or Bruce Forsyth or, hell, Nick Ferrari, and think it's an easy gig, but it's really, really not. It's hard as fuck to do well. So I think Meghan was kind of setting herself up for failure with her choice of work.

elessar

She can’t make fun of herself and she won’t be honest about all the mistakes she’s made because she’s so desperately trying to protect her image and make out that everything has happened the way she intended.

Very much this.
She just can't do self-deprecation.
Also, she doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humour.
She talks quite a lot about her "playful" side, but she reminds me a lot of someone I used to work with who used to laugh hard at every little joke (well, the ones she got, at least) in lieu of actually having a SoH.

Good talk show hosts in any medium need to have a genuine and informed interest in the people they are interviewing and an ability to put themselves on the back burner while doing so. I don't think Meghan has either of these things and (IMO) most of her guests are not "draw" enough to a sufficiently large number of viewers/listeners for it to be successful.

Parkie talking to Muhammad Ali (Parkie talking to anyone) this ain't.

Yeah, exactly. As with As Ever, and all her other endeavours, the primary reason COAFF is flopping is because Meghan, and her advisers, don't seem to know who the audience is.

I mean, there are LOADS of excellent business podcasts out there, with a large and healthy NICHE audience of people who want to succeed in business. But those podcasts are very meaty, there's proper technical detail - how to invest, how to get seed investors, how to value a company properly, how to grow gross margins organically whilst keeping overheads efficient etc etc. Because that's what that particular niche audience wants and needs. Not meaningless platitudes about believing in yourself because you're so awesome, sweetie!

Then there's the more general mass audience you would target for general interviews with big or at least known names. These you can keep more superficial in terms of content because it's the guest and the host per se that are the real draw. But COAFF doesn't have this either.

So it falls awkwardly between two defined audiences and thus has no audience. And the execution is poor, so it won't grow organically by WOM.

It's frustrating, because DEFINING YOUR AUDIENCE and understanding how to MEET A DEMAND THEY HAVE is, like, Business 101. Not MBA level, literally A-Level business, day one. A child on the street could probably tell you this. And Meghan doesn't appear to have done it. Why? Why? Why would anyone be so lazy / complacent / dim-witted?