Lily Houston Smith
Appearances
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
Yeah. And to me, that story also is so much about fame and Mormonism and a woman striving for power within the ways that she's allowed to within the Mormon church, which is means within the home and becoming an influencer. Yeah.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
through showing her home life but also at the same time part of her home life is her children and for me a big question coming out of that series is the burgeoning field of child labor rights in the digital sphere where I have a lot of questions as to whether it's ethical for momfluencers to be posting their children and because you're essentially making money off of your kids and your kids are under 18 and they might say they want to be on camera but like
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
That's our tagline. Everything's about everything. What a terrible tagline.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
I actually started a little more behind the scenes on Infamous as a writer and reporter. And what I loved about it was kind of the mix of high and low of subjects where we're dealing with pop culture figures, somebody like Kylie Jenner, who I reported a lot on when I was at Forbes before working in podcasting.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
And we actually did a bunch of episodes on all of the scandals surrounding, is she a billionaire? Isn't she a billionaire? And her sort of Kylie Cosmetics fortune. But I loved that we kind of like take...
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
pop culture figures and treat them seriously and do a whole mix of both business and scandal, whether we're talking about Mr. Beast or Johnny Depp or a new kind of true crime story, that high-low mix was very appealing to me.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
Yeah, and to me, we do a wide range of stories because I think no story is ever just only one thing. And I think no one person is interested in just one thing. And sometimes I actually think like our algorithms are a little bit patronizing to us and that they kind of like are so curated and specific and we're all interested in a bunch of different things.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
I do wanna know about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Because even if it's ostensibly a story about a football cheerleading squad, it's also really about women's labor and the feminism movement and what has been going on in women's rights or labor rights over the last however many couple decades.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
Yeah, my favorite episode is actually a series that we did on Kelly and the Satanic Panic, originally aired back in 2023.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
That is the story of this woman, Kelly Michaels, who was convicted of some absolutely horrible crimes, but then it turned out that she actually never did them and she ended up being released from jail. And that story is so fascinating because it's kind of dealing with the worst stuff in the world, essentially horrible things happening to very young children, but it's actually all about memories.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
and our own memories and how memories shape us and how we shape our memories.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
And for me, just learning about our brains in that way and talking to these experts and also just learning about how our ideas of memory and how we conceive of time has changed over time, you know, like that back in the day in the 80s, this idea of repressed memories were so important and how that comes out of all these psychologists being very trained in Freud and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
was absolutely fascinating to me. And just like being able to get a little bit more philosophical with it was that that's my favorite story. And it's just an incredible story. And she's an incredible character. And I mean, how often do you get to speak to somebody who spent years in prison and actually a lot of it in solitary confinement for something she never did?
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
So these episodes, they're called Dubai's Missing Princesses. Again, we originally published them in 2023. And they dive into the story of Sheikh Latifa, who was basically tried to escape from Dubai. And she is the daughter of Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed. But we also really got to look into the story of her half-sister, Shamsa, who also ran away.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
and Princess Haya, who was Sheikh Mohammed's wife, who in a different situation also fled the country. So it's actually the story of kind of three princesses, I guess, sheikhs who have tried to run away from Dubai and just absolutely the stuff of a Bond movie, you know, like Latifa was smuggled out of the city in the trunk of a car and then
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
there's jet skis to a dinghy to a boat and then Indian commandos storming the boat to bring her back to Dubai and allegedly drugging her. And a lot of that we were able to find out from British court documents. She'd also recorded a ton of videos as well, describing her own situation where she was essentially taken back to Dubai and then in her own words, kept prisoner. And
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
There are some questions as to the extent to which she's free now, despite pictures being posted on Instagram. But, you know, that story is really important to me because I grew up in Dubai, as I'm sure listeners are probably sick of hearing about.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
I know. I guess like dropped in the middle of an ocean is where my accent's from. But yeah, I grew up in Dubai. My mom's English, my dad's Lebanese. And so I went to a British school there and then came to the US for college. And so My accent is now just a strange mishmash where some people think I'm Australian and some people think I'm English and some people don't realize I have an accent.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
One of my friends, just after they met me, thought that I was from the Midwest with a speech impediment. Oh, nice. Okay.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
Yeah, you know, the one story that I think there's even more than we were able to fit in to so many episodes, six episodes about it was the Ruby Frankie story.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
That series is all about the Mormon momfluencer Ruby Franke and a therapist friend of hers called Jodi Hildebrandt and the way in which these two women came together and sort of devolved into very sadly, physically, probably emotionally abusing Ruby's children and it ended with a very shocking arrest and conviction of both Ruby and Jodi who are now in jail.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
And so as part of reporting that, there were so many documents and police videos, like body cam footage, recordings from the interviews, their police interviews that we were able to get from the Utah government. And we used a lot of them, but there was still so much that just simply couldn't couldn't make it in. And honestly, a lot of it was because it was too disturbing.
Infamous
Infamous's 100th Episode!
I watched all of those videos and it was really tough and really hard to sit through watching videos of an emaciated child being found by police officers. And a lot of them really did move me to tears. It just
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
Like for example, he says that Ryan Reynolds, her husband, made fun of him in the Deadpool movie by creating a character who was a tacky male feminist. He also says that Blake used her friend Taylor Swift to try to pressure him into making changes to the script. Which, yeah, if Taylor Swift said to make some changes to a script, I'd do it too. She certainly knows successful writing.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
All this is to say, it's possible there is a lot more under the hood to be revealed in the story of Blake versus Justin. But here at Infamous, we still didn't see anything in Justin's new lawsuit that made us think he didn't also run a smear campaign against Blake Lively. Which is not cool at all, no matter what she did to him. All right, that's it for the update.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
We have a pretty dark episode planned for this week, and I hope you stick with us. You might find it meaningful. We'll play that for you now.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
Hey everyone, it's Lily Houston Smith here. I just wanted to come on for a moment to say that we recorded the last episode before Justin Baldoni, that's the star and director of It Ends With Us, who's in a big fight with Blake Lively, filed a lawsuit against Blake. In this new suit, he does make it seem like Blake was actively messing with him more than we knew before.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
The Hamburglar was just a mascot, but Jerome Jacobson was the real deal, a McDonald's security chief who almost pulled off the ultimate inside job. On Wondery's podcast, The Big Flop, comedians join host Misha Brown to chronicle pop culture's biggest fails and try to answer the age-old question, who thought this was a good idea? At the time, the McDonald's collab with Monopoly was a genius idea.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
Come get a Big Mac and you could go home with a million-dollar prize piece. The only problem? When they picked their head of security, the one guy in charge of protecting those million-dollar pieces, McDonald's drew the wrong card. Comedians Ify Wadiwe and Beth Stelling join Misha to break down what really happened with the McDonald's-Monopoly scandal.
Infamous
Narcissists, Psychopaths and People You Know
Listen to The Big Flap wherever you get your podcasts.
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Do you remember just like more sort of company culture things like particular lingo that they used?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Do you remember when you were first approached about Landmark? Was that like right at the beginning or did that come?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
So can you describe the clientele, like who's coming in to this store?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
So from talking to some other people and reading, some of the sense I've gotten from the managers at Lulu and about just the culture is that there is this kind of blurring of personal professional, that there's this like encouraging to talk about maybe sort of personal things. Can you just talk about some of that?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Well, what does manifesting out loud look like? Like, what would you say to manifest out loud?
Infamous
Murder at Lululemon | Part 4
Was that your only, quote, breakdown in the store? Or were there other times?